Page 55 of The Fall

“Too late. It’s way too late,” I added. “This was not the time.”

“Austin? Your graduation day?” she asked sadly. I nodded in agreement. She closed her eyes briefly. “I knew it. I should’ve stayed. I should’ve made sure you were okay. I thought you wanted to hang with your friends, but I knew something wasn’t right.”

“He was supposed to come for me and propose. I mean, at least that’s what he promised before it all turned to shit.” She seemed a little shocked as I continued. “I know I never told you, but we were that serious. He never showed. I waited for him in vain, knowing it’d been too long, but something inside me wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t. I just knew he would come. That all the pain of missing him would be worth it. That’s why I insisted you all go to eat without me. I was waiting for him. I waited until every single person left. I stayed there until the sun set.” My chest was raw as I thought of how I circled campus endlessly, crying openly in front of everyone who saw me, searching for him relentlessly, refusing to believe he hadn’t shown. He’d given me absolutely no reason to hold on, and still, I couldn’t let go.

I could see my mom tearing up, and I shook my head. “It was the worst day of my life. So, he can’t be the right one,” I insisted.

“So why are you letting him disrupt your life now?”

“Because he’s…he’s…gah! I don’t know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“Yes, you do,” she said, filling our glasses up and retreating to the house to grab another bottle. When she rejoined me, we sat for several minutes in silence, listening to the noises of the cool summer night. The fragrant smell of her roses soothed me. I breathed in deeply.

“I can’t go back there. My heart can’t take it. My head is already a mess,” I said defiantly. “He expects too much for nothing.” Sighing heavily, I felt the warmth from the wine spread through me, and I welcomed it.

“Well, then you’ve made your decision,” she said carefully as if I would object.

“Technically, he didn’t do anything wrong. I told him to go and pushed him away. But for some reason, I still blame him for how much it hurt.”

She simply nodded and waited for me to continue.

“Mom, how do you look at someone you loved so completely at one point that you drowned in them? Someone who knew you so intimately they were a part of you, and you had no idea where you started and they ended, or who you were apart from belonging to them? How do you go from that to friends or even acquaintances? How do you just ignore your past with that person? How do people do that?”

“I think you answered that for yourself already. With Dean, you can’t.”

“So, what? I just stay away from him?” I asked.

“First, tell me why you’re trying so hard to avoid him, Dallas.”

“The first reason is Josh.”

“Let’s keep him out of it for now.” She leaned over, grabbed a blooming rosebud, and delicately thumbed it.

“It hurts too much to love Dean. He’s proven it time and time again.”

“Not intentionally,” my mom pointed out.

“I want to believe that,” I said. “He told me he met his ex-fiancée his first year. He’s been with her all this time. We were only together a year.”

“You have known that man half of your life, Dallas. Love doesn’t care if you were there five years or—”

“Five minutes, Mom. I know.”

“Dallas, you’re forgetting something pretty important.”

“What?”

“Everything else,” she said slowly. “Aside from the pain your breakup caused and constantly reminding yourself of it, it seems you have completely forgotten why you were in so much pain in the first place. Obviously, you had something good with him, something memorable, worth suffering over.”

“Being his, with him, it was the best time of my life,” I said, twisting my wine glass in my hand. “He made me feel loved and beautiful and wanted. Even when we fought—which was often. We just fit, and neither of us could stay away.”

“All consuming,” she encouraged.

I nodded, leaning back in my chair, my voice cracking with my following words. “It still is, and I can’t figure it out, Mom. I can’t make it stop. The need to be with him is so strong. I feel too much. I can’t stay in the same room with him without wanting more.”

“You can’t help the way you feel, Dallas. As guilty as it makes you feel about Josh—and I know that’s what is eating at you the most—you can’t help it. Trust me when I tell you I’ve been there. They invented the ‘nice guy’ theory for men who are innocent bystanders left in the wake of our first love gone wrong. We always recover, never forget, and never love quite the same. The first love is always the most felt, the hardest to get over, and the hardest to forget.”

“Great,” I said, feeling hopeless. “So, what do I do?”

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