The Stories We Keep

There were two things I remembered most from my childhood. The first, and the main reason I was paying good money to see a therapist twice a month, was that my parents were incredibly inept at, well, parenting. It seemed they’d had me as some sort of bizarre challenge to fulfill some picture perfect family ideal, but as soon as the high from their achievement wore off, they’d grown bored of me. When silly little me finally figured out they were never really going to be an active part of my life, I found other ways to keep myself occupied. This led me to the second thing I remembered most as a kid.

There was this book I’d found in the attic, amid several dusty boxes of old clothes and pictures, that I used to read before bed every night. The stories had carried me away from home, to some place I could just be a kid for once, instead of the boy whose parents couldn’t be bothered with him. I’d sailed the open seas aboard the fiercest pirate ship in the land, fought hoards of monsters to save a prince from certain death, tamed dragons and unicorns and phoenixes. There was one story I was never really willing to admit to myself was truly my favourite. It was of a young boy who was taken in by a family who loved him very much. That was it. Just love. A few months later my parents were killed in a car crash and I was sent off to live with my aunt who I’d never met, mostly because she’d come to the realization early on that my parents were insane, and had kept her distance. That woman loved me more than I thought possible.

I’d always believed the stories were real when I was young. They had felt real. But as I grew older I became less interested in fairytales and more interested in boys. The reality of being a gay teenager in a small town took over my life for a while and I forgot all about my little world inside that book. It was packed up into a box along with my other childhood things and stored lovingly in my aunt’s attic. The only reason I knew where it had gone was because I found it, many many years later, when I needed it most.

Time had found a way of ceasing to make any sort of sense to me. I knew my husband had passed the day after my birthday. I knew, logically, that had happened seven months prior to my moving back in with my aunt. Yet time made no sense. It had felt like I was reliving the same day over and over, and yet simultaneously charging headlong into my fifteenth year of incessant grief. The pain was as fresh as the day it had happened, but I was so mentally and emotionally drained that there was no way it had only been seven months.

I quit work. I stopped doing the one thing I was passionate about: painting. I stopped talking to people. My aunt had begged me to come stay with her for the entirety of those months. I declined every time until finally I was afraid I was going to wither away and be swept up in the breeze if I didn’t let someone look after me. And so I relented. A week passed before I found my way into the attic at some ungodly hour, still half asleep, trying to remember the dream I’d woken up from. It had felt important.

Moonlight filtered in through the dusty attic window, spilling over my legs and onto the scattered contents of the box in front of me. An old stuffed panda bear stared up at me from the floor. He had been my confidante growing up, until I learned to trust my aunt with those same secrets, until he was packed away with the rest of my childhood. There were also a handful of loose pieces from some dungeon crawler board game I used to love when I was a kid. It was odd looking at them now, orphaned and forlorn. Much the same as I had felt at the time. What stood out to me most, though, was that book.

The cover was blank, just simple and black and lovingly worn at the corners. Yet there was something about the pages within that struck me. An uneasiness settled into my bones. The stories weren’t the same ones I had read when I was younger. I could understand only some of the stories being there. It would make sense that my overactive imagination had completely made up the rest and credited it to my beloved book. The problem was, not a single story I remembered from my childhood was in there. What was there was grief. Loss. Heartache. Hope.

The stories, typed neatly on their weathered pages, felt like they were screaming at me. I could feel their pain nestling into my heart next to my own. I could hear the wracking sobs and gasps and pleading. It was all an echo of my own and it was too much. And so the book sat on my nightstand for another month, waiting for me as I broke down night after night, wondering how I could ever possibly find a way to live out the rest of my life with such a crippling pain in my heart.

It was once again some ungodly hour of the morning when I finally sat up in bed, eyes wrecked from nearly crying myself to sleep for the ninth night in a row, and opened the book again. To this day I have no idea how much of the story was actually in the book and how much of it was from my dream that night--the story is no longer there, none of them are. In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter either way.

