Bella
ONE
Two weeks ago….
Life can change quickly. Sometimes in the blink of an eye. One moment you are on top of the world and the next moment you wake up in the gutter with other peoples trash and bullshit heaped all over you. Sometimes there is no explanation for how you got there and sometimes the memory of what led you to your current state is just too painful to relive. That is where I am right now. I am in the gutter, or in a ditch, take your pick. Either way my life is so extremely fucked I don’t even know how I have the strength to consider how everything went bad so quickly.
This is my fault, well some of it is. See I am a lawyer. By nature I am a seeker of truth, a righter of wrongs, a fixer of problems. Well, in my search for truth I made a fatal error. I let emotion cloud my judgement and well, you know how they say you can miss the forest for the trees? That’s what happened to me. I took my eye of the prize and in my emotional state I made a bunch of decisions. They seemed like good ones at the time but now when I reflect, a glass of sangria in my hand, I can see all the many ways I fucked everything up.
See I broke a lot of my own cardinal rules that I adopted long ago. As a kid in foster care I learned quickly that I had to play a part. I had to be what people wanted me to be in order to survive. Sometimes I played the saint, sometimes I played the shrink. Sometimes I was the quiet church mouse, other times I was the dutiful maid cleaning other peoples messes. Mostly, I was never me. I haven’t been me for a long time. I don’t think I even know how to be me anymore, I’m too wary of how people may react, too afraid of the consequences. So these days I pick a mask and then I wear it.
I know this sounds horrible but I’ve made it this far. This far being Suma Cum Laude from UCLA law school and working for a prestigious firm in Los Angeles handling patents. My job is lucrative and it affords me a life that I never thought I could have, all those nights sleeping on a cold floor, or pretending to be sleep while my creepy foster brother stood over my bed. I was often too paranoid to sleep, teachers often wondered why I fell asleep in class but the explanation was too much of a hassle so I just made something up and promised to pay attention.
I take a shuddering breath conjuring up these memories. I’ve come so far. I don’t even think about how lonely my life used to be because right now, its so not. I have great friends and their family is like my family. Especially my friend Alicia Vanguard. Alicia and I met in high school and we were instant friends. Alicia Vanguard, the princess of the Vanguard empire and she wont let you forget it either. I think that’s what made us such fast friends. She had that take no prisoners attitude and this kindness all wrapped up in one. Alicia would give you the shirt off her back and strangle you with it if you got out of line. You always knew where you stood with her and she didn’t pull punches.
I’d like to think that we are very similar but the reality is that I hold a lot back. There’s a lot I’m afraid to say. Mostly to her brother. Nicholas Andrew Vanguard. He is my one weakness. My Achilles heel. He is the thing that someone could hold over my head that would make me do almost anything. The one person I’ve allowed to creep so close to my heart that he is now the one who ripped it out of my chest.
It is because of him that I never much paid attention to guys in high school. I didn’t admire anyone else from afar, I didn’t plot out my life with anyone except him. I had it all planned in my head, he would be my husband, we would buy a house near his parents so he could watch our kids for date nights and when we got old and gray we would die within minutes of one another. One of us succumbing to old age and the other dying of instant loneliness. As you can see I was super thorough with this and I couldn’t imagine any other scenario playing out for my future but this one. I was willing to wait on this for as long as it might take.
See, I had a crush on him the moment I met him. For those who question whether it is possible to fall in love at first sight, I did. I saw him and something inside me immediately clicked. It was like he was the missing piece I had been searching for and he was the key to ending my life of loneliness. I latched onto this idea immediately and it is one that I have held very close for much of my life and often one of my biggest secrets.
