Here is the devastating truth about growing up: you absolutely cannot have everything that you want.
I wish this wasn't true. I didn't make this rule, but it binds me all the same.
Nobody tells you this as a child; no loving mother or father warns you not to let this heartbreaking fact bite when you go to sleep at night. Spawning in your mattress and penetrating into your fragile skin. No, you have to learn it for yourself, in the most excruciatingly painful way possible. Shards of broken glass, smashed from a screaming mirror; fragmented from a discarded bottle, traces of stale copper whiskey still swirling inside, lacerating your acquitted skin. Leaving gashes that never completely heal and raised scars that follow you to the afterlife.
The fleeting contemplation of telling my children this plays on my mind, before I shake it out of my head, letting it fall dead on my living room floor. It thumps against the carpet. My eyes squeeze shut; half to let the acceptance – where agony had used to live – seep into the area behind my eyes, half doors slamming shut on the faint possibility.
Now, I understand. There is a reason nobody tries to warn you off. It is because they can't.
They are too young to learn this unbearable lesson, to be tainted with the ugly knowledge that not everything in life will go your way – that sometimes, a happy ending doesn't always look like it's guaranteed.
They gaze attentively at me, as I momentarily get lost in my thoughts. I smile back reassuringly. I can't tell them. I want to protect them from all the bleak darkness of the real world for as long as I can. The shadows that skulk behind you and the cruel puppet master that toys with your fate, all for his own gluttonous entertainment. If the bullet of reality came speeding towards them, I would offer my own back as sacrifice – a hundred times over, if I had to.
The nostalgia of childhood was sometimes the only thing that kept me going.
I smile again – it's a sad smile. The corners of my eyes crinkle, a certain weary melancholy embedded in the edges. I say to them, but I think that I'm saying it to myself as well, "A sunflower cannot grow without its roots, buried in the grimy dimness underground. Similarly, you cannot know happiness if you never know sadness."
"Do you have to go?" fourteen-year-old Chase asked me reticently from where we sat, under a giant maple tree. Its expertly tapered leaves had only recently transitioned into beautiful warm tones of amber and deep orange. Balmy strawberries and apricot pudding. Its deep chocolate branches formed a network of veins, forking across the sunset thicket of leaves blocking us out from the outside world.
"My dad got a job there," I mumbled imperceptibly, lips pursed together and pouting. Anvils rested heftily on my eyebrows. The irrepressible weight of disappointment threatened along my eyelids, bleeding into the crease where they folded in.
"This is bullshit," he swore in return, willowy fingers – they had grown into their svelte shape by the time he was thirteen – aggressively plucking off the heads of innocent mantis green blades of grass.
"It really is."
Chase and I leaned our backs against the thick, sturdy trunk of the shady maple tree, sitting so close together that our shoulders were leaning against the other's. His bone protruded from underneath his milky skin, drawing a languorous curve to where his jutting collarbone peeked out from beneath his ivory uniform collar: lazing languidly against his clavicles, marble cream buttons left undone in rebellious fourteen-year-old protest against the system.
I sighed, wondering if the eighty-pound anchor dragging down on my strained heartstrings might have somehow been dispelled along with my boulder exhalation of air. No such luck.
"What's so good about the city, anyway?" he interrogated accusatorily, swirled indigo eyes – translucent blueberry ice cream – focused on the steadily building pile of shredded grass shards his nimble fingers were quickly creating. For every time I blinked, his lissome hands had already sprinted back and forth thrice. "There isn't even anything to do there."
"Tell that to my dad," I harrumphed scornfully, still bitter at my father's decision to move the family away from the quaint countryside town my entire childhood had been conjured in. Kasey – he had been fifteen, at the time – was still throwing a fit. Sneaking out in the dead of night and hiding stashed bottles of alcohol underneath his bed in an act of rancorous revolt. Giving the glacial shoulder to our parents. I was no better. "I still can't believe he's goddamn doing this to us," my voice gradually built up with pent up aggression, small fists clenching into quivering spheres, "It's not fair. It's not fair."
