Between Black and Sunshine (27 page)

We did it. Luca and I did what we always promised each other we would do. We took a break from reality, got on a plane and flew south. To the place that Jonah, Luca and I always dreamed of escaping to – Mexico.

There is nothing within miles of us and it feels like we are the only two people in the world. The world belongs to us. And what a beautiful world it is. This seems so obvious right now as I stare out into the water that is so blue it looks unreal, like someone colored it with Rit dye. The sky is so vast yet comforting. Wispy, white clouds dance around the sun and it just seems so obvious, how beautiful the world is.

Life looks so different to me now. Everything I have seems precious: Callie, Piper, Anton, Rose… the years I had with Jonah. And my mom. Once Luca and I finally left his room and reentered our lives, everything was just… brighter and better. Things just became clear.

I think about my life before
the separation
as Rose refers to the time Luca and I spent apart. I think about it a lot and I think about how selfish I was. I had been nothing but self-involved ever since Jonah left me. I didn’t realize that. I told myself that I was living for Luca and I believed it. But really, I was living to be with Luca, to finally make him mine. After Jonah died, it was all I cared about. I closed the real me off from my friends. I was never there for Callie like she was for me. I didn’t try to help my mom. I lived for the day when I could finally leave Arnie, but I never thought about helping her do the same thing.

Things are different now. I found my happiness and I know how beautiful it is. And I want everyone to feel what I do. I talk to my mom and Callie every day. I listen to them and I hear the things I couldn’t hear before: that they have their own lives apart from mine and they need me. More and more I catch my mom when she’s in a state of drug-free clarity. Sometimes she admits that Arnie was abusive and none of us, especially Jonah, deserved to be hurt by him. We talk about Jonah now – something we haven’t done since he died.

It’s strange to have conversations about reality with her. I miss having a mom. I tell her this too and she cries. Rose tells me that it’s all I can do – talk to her. Remind her that I’m here and that I love and need her. Rose says she has to decide on her own to leave him and to get help for her prescription drug problem. I gave her all the information that she needs to get help and she says she will. I feel like I need to go back and help her like I should have been doing all along but I can’t go back there. Not yet. I tell my mom that she can come to Portland, that we can figure it out, but she says she can’t leave him and that he would never hurt her again. She says he’s changed. I know that’s not true but more and more I’m seeing that Rose is right – she has to want to change. I can’t make her do it.

I run my feet through the warm sand until they are covered. I think about my mom and I think about the sand. Sand… this amazing stuff that used to be a big hard rock, whittled down, beaten over and over until it becomes so insignificant, just a piece of dirt, when it’s by itself. The world is such a beautiful place in so many ways. And yet it is so, so ugly.

I watch Luca out in the ocean, his head and torso bobbing with the waves. He looks up to the sun and raises his arms. He’s at home in this beautiful world. The waves crash into his perfect body. Perfect but flawed. Beautiful but ugly.
Luca
.

Luca who destroyed me. Luca who has broken my heart more times than I can count. Luca who almost killed one of the best people I’ve ever met with his bare hands.

People can be ugly. We fuck things up and we hurt people. And even when we aren’t hurting people, even when we are just trying to love them, sometimes it’s not enough because our minds are capable of believing lies. Festering lies. Luca, who I thought was capable of hurting me on purpose, who I believed was sleeping with Clara while he was with me.

Our minds are terrible things. Unreliable and unstable. Capable of taking over our bodies and turning us into something we are not. There are chemicals and genes- things we can’t see, things we don’t understand, but things that are part of us. You can kill someone and not even know it… if you have the right genes and have had an especially shitty life.

Our minds betray us. They can create people that seem so real, more real than the actual people in our lives. Made up people can feed us lies and tell us half-truths. And our minds, our same minds that are lying to us, believe the lies.

Why is that? How can a mind that is capable of destruction, also be so weak? 

Because, other screwed up people with messed up heads have come before us.

They may have passed on genes to us. But mostly they are just regular people who have stumbled into our lives and decide to hurt us. They lie and they manipulate. They use their bodies and they hit us, they throw us around and they continue to hurt us until we submit. We agree- there is no sunshine in this world, only blackness. And we proceed to share this blackness with other people with fragile minds.

