Shattering Love >Chapter Three<

We stayed up all night and well into the next day, talking and laughing. He told me about his childhood in England, and all the trouble he used to get into at boarding school, until finally his father had felt forced to send him to a boarding school in New York City. They weren’t teaching me about life, he said, there was no point in staying in school. That’s why he dropped out at 15 and stayed alive only by singing and playing his guitar on street corners. 1

I told him about the childhood I wished I had had and the horrible things I used to do to myself when I was a teenager because I hated myself so much.  He looked sadly at me and a dark shadow flitted across his eyes for a moment. Holding my hands in his, and he told me to tell him all about it. That it would help, and maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone anymore? That’s what I felt right? Loneliness? And I told him, because even then, on that first night, I loved him and trusted him. And after I had, it was then that the ever present fear of losing him settled itself into my core.  2

All that winter and early spring, I wrote stories of curly-maned lions who snuck into the forest and painted the tops of all the trees with super-glue, causing all the proud, colorful birds to share their feathers with the trees. Tales of gallant young horses who galloped away from the constraints of society and tradition. 3

He continued to perform at the Looking Glass, singing songs of girls who threw themselves into waves of sharp edges and pins, hoping to end their sorrows. Ballads about Summers when exquisite flowers were too frightened to bloom, for fear of the larger, more beautiful and dangerous roses rising above them and strangling them.  After every performance, it was me who he always made his way to, and all the little boys and girls who wanted bits and pieces of him would drift away. 4

There were times when I’d look at him, and wonder what I had ever done to deserve him. Someone as beautiful, talented and kind as he. Maybe if I hadn’t spent so much time counting down until the moment that I lose him, it wouldn’t have happened. 5

There was a while when I was Mia… I wanted to just lose 15 pounds, so maybe I could come a little closer to deserving him. But he came home from his part time job at the store one night and caught me with my head bent over the toilet bowl. 6

He grabbed me roughly by the cuff of my shirt and shouted at me.7

“What are you doing, Summer!? What are you doing?!?!”, and I was speechless, I couldn’t explain. He leaned away from me, looking deep into my eyes, his own filled with overwhelming concern. And he could see why. Like a father comforting his daughter, he wrapped me in his arms and kissed my forehead and my hair. 8

“I love you Summer, just as you are. Don’t ever forget it.”9

Yet, I never took faith in his words. Is that why it happened ? Because I never wanted to believe that love could exist for me, therefore making it fade away, so as to move onto someone who could believe in true love? Or was it because I had felt in my being that something such as this would happen? 10