How Hard Can Love Be?

by Holly Bourne

  She didn’t really try and stop me leaving.

  Just as I knew she wouldn’t.

  SITUATIONS THAT ARE DESTINED TO FAIL:

  Crying

  +

  More crying

  +

  More crying

  +

  Knowing crying can’t make the pain go away

  Thirty

  We drove for hours into the blackness, Kyle steering his battered jeep along the ups, downs and infinite curves of the mountain roads.

  I cried the whole time, staring out into the inky black sky – not even the stars able to warm my confused stupid heart. I kept replaying what I’d said to Mum, how her face had looked, how I’d left her.

  What if she relapses? What if she drinks again? Because of me? She looked so broken…and yet, it’s not like she’d said sorry.

  She’d never once said sorry.

  Kyle, either out of awkwardness or just a general psychic ability to know this was what I needed, let me cry. He drove us in silence – no music, no small talk. Every so often, on a straight patch of highway, he’d take one hand off the steering wheel and squeeze my knee. We stopped for gas once. I stayed in the car, still sobbing, worried if I went in to buy gum or whatever they’d take one look at me and arrest Kyle for kidnap.

  I wasn’t sad I was with him. But I was sad I’d left Mum. I was sad I’d had to say what I had, sad I had to let it out the way I did. I felt like maybe I’d failed somehow, if there was a test on how to empathetically deal with addict parents.

  I wasn’t sad I’d done it though. And now, finally, after all these years, I let myself cry for her. And more than that, I let myself cry for me too.

  I cried for the child that saw what she did. I cried for the young teenager I was when she hopped on a plane and left me behind like a lost teddy. I cried for the two years I’d been forced to live through, feeling like a complete fucking stranger in my family home, having to put up with my idiot stepbrother, having no one in my family ever putting me first, not ever. And, as the darkened mountains whizzing past my passenger window morphed into a straight boring blur of American interstate, I realized I’d not really let myself cry at all, until now. Until this summer.

  Maybe there in a set amount of crying your body needs to deal with any trauma. There’s a certain water-level of tears you need to shed until you can find acceptance or move on or whatever. And, if you don’t cry them out, they just catch up with you. I’d been on the cusp of crying since the day she didn’t take me with her. And yet I’d never quite allowed myself to open the floodgates. I turned all the emotion into rage instead – at my dad, at my stepmum, at the patriarchy (but, hey, at least that one’s helpful), and emotion kept bubbling up inside of me, like an underlying herpes virus, but something less gross and more poetic than that.

  I whispered goodbye to the people I’d left behind at camp – knowing I’d never see them again, knowing they’d always wonder what happened to the two of us. Hoping, somehow, Whinnie and I would be able to find each other online.

  But, other than Whinnie, I didn’t really care. Not really.

  I cared about the boy squeezing my knee. I cared about the road straight in front of me. I didn’t care that I had not one holy clue where it led to.

  In fact, that was what I liked about it.

  Kyle eventually pulled up into this teeny town called “Lone Pine”.

  “It’s got a great view of the mountains.” He backed the jeep into a parking space outside a cute yellow motel that looked like it had been shrink-wrapped in 1959 and never once let the air in. “You’ll see it in the morning.”

  I nodded. Crying.

  “I’ll go book us in.”

  I hiccuped. “Do you need any money?”

  He gave me a sad smile. “I’ll get this one. We’ll sort out money tomorrow, when we’ve both slept.”

  I cried as he got us a room. I cried as we wheeled our stuff into it. It was cute – all wooden panelling and fake antlers sticking out everywhere. There was only one bed, which I lay face down on, and continued to sob. Kyle went out to explore, after asking if I was okay twenty million times first. I spread out on the bed – a big one, in total privacy, just for us. Last night, under the stars, this would’ve been our dream. Now the world had spun once on its axis and changed everything.

  Kyle came back in, the hum of cicadas interrupting the steady hum of the motel’s air con.

  “There’s a pizza place that’s open till half eleven over the road,” he said. “We have time to still go and order something.”

  Was it not even midnight yet? It felt like three o’clock in the morning.

  “I don’t think I’m hungry.”

  “I don’t care. You’re eating…” He perched on the edge of the bed, and stroked my hair – the gentle touch of his fingers on my scalp calming me. “But you really need to stop crying before we go in…otherwise I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions.”

  I hiccuped again. “I’m trying to stop but it just keeps coming out.”

  He laughed quietly. “It really is a rather impressive display. I wish I had a stopwatch. I would’ve started timing you the moment you started crying and entered you into some kind of record book.”

  It worked. I laughed. Then started crying again.

  “Well that broke the sobbing for, what was it? Two seconds? I need to think of more jokes.”

  I laughed again and took his hand. He looked at my face, and I saw the hurt I was causing him. He really stared into my eyes, and slowly pushed back a tendril of my hair, tucking it behind my ear.

  It sprang straight back to where it was.

  “I warned you before, you can’t do romantic shit with my hair,” I said. “It’s even more strong-willed than I am.”

  “Are you…” he began tentatively. “Are you upset you came? I can drive us back?”

