Me, Myself, and I

flashback: when we started dating

Second semester senior year. I'd sprinted from my failed history exam and hid beneath the bleachers. Don't let them see you break, my mother'd always say. But that day I'd bawled beneath the cold metal as it was pegged with raindrops. I heard the boy's basketball coach blowing her whistle, demanding another lap from her team on the football turf, feet pounding. My feet stayed glued to the grass below the bleachers. Shuffling. Done with conditioning, they lined up for the showers.

Then this boy I'd hardly spoken two words to poked his head around the corner with a thin smile, sweat and raindrops all over his head, drenched in his basketball uniform. He sat. He asked that question. Didn't ask my name, just how I was. How I am. And I told him. I told him the story I hadn't told anyone.

It wasn't an entertaining story. Just one about the collapse of a family's kingdom: a mom, a dad, a son, a daughter. The son, paralyzed waist down at birth. A mother's obsession with his unachievable happiness. The father wasn't in the story much, and neither was the daughter, as one lived in an office and the other in her bedroom up the stairs across from her brother's. The daughter hid her troublesome report cards and spent nights in other houses when she could.

The boy kills himself at eight years old while sitting atop his bed one night. The girl finds him first. After all, she was just across the hall.

The mother can't take it, sails off, abandons the broken kingdom, never to return. The girl lives in her bedroom again, but her father is no longer in the office. Somewhere along the way the story was written down, the father and daughter went to a new stronghold, building from the ground up. Except I felt like I was only burying myself deeper. Many had claimed the story to be fiction, but we all know they bought it anyway.

When I finished the tale, not because it was over, but because I'd run out of words, Alex leaned in and kissed me for the first time.