Total pages in book: 213
Estimated words: 201920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1010(@200wpm)___ 808(@250wpm)___ 673(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 201920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1010(@200wpm)___ 808(@250wpm)___ 673(@300wpm)
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.
I didn’t tell him that my parents were buried there, but he found out shortly after we arrived.
Part of me will forever be his for how he handled that day. For letting me cry and holding me. For not forcing me to talk, but being there when I was ready to.
Like I said, I never deserved him.
The second is a picture of the first place I’d rented after I ran away from Dixon Falls. I went from place to place, spending every cent I’d gathered over the years and not staying anywhere any longer than I had to. Until I found this farm cottage in the UK and met Rae.
She’s such the opposite of me in every way. And she reminded me of Tyler. The happiness and kindness, the fact that she never stopped smiling and joking. Some people just do that to you … and because of it, I stayed. For a long time.
She’s the one who took me to the bar in Leeds where I kissed another boy for the first time after Tyler’s death.
She’s the one who showed me how to really market my photography and introduced me to a gallery owner. She made me want to stay in that little cottage I’d rented for much longer than I’d planned. But feeling so happy and having everything be too easy felt wrong. It was wrong that I could move on and it made me feel like what had happened in the past was right, when I knew without a doubt that it wasn’t.
It would never be right and that realization made me see Tyler everywhere all over again. I needed to leave. It was okay to remember, but it wasn’t okay to forget. And I did leave. Each place I stopped at was closer and closer to Dixon Falls. At first I didn’t realize it. But when I picked this university, I was keenly aware that I’d only be hours away.
The third picture is only a silhouette I took in Paris.
I don’t know the people.
It’s the shadows of four men standing outside of a church with a deep sunset behind them.
From a distance, all I could see were the Cross boys. And I took picture after picture, snapping away as quickly as I could. As if they’d vanish if I stopped. I wanted them back badly. I wanted them to forgive me and tell me it was alright. After all, they were the only family I had for a long time and just like my parents, I lost them.
That picture hurts the most. Because there should be five people in the shot. And because when the men did leave the hilltop behind the church and come closer, they weren’t the Cross boys and I knew in that moment I’d never see them again. Daniel was never going to show up for me to stare at from a distance. It would never be them, no matter how much I prayed for it to happen.