The one thing that I always take everywhere with me. It’s like a Talisman. I open and read the inscription I wrote in my ten-year-old scrawl - “You’re my Venus, I’m your Mars.”
How true that turned out to be - just not the way I’d hoped. Like the actual planets, it feels like we have the whole world between us.
Yet, she’s still my Venus - that out of reach, elusive star. My goddess of love, my ultimate woman.
But am I her Mars? Didn’t I tell her that how the god fought for the love of his goddess even though she was completely off limits to him?
In three months, I’ll be headed on an expedition that will take me away from any modern conveniences for a whole month. If I didn’t come back, wouldn’t I regret not telling her that until my last breath, I loved her?
I make a decision, one that feels slightly premature and that I’m certain I’m not prepared for. But that’s never stopped me from trying before.
It certainly won’t stop me now.
Not when I think that loving Regan Wilde the way she was born to be loved - the way I know no one is loving her now - is also my calling.
There is nothing about a life with her that is as I imagined my life would be - the children I thought I didn’t want to raise, the domestic stasis of cohabitation - but after just that week with her, I know I’d live in hell if it meant she was by my side.
So, I package everything up and I make this last note a question. One I hope she’ll answer when she’s ready. And until then, I’ll take a measure of comfort in knowing that she’ll have these to remind her that I’m thinking about her.
Walls Come Tumbling Down
Regan
“When you punish a child for telling the truth, you teach them to lie.” That was one of my grandfather’s most common refrains. I stare unseeing at his undisturbed, meticulously arranged desk and wonder what else he taught me but didn’t really believe.
He made me think he loved me. He made me think I could trust him. And because I was so desperate for a loving father figure, I didn’t ask questions that I should have. I just… followed his rules and gave whatever he asked of me.
Even when it cost me everything.
In the week since Remi’s bombshell about our father’s disappearance and the role my grandfather played in it, I’ve been plagued by something deeper, more corrosive than guilt. There are huge fissures in my consciousness.
I can’t change any of it. I can’t disown my family and as far as I’m concerned at the most basic level, we’re all victims of one person’s God complex. But, if Matty could see it, that means I chose not to.
I came to the belly of the beast today, not even sure what I was looking for. I don’t know what, if anything at all, from all those years ago would even be here.
So far, I’ve looked through the filing cabinets built into the desk. But there’s nothing, at least nothing that means anything to me. My mother has only let the cleaning lady in here to dust and vacuum since he died.
The book he was reading the morning he had his stroke lays open on the wood lacquered side table next to his dark brown leather recliner.
I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But there’s no one left to ask. Dan, his assistant, retired to Costa Rica, the year my grandfather died and hasn’t responded to the email I sent him. I want to have some answers before I call Matty. Or maybe, I’m just putting it off because I don’t know how to apologize for the wrong I’ve done.
I shove away from his desk and walk over to the bookshelf, where dozens of sterling silver frames line the shelves, with as much prolificacy as the books they were built to house.
Most of the photos are of him and me. There’s only one of him with my father. I used to think it was because he found looking at him painful. The truth of it makes bile rise in my throat. I pick up the picture and look at it through this new lens. It’s from the day of my father’s high school graduation. I run a finger over my father’s broad, handsome smile. Remi, minus the blue eyes, is his spitting image.