The story unfurled onto a small merchant ship in a century long past. The night sky was engorged with twinkling stars. The seas were calm. My heart was full. As I stood with my lover, our eyes cast up toward the heavens, there was no sign a wicked storm would hit that night. If there had been, I would have told him how very much I had loved him. I would have kept him safe. I would have fought nature with my bare hands to keep her from taking him from me. Yet, there had been no knowing, and when the storm finally passed, I was left alone on a wrecked ship in the middle of the ocean. It had taken everything from me. I spent months at sea, lost and alone and in agony. I do not recall ever making it to shore.

I awoke the next morning damp with what I told myself at the time was sweat. Now I firmly believe it had been saltwater. And tears.

It took me a few nights to find the courage to dive into another story. The first one had left me an emotional wreck, reopening what little of my loss had begun to heal over. That little bit of healing at the time had felt like a massive achievement, but I knew, even then, it had healed all wrong. The story from that first night had pulled it back apart, given me a second chance to heal properly.

The next story began already in grief. The grave before me had begun to blend in, the earth reclaiming what was rightfully hers now. I knew in my heart my partner was gone, that he’d been gone a while now, but some part of me thought if I could just find him, he would still be alive. I dug at the ground, tearing out the grass that had just begun to make his grave its home. I dug for hours, maybe even days, and made no progress. I had done no more than disturb the grass.

There was dirt under my nails the next morning I couldn’t convincingly explain away. I tried to tell myself it was from earlier that day, but I hadn’t even gone outside that entire week. The entirety of the rest of that day was spent in quiet contemplation. Since the day my husband had passed, I’d been clinging to every little speck of him left in my life, as if I could bring him back if I could just find all the right pieces. I’d been spending all of my energy focusing on what was lost instead of what he had given me.

Over the next year, I continued through the book of odd stories. I lived many lives of grief and sorrow. I learned to let go of what had already come to pass. Nothing I could do now would ever change my loss. It would be, instead, what I chose to do with what was still to come that would make the difference. The more stories I read, the more time passed between each one. Days at first. Then weeks. Months. It’d been almost four months now since the last one. There was only one left.

On a whim, I’d traveled down to California to look into apartments. My aunt said I could stay as long as I needed to, but I was itching to start over. I wasn’t really sure I was ready, but the only reason I could come up with not to go was the simple fact that I was scared. Well, and the fact that I was far too broke to live in a place like Cali. My husband had grown up there and we’d always meant to move back, but it never happened.

I’d rented out a little bungalow on the beach for the duration of my stay, feeling a pull to be close to the ocean, to be close to him. He’d always had a love for the ocean I admired. There was a small patio off the back that overlooked a private little section of the beach. At night, the only sound was the waves crashing against the sand below.

It was, yet again, some ungodly hour of the morning. I was curled up in a cozy little chair on the back patio, my little book opened to the last story, nearly drifting off to sleep. I wasn’t ready for it to be over. I’d found myself again in those stories and I was terrified that once I’d read the last word, I’d be lost again. A little lost boy with no one to love him.

He was there in that story, my husband. We sat for a long time in silence, snuggled together on that little back porch, looking out over the ocean. Every little thing about him was exactly as I remembered. He looked at me and there was love in his eyes. Love and tenderness and longing. And concern.

“Your light is dimming, my love,” he said. “Please don’t let it go out.” I opened my mouth to question him, but he pressed on. “You haven’t painted in over a year. I remember catching you up at two in the morning, in your pajamas, because you’d woken up with a brilliant idea you didn’t want to slip away.” He looked around at the landscape surrounding us. “You belong here. You’ll thrive here.”

“I can’t afford it, babe. I haven’t worked in over a year and if I push myself at a nine-to-five just to afford rent out here, I’ll never have the energy to make art again.”

“I know. I’ll fix it,” he said simply. “Promise me you’ll stoke that beautiful fire in your heart. Promise me you’ll paint again.”

I awoke to the sunrise. My book had fallen to the floor in my sleep, but clutched in my hand was an envelope. Inside was a money order for twenty thousand dollars that, to this day, I still can't explain, along with a note.

'Promise me.'