Page 114 of The Problem with Falling
“No, she didn’t.”
“Uh, yeah. She did.”
“Well, go tell her you don’t accept it or something. Go tell her how you feel.”
What the hell was going on? Was it “push Theo to go after Willow” week or something?
“Jensen, it’s a done deal. That’s life. Things come, and things go.”
“But Willow isn’t a thing. She’s your person. You can’t just let your person go.”
“She’s not mine.”
“Then what’s the point, huh?!” he shouted, tossing his hands up in the air. “What’s the point of anything?” he questioned, growing more and more emotional.
“Jensen—”
“You love her. And she loves you. How could anything else matter outside of that?”
“You’ll understand when you’re older how—”
“Oh, don’t give me that bull crap, Theo. I might be a teenager, but I’m not a stupid kid. And maybe I haven’t been in love before, but I know what it looks like, and I’d never seen you happier than you’ve ever been with Willow, even during losing PaPa. You were so sad before her. So what, you’re just going to go back to being sad again? Fishing alone? Sitting alone? Being alone?”
Well, yeah.
That was the plan.
His eyes flashed with tears, and I couldn’t comprehend why he was growing so emotional over the topic. It was my heart that was stomped out, not his. Yet based on his reaction, you’d think he was the one going through the motions of heartbreak.
“You thought you loved my mom, right?” he asked me.
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“Did it feel like what you have with Willow?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“How was it different with Willow? How did she make you feel?”
I took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Alive.” She made me feel alive in ways I hadn’t in a long time. I’d been sleepwalking through my life for years, and then Willow came and added color to my world. She woke me up, even if I was first annoyed with finding her wild self in the lake at two in the morning.
She shook me awake.
Jensen frowned. He fiddled with his hands. “Why did she leave?”
“She got scared for some reason. So she ran.”
“Yeah, well. She’s kind of the hummingbird to your oak tree.”
“What?”
“You know, hummingbirds,” he mentioned, gesturing over to the bird feeder he’d put out earlier this summer. It rested against a big oak tree, and the birds would come buzzing in and out nonstop. “Hummingbirds dart away at the first sign of any storm. They get scared.”
“Oh. Well, yes. She’s like a hummingbird.”
“And you’re the oak tree. You just gotta stand still and let her know that she can land on you. You gotta show her that she can trust that your branches are safe places to land so she feels safe enough to stay. That’s why the hummingbirds come back. They know they’ll be okay because the tree isn’t moving.”
“When did you get so smart?”
