Chapter 1
I think I’m afraid of commitment.
It isn’t that I don’t want love.
I crave it. Pining slow-burn stories read at three a.m. on school nights and lovesick, longing songs about sincerity and intertwining souls have plagued me. I long for someone who craves me wholly. Someone who will love me poetically and hopelessly.
I want someone who falls in love with the caramel color of my eyes, or all four beauty marks on my face, or gives me paper plates and plastic silverware because they know how much I loathe doing the dishes.
I want someone who cares to know me. I want someone who will be as artistically head-over-heels with me as I will be with them.
But I’m afraid of commitment.
Why?
Two reasons.
Giving up oneself wholly and fully to another is terrifying.
I want someone who loves me for my heart, body, and soul. I want someone who will sing by my side, and fall asleep with me under the stars, and touch me in ways I’ve only dreamed of, and remember to wish me sweet dreams every night.
I know that there are many people out there who want the same, but I also know there are many who have impure intentions.
There are endless horror stories out there; lovers leaking nudes, or secretly filming intimate acts, spilling secrets told in private, or even physically abusing their spouse. It is simply too difficult to put my trust into someone completely.
But on the other hand, I do still want love.
But I have seen the sands of affection slip through the grasp of desperate fingertips right before my very eyes.
I was twenty when my mother decided she wanted a divorce.
She’d been married to my father for over twenty-five years. There was not a single day of my life that they weren’t together.
They lived together the entire time too. She cooked all of his meals. Kept the house in tidy order and looked after both of my siblings and I. Over two decades of commitment and connection.
Only there’d been minimal connection the entire time.
I hate my dad, too. Not because my mother also hates him—though that is a common misconception in his deluded mind, that I am a dependent robot with no ability to form opinions of my own, and any and all disdain for him was sewn in me from her.
I hate him because he does not truly love me.
He doesn’t remember my favorite colors or foods. He doesn’t know my favorite hobbies, or what I aspire to be. What I’ve been majoring in for the last year.
He doesn’t look me in my caramel eyes, or kiss me on my four beauty marks, or give me paper plates and plastic silverware because he knows how much I loathe doing the dishes.
He does not offer to take me to campus, or pick me up. He doesn’t help me acquire my school supplies. He doesn’t give me money to eat any meals when I’m away at school for over eight hours at a time.
He doesn’t eat meals with us. He doesn’t laugh with us. He doesn’t comfort us when we cry.
He speaks to me in ways that infuriate me.
Like this: Senior year of highschool, seventeen years old, and I was seated at the kitchen island in conversation with my mother. He enters in from the living room, striding up to the table in the midst of our talk.
He cuts me off mid-sentence like I was not even there.
I interject. I tell him my thoughts, because I’d been there first.
“Quiet—the adults are speaking,” he says.
Dismissed. From a talk I had initiated with a party excluding him. He brushes me aside like I were a toddler or little elementary school, snot-nosed brat, and not a soon-to-be college student less than two months away from adulthood.
Mind you—even if I had been as young as 10 or even 5, my opinion still mattered.
But when it comes to anyone but him, there is no one he will respect as much as himself.
Another instance: he had knee replacement surgery some few years ago, and was bedridden. At the time, my eldest cousin—we’ll call her Mercury—had been living with us. She had a car and license, I did not, and thus in his place had offered to take me to school.
Before we departed, as I waited for Mercury to collect her jacket and purse, my father called me to his bedside. He passed me his credit card and requested that I tell Mercury to get him a black coffee and a sandwich from the Starbucks down the road while we were out.
I accept, begrudgingly, and return downstairs to the living room to wait. It is several minutes before Mercury joins me—and yes, I should have written his order down, honest mistake—but by the time she does, I’ve completely forgotten what sandwich he wanted.
She assures me it’s alright and offers to ask him herself, so I oblige, and sit on the couch to wait. She goes to his bedside to ask him.
One note about my father; his voice carries. He is loud, and for whatever reason still unfathomable to me, he keeps his bedroom door open. You can hear him speak from the living room, the kitchen, the foyer—nearly every other room in the house.
So I hear him loud and clear when he says, “I just gave Venus my order.” Mercury counters, “She forgot, so I came to ask you.”
And with complete hatred in his voice, he seethes, “And she’s supposed to be the smart one.”
Yeah, that’s me; the smart child. The straight A student. The kid out of my siblings who always made honor roll, and so my parents exclusively introduced me as the genius child to everyone we met. My grades were my biggest achievement to them.
Not my smile. Not my laugh. Not my dancing. Not my writing. Not my creativity. Not my patience.
My grades.
And in a single sentence, all of my worth had come crushing down to the floor, debris at my feet.
Tears in my eyes.
I swallowed down the wail in my throat and smiled when Mercury came back downstairs to take me to school.
I still don’t remember what sandwich he wanted. Maybe I am still too stupid to.
I have no doubts he makes my mother feel just as small, just as neglected, and just as stupid.
Love dies here, in this household. He is its killer.
And I suppose then that I am afraid of inheriting either of my parents’ plights;
The one to kill my lover’s spirit, or the spirit whose love is killed.
