As soon as I stepped into the bedroom where I spent my teenage years, I felt the last few years just float away. It didn’t help that it had been kept exactly the same ever since the day I left, despite the fact I swore I would never be back no matter what happened. Of course when I said those words, I didn’t know how things were going to turn out, so maybe Mum was smarter than I ever gave her credit for. The floral duvet covers I thought were ‘sophisticated’ at the time, the odd shade of lilac I decided to paint the walls, the endless photographs of me and Joe all over the place…it was like a shrine to the person I once was, and it made me really uneasy. I felt a little strange with his eyes watching me from every single angle, like he could see me, even though I knew that was impossible. How the hell did I ever manage to survive in this when I had all those feelings for him? It felt much more nightmarish than comforting!
“So, you will let me know if you need anything?” Mum asked me, standing awkwardly in the doorway as if I was some unwelcome houseguest, rather than her daughter who’d spent the majority of her life in this house. “I don’t want you to feel weird. I know it’s been a long time…”
“I’m fine, Mum,” I snapped back quickly, needing to put an end to this conversation. Things were all right at the moment, but Malcolm would be home soon. Who knew how things would be then? “I’ll be out a bit later on, anyway.” I half hoped I could avoid him for the most part, and I was certain he felt the same. He probably wasn’t even working overtime, as Mum had suggested. He was probably just keeping as far away from me as he could without offending everyone.
“Oh…will you?” She sounded a little stunned by this, which didn’t really surprise me. I had made out that I’d only come to stay to mend my broken heart, now I was saying I would be out having some fun. “With who?”
I bit down on my lip hard, trying to stop Joe’s name from coming out. I knew it’d make me feel good to shock her, to make her think about the past again too, but I actually did want to be able to get out tonight. I didn’t want to sit there like a child having an intense inquisition all night long, especially when I didn’t have any real answers for her yet. “Just some friends, Mum, people you don’t know,” I eventually decided upon. She gave me a look like she didn’t quite believe me, but fortunately it mustn’t have been worth her time because she clamped her mouth tightly shut. “I just need to get out and blow off some steam, stop myself from going insane.”
“Oh, of course.” She looked a little ashamed at that, like she should have known that was what I’d need. I didn’t know why, it wasn’t like we knew each other anymore, so I certainly didn’t feel like she had to understand me at all. “Well, like I said, I’m here. If you need anything, I mean.”
I could tell it pained her to leave me alone while she wasn’t quite sure what I was up to, but thankfully she did anyway. There were obviously a lot of unsaid things between us, but we’d become so used to that by now we’d accepted that was the way it was always going to be. Once she was gone, I thought over the text message I finally received from Joe to confirm our date…no, meeting, not date. I could not allow myself to think along those dangerous lines. I had no idea where it would lead.
Joe: Hi Lottie, it’s Joe. Did you still fancy going for a drink? How about Saturday night at 8 p.m. at The Stag?
I felt like I could hear the little inside joke there, the flashback to when we were kids and we looked forward to celebrating our eighteenth birthdays anywhere other than The Stag. In our minds, it was the place where all the old people went to drink, we saw ourselves as so much cooler than that. Yet here we were, making the plans we never thought we would. I’d replied, to say that sounded good to me, but that had been it as far as communication went. Much as that left me feeling a little frustrated and confused, it was probably a good thing too. Catching up on each other’s lives would be much better as a face-to-face thing, rather than over cold, impersonal messages. In a way, it would make things that much more exciting. We’d never really communicated too much via technology anyway, so this was a lot more us.
I wandered around my room, looking at each of the images in turn. Once upon a time, these photographs were so ingrained in my psyche I could have closed my eyes and still seen them. I knew exactly which picture was where, and exactly how Joe looked in each and every one of them. Now, as I glanced at them all, it made my insides feel weird. Ever since I first saw the more updated picture of Joe, that image of him had overshadowed the way he looked when he was young, so seeing him that way again was oddly unsettling. Actually, seeing me that way was much worse. I looked so youthful, so hopeful, so full of dreams. Despite all the teenage angst that filled my diary’s pages, I always looked happy when I was with Joe.