  I shook my head fiercely. “No. Don’t. I just need…tonight… I think I’m grieving over something I should’ve grieved over a long time ago.”

  “You see?” he said. “These stiff upper lips only get you so far.”

  More laughter. A longer break from tears.

  “Yeah, if it had been you,” I said, “you would’ve had extensive therapy with a shrink, dealt with all of it within ten sessions, had a ‘reconciliation service’ with your mother, and both started up some kind of ‘foundation’ to mark all your ‘emotional progress’.”

  “It makes my heart hurt, in a good way, to hear you make a joke…” Kyle tried tucking my hair back again. “Do you think you could eat something?”

  I did one final sniff and sat up.

  “That depends. Is American pizza as amazing as you all say it is?”

  “You’ve flown all this way and not tried proper American pizza?”

  “No. I’ve only had camp food. And one burger and some raw food in San Francisco.”

  “Oh, Amber.” Kyle picked me up off the bed and dragged me along the carpet towards the door, kissing my head as he did so. “No wonder you’ve been crying.”

  SITUATIONS THAT ARE DESTINED TO FAIL:

  Private sketchpads

  +

  Nosy sort-of boyfriends

  Thirty-one

  I woke up before Kyle the next morning.

  It was the most glorious feeling – your consciousness returning with the heat from the guy you really, really like cuddling next to you. I’d managed to eat two slices of (admittedly amazing) pizza before the tears started again. Kyle immediately stood up, dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table and, with his arm around me, steered me back to the motel. I’d fallen asleep, crying onto his shoulder, as he held me – whispering that it was going to be okay, that we could always drive back, that he was proud of me, that everything was going to be fine.

  On this new morning, I didn’t feel like crying at all.

  I felt light – like all those tears I’d been carrying around, unshed, for two years had weighed a tonne.

  I wiggled around so
I could stare at Kyle’s face.

  God, he was fit. I still couldn’t believe it. That I got to touch him, got to kiss him… I wanted to touch him then. The urge boiled low down inside me but it wasn’t fair to wake him. He’d driven miles the previous night and we had Lord knows how many to cover today.

  So I sneaked out of bed, quickly changed into my swimming costume, and stepped outside in my flip-flops to check out the motel swimming pool.

  After a night of motel air con, the Californian heat hit me hard and my body warmed up instantly. The motel ran around on itself like a square, and the swimming pool lay in the middle. I flip-flopped over, stopping to admire the incredible mountain view – even in midsummer, the very tips of them were covered in snow. The pool area was empty, and I let myself in through the small gate and chucked my towel onto a white plastic sunlounger. Without giving myself time to think about how cold it would be, I dived right into the deep end, swimming an entire length before coming up for breath.

  It felt amazing – the water, the lightness inside of me, the sun shining so strong that I could still feel its heat through the water. I swam length after length, smiling stupidly to myself. I realized I had no regrets. Not about leaving with Kyle. Not about what I’d said to Mum. For once, I’d made a decision based entirely on me, what I needed, what I wanted. The only regret I felt was that we had left the children in the cabin overnight, and that was wrong… But it was also an accident and nothing had happened to them.

  After about thirty lengths, I dried myself in the sun for a while, then went to wake up Kyle.

  The bed was made and he was lying on it – looking through my sketchpad.

  “Well you look like a much happier version of the Amber I had with me last night.”

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  “I think I’m done crying. Thank you…for last night. You were amazing.”

  I wrapped my towel around myself further and shivered in the air con, suddenly unsure of my body.

  “Don’t worry about it. I was glad I could be there.”

  “And I’m still so sorry I got you fired.”

  Kyle beckoned for me to join him. I sat on the edge of the bed, my feet still on the floor.

  “I got me fired, remember? And come closer, please. It felt entirely inappropriate to tell you last night, but you looked really beautiful. And you do this morning too.”

  I blushed, but scooted closer, leaving a damp trail across the bed. He put his arm around me and I nuzzled into his chest – kissing it through his T-shirt.

  He turned a page of my sketchpad and I jerked up a bit.

  “You’re going through my art?”

  I felt him nod, as his chin rubbed up and down on the top of my head.

  “Shamelessly so. I’ve wanted to ever since I first saw you carrying your sketchpad around camp.” He turned another page, to one of the lists I’d been working on with my special black fineliner pen. “Though I am intrigued by these pages.”

  I tried to shut the book, but he put his hand in the way. “I’ve already read them all.”

  I kicked him.

  “You do realize looking at an artist’s sketchbook is like reading their diary?”

  He ignored me and pointed to another page. “Why are you so obsessed with situations that are destined to fail? You’ve, like, drawn the whole summer. And I LOVE that I’m in them, by the way.”

  I was SO embarrassed. I grabbed the book off him and hit him on the head with it.

  “Oww.”

  “Good, you deserve it.”

  “You’re, like, really talented. You know that, right?”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, you snoop.”

  “Seriously though, what’s with everything that’s destined to fail?”

  I turned redder. I’d been doodling these cartoons all through camp… I never thought anyone would see them.

