Jovie & Bash

Twenty One || Romantic

|CHAPTER TWENTY ONE|

They say that people change over time. They say that when push comes to shove people can do the unexpected. I always thought that the change they were talking about would be groundbreaking, that all of a sudden somebody would wake up completely different from the person they had been before.

I was wrong. And, I guess that's why people seemed constant to me for the longest time.

It's gradual, like the way the ocean waves polish rocks along the shore. We forget that as we're changing and growing, so are the people around us. Maybe they're in sync, being altered by life the same way we are. Similarities and differences in experiences leave nuances in behaviors, so much or so little that we hardly ever notice or we suddenly start to drift.

I didn't notice how much the people in my life had changed in the past year until I lied in an unfamiliar bed in a Manhattan dorm room swallowed by the dark, unable to sleep.

It was just a tour, just a weekend stay at the university I would be attending in the fall. Meredith had made the seven hour trip with me, an impossible feat I thought I'd never witness, and left me uneasy and nervous in a crowd of high school seniors I may see on campus later that year.

I didn't think of myself as a shy person, I could get my way through uncomfortable situations just fine. In fact, this is an experience I had looked forward to my whole life, to be able to step into a crowd of unfamiliar faces and become invisible. But, as I made my way through the crowd to register, I found myself feeling lonely and lost.

And, while there were fun moments in the tour and good laughs with the girl whose dorm I was staying in, I began to get homesick. I began to miss the people I thought would be easy to say goodbye to-and I'd been there less than twenty-four hours.

That terrified me. I wondered what had happened to me, what I had done to make myself so vulnerable to change and new atmospheres.

Here I was these past months pushing for a relationship with my mother I never thought I would have. Here I had been falling in love. Here I had been establishing an identity in entirely the wrong place. That wasn't supposed to happen until after I'd left Ashwood Creek so that I could start fresh and make my own rules. I wasn't supposed to bring baggage-just snip the ties and find myself.

It felt awful disappointing lying in a bed that was too springy with my eyes trained on the grey ceiling, melting it into a void of my own insecurities as they flashed before my eyes. It was so confusing to want to hate something that you loved. It felt wrong to want to let go of Ashwood Creek.

I'd grown far too attached to perishable things.

I just wanted to numb the stabbing in my gut and clamp my hands over my ears to stop the little voice in the back of my head from telling me all the things I was afraid of hearing. I wanted to stop feeling so much.

And even though at home, in Ashwood Creek, I was happier than I had ever been, deep down inside I wished that I had never changed. I begged the ocean to stop rolling over the shore.

I knew in the beginning that staying attached to things would do this, but I also told myself that I could end it all without so much as a frown.

I was wrong. I was so wrong.

As I listened to my roommate snore, I decided that I didn't regret these past couple of months. I only wished it hadn't affected me with this much intensity because saying goodbye would sting like a slap across the cheek-or like a permanent ache in a once impenetrable heart.

I knew there was nothing left for me to hold back anymore because it would all hurt the same way in the end. All the work I did to protect myself had been in vain.