aubrey; a prelude
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
In memory of Uncle Larry, in whose home I know I was safe from every harm.
early 1995
Randomly one night, in the commercial break for an All In the Family rerun, Mama said:
“Georgia sounds like a beautiful place, don’t it?”
I didn’t look up from my homework. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.”
The show came back on. Hollow laughter echoed on the set. Mama interrupted Archie’s droning:
“The state tree is the peach tree. They have fresh peaches all year round. God, wouldn’t that be divine? Coldest it ever gets is fifty! And not nearly as humid as Florida, thank God. The capital is called Savannah. Doesn’t that sound just the sweetest place to live?”
I hummed something noncommittal, neither affirming nor adverse. I don’t remember what. It was just to pacify her fleeting wanderlust—which had only just brought us to Rochester something like eight months before. (“Think of it! All that snow!”)
I don’t think either of us spoke again until I finally got up to get ready for bed, when she said:
“So what d’ya think?”
“About what?”
“Georgia!”
I sighed. “Mama, come on. We just got here.”
Her forehead wrinkled in that ridiculously cute way. “I just asked what you thought. I’m not saying we up and move tomorrow.”
“Good, ‘cause I have a test tomorrow.” I turned back toward the bathroom.
I didn’t tell her I was skipping out right after that test. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t actually studying for that test, but rather studying the clock that ticked on and on, counting how many hours—minutes—I could be with him now. Or now. I didn’t tell her I’d been waiting all evening for her to go to bed so I could sneak over and knock on Gavin’s window. And now he’d probably be in bed with her, in-between their rosy-colored sheets that he told me he hated. And now I’d have to lie awake in my own lonely bed, hating myself for even pretending to have a claim on him. Hating that I still wanted to be there, despite how cloying and childish it was.
“But maybe someday we could—”
“No, Mama!” I remember I said it angry, said it loud enough to made her jump. “I don’t wanna go to Georgia.”
So, you see, I told her explicitly where I stood on the matter. She had no reason to take me along.
And in her defense, she kept her word. She waited for the weekend.
Read the next chapter here.
