Muse [18+] • REVISING

41 | Vertigo

D A M I E N

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I remember the look on her face when I told her I was leaving Paris, and how it felt like the kind of wound that would leave the nastiest scar when it healed if it ever did. We sat on that living room floor for hours that night, too caught up in the silence to ever look each other in the eyes and make sense of the whole thing.

I shouldn't have waited. I should've told her right away when I found out that I was getting let go. But she deserved a place here more than anyone, and I couldn't come clean about the very thing that would've torn her away from it all.

The girl I met all those months ago is also quite brash. She wouldn't have allowed me to go through with my decision if she knew I took the fall. She would've marched her ass to HR, and demanded they fire her instead. It would hurt her equally as much, but she isn't a mouse. She'd find a way to make sure the world fully collapsed on her before it did anyone else. The girl is noble that way. Sometimes, I wish she was everything but. I want her to just take without feeling like she's asking for too much. She could never ask for too much.

I, on the other hand, am nothing short of selfish. A part of me felt that if I told her about Avignon and Italy so soon, it would make things more finite. I wasn't ready to blow up the one thing in my life that made the most sense. The one thing I didn't feel the need to control, because, with her, I didn't have to adjust. She never stopped seeing me as Damien.

I took all of that, and I broke her. That day plays in my head like a broken record. I took her out for a picnic, I set everything up, and then I watched her heart sink. I told her I loved her and then got a train that would separate that love with four hundred miles. I didn't speak to her for a month, not even a call to see how she was doing. Instead, every night, I just pictured her alone in that house, selfishly hoping she still loved me despite everything.

A month came and went, everything plummeting lower than rock bottom. All I wanted was to call her, just to hear her voice on the other line, the only sound in the entire world that could calm me down. Both Nico and Delia wouldn't stop calling, my father kept at his games, I flaked out on the three job interviews I had in Italy, and my mother had announced that she felt like she only had a week left.

Imagine the woman you've only gotten to truly know over the past thirty or so days, telling you she feels death creeping up on her like a time-lapsed sunset. Those last seven days were the first time she had ever truly felt like my mother.

I remember that last Saturday with her, and I'll never forget it. She's the reason I made it back.

"Grab that silver box on that shelf over there, will you?" she asks as I help her sit up.

I pull the throw blanket higher up her body before walking over to the only bookshelf in her room, grabbing a little lockbox that sits on the top wooden panel. I bring it back to her, setting it onto her lap, and she reaches over to her nightstand, pulling out a little key. I sit on a stool beside her bed, watching as she unlocks the box, beginning to rummage through the tiny mess. I can only see small glimpses of papers, maybe pictures, and some other little trinkets as she tries to hide what she's doing. I raise an eyebrow as she pauses, picking out what looked like a four by six photograph.

She smiles, her eyes watering at the corners. She looks up at me, back at the film, and then up at me again. She places it face down onto her lap before locking the box again and placing it onto the nightstand. Then, she hands the piece of film to me. I grab it, flipping it over.

It's a photo. Of a baby and a woman. He's swaddled in a blanket, held close to the woman's chest. They share the same eyes, the same lips, the same jet black hair. A boy and his mother. My chest squeezes, and I grind my teeth just to stop everything from hurting. I look up at my mother, searching her eyes, and she nods.