Heart Bones

Maybe we both grew heart bones.

Damaged people recognize other damaged people. It’s like a club you don’t want a membership to.

I just wish our fall and winter fit as well as our summer.

There’s something about the saltiness of the air that feels forgiving as it mixes with the stale Kentucky air still clinging to the walls of my lungs.

I didn’t realize what seeing the ocean would mean to me, but now that I’ve seen it, I want every human on earth to experience it.

Maybe the only reason I wasn’t accepted is because I didn’t want to be. It was easier to stay to myself.

I’ve spent a lot of years becoming the person I am. It’s hard to change who you are in a span of a few days.

I know what love is, because I spent my whole life knowing what it isn’t.

I thought I knew who I was, but I had no idea people can become different versions of themselves in different settings.

In August, I’ll be out of this life, and it won’t be because of anything my mother did for me, or because my father bailed me out of here. It’ll be because of me.
I want that victory.
I want to be the reason I turn out the way I’m going to turn out.

“Thank you for believing in me, Beyah.”
“You believed in me first, Samson. It’s the least I could do.”

She has a good energy. Sometimes I feel like a black hole around her. Like maybe I’m sucking all the life out of her by just being in her innocent presence.

“I love this song!” She jumps up and starts dancing. Marcos gets up and dances with her. It’s not a slow song, so they’re stomping and spinning around like their lives weigh nothing.

Marcos looks at Sara and says, “This would have been a great marriage proposal moment with all these free fireworks in the background. Too bad we just met over spring break.”
“Bring me back here next year,” she says. “I’ll pretend I forgot this conversation.”
They make me laugh.

Marcos laughs and reaches down into the bag for a donut. “Beyah is right. You’re perfect.”

I think when you’re the worst of people, finding the worst in others becomes a survival tactic of sorts. You focus heavily on the darkness in people in hopes of masking the true shade of your own darkness. That’s how my mother has spent her entire life. Always seeking the worst in people. Even her own daughter.

For her sake, that’s the version of her I’m going to choose to miss. The person she never had the chance to be.

It’s the first sunset I’ve ever felt this deep in my chest. I feel my eyes begin to tear up at the sheer beauty of it.
What does that say about me? I’ve yet to shed a tear for my mother, but I can somehow spare one for a repetitive act of nature?

Most kids get the kind of parents that’ll be missed after they die. The rest of us get the kind of parents who make better parents after they’re dead.
The nicest thing my mother has ever done for me is die

At least when I was in the house with my mother, it felt like I fit there. We belonged there together, no matter how mismatched we were. We learned to navigate and weave our lives around each other, and in this house, I’m not sure I can invisibly weave around any of these people. They’re like brick walls I’m going to crash into at every turn.

It feels strange even referring to them as parents. They gave me life, but that’s about the only thing I’ve ever received from them.

I hope I’m misinterpreting his tone, because I’m not sure how he could be resentful of me in any way, shape, or form. He’s the parent. I’m just a product of his poor choices and lack of contraception.

I shake my head again, because even if family counted, my answer would remain the same. My father barely knows me. My mother wasn’t capable of loving me.

Even though pieces of me resemble pieces of them, I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged to either one of them. It’s as if I adopted myself when I was a kid and have been on my own since then.

I may not be ending the summer with Samson by my side, but I’m ending it with something I didn’t have when I showed up here.
A family.

I feel like a flower being taken out of the shadows and put into the sun. I’m blooming for the first time since I broke through the earth’s soil.

Whatever it is that makes him up as a whole, I find myself viewing him as a project I want to take on. A challenge. I want to crack him open and see what’s inside him that makes him the only person on the planet I’m genuinely curious about.

I’m not impenetrable against his mouth. I’m vulnerable, and I feel my guard lowering. I’d give him all my secrets right now and that isn’t me. His kiss is potent enough to turn me into a girl I don’t recognize. I love it and I loathe it.

“I’ve never felt more myself than when I was with you that summer. That’s exactly who I want to be. Forever.”

We are alike, but only in the saddest ways.

“Stop worrying about my feelings, Samson.”
He pushes the hair back from his forehead. “I can’t help it.”

“You can fill your life with nice things, but nice things don’t fill the holes in your soul.”
“What fills the holes in a soul?”
Samson’s eyes scroll over my face for a few seconds. “Pieces of someone else’s soul.”

My mouth falls open when it hits me. Samson remembered what I told him—that no one has ever come to any of my games.
He came out here to cheer for me.

I don’t understand humans sometimes. I hate it, because I find myself wishing that the entirety of humanity would suffer just a tiny amount more than they do.

“I don’t have to know anything about your past to know you’re a good person. I can tell by your actions. I can tell by the way you treat me. Why would it matter what kind of family you have, or how rich you are, or what the people in your past meant to you before I showed up?”

Sometimes I believe personalities are shaped more by damage than kindness.

No matter who Cierra was in high school, or who I was, we’re all made up of more than our past behaviors, good or bad.

Maybe you don’t have to know a person’s history to realize who they are in the present.