I did. I took my shitty life and I let it control me. When there was nothing good to hold onto I gave into the darkness and I used it to hurt other people. To hurt Luca. To hurt Clara. I looked at Clara and I didn’t realize that she was a girl, same as me. I was so hurt I didn’t think I was capable of hurting someone else.

Luca did it too. He clung to a past that was so exceptionally messed up, he let it take over him until it became who he was. He became his past and knew that I was not safe in that past so he kept himself from me. He hurt me.

He looked at Clara and decided that he was going to use her to deal with his fucked up feelings for me. He put all of his ugliness on her and when he left, she was still covered in it, still holding onto it.

He looked at his aunt and uncle, the two people who had raised him and given him everything they could, and he couldn’t accept that they loved him for him and didn’t hate him for what his mother did. He convinced himself he wasn’t worthy of their love and not only did he cut them out of his life, but in his mind he convinced himself that they would want it that way. They didn’t. He knows that now because he talked to them and he told them that he knows the truth – that he’s known since he was ten. It’s something that he still has a hard time talking about. For him, it would be easier to pretend like none of it, including his aunt and uncle, ever existed. But Luca deserves a family and they deserve to have the son they’ve always wanted. And I think someday they will have that. Each other.

I take in deep breaths and try to accept the facts but not let them overcome me. It’s so easy to be overtaken by the mistakes you’ve made in the past. Even though I know Clara is okay, even though I’ve done everything in my power to show her how sorry I am and how much I care about her, even though we’ve had two lunches since that first one and it sometimes feels like we’re friends, it’s hard to accept that I deserve this moment on this beach with Luca. 

Luca comes out of the water. I watch as his body emerges. I look into his ever changing eyes and I know that as powerful and as big as all of the ugly blackness is, it takes only the smallest amount of love to make the darkness as insignificant as a grain of sand. The good in us, the part in us that is hopeful and loving – no matter how small it becomes – it is always there. It never dies. And, although easily forced into a small particle, it is stronger than anything else. It can overcome all the darkness.

Luca stands above me, salty water dripping off of his tan body and onto me. I smile up at him, at my goodness, my love, my sunshine. He topples down dramatically, landing with half of his body splayed out on top of mine. “God, I love this place,” he tells me.

“It’s heaven,” I agree.

He leans into me, covering my hot, sun-drenched body with his cool, wet one. “This is heaven,” he tells me, running his hand down the side of my body. “You are my heaven.” His mouth finds mine; his wet, salty lips cover mine. His tongue merges with mine and makes me feel like I am melting. Like I am just a body-shaped mound of wax that can easily melt into him until we are all mixed up together. His cool body mixing with my hot one. My bad parts taken over by his good parts and my goodness overtaking his bad.  A body that will not hurt another body. A mind that will not fuck with another mind.

Apart, Luca and I are ugly, black vessels. But together, we are the most beautiful light.

I wrap my arms around him and stop thinking about cells and science because none of that matters. Who cares about anything except how our bodies feel when they are wrapped up in each other?

“You’re mine, Jude,” Luca tells me.

“Forever,” I reassure him.

“I want to stay here with you forever,” he tells me.

“I have a huge lit test next week,” I tell him, smiling. I’m back in school. What Luca and I went through felt like a huge chunk of my life, but in reality it was a little over a month of it. It took some work, but they let me back in. I didn’t go back to the dorm though. And I’m hoping that the spare room in our apartment will be occupied by Piper once school is out in two months from now. Rake and Anthony love her and it would be nice to have another female in that place. “And you and Anthony have work to do.” Luca’s schooling was derailed by us too, although he never dropped out and the work he does is mostly studio – he wasn’t failing any tests or not handing in work. He’s back on track now and producing kick ass paintings like it’s his job. Which it’s not – his job is building furniture with Anthony and that is going amazingly well, too.

“Reality – it sucks,” he mutters.

“I don’t know,” I tell him, kissing his neck. “I think our reality is kind of incredible.”

“You are my reality,” he says, bringing my face from his neck so he can look in my eyes. “It still seems unreal, sweet girl. You are my reality.” A cute smile covers his face.

“Forever. You’re stuck with me forever,” I tell him, smiling back at him. “I don’t ever want to be apart from you,” I whisper to him.

“We will never be apart from each other. You and I, our own secret paradise, we will never ever leave. You’re right,” he says, lowering me down to him. “It’s fucking incredible.”

“It’s beautiful,” I agree. “Everything is beautiful.” 

The End