The fact of the matter was that she was alone. He was all she had and he had no idea. The man with the family would never understand how this woman had never had one. That drunken shell of a woman, of a mother, was never her family because you can't break bread with guilt, no matter how many times she tried. The sorority in college was a picture she drew for herself to get by. And now him. He's living, breathing, feeling…seething. And it's his occasional charisma, his heart-spoken words that keep her coming back. Because she trusts him, perhaps no longer with her life, but at the very least with his own knowledge of family. A family that lasted twenty years seems good enough for her, a few seconds would suffice. Because somewhere in her there is still that little girl who would swing her patent leather Mary Jane's against the side of the wall as she watched her classmates being picked up by their mothers, their fathers. The ones who would get out and hug their children, kiss them. The ones who smiled when they saw them. And those little girls, the happy ones, they had skinned knees. She had bruises in the shape of fingers that surrounded her tiny wrist. She thought he knew her, at the very least as much as she would let him. She's a guarded person, she always has been, but she thought maybe she had let him past that, but not anymore, he left her on the sidewalk, just like everyone before, leaving her to observe what should have been with big brown eyes, only this time she can't swing her legs because he's left her paralyzed, he's left her crying and broken because maybe, just maybe, she thought he was family, she thought he cared enough about her to qualify. And she hasn't forgotten that he is just as broken as she is, only she knew that she has tried to glue his pieces back together far too many times, and usually she ended up with scratches on her hands and tears in her eyes. And she tried to give up, she tried to walk away and leave him, but that man, that orchid parasite of a man, he came back, he wouldn't let her leave, he wanted to finish her off, burn her one more time with his icy blue eyes. She knows that he will, and yet, here she is, laying her hand on his back, ready to go, as suicidal as she ever was.
