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“What exactly are we doing here again?” Nicole asked, hands shoved into her jacket pockets as her footfalls fell behind her wife’s own. She watched the leaves crunch under the blonde's shoes, stepping where the other step, as they made their way past headstones and grave markers. The early autumn chill was enough to make her clench her jaw and her hand gently clutch the paper in her pocket. Definitely the autumn chill and nothing else.
“Your therapist suggested this, remember? You even agreed to it and we flew all the way here for this, Nicole. You know why we’re here.” Jecka turned her head and glanced back at the brunette, eyebrows knitting together in annoyance. “You’re not getting out of it now when we’re already here. If you wanted to change your mind, you should have done it before we got on the plane, like I told you.”
“No, why the hell are we here this early? We could have done this at any time today, what’d you decide to do it for at fucking eleven in the morning?”
“Because most of us normal people who have jobs and function normally in society have actual sleep schedules and get up before the sun goes down.” Jecka rolled her eyes slightly as they made their way forward. A couple more turns and they reached their destination. She stopped and waited for Nicole to stand next to her, and her hand gently reached out. Her fingers interlaced with hers, giving Nicole a reassuring squeeze and her fingers softly twirled the band on Nicole’s ring finger. “When was the last time you even came and saw it?”
“I never did.” Nicole took a deep breath, steadying herself as she looked down at the headstone. “I didn’t even come the day they buried him. I was too fucked up after watching what happened, and since Mom and him were already divorced, she didn’t care enough to come.” Nicole squeezed the blonde’s hand back in return, before letting go and bending down. She gently wiped away at the dirt and the grime that had built up along the stone from years of exposure, exposing the name of the man who was responsible for her birth and, ultimately, part of her nihilistic outlook on life.
“I’m not entirely sure if I can actually do this, Jecka. This seems extremely fucking pointless.” She glanced back up at the blonde, subtly getting lost in the sea of gold that stared back down at her. Even when Nicole was ready to die, ready to end it all, ready to do something extreme, or felt the hatred and crushing depth the world had given her, all she’d have to do was look at Jecka. See those deep pools of honey and gold and light. She could glance and know everything was ok. That life was worth living for another day.
“I know it does. But, your therapist suggested this. You never got to say goodbye properly. You never came back here after everything, so… It could help. Yeah, it may not fix a single thing, but. It’s worth a try, right?” Jecka motioned, glancing around. “If you want, you can just read off everything you wrote down and we can leave. If you have nothing else to say beyond that, then that’s your closure and we can move on.” She smiled softly. “Do you want time alone to do it or do you want me to stand here with you?”
“Stay. I’m pretty sure if you walk away, I’m just gonna sit here and not say anything then come back to you and say I’m done.” She sighed again and sat down on the cool earth, the sun shining warmly on her back. Her hand rummaged in her pocket and she slowly pulled out the piece of paper that was haphazardly folded. She unfolded it as Jecka slowly sat down next to her. Her eyes scanned over the paper once more, harsh black lines of ink somehow forming letters and those letters somehow forming messy words.
“Are you ever going to fix your handwriting?” Jecka asked, smirking just slightly. Leave it to her to always try to lighten the mood slightly.
“No. I barely ever write, what need is there to fix something I never use anyway? I can just type on a computer or phone or something.” Nicole retorted back, anxiously reaching down with her free hand, and started to gently press her nails into her thigh. Her eyes shifted from the paper to the block of stone in front of her, and, with a slightly shaky breath, she started. “Hey, Dad…”
Jecka gently wrapped an arm around Nicole as they sat there, offering some form of silent support as Nicole bit down on her tongue for a few seconds. Opening up had always been borderline impossible. Exposing her heart, and talking about her feelings, all of it was beyond Nicole’s grasp for an eternity. Therapy helped, in very small fractions. But it was one thing to talk about what pissed her off in a week's time and how she still wanted to die. It was another to openly try to talk to the grave her dad rested in with her wife sitting next to her and try to get some sort of closure and solace.
“I know it’s… been a really long time.” Nicole continued, her eyes scanning over the page and her scribblings once again. “I know I never came to your funeral. And… I know I didn’t ever come to say anything to you or see you again after you died. I guess I just… Had to accept that you were gone and that I was going to try to move on like you killing yourself in front of me wasn’t that big of a deal or anything.” She laughed dryly. She felt what should have been tears welling in her eyes. But, in all the time she had spent in therapy and all the time she spent taking medication after medication, she had never shed tears. It was like her eyes knew the process but never actually formed anything. A simple, phantom feeling.