The steel box inside of me, that I had been attempting to keep sealed up, locked beneath rusty chains, detonated, leaving my body in the form of salt-riddled tears that raced down my cheeks. Plump raindrops from heaving clouds. Pain invaded the area behind my eyes, burning into my brain.
"Hey, hey," Chase murmured comfortingly into my chestnut locks, scooping my body into his slender arms, so that I faced his side, and the hollow between his jawline and collarbone cradled my sobbing face. Dripping snot spread evenly onto his creased shirt. "Nothing about this is fair," he cooed soothingly, fingers delicately rubbing the back of my neck, baby soft petals caressing against my sadness-warm skin.
"I don't want to leave you," I whispered faintly into his collar, muted bawling causing my words to land on his ears shakily, struggling to find their footing. Had my face not been right next to his ear, he might not have heard me.
"I know," he breathed back, habitual barrier of sticky sarcasm momentarily deconstructed, a rare sight reserved only for my eyes.
"I know?" I questioned back, amber eyes widening expectantly as I stared directly at his chiseled face – the slightest remnants of baby fat still clinging onto his cheeks.
"What?"
"What about a, 'I'll miss you,' or a, 'You're the best friend I've ever had,' huh? Man, fourteen years of friendship and we're suddenly cruelly torn apart and all you've got for me is a lousy, 'I know'?" I chastised, semi-jestingly. My mini tirade managed to bring a half-hearted smile to my teardrop-stained face. The corners of Chase's lips curled upwards as he let out a despondent exhalation.
"Please, God's probably heard all my prayers for the past fourteen years," he joked spiritlessly, resting his head atop of mine.
We lapsed into silence – a special kind of silence that had been fostered over fourteen years. Carved on a titanium foundation that could only be created through a deep, unexplainable understanding of the other. I could hear his heart beat in tandem with mine. Even back then, I think a part of me already knew.
"We'll be okay," he finally uttered under his breath, his resolute words dissipating the enveloping quiet. A pin dropped into a still ocean.
"How can you be so sure?" I enquired suspiciously, sniffling up the last of my tearful outburst.
The sun filtered through the miniscule gaps between the honey-stained leaves, each individual ray of light resting smilingly on our young skin. The world's way of comforting us.
"We'll meet again someday. Somewhere." Chase's eyes glimmered in the glittering sunlight. Hopefulness.
"You say that like it's for certain."
"I've got a good feeling about it," he smirked, one corner of his arched lips tugging up; the swooping curve of a bow, the sharp angularity of an arrow. He continued, "But here. Just in case." He held out his slender pinky finger, the rest of his digits curled gracefully into his line-scattered palm. "Pinky promise me that we'll meet again. It doesn't matter how long I'll have to wait, just as long as we find our way back to one another."
I smiled, hiccupping through fresh tears; fresh wounds. Chase's sweetness resonated in my quivering heart, velvety custard warmth melting over my clogged up throat. I linked my smooth pinky finger – it had yet to be worn by the tribulations of farm work – through his, a promise with each other, and with the universe, that two souls who shared the same heartbeat deserved to find one another again. A pact to never forget the other. It was a promise that didn't even need to be made.
"I promise, no matter what," I voiced out loud, cementing the vow, "you're going to have to see my face again, Chasey."
He smiled, sadly. Unconfident worry trembling on his lips. "I'll look forward to it."
We sat under the maple tree, the grubby claws of reality seeping in to scratch at us, wrapping its strangling fists around our throats. We clung onto each other in the imbibing ocean of the real world, hanging onto the other by our slowly separating pinky fingers.
It's funny how you can still laugh while your heart slowly shatters.
The cruel ocean waves swept me away, breaking us apart. Breaking my heart.
Contrary to popular belief, heartbreak does not feel like your heart is splitting in two.
It feels like the light has gone out of your entire world.
The quickly withering autumn light trickled in through Chase's window, frosty air breathing plumy clouds of condensation against the tinkling glass panes. I ran a rough thumb over the puffy bags that had materialized underneath my eyes overnight, a result of an anxiety-riddled terrible sleep. The manifestation of pain before it begins.
"Moll, you okay?" a groggy Chase questioned soothingly as he strode across his latte floorboards, making his way towards me; the natural pull between metal and magnet.
A loud whipping of crisp paper against oak followed, as I let the letter I'd been clutching in my palm fall onto the dining table. My incisor dug sorely into my waxy bottom lip, trembling, as I bounded past the point of no return.
Wide amethyst eyes darted up to look at me; the ever-solid liquid inside a magic eight ball seemingly crumbling, as if he no longer knew all the answers.
"Why were you digging through my trash?" was Chase's first redundant response – albeit, not unjustified. It almost seemed like he was torn, between laughing at the visual of me scavenging like a raccoon through his rubbish, and shock that I had actually found something our entire being balanced precariously on. Our world right now was a performer, and the letter was his deathly tightrope.
"Why was this in the trash?" I retaliated calmly, mussed eyebrows furrowing in concern.
This was Chase and me: we had grown up together, side by side. Our roots had developed entangled with the other's. He had wiped my bleeding nose and I had picked lice out of his pearly hair – said parasites had promptly chosen to leech onto my scalp instead. Whatever one was thinking, the other probably already knew. When we asked questions like these, we both knew that behind our hand of fanned out cards, we were just playing a bluff.
He looked meaningfully at me, and all at once, that bluff crumpled; a ball of paper haphazardly tossed at the bin – a crosshatching of metal – ricocheting off the rim and landing, lonesome, by its side.
"This is your dream," I reasoned with Chase, as I took a seat opposite him, across his dining table. His eyes remained transfixed on the letter, immaculate black font crawling like army ants across the page.
"Moll, you and I both know why I don't want to go."
"You can't stay here just for me," I breathed unwillingly, heaviness crushing my soul. The unspoken words that both of us knew, but furiously resisted voicing out, were whispered into existence; pricking needles into our perfect haven. His svelte fingers reached over the table to lace between mine, nestling themselves in the etched out spaces: molded specifically for his limber digits, the way a tree grows around a fence. "You have to go."
"It's in France," he said, deadpan. His usually upturned lips – whether in genuine laughter or sardonic smirk – cut a harsh line when solemnity held them straight. His fingers squeezed mine tighter. "I can't-" his sentence trailed off, wobbling on the jagged edge of a cliff, falling into a serrated stone abyss, "I can't leave you. Not again."
"I hate when we have to talk serious," I admitted, a morose smile lounging on the corners of my mouth. My dry locks fell, in wisps, against my glum temples.
He let out a reluctant exhalation of tickled air. "Alright, I can't wait to get away from you. I've finally found an answer to all my prayers. How's that?"
I laughed; anchors tugging down on my heavy heart, dragging it into the sea of salty unshed tears washing up in my lungs. "Better."
"I'm not going, anyway," Chase broke the terse silence, softly dragging his fingertips across my knuckles. Velvety peach skin.
"You're so stubborn."
"That makes two of us," he countered. His perfectly aligned teeth made an appearance in his trademark smirk, never failing to make the vibrant flower garden in my heart beam.
"But," I cut in, all of a sudden realizing how repugnant a word but was, a wrecking ball smashing into an impeccable concrete wall of tranquility, "a part of you wants to go, right? If I wasn't part of the equation, would you take the fellowship?"
"Yeah," he replied simply, in a moment of bared honesty. Amethyst eyes dove into my hazel ones, swimming on their backs – my corneas relished in his piercing gaze. "And don't let this go to your big head, but you're a pretty big part of the equation."
