Page 35 of Give My Everything
Because there was a time when I didn’t. When I wondered if being alive wasn’t for me anymore, if I could quiet the memories and the pain forever. It was my darkest time, something I’ve only ever shared with the therapist I saw during my senior year. And Josslyn.
She was the only one who went to bat for me when everything happened at the end of that first semester. The only person to care when I just…disappeared from school.
The only person who has ever truly been there and known exactly what lurks in the recesses of my mind.
God, I miss her.
A shriek from a nearby child pulls me from my thoughts and I watch as a woman chases a young boy across the sand and toward the water.
“Jones, come back!” she shouts, though there’s laughter in her voice.
The little boy giggles, getting closer and closer to the ocean before suddenly he’s swooped into the air, his little voice bursting into full-out laughter.
The woman kisses him rapidly on his cheeks. “You can’t run off like that, you little goofball,” she says, spinning the child in her arms.
When she comes to a stop, she sees me, flashing me a somewhat embarrassed grin. “Oh, hey. Don’t mind us,” she says, her voice still filled with laughter.
I grin but say nothing, just taking in the comfortable way she interacts with her son. I wonder if I’ll ever look at my child like that. If I’ll love it. If I’ll mean it.
“Annie!”
My head turns to the side and I see a man in the distance, holding a toddler. He waves the woman over.
Annie, I assume, sets the little boy on the ground and then lifts her hand in the air. “Coming!” She glances back at me. “Have a great day.”
She smiles, her happiness radiating through her, and then she slips her hand into the hand of the boy and the two walk off in the direction they were called.
Something about that interaction lances through me and I wince, my eyes brimming with tears.
I try to remember a single day in my life when I’ve looked as happy as that woman, even on the good days.
I can’t find it. I can’t find the memory that reassures me I haven’t always been this dark thing, a mess, a waste.
I spin on my toes and march up the beach, my emotions feeling ragged and torn and suffocating.
For my entire life, I’ve only been worth what I can provide to men. I’ve only been used and enjoyed and discarded, by nearly every person around me.
I don’t know how to do anything. I don’t know how to be anything other than what I’ve been.
How am I supposed to give any kind of future to this swimmie thing if all I have to provide is toxic sludge and self-hatred?
When I make it back to the house, I don’t even wash my feet off. I just storm through and up to the study, gripping a nearly full tube of black paint and squeezing it straight onto the canvas.
Lifting a brush into my hands, I smear it across the unfinished image I was working on. I swipe it back and forth, over and over and over.
Until it’s covered in solid black.
And when I’m done, the entire canvas filled from edge to edge, I step back and take a deep breath.
I paint what I feel. It’s what I know, and right now? This is a better reflection of my insides.
It isn’t a storm in the distance, brewing and building.
The storm is already here.
And it will be a miracle if I make it through.
CHAPTER7