There was one picture of me and Joe, sitting at the bottom of my garden, which must have been taken by Mum. We were too young in the picture to have any of the complications of feelings, but from the way our heads were pressed together—we were sharing an inside joke—I could sense the spark was still there. We were probably just far too young to recognise what it was. Then I looked at the close up picture I took of his face when I’d decided to become a professional photographer. We both laughed at the time, especially when it was printed, deciding that portraits just weren’t for me, but I was always secretly proud of it. Yes, it was a little blurry and part of Joe’s head had been cut off, but I always felt like I captured his charismatic, fun-loving personality well. It was just him all over. Then there was the one image I took of us kissing. At one point, I’d hid it behind another, not wanting anyone else to see it, but at some point I must have stuck it to my mirror, where it still resided now, taunting me, reminding me of what could have been.
There were other pictures of course, some of me with Emily, the odd one of me standing awkwardly at the edge of a group of girls looking like I would never fit in, but none of them drew me in right now. None of them held any interest right now. There was also another picture, the only one I had of my father, but that was nowhere to be seen. On the day I’d asked Mum for it, and she’d given it to me, I stuffed it in the back of my drawer where I vowed I would never look at it again. The temptation was there, deep inside of me, clawing at me to look at it, but I couldn’t. Not knowing he had his other family out there, the people he cared about much more than he did me…
Eventually I could barely stand it anymore, the memories became a little too much, and they made me far too nervous for tonight, so instead I stared out the back window, over at the garden where so much had happened. With Malcolm having some great gardening skills, he’d changed the entire look of the yard into something much better, but all I could see as I gazed out was the overgrown mess it had once been, with intense, powerful, life changing events clinging to every blade of grass.
My eyes grew wet with tears, as the emotions started to become a little too much for me, but I didn’t allow any of them to fall. For the moment, I actually wanted to be strong, I didn’t want to be the mess I’d become over the last few days. For some reason that was really important to me. But then my eyes fell on Joe’s childhood home, and it became damn near impossible. His parents may not have lived there anymore, it might belong to someone else these days, but I didn’t feel like I would ever be able to see it as anyone else’s home. Even if they’d moved to the other side of the country, rather than across town, I still wouldn’t have been able to see it as anything but theirs.
I spotted a teenage girl dancing in the dining room window with such a carefree spirit, it almost made me laugh aloud. She wasn’t like me, stuck in what felt like a hole with no escape. I wondered what hopes and dreams she had for her future, were they anything like mine? Would she actually follow through with them? I always assumed I would, but of course my happiness was crushed by an intense, powerful heartbreak. One I didn’t think I could survive again.
Maybe, because of that, I’d never really given myself the chance to move on. Maybe that was why I was still so drawn to Joe, despite everything. I guessed it was all something I’d never really accepted, I just sort of…coped, carried on because I had to. Maybe I didn’t deal with any of it properly, which had gone on to impact me and Danny. I always thought I’d given myself to him fully, and that I hadn’t really considered the past at all for years, but maybe that was just the lie I told myself to help me carry on. One that had come out the second I heard he was going to ask me to be his wife.
Maybe, if I hadn’t ever fully committed to Danny, if he could see that I couldn’t, maybe that was what had caused him to stray. I didn’t want to blame myself for something that really could have been prevented, but with the undeniable evidence simply staring me in the face, it was difficult not to. It also hadn’t escaped my notice that I was sort of just assuming what the newspapers were saying was the truth, but without him here, defending himself, what else was I supposed to think?
Urgh, I didn’t want to think about Danny, not right now. I had too much else on my mind, too many other things to be worried about, things I could deal with right now…not things I had to wait for. If I didn’t want to allow this to overwhelm me, then I really had to tackle it one moment at a time. Luckily I had quite a few hours until I was meeting Joe, which I’d planned perfectly to give me some time to adjust. I’d brought my diary with me to get me back into the right frame of mind. Sure, I was aware it could potentially drag me right back into being sixteen-years-old all over again, but I felt like that was the only way I would be able to tackle things with Joe. I felt like I needed to be that person before I could even consider seeing him, and that was a whole lot easier being surrounded by everything that made me her.