"Big head?" I questioned in offense, holding one calloused hand up to my chest for added drama. His honeycomb walls of acerbity never came down for long. "I'll most definitely let that go to my big head," I affirmed evilly, before shutting my eyes and willing myself to say my next sentence, "And that's why you have to go." Confusion buzzed in the air, as I hurled us head first down a track that neither was ready for. "I can't let you stay just for me," I elucidated, a familiar old weightiness tugging at the corners of my eyes, jamming into my throat and filling it until I was no longer sure where my next breath would come from, "I wouldn't be able to live with myself, knowing I was the only reason you never got to live your dream."
Chase's living room quickly morphed into a void; we sat suspended in time, knowing that one wrong move – a word spouted too quickly, or a breath heaved too heavily – could distort the barbed precipice on which we teetered.
"Dummy," he finally murmured, shattering the glass capsule we dangled in, interlaced hands clasping the solitary string still holding our world together, "You don't know by now?" A pause. "You're my dream, okay? I don't need some fancy culinary fellowship and fame to make me happy. Hell, that probably wouldn't make me happy at all. I just need your dumb face for the rest of my life, and I'm set." He went quiet, magenta precipitously painting the sculpted apples of his cheeks. "You don't lose something once and let it go a second time."
His words bled fully into my heart, swirling around in the organ before storing themselves in the part of it reserved solely for him. "You're not making this easy for me at all, Chasey," I replied, my resolve quickly dissipating. I rushed to eject the words out of me, before I lost all the willpower to say them at all, "I love you. I always have, and I always will. And I don't know why I do, because it's totally beyond my control and reason, but I do all the same." The habitually hard edges of his amethyst eyes, the intense cuts in the gemstone, the fort he constructed to block his vulnerability off from the outside world, melted, and I could see his true softness shimmering through. "And I know you. I know that you want to go, but you don't have the strength to leave me behind."
Silence weaved its web around us.
"So I already told them that you'd take it."
"What?" His voice was laced with shock, anger, betrayal; worry danced on his notes, its footsteps clumsy and unbalanced, toes tripping over themselves. However, underneath it all, I could detect the slightest intimation of relief, gratitude, flowing from deep inside him – for doing for him what he couldn't bear to do.
"If you love something, you let it go, right?" I dared to venture, as I concentrated all my determination on not crying, "I love you more than anything. That's why I can't be selfish."
"Moll," Chase got up and instinctively wrapped his arms around me. The warmth from his veins seeped into mine. We stood in the middle of his living room, clinging desperately onto one another for the second time in our lives. "You idiot."
"You want this, right?" I asked shakily, with my cheek pressed up against his pounding chest. His heartbeat resonated in my eardrums; the harmony that assured me my soul did not exist in just my own body, but in his as well.
"Not like this," he muttered back, drawing me closer to him, "Not without you."
"Please, just tell me that you do want the fellowship," I begged softly, closing my eyes to soak in what I now knew would be one of the last times we would be like this, "Tell me I didn't let you go for something you don't even want."
Silence slinked on its paws, grinning. Deadly.
"Yeah, I want it."
"Okay," I responded, heaving a colossal sigh of relief, clutching on tighter to him – the only boy I had ever loved, whose heart resided in mine, "Okay."
Winter had never been my favourite season.
No matter how many layers of plush angora, mohair and cashmere you piled on, the inescapable cold always succeeded in permeating the valiant coats, impaling your fragile skin. No matter how distraughtly you endeavoured to cling onto autumn, it always skidded right past your outstretched fingertips, taking with it all its lovely cinnamon bronze earthy warmth. Leaving you with only ice shards in your heart.
"Remember to take your coat everywhere with you," I nagged at Chase, as I fidgeted with the pilling lapel of his steel gray wool coat, "It gets really cold there."
