(For the record, they were too large and therefore never used.)
He's standing on the patio having another cigar. Slay me with a feather, for I still love the smell so much it hurts. But I can feel the spectre of Cole eroding a little more each day and I have to work so hard to remember dumb things. His voice. The mannerisms I only witness now through Caleb, and the memories I fight my way out of without the need for padlocks and straps, though he'll use them anyway. A figurative landscape of denial is painted and framed and people will file past it, quiet murmurs of appreciation filling the airwaves and still we deny that the only way I will go to him now is under duress.
Duress, well it weighs a ton but I skid into the room and stand accounted for, all the same. Bad habits don't die. Not like people do. It should be the other way around but it isn't.
And forced compliance is sometimes good for everyone. It teaches us our limitations and it teaches us our thresholds for danger and for pain. It teaches us how to be humble and how to endure. We learn the true meaning of love and gratitude.
We learn all kinds of things.
Right now I am teaching THEM something, and they are very good students. The first thing is you don't need to lock Bridget into your fantasies, she'll just show up anyway, and the second thing is that forgiveness goes a really really really really long way.
