Page 88 of Big Little Spells

There’s no taking it back.

So I catapult myself into the sky with no fucking clue where I’m going.

Except away from here. I have to get the hell away.

And this time, I’m not coming back.

24

THIS TIME IT’S NOT my power or my visions that are fractured.

It’s me.

I’m up in the air, soaring over St. Cyprian. I don’t have a plan. I’m not heading anywhere. This feels like proof that the people I love were right to walk away from me. To leave me.

If I was worth something—anything—I would have somewhere to go, wouldn’t I?

I wouldn’t be left no matter what I did.

The real, ugly truth is what I always feared it would be, and now I know it beyond any doubt: No one wants me around. Not once they know who I really am.

That’s the real reason I never tried to come home.

Maybe it’s time I admit it.

I’m hovering high in the air, looking down at the miserable little town that made me and broke me, more than once. The urge that had me shoot up into the air is gone now. I don’t want to go anywhere. Sedona doesn’t seem like an escape any longer. None of the other places I’ve lived over the years appeal.

I don’t want anything but to take back the last few hours. Or better yet, turn back time and do something different ten years ago.

“Time is mine until time takes me home,” I say, the words falling from my tongue.

And I get it now. I had all that time, but it ran out the day Nicholas dragged me back here. I look down at the rivers, the gleaming little village, the lights that mark the ferry as it chugs across the low, brown water.

I was always coming back home, wasn’t I? Sooner or later. My mistake was imagining that it might be on my own terms. That if I couldn’t hide the past, I could change it or shape it, somehow.

So I spread out my arms as wide as I can. I tip myself back, like a trust fall.

Then I just...let go.

And I let myself plummet back down toward St. Cyprian.

It can do with me what it will.

Because this feels right. It feels meant.

And it’s not like I’ll die. I’ll just crash to the ground and hurt a little. Maybe a lot.

But I’ll deserve it.

All the old voices I fought so hard to come to terms with are back. It’s like a faucet of shame and self-loathing, and the worst part is how well I know every syllable, every insult, every whisper—

I can’t believe I thought I could actually recover from this.

From this place. From who I am here. From what I did.

Exile seems like more than a sentence. It seems like a kindness.

And if the Joywood take me out, well. This was all borrowed time since the night I tried to burn everything down on sacred bricks like the little criminal they always accused me of being.

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