Burning Moon (Wattpad Version)

Alternative ending-Chapter 21

My mother said something to me once.  Well, she’d burbled something to me in a somewhat slurred sounding voice with the half closed eyes of a mad, drunk woman, while trying to pick herself up off the floor. (It was a delightful sight)

“Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to go back to the beginning again.” *Hiccup

At the time I’d paid her no heed. I never did. I thought the words were nothing more than the intoxicated ramblings of my liquored up mother, the actress who talked incessantly, but never said a single thing. At the time she’d said it, I thought she was just trying to justify the fact that she was being dragged into rehab for the 5th time, and the 2nd time that year. Especially since she’d said it as she fell out of the stationary car and tumbled into the parking lot of the rehab center, all very dramatically of course.

But now, holding a ticket to Thailand in my sweaty hand once again, almost a year to the day, I got it. I was right at the beginning all over again. I smiled to myself; this was the first thing my mother had ever said to me that actually made any sense. Everything else that came out of her mouth needed to be taken with a mountain of salt.

The trip had been a very easy sell to my family and friends this time- they practically pushed me onto the plane when I told them what I was doing. I think Val and Sue both breathed a collective sigh of relief that was a year in he making, no doubt they were bored of my Damien induced conversation- although they would never have said that to my face.  They’d been very supportive, although at the beginning, I they didn't really know what to make of the whole situation.

As all good friends would have done under the circumstances, they’d tried to convince me that perhaps my feelings for Damien were just fleeting. A rebound thing. Born out of the obvious trauma of being left at the altar.  And I don’t blame them, if my friend came back from her husband-less honeymoon in love with a stranger she’d just met, I too would have erred on the side of caution. But I hadn’t waivered once in my conviction that Damien and I were real. It was real love. And as the year progressed, I think they realized it too. And I’m sure that right now they were downright thrilled that I was going to do something about it.

Sometimes I wonder how I got so lucky with those two- my girls. I met them when I was thirteen, my dad had just gotten custody and I’d moved in with him and started at a new school. I was the new girl once again and I was also a complete basket case, from years and years of living with my mother I think. I was a bully’s best friend back then, I practically had a sign around my neck saying, ‘pick on me’.

For starters, I was new and from out of town, I was going through a bit of a ‘puppy fat’ stage, I had horribly large boobs which were hard to conceal, and my mother was semi-famous, well, famous enough to have grabbed a few headlines over the years, unfortunately not for her award winning theatre work, but rather for her roles off stage like, “The drunk”, “The sexually promiscuous” and my favorite, “The jail bird” after she and one of her many suitors were caught in a compromising position in a movie theatre.

It wasn’t long before the bullies descended, practically on the first day. And while they rallied around and called me names and the cool girls stood watching from the sidelines laughing, Val cut through the crowd, she was a real fire-cracker even at that age, and single handedly warded them all off.  And that had been it really, she and Sue had taken me under their wing and from that day onward, we were BFF’s.  

Now, I’m not Kevin MD with evil wooden voodoo masks on my walls, but I don’t think it takes a psychoanalyst to figure out that I’ve needed a lot of rescuing in my life- that I’ve been protected by everyone I know. That somehow people felt it necessary to do so…