Page 180 of Paint the Town, Dove
Fuck.
It feels so fucking good to say that.
Things unfold when they need to. I realize that now.
My mother came back for a reason. And maybe now I was starting to see punishment as change.
Maybe she pushed me so I could fly.
Maybe without her, I would’ve continued locking my feelings inside of a box, allowing them to torment me until the darkness came.
But something broken inside me that day. The old me. The scared me.
Something new took its place.
I’d caged my feelings for too long, worshipped the burn.
The world saw it. Everyone saw it.
But theFallworked in my favour, did it not?
When everyone drops their expectations of you, you can finally fly.
And I didn’t just fucking fly. I fucking soared.
No more hiding, no more pretending.
I had nothing more to lose.
Just. One. Thing.
And my Dove, that took work.All the best things do.
We were children when we met, we grew up in volatility. What was love if not each other?
It had been there, swimming beneath the murky water all this time. A story of us; erratic, misbehaved, yet completely whole.
I couldn’t get enough of herfire.
She wrapped herself in my warmth.
I replayed the moments leading up to the photo booth, what possessed me to claim her as mine.
I was over the restrictions, the patