If You Love Me

13

a v e r y

MY MOTHER ALWAYS TOLD ME never to hate anything— that even a strong distaste for something, or someone was too much of a burden that the heart should not have to handle. Whenever she messed up on one of her art pieces, she would just incorporate the mistake until it fit her original vision. Whenever she cut herself on a knife while attempting any meal than wasn't chicken nuggets or macaroni, she would just hold her hand under the running faucet until the cut slowly began to heal itself and then try again. And when I would make adolescent comments about her underarm odour after she laid in bed for days, she would just smile and then sit in the bathtub until her fingertips turned to prunes. She took everything that was handed to her, whether she deserved it or not, and never once expressed hatred towards anything or anyone.

For awhile, I was the same way. When the girls whose noses were stuck in the clouds made it a point never let me in on the topics of laughter; when I saw children playing in the park with their fathers running after them; and when my mother would wake me up at three in the morning to hold the ladder as she painted the tops of the walls. I didn't hate any of it.

— but when she died, I started to hate even the smallest of things. I hated the way that the birds sang in the early hours of the morning; I hated the way that all of my white clothes had become tinged with pink after I had thrown a red sock along in with the load; and I hated way that Millie made it a point ask me about my day every night at the dinner table.

Every mentions of taking life's tribulations with a grain of salt had gone completely out the window and hate was the first emotion that I felt when meeting someone new, trying something new, and being someone new.

I had escaped my hometown with every intention of breaking that vicious cycle. I did not initially hate Olivia upon meeting her; I did not hate any of the other students, even the one that always smacked his gum in the elevator; and I did not hate the new life that I had planned to establish for myself. But in my art class on my first day, the feelings of hate slowly crept their way back into my body and made a bed in the front of mind.

As I stared at the white canvas, the very ones that I spent hours in the store staring at as my mother ran rampant with a smile on her face, I began to hate that I would never see her again. I began to hate that I was sitting behind an easel living out the dream that she had never gotten to. And I began to hate that the only thing that I really knew about her was that she loved art and me, and nothing of the words that whispered to her at night; nothing of why she hated and missed my father; and nothing of why she had chosen death over me.

And then I met Dean.

I wanted to hate him. I wanted to loathe that he was the riches and I was the rags; I wanted to loathe that he was always smiling; and I wanted to loathe that he was the first man that looked at me like I was something— but I didn't. I didn't loathe him, I envied him. I envied that he was going places, rather than had been places, and that he did not have to have someone look at him in order for him to be something.

And despite all of that envy, I found myself liking the boy that had thankfully ditched the sweater vest and khakis I had seen him in the day that we met. I found myself wanting to tell him things about me, thinking about him in times that he wasn't around, and welcoming his touch.

With him, I was no longer the girl that had lost her mother and herself, the girl that had gotten so good at lying that she couldn't even trust herself, and the girl that welcomed loneliness like a warm blanket.

And all it took me was those blue irises to bring me back to earth where my harsh reality was waiting for me.

Asher. He reminded me that I was that girl and always would be.