Page 12 of Again, In Autumn

When my dad threatened to not pay for my college, I succumbed. I had my car packed with dorm room essentials, my best friends to room with, and a football team to cheer for. I wanted to go to UGA, to study business, and then to cooking school and start a bakery. I didn’t want to give up Adam, but I didn’t have any other choice.

Adam wouldn’t answer the door when I knocked to tell him I was leaving with my dad. He wouldn’t answer my calls or texts. He didn’t come out of the house at all. I cried the whole way home, not knowing how I was going to soothe myself alone after spending two months wrapped up in the arms of a boy I came to love so fast and so much.

I failed my first semester. I barely went to class. Heddy tried to get me into therapy, but I refused to talk about it. Eventually, when the dark skies parted and my lungs could to breathe again, I decided everything needed to change. My dreams were wrapped up in Adam. I couldn’t have him, so I couldn’t have them.

I followed my friend Tiffany into education, and I gave up all other plans, it just seemed easier that way. I wanted to be a completely different person than the one who fell in love with Adam Kent that summer. Which I did. Only, I’m not sure she’s me. And I’ve been punishing myself ever since.

“I made my own choice,” I admit. “I knew Adam and I weren’t being realistic.”

Heddy runs the back of her hand along my cheekbone. “Go to the house tonight and get reacquainted with yourself. There’s some reason you never went back there.”

A knife twists in my heart. “Yeah, because I was afraid I’d see him there and he’d have forgotten I existed. That he’d look at me and say, um, Veronica, right? Like I was just some girl he knew for a few months. I figured after we ended things that he went off to Nashville immediately and started having random sex with girls on bachelorette weekends like I didn’t matter.”

“Maybe he did,” she brushes off nonchalantly.

My jaw drops. “Why would you say that to me?”

“Because you can’t put off going to your family home because you’re afraid.”

I say, “It’s not my family home.”

“It will be – yours and Fran’s, when I die. Which, according to the cards, will be in twenty years, on a full moon sometime in the Spring.” She smiles, knowing I don’t believe in any of this gibberish, and she made that up just to tease me.

This time last year I was two years deep into a relationship with Justin, the very nice guy who I met when he rear-ended my car, and I spent Thanksgiving with his family in Charleston. When I broke it off two months later, he didn’t seem all that surprised. In fact, that’s exactly what he said.

“I can’t say I’m surprised, Vienna,” he told me. “You were never going to let me in.”

I didn’t know what that meant.

He elaborated, “You hold parts of yourself at arm’s length. Like, one day you’ll do this and one day you’ll have that. Like you’re not good enough right now, as you are. What happened to make you think happiness doesn’t happen right now?”

As harmless as he was, I didn’t regret breaking up with him, but I did regret not getting more clarity on his breakdown of my psyche. Because he was right. I did do those things, to the point of exhaustion.

I want to stop pretending that I am separate from my past. It needs to come with me if I’m going to move forward.

Biting my lip, my eyes read the soft, comforting gaze of the person who loves me most in the world. She smiles back, nodding, knowing the words before I utter them.

“I feel stupid even thinking about it,” I mumble.

“I know.”

“I wish I didn’t make it so heavy.”

“I know that, too.”

I twist my hair, gathering it back in my clip.

Before I can get up, Heddy clutches my hand, holding me down. She offers, “One thing I learned in my years of internal reflection is that what you fear isn’t usually the big scary thing. It’s just the bug caught in a spiderweb. The invisible stickiness on the outside makes it look bigger. That’s the stuff that’s scary. You’ve got to wade through the cobwebs to clean up the problem.”

That’s quite the analogy.

“I don’t know what that means,” I say.

“I think maybe you’re afraid to go back to the house, to confront your career and maybe other stuff I don’t know about, because you left so much of yourself behind when you were eighteen.”

She has a point.

I haven’t spent enough time dissecting why I’m still so bothered about what went wrong with Adam. If he hadn’t become famous, I wouldn’t feel as bad about my lackluster career. If I wasn’t single, I wouldn’t regret that lost love. If I had a good relationship with my father, I wouldn’t feel angry at being persuaded to give up Adam entirely.

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