We stood on the snow-drizzled pier, Chase's suitcases speedily growing damp from the melting ice beneath them. Our winter boots sorrowfully turned dirty snow into plump droplets of weeping water. We remained steadfastly planted in our positions.
"What am I, two?" he refuted languidly, silky fingers embedded in my dull chestnut strands, gracefully picking thawing snowflakes out from the spaces between the tangles.
"Exactly," I chortled mellifluously, lifting my eyes to meet my favourite sight in the world. Glimmering amethyst orbs gazed back, tracing the outlines of my face. "Need I remind you of the time you tried to be a hero and came out to play without a coat? You had to stay in bed, sick, for a week."
The murky winter sky was the colour of decaying skeletons, long buried underground. They laughed at our looming fate.
"I had to put up with you bothering me for a week straight. And I couldn't even leave, what with it being my own house," he lamented melodramatically, rolling his jewel eyes for good effect. He rested his sylphlike fingers on my fleshy cheek, one digit tenderly caressing the faint indentation that lay right above my jawline: the rubble from an incident where we had been jumping on my couch, aged five, and I had fallen and hit my jaw against a glass table. Even though I had bawled at the mere sight of gleaming blood dripping from the wound, I hadn't been scared. Chase had dabbed away the rust-coloured fluid and held my tiny hand the entire time. My protector: all of four feet tall.
"Dummy," I scolded childishly, knocking a playful fist against his chest, "You'll miss being able to say those things when you're in France."
All at once, the jovial atmosphere abruptly dissolved. The feeble hum of discordant horns sounded in the air.
"Yeah," Chase mumbled, face suddenly downcast with the very clouds that threatened along the wintery sky, "Yeah, I will." He sighed, locking his free hand with mine. "I wish I could take you with me."
All the endless possibilities of what could have been weighed down on my folded eyelids, pulsing pain through my nerves in shockwaves. "And I wish I didn't have an entire town's worth of people relying on me," I huffed sullenly, tragedy engulfing my trachea. Disappointment with the universe searing from my open pores. "Timing has never really been on our side, huh?"
"You don't say," Chase replied silently, lissome eyelashes fluttering in the placid winter snowfall. The dim sunlight painted elongated shadows on his angulated cheekbones, the contours of which I could close my eyes and map out from imprinted memory. I wished I had pressed more butterfly kisses to them when I had the chance, that I had spent more hours wrapped up in his homely arms, that I had ran, on my bare feet, to Castanet the moment I was free to do what I wanted, so I could have gotten more time with the boy I could only ever dream of meeting again.
"I can't believe I have to say goodbye to you for the second time in my life," I muttered, hushed, so that the words couldn't escape, couldn't get lost, so that they would be ours, and ours alone, "I always thought that when I met you again, that would be it."
"You say, 'when.'"
"Hm?"
"You say, 'when,' we met again, not, 'if.'"
"Well, I had a good feeling about it too," I chuckled lightly, playing on the very words he had uttered to me when fate had wrenched us apart for the first time.
"Look, Moll, I think we're old enough to know not to make promises we have no control over. And I don't believe luck is that kind. But, if it worked the first time, and there's even the slightest possibility that it'll work a second time, I'm not taking any chances." He held up his svelte pinky finger, bent in an elegant arc, all the individual creases that made his finger his close enough for me to discern.
"Fate certainly has a twisted sense of humour," I meditated aloud, before promptly linking my pinky finger with his, "But I'm not taking any chances either. Two people like us deserve to be together, don't you think?"
"Like us?" Chase echoed back, entertained.
"Like us, as in, nobody else in the entire world is ever going to be able to tolerate that knife you have for a mouth."
"You're an idiot," he smiled, one corner of his lips lazily tugging up more than the other. I loved that lopsided smile with all my heart.
I love you.
The dam exploded, as saline tears began their rapid descent down my strawberry cheeks. I covered my mouth in a futile attempt to hold back the free falling droplets. Rain galloping down a windowpane.
You can't get everything you want in life. That's a part of growing up.