“I uh… I graduated high school, somehow. It was awful. We had moved so many times and everything else that I never really had a lot of friends. And then the last high school I ended up at and graduated from was just absolutely awful. I’m pretty sure almost every guy wanted in my pants and every teacher wanted the same. The one teacher that didn’t turned out to be racist. So… It was a hell of a time. But, I did at least make a couple of friends.”
She pictured the memory of her, Jecka, and Emily all going to the mall together. The time that Nicole, Ari, and Jecka went to watch a movie because Ari wanted to see it and Jecka just wanted to get high with Nicole. The one time she got along with Megan when they were all at one of Kelly’s parties. Sure, she wasn’t super close with most of them, but that didn’t mean they really weren’t her friends either.
“And, you know, I moved away from here… I started my own life across the country where I didn’t have to deal with mom anymore. So, that was already a massive one up and made my life slightly better than it was before.” She took a slow breath as the wave of feelings crashed through her. Mostly just the unbearable feeling of depression and anxiety that she always felt at any given moment in time. But, there were others there. There was a slight amount of grief, sadness, anger, and regret: She grew up without her dad in her life when she needed him most.
“I got a loving girlfriend who puts up with all my bullshit and we made it work. She’s supported me and dealt with me and my many attempts and all my fucked up, mentally ill decisions that she should have not put up with and left me for instead.”
“Did you actually write that down or are you just self-deprecating again?”
“Can’t it be both? Don’t interrupt me, I’m trying to have a conversation, bitch.”
She felt Jecka’s hand shift and pinch her arm, then returned to holding Nicole against her and gently rubbing the spot she had pinched. Nicole made a noise of annoyance and found her spot on the page once again.
“And… Now, I’m married. To the same girl. Which is really fucking weird to say. I didn’t think I would ever be married. After watching you and Mom fail at it, I didn’t think it’d ever be possible to be happily married to someone. But, I guess it is. In it’s own, really complicated, fucked up way.” She grinned slightly as she heard Jecka mutter something about being a bitch under her breath. “It would have been nice for you to walk me down the aisle, or some dumb cheesy thing like that. Mom wasn’t allowed to come. So you wouldn’t have had to deal with her.”
She heard Jecka giggle quietly beside her, the blonde resting her head on Nicole’s shoulder. “She was beyond pissed about that. But, it was also really worth it.” The blonde mentioned, looking down at the gravestone with Nicole.
“Yeah, it really was. Though we did miss out on a wedding present from her, which would have been nice to either have something else or we could have sold it for money and got something we actually could use.” Nicole waved her hand at Jecka as she stared down at the paper. “Now, quit interrupting me or this is going to take all day and I can only handle doing this therapy-demanded activity for so long.”
“Activity that you agreed to do.”
Nicole rolled her eyes and chose not to respond to the blonde’s reminder, instead looking back down at the paper and then the gravestone once again. She was running out of things she had written down. There was more than enough that she still wanted to say, even things that were no longer on the paper. But each word felt like someone was dragging a piece of her soul out of her body using barbed wire. This would have been so much easier if she could have said goodbye to him the day that he was buried. Not now, years later, when everything had a chance to fester and eat at her and give her time to build resentment.
“I don’t really blame you for what you did… I get it a lot more now. Life really fucking sucks. Being an adult really fucking sucks. Being a person who has a lot of trauma and trying to heal from that trauma makes it even fucking harder.” Nicole bit down on the tip of her tongue as she forced the words to come out. “But… I still get pissed about it as well. You took away the only person in my life who showed me any sort of support, any sort of kindness, and reinforced the fact that I can have nothing fucking good in life.”
Jecka had turned her head, a quizzical look on her face as Nicole’s tone shifted. She had read Nicole’s note on the way here, knew it inside and out, letter to letter and word to word. “Nicole, what are you?-”
“I could have relied on you so many times and you took that from me because you couldn’t handle what you were going through and then blamed me for it. Do you know how fucked up that left me after you left? How many nights I sat there, cutting my wrist, wishing I had died because the only guy in my entire life that I knew wasn’t a massively shitty person blamed me for his death?” There were drops of clear liquid falling down onto the paper, causing the ink of her letters to blur together. “All I wanted was a dad who could support me through all the bullshit in life and give me a reason to stay alive because you knew how shittily mom treated me. You knew I hated all the boyfriends she brought around and you knew I hated guys at school because everyone wouldn’t stop sexually harassing me at every turn. And instead of staying, instead of helping me, instead of protecting me, you fucking left!” She crumpled the note in her fist as tears fell down her cheeks and to the earth under her.
