I want to tell you my wedding ring is still way too big and crawls off my finger every chance it gets. I have a rough bump where my ring finger meets my palm because of always clenching my fingers to keep it in place. It's a full time job. I should get the ring re-sized but I don't want to leave it anywhere anymore.
If I tell you that, in addition to telling you I refuse to eat prawns with their armor still on and that I can be a skeptic but still miss a nuance a mile wide, then I won't have to tell you that everyone is here today.
Literally, everyone.
Well, except for Cole and for Jacob because they're dead but everyone else is within reach presently and it's not been easy, but maybe that's because Joel is watching me because he can read my face in spite of my ability to charm him into ruin and absent servitude, Nolan is watching me because he cares about us and really he wants to do everything he can to make our lives easier if he can, and Caleb is watching me just because...well, because he covets, and there is no way of sugarcoating that to make it sound like anything else anymore.
Be careful what you wish for was an early tattoo, a reminder that I failed to heed. His favorite quote, not mine, and when I read it my brain says it in his voice and that makes me want to snatch up a dull spoon and scoop out the contents of my mind like pumpkin guts on Halloween Eve. Carve a scary face on the front, light a candle and let's get this night underway.
We took the costumes off. After a while things become so uncomfortable you no longer care to remain in character. We have stopped playing nice. So many years and it feels like yesterday and he left and made a go at life in the hot potato and I got married and got a job at the bank and every chance I got I would take leaves of absence to join the closest show and warm my freak blood under the big top and everyone complained and lowed against that but I did it anyway. I dropped out of university at the age of twenty-one because I don't know what people wanted from me and at the show I knew for certain. Sometimes Lochlan would join me but more often than not I was alone just because once the worst passes you begin at the bottom and you don't have to worry so much about things. They have already happened, the only direction is up.
And I was in harm's way because I don't know how to be anywhere else, clearly. And I'm not anymore but it still feels the same. The sun is warm on my face, the promise of summer is just within reach and I want to pack light and hit the tents now, because I can make a spare few dollars and escape into unreality, where I fit in best.
I suck at real life, Lochie.
You just think you do, Bridge.