  “I dunno… I’ve just been thinking about it as a concept over the summer, I guess,” I said. “Did you know there’s sometimes foreign words for really cool things that should totally have an English word? Like schadenfreude in German? It means ‘getting pleasure from someone else’s pain’. Like, the good you feel when you see someone else fall over or something.”

  Kyle’s smile was so large, it made all bits of me goo.

  “I LOVE those words!” he said. “Like, don’t the French have a word for that moment when you think of the PERFECT thing to say in an argument, but like, two days too late?”

  “L’esprit de l’escalier,” I said, grinning. “The wit of the staircase…”

  “You know it?”

  “I know lots of them. I really like them – these weird phrases. Like, do you know voorpret? It’s Dutch and means ‘the feeling of fun you have anticipating an event’. Or, there’s this really beautiful one in Arabic ya’aburnee – it translates as ‘you bury me’. It means hoping you’ll die before the person you love, because the thought of living without them is so terrible.”

  Kyle picked up my hand, holding it so our fingers entwined. He pulled me in for a kiss, before grabbing my book out of my hand and pawing through it again.

  “Stop!”

  “No, they’re good. And you’ve still not explained it all.”

  I twisted my hand in his… I didn’t like talking about my art much, I was always scared I’d sound like a twat.

  “Well, these foreign words that represent cool concepts. I once found this amazing artist’s website where he makes digital art of what these words look like. It gave me an idea for my A level coursework next year – we have to pick a theme, and follow it the whole year. I think there are words that haven’t been invented yet, and I want to invent them, and do my project on them. Situations or scenarios which language hasn’t caught up with yet. Like, do you remember a time before the word ‘selfie’? Someone invented that word, for a situation we all know. Well, so, for my project, I had this idea to come up with these types of situations, and make them into paintings and then invent words for them.”

  “God you’re smart,” Kyle almost whispered.

  “Not really. Anyway, that’s what this is.” I jabbed at my ink drawing. “I was thinking about situations people get involved in where they know, without a doubt, that it’s going to fail. But they do it anyway. There isn’t a word for it, but there should be. Like…I dunno…going into a battle when you have no chance of winning. Or trying to argue a Christian out of believing in God. Or knowing you’re not the prettiest by miles, but still entering the pageant. Or falling in love with someone who’s dying… Or falling in love with an addict… I guess most of them probably relate to falling in love…”

  Kyle let go of my hand so he could brush my hair with his fingers. His touch was so electric, my body automatically turned towards him.

  “How about falling for a dude who lives in America and running away from camp with him? Does that count?”

  I looked up, worried. Even though I knew what he meant. “You think this…us…is destined to fail?”

  “No… I guess it depends what you mean by ‘fail’. I mean, look at all these.” He used his spare hand to gesture towards my sketches. “You’ve listed all these situations that were destined to fail, but what happened? Really? They all came out okay, didn’t they? Like, you’re still alive…”

  “So failure is dying, everything else is okay?”

  He dug me in the ribs for being difficult and I squealed. “I guess I’m just saying, yeah, these things are hard, but you did them anyway. And they all led up to us being here, in this very private motel room I might add…” It was my turn to dig him in the ribs. “You just…lived, Amber. You just did stuff and got through hard stuff and life happened to you, and you happened to life. And, I guess I’d be lying if I said I’m not a little freaked out by what you and me are doing here, and what’s going to happen, and, well, I think I’m in danger of possibly falling hard for you…” My heart stopped then, it just stopped. But I let him finish, though I could hardly breath
e. “And you could see that as a stupid thing to do, something that’s destined to fail. I mean, whatever happens between you and your mum, you’ll have to get back on a plane to England at some point this summer. America is not just going to let you stay here, we can be certain of that. And that thought makes me, like… Well…everything hurts. You’re already proving to be practically the best person I’ve ever known…”

  “What?” I interrupted. “Even with all the crying?”

  I was crying again, silently, at his words.

  “Of course. With everything that’s gone down with your mum, it would be weird if you WEREN’T crying. In fact, I’m relieved you’re crying, rather than chucking all of Russ’s whiskey down your throat… Anyway, yeah, I’m falling for you. That may be something that’s destined to fail, if failure means I’m going to get hurt. But you know what I think failure really is?”

  I looked up and stroked his face.

  “What is it, wise Prom King?”

  He grinned. “Failure is never getting hurt. Because that means you’ve not done anything you cared about.”

  I thought back to my conversation with Whinnie, about Winnie the Pooh, and love being caring too much.

  “That’s very deep.”

  “I know. Don’t tell the basketball team.”

  “So we’re going to drive across America together? And maybe fall in love? And not worry about the fact it’s inevitably going to be terrible when I have to get on a plane back to England?”

  “Yes, we’re going to do all of that. But right now…” Kyle turned over onto his side, and grabbed me, turning me so I faced him, so that the whole front of my body touched the whole front of his. It sent uncontrollable waves of lust through me, every teeny hair on my body stood on end. “We’re going to make full use of this private motel room.”

  “Otherwise we’re failures?” I said into his mouth.

  “Otherwise we’re total delinquents.”

  SITUATIONS THAT ARE DESTINED TO FAIL:

  Running away

  +

  With someone you only met a month ago