Chapter 81: Is that a Castle?

What if six years of Callum was not six years of a bad man?

What if it was six years of a woman who made it easy to be treated badly because she had been trained, somewhere before she could remember being trained, to accept what she was given and call it love?

What if Pierre looked at me and saw exactly what Callum looked at and saw me as a woman who is paying attention?

Who is so grateful to be paid attention to in return that she will breathe through her own instincts and call it a disturbance….

What if the issue has always been me?

I stop walking.

I am on a street I do not recognise.

It’s narrow and quiet.

This kind of street exists in the spaces where the gravel cost more than my prettiest dress.

And right now, there is no one on it except me.

The buildings on either side are the colour of old stone with high rise fences and large houses.

I stand in the middle of the narrow quiet street and squint at the large house in the distance.

Is that a castle?!

My mind works fast and my architectural brain lights up.

I should get a closer look at the house.

Oh my gosh. Imagine if it’s a freakingly castle!

My mind goes to the woman at the café table.

About the way she laughed.

About the way his arm was around her shoulders when they came out of the boutique.

About the way I raised my hand to wave and saw them and lowered my hand and told myself there were explanations and followed them anyway because I needed to know and then stood in the gap between the café and the neighbouring building and listened and heard everything I needed to know.

And I think about the bathroom floor at two in the morning counting missed calls.

And the dish cloth around my palm.

And the blistered burn I pressed my thumb against and felt nothing.

And I think, standing in this narrow quiet Paris street, that I am so tired.

Not tired like sleepy.

I’m tired like a structure that has been load-bearing for too long without maintenance.

I’m stressed about been rebuilding myself for a year in this life and for six years in the last one and who has not, in either of them, found a moment that felt like finished.

There is always something else to hold.

Always another thing to carry.

Always another reason to breathe through the thing in her stomach and call it a choice and keep moving.

I am so tired of breathing through things.

I am so tired of the keeping moving when it does not feel like anything is changing.

I really want to put something down.

I want to put everything down.

Just for a minute.

Just for one minute in a narrow quiet Paris street where nobody is watching and nothing is required of me.

My eyes fill and my throat burn.

Oh. Not again.

I am not going to cry on a Paris street.

I am absolutely going to cry on a Paris street.

I press the back of my hand to my mouth and breathe, struggling to regulate my emotions.

I look up at the buildings.

At the old stone and the beautiful sunlight creating mirages down the road,

The ironwork on the windows looks different from the 1817 building but present, always present in this city, always the conversation between the structure and the detail, always something talking to something else across time.

Tears run down my face.

I wipe them angrily, my hand brushing across my face.

I just stand there because there is no one on this street and nothing is required of me and I don’t have to be someone right now.

I am just standing here.

Being tired.

Being someone who chose wrong again.

Being someone who is starting to wonder if choosing wrong is not the exception but the pattern, not the circumstance but the character, not something that happened to her but I am, even with a Rebirth.

I might just be the one with the problem.