Willa

Chapter Thirty Nine: Years pass slow

The next few years do pass slow, and before you know it I've been in Manchester for three years. I feel like I've kind of been here forever, life has settled to a rhythm I can count on. Years have patched up the wounds left by the loss of Morgan, and of course Allies words, they have been healing. To be so loved and so wanted by her, it is beyond anything I could have ever imagined and even from afar, it is as if she touches me more with words than physical touch ever would. I love Alberta, more than I've ever loved another, it is so deep, it feels like it must be as old as I am. A forever weaved within my soul. Although I've worshipped her from afar, and savoured every last word she sends, I feel as if I have hit some kind of wall. I don't look outside to the world enough, I have got so lost in Allie and the future that I no longer live in the moment. I go to school, teach, go to the gym, and return home. When I have visitors staying I enjoy them, but when they go home I am again three years into a life alone here, and it's not that I want someone else. I couldn't think less about women. I've not looked or thought about anyone else since Allie came to Oregon and told me that she loved me. No there would never be another for me, but I needed to breathe a little for a while, to stop obsessing over Allie's messages. I had to go live out in the real world here on the east coast, checking in still of course with Allie, but breathing between them, not checking my Mail and inbox frantically for word, because right now, we couldn't be physically together. We both had to live, separate lives, for now, whilst we waited for our forever.

***
Allie would get my message about taking some time to breathe, but she had news for me too, her mama was sick and she needed me to return home. Of course as soon as I read those words I was booked on a flight and returning home to them.

***

The trip home was pretty harrowing. Helena passed away hours after I arrived, but not before a revealing letter by Mary that I read to her. Allie sat there and listened as she learnt how her mother and Mary were once in love, how her mother was the one who helped me leave town that day. She learnt how she sent me to Mary, and of course it was an overwhelming surge of confusion, grief and anger that would follow, washing over her and dragging her away.

Allie was furious, beyond devastated by her mothers death and desperate to make it all stop, the raining bullets of grief, of pain, of betrayal. Allie would do something I don't even like to talk about, she would take our love, take my loyalty and stretch it as far as she could, push me beyond my boundaries, say things that she didn't mean, make me feel like I wasn't someone she loved at all. Then she took the longed for intimacy, and she engaged it, but not in a loving way, she would kiss me, touch me, have me do the same to her, to devour her, take her, and refuse to make it anything but an angry and grief filled fuck to desperately try and smother the pain she felt. The thing was, she filled me with that pain, she filled me up with it and sent me off, to go and hold it, and to nurse it. I left the funeral the week after. I didn't have the strength to deal then with my parents, and the conversation that would be had with Mary, at their home, before we left town again.

***
I think I've pushed Willa too far. Way too far from me, and far from the love that threatens to end me. I didn't mean to take it all, all of that grief and pain and pour it into her, to make her hold me and then the pain and take it thrust by thrust, kiss by kiss. It was a deadly combination of lust, and desperation, to forget it, forget everything.

Oh Willa,

I'm so sorry.

I never want you to feel the burn from my flame or the cut of my tongue. Words are all I have ever had, and I used them against you. I feel like I've assaulted you with them and I can never take it back. I want you to forgive me more than anything in the world but I fear you won't. I fear you've gone and you will never return to me, and every day since the funeral, since you left...I've grieved you and Mama. It's as if you both left here at once, going together, and that loss it is far, far too much to bear. I am seeking therapy and learning, about myself and life, about why it was I behaved that way when I never would have in a million lifetimes usually. It is not an excuse, but I was not in my right mind, and my god, I hope you know me enough after twenty six years to know that was not me. I love you more than you will ever know my love, so much more than you could imagine.