Two Words

It was a small thing, sitting on the ground so innocently, so perfectly, as though it truly had nothing to hide. For days it had been the same, so delicately wrapped and tied up with a bow. “A gift.” That’s what the little tag beneath the ribbon said in curly, precise handwriting. It was almost funny. Still, the woman sitting criss-crossed in front of it did not look amused.

The pristinely wrapped package sat in the midst of chaos, placed so carefully in the center of the cluttered room where unopened boxes and letters were scattered around on the floor.

It had been a long couple of months, a long year. Sitting in this apartment alone, about to be evicted, a college drop out, a woman who barely felt human anymore.

Two words had ruined her, and there was no taking them back. For so long she’d been pretending, for so long she’d put on a mask and a costume and if she just hadn’t said those two words, it would all be different.

She had always known there was something wrong with her. From a young age, Mary was different. Mary didn’t like dresses. Mary didn’t want to let her hair grow long. Mary didn’t like the way boys looked at her. Mary wondered why and how it was decided that God was a man.

Mary hadn’t been allowed to share such thoughts.

Now here she was, twenty one and alone because of one single mistake, her long blond hair, falling over her shoulders as she stared at that box. Love is supposed to be magical, isn’t it? Like, once she found her person, it was them and only them and everything could just fall into place. Love wasn’t magical. It was messy and hard and awful and Mary vowed that she’d never fall in love again. She would only daydream every morning about that perfect woman who had come crashing into her life, shattering her perfect glass wall, one she had spent a lifetime perfecting.

That day was like yesterday in Mary’s mind. She still thought about it every time she had a chance, chocolate skin running smack into her, knocking her down onto her ass and then Mary looked up and time stopped. There was that smile, and then a laugh and wide brown eyes and lips that moved so quickly and perfectly and Mary didn’t hear a word of it. She was too mesmerized by that angel who had just crashed into her life.

Ladona. La. That was her name. La. Like a song to sing. La, like the melody ringing in Mary’s head when she realized that she believed in love at first sight because her soulmate was staring right at her for the first time, worried she might have a concussion. “My name is La,” she had said. “What’s yours?” Her voice was so smooth and perfect and that smile was all it took for me to question the one thing I had never had to think about.

Mary was nothing original. Everybody could have some boring name like Mary, pasty white skin and long blond hair, but La… La was beautiful. La was what Mary wanted everyday, La was an unmistakable work of art crafted by the gods and set on this earth just to prove Mary wrong about everything she’d ever thought to be true. So, once her brain began to tick again, Mary asked La how she could see her again, when she could see her again, knowing this woman had to be in her life no matter how it happened to be.

And two months later, La was singing a melody over her ear, in her bed.

It was a secret, just a secret. Just some fun, La said in that perfect voice of hers. She was like a siren, she was, always knowing exactly how to get what she wanted, and I could only smile and comply.

But those two words ruined her as people began to get curious. Those two words shattered a world that Mary had known to be a dream all along.

“I’m gay,” she had said to her parents on one lazy afternoon as they pried and pried into her personal life which was expected to be boring and predictable.

That’s when the whole world blew up.

So here she was, alone, La somewhere laid up with bruises and broken bones and there was a box in the middle of her floor, untouched and unopened. So Mary took the box slowly and unraveled it after days of willing it to disappear. Still, there, beyond piles and piles of paper was a framed phone. Her mother, her father and a face unseen. She had been scratched out.

Mary had always hated her long hair. So, she grabbed a pocket knife, set up the picture on her coffee table and sawed away at the locks that she had been using to block out the world, outcast, alone and scared of the steps she would have to someday take beyond the door.

There was no taking it back now.

Two words and now it was all gone.