By: Stew Pid
Rating: Should be okay.
Disclaimer: I only own the Stew Pid stuff.
A/N: This was written directly after Threadbare (it was a productive day) and meant to be in continuation. There was supposed to be a third part to it but I didn't get around to it before I regained my resolve. So it ends with this.
Eggshells
She hopes she wasn't wrong. He's leaving Lindsey. They're both unhappy. They weren't meant to be. She hopes mother isn't always right. She knows Dean. He isn't that type of guy. He wasn't just after her sex. He loves her. He always took care of her. He is her knight in shining armor. Her safety…better end it there. Dean is not her safety net. He is the one. She's happy he was her first lover. How can one be so happy and so miserable? She's miserable because she's unsure and insecure. Dean was not supposed to make her feel unsure and insecure. He was not the one to leave her bobbing around in anxious desperation. Why hasn't he called? Has he spoken to Lindsey? Are they getting a divorce? Is he packing his suitcase right now as she weeps? She doesn't know. It's Dean—steady, secure, safe Dean—and yet, she doesn't know.
She hopes her reflection in the mirror will look different. And it does. Her cheeks are stained red with tears. It's an interesting phenomenon. Tears, just salty water, stain red, like blood. She's taken her science. She knows it's not the tears, but in fact the blood from the capillaries beneath her skin, swelling and bursting beneath her healing, breaking hands. She's supposed to glow, she knows, but she feels burnt out. She hopes when she remembers this day, the memory is a better skewing of the reality. In her mind she sees a painting she had seen once before in a museum, a fallen basket of eggs, the yolk-y mess, the girl's face so complicatedly unreadable, and the child trying to put the eggs back together. The caption on the painting explained that the broken eggs symbolized the young girl's lost virginity, and the child's futile attempt to repair the eggs signified the fact that once lost, virginity could not be recovered. She wonders if it's not just virginity, but if the heart is like an egg and once broken, irreparable. Was that the problem? Was that what they were really doing? Trying in vain to fix a broken egg? She had broken his heart. She knew that. Were they foolish enough to believe that they could have sex and start over, pretend like nothing between the night before the dance marathon and the night they just shared ever happened? And all the heartache would be wiped away, their hearts would remain in tact, safe and secure.
She hopes that the fools really are the wise ones. But it's all starting to come together for her in a way the pieces of eggshell never could. The problem was that everything had changed. She wasn't the Rory that thanked him for her first kiss. He wasn't the Dean that read Anna Karenina for her. Those people were broken, irreparable, with irreparably broken hearts. He thought she, being the one who broke it, could fix his broken heart, and she thought that he, who, she could imagine, had never broken any heart, could fix hers. And they weren't acting with their heads. Her head would tell her to be rational, to realize what she was doing, to stop and wait. She had waited all this time. She could wait for a divorce. His head would tell him to be rational, to realize what he was doing, that in attempting to fix his heart, he was breaking another's. Not only was he no longer the bearer of security, but he was, as well, a breaker of hearts. Poor Lindsey. Another broken egg. What were they thinking? We weren't, she admits to herself. They were working from broken hearts. Nothing broken works very well.
She hopes she's wrong. She hopes hearts are not like eggs, that they can be fixed. The problem, the problem she has avoided thinking about up until now, is that Dean wasn't the one who broke her heart. It was him. Maybe if he hadn't come that night, if he hadn't come like some California earthquake shaking the fissures of her broken heart, she wouldn't have been in such dire need of repair. Maybe. The land of justifications, of blaming someone else. Maybe is always simple. The problem is never so simple. The simple fact is that the problem is very complicated. If she is wrong, as she hopes she is, and broken hearts can be fixed, then not only are she and Dean not so absurd and foolish and crazy, but neither was he. It would be easy to dismiss him for crazy. How could he think she would just pick up and go with him, without a plan, without thinking about it, without discussing it with her mother? She admits those were the conditions of her recent experience with Dean, but…Okay, she says to no one in particular, so what's your point? She's talking to herself and she responds that the point is that they are a yolk-y mess of broken hearts futilely trying to repair the irreparable, and hoping against all hope that hearts are not like eggs. And all they have is maybe. Maybe is the land of broken things.
She hopes that she was right and wrong. She hopes if hearts are like eggs and cannot be fixed, then at least like eggs, they can be thrown out. She hopes you can pick up a new one at the grocery store. She hopes she can get rid of her broken heart. And she wonders if she'll be finally free or dead.