Page 123 of You Might Be Bad for Me

Addison

Iwonder what the girl I used to be would think of me.

The girl who still had both her parents and a life worth living for.

I think she’d make up excuses for my poor behavior. She’d say I was sad, but she has no idea how pathetic I am.

Grief isn’t static. It’s not a point on a chart where you can say, “Here, at this time, I grieved.” Because grief doesn’t know time. It comes and goes as it pleases, then small things taunt it back into your life. The memories haunt you forever and carry the grief with them. Yes, grief is carried. That’s a good way to put it.

I pull a pillow on the sofa into my lap and stare at the television screen although my eyes are puffy and sore and I don’t even know what’s on.

Playing with the small zipper on the side of the pillow absently, I think about what happened. How it all unraveled.

I think it started with his scar, the past being brought up. But just like scars, some of our past will never leave us. The old wounds were showing. That’s what it was really about.

I always knew Daniel was broken in ways Tyler wasn’t. But I didn’t know about his father. I didn’t know any of that. I don’t even know if Tyler knew.

But what happened between Daniel and me, that … I don’t even have a word for it. It was like a light switch being turned off. Everything was fine, better than fine. Then darkness was abrupt and sudden, with no way to escape.

My eyes dartto the screen as a commercial appears and its volume is louder than whatever show or movie was playing. I sniffle as I flick the TV off and look at my phone again.

I’m sorry.Daniel messaged me earlier and I do believe he is, but I don’t know if that will be enough. My happy little bubble of lust has been popped and the self-awareness isn’t pretty.

I’m sorry too.It’s all I can say back to him and he reads it. But there’s nothing left for either of us to say now. I wonder if this will be the end of us.

We can’t have a conversation about the bad things that have happened. That’s the simple truth. It’s awkward, tense. And we can’t escape the moments coming up in conversation. There’s no way getting around that.

It’s easy to blame it on my past. On things I had no control over and things I can’t change.

It’s a lot like what I did when I left Dixon Falls. But really I was running, just like I had been since the day my parents died. Tyler was a distraction, a pleasant one that made me feel something other than the agonizing loneliness that had turned me bitter.

And then there was Daniel. He left me breathless and wanting, and that’s a hard temptation to run away from.

I’m woman enough to admit that.

So sure, I can blame it on our past.

It’s easy to blame it on grief, but it’s still a lie. It’s because neither of us can talk about what happened.

I startle at the vibration of the phone on the coffee table.

My heart beats hard with each passing second; all the while a long-lost voice in the back of my head begs me to answer a simple question.What am I doing?

Or maybe the right question is,What did I expect?

My gaze drifts across each photo on the far wall of the living room and it stops on three. Each of the photos meant something more when I took them. There are a little more than a dozen in total. Each photographed in a moment of time when I knew I was changing.

I keep them hung up because they look pretty from a distance; the pictures themselves are pleasant and invoke warm feelings.

More than that, the photos are a timeline of moments I never want to forget. I refuse to let myself forget.

But the three I keep staring at are so relevant to how I feel in this moment.

The first photo was taken at my parents’ grave. Just a simple picture really, small forget-me-nots that had sprouted in the early spring. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground, but they’d already pushed through the hard dirt and bloomed. Maybe they knew I was coming and wanted to make sure I saw them.

In the photo you can’t even tell they’ve bloomed on graves. The photo is cropped short and close. But I’ll always remember that the flowers were on my parents’ grave.

Tyler was with me when I took it. It wasn’t the first, second or even the third time we’d gone out. But it was the first time I’d cried in such a long time and the one friend I’d met and trusted was there to witness it. I thought I was being sly asking him to drive to a cemetery hours away. Back to where I’d grown up. I hadn’t been there in so long, but on that day when Tyler said we could go anywhere, I told him about the angel statue at the front of a cemetery I’d once seen that would be perfect for the photography project.

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