But Chase – oh, God, I wanted him most of all.
"Hey, hey, c'mere," Chase crooned calmingly to me, enveloping me in his arms. His own honeyed voice wavered with uncertainty and emotion. We struggled to hold onto each other, the only thing keeping us afloat in the menacing waters of life. "I love you," he whispered against the shell of my ear, translucent baby pink, silvery seashells strewn by the shore, "I've known it before I ever gained consciousness. And I'm always going to love you."
"I love you too," I trembled through silent sobs, anguished crying quickly evaporating, so that Chase could have one last memory of my smiling face, "You're the first and last person I'll ever love."
Our lips pressed together – I no longer knew who initiated it, or whose head inched forward a fraction of a millimetre first. It didn't matter. What mattered was that when his lips met mine, I knew that there was a part of my heart that didn't live in my body. There was blood that coursed through my veins that was not my own.
Soulmate.
We broke apart, our faces stained with dried tears and unfathomable agony.
A door creaked open – mahogany, stained with deep olive polish. Individual crevices in the wood: rivers running through the marshy rust brown. Blinding light peeked through, its giggling baby hands hugging the doorframe. Dust specks pirouetted in the streaming illumination.
"You'd better go," I finally spoke, sending us spiralling into our engulfing fate, a vehement whirlpool all too eager to swallow us whole, "If you don't leave now, I might just ask you to stay."
Gentle whispers of possibilities pranced through the cracked door, whirling around my head and lacing teasing ribbons of temptation past my temples: satin, lush enough to fall into. The nostalgic feeling of Chase's knuckles tenderly knocking against my forehead washed over me.
"Then I'd better go," he breathed back, our hands still clasped together, "Because if you ask me to stay, I'd do it in a heartbeat."
Fairies leaned their delicate pretty heads next to my ear, with melodic choruses of it's not too late and the beautifully gruesome word: stay.
My heart caught in my throat.
Stay.
I smiled back with all the strength in the world. "It's a good thing you're going, then."
A gust of inexorable wind slammed the door shut, leaving us in numbing darkness. No more possibilities. Just the cruel claws of fate coming for your skin.
How do you say goodbye to the whole of your heart?
"I'll see you, Moll," Chase murmured softly, pressing one last kiss to my lips.
I could have lived forever in that moment.
"You don't know that you will."
Excruciating pain bled into his beautiful eyes. "Yeah. But I can't say the other thing," he begrudgingly began to let his fingers fall from my grasp, "and, 'I'll see you,' is so much more hopeful than, 'goodbye.'"
"There, you just said it, didn't you?" I attempted to tease through threatening tears.
"Not to you," he replied, incisor biting into his warm bottom lip, "Never to you."
"Okay," I whispered, crumbling as our fingers pulled away, "I'll see you, Chasey."
The minute hand struck twelve. The buzzer beeped its dreaded alarm.
Time up.
Our hands broke apart.
I watched Pascal's ship sail off with the love of my life; the point at which my entire universe marked the coordinates for its foundations; the sun that lit my stratosphere up at its edges. The flickering light of the boat slowly faded into nothing.
Heartbreak never gets easier.
Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.
Disclaimer: I do not own 'The Dovekeepers' by Alice Hoffman.
Author's Note: Wow, this chapter was insanely long. I am terrible with the sporadic updates. It's even worse when I leave them on melancholy notes, so rest assured I'll be working on the next chapter as soon as possible.
Please don't hate me for this chapter – it took me ages to write because I'm way too unhealthily attached to Chase and Molly, and also because once I get out of the groove of writing, my writing skills seem to absolutely decay. I'm still trying to work on that, so forgive me if the quality of this chapter is not quite up to par. I know there are a lot of Chase and Molly supporters out there, so let's just say the story's long from over, and anything could happen! But guessing who the father will be is all part of the fun, isn't it? Anyway, please review and let me know what you think!