Jecka wrapped her arm around Nicole tightly and tried to hold the other girl against her, doing anything she could to console her wife as the emotional damn Nicole had spent years building, years perfecting, started to leak. “Nicole, you don’t have to keep going…” Jecka mumbled softly, leaning down and pressing her lips against the top of the sobbing girl's head.
“It isn’t fair that you fucking left me, Dad!” She yelled down at the headstone, ignoring her wife’s words. “You told me you’d always be there for me and you weren’t! You lied to me! You left me to deal with Mom and all the fucking pedophiles in the world while all I wanted was a dad!” She sobbed out as she leaned into Jecka, emotional exhaustion starting to set in. Still, she wanted to finish saying what she felt she needed to say. “I fucking… I miss you, sometimes, you selfish prick…”
Jecka rubbed small circles on Nicole’s arm, holding her wife against her and repeatedly planting small kisses along the side of Nicole’s face and along the top of her head, gently brushing away tears as they fell. Nicole sobbed into Jecka’s side, running out of the ability to speak any further. So, Jecka cradled her in her arms, and the two sat in front of the gravestone as Nicole let out the pent-up emotions she had suppressed for many years.
Eventually, when Nicole had finally stopped sobbing and had calmed herself down some, Jecka softly mumbled into the girl's hair “Feeling any better now?”
“Not really. I still feel like fucking killing myself just like every other time that I have to be vulnerable.” She mumbled back in return and reached up, using the sleeve of her jacket to wipe away the remaining tears that were still in her eyes. “But, it’s whatever.”
Jecka nodded slightly and continued to hold Nicole against her. She knew the brunette wasn’t one for physical contact, even after years of marriage, so she’d guiltily accept it any time she could. “You never really told me anything about your dad so… I really wasn’t expecting that kind of goodbye. I figured you’d tell him to fuck off a hundred times and say you were glad he was dead. Not sob and say you missed him.”
Nicole stiffened slightly in Jecka’s arms. She chewed the tip of her tongue once again till she could taste copper, then pulled away from the blonde’s arms and sat back up fully. She reached out, tentatively brushing away the dirt and leaves that had built up along the gravestone. “He… wasn’t surprisingly a bad person. Before he died, I actually thought there were a select few guys in the world who weren’t all pedophiles, rapists, murderers. Everything he did was to try to set a good example for me and my brother.” Nicole mentioned, almost softly. “We had the sitcom stereotypical moments, like him teaching me how to ride a bike or taking me to a baseball game or something. But then other moments were just… uniquely him.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the pack of cigarettes, flipping the pack slightly around in her hand. “One of those really distinct moments I remembered was around when I was ten… He and Mom had already gotten divorced and I was spending time with him. We were home, during this big storm. We were sitting in the garage with the door open, watching the rain come down. It was one of the few times I had ever seen him smoke. He had put on a CD he really enjoyed by one of his favorite bands… And we sat there, listening to this really slow song. He pulled out his guitar and started teaching me as the song played in the background. And as he taught me, he just sang along with it. It became our song…”
When Jecka didn’t say anything immediately, Nicole started to sing softly.
“ So long, this is goodbye. May we meet again in another life… Like strangers, passing by. May we see clearly in a different light…”
The silence between them slowly drifted as Nicole stood, and brushed the dirt and leaves off of her. “Come on. Let’s go before I start crying again. Besides, you owe me food now for this, even if I agreed to do it back in California.”
Jecka stood, rolling her eyes, but there was an undeniable smile playing across her lips as she reached out and took Nicole’s hand. “Alright, fine. But I’m picking the place.”
As they made their way out of the graveyard, back towards Jecka’s car, Nicole glanced back. There was a slightly more relaxed feeling on her shoulders like a weight had been taken off of her chest. The sun peeked out slightly from the cloudy sky above. Yeah, therapy was probably bullshit in most ways, paying someone to tell you something you already knew and then having them remind you that you had to do all these things you didn’t want to do. But, every once in a great while, maybe other people were right. As she got into the car with her wife, she heard Jecka softly humming “ So long, this is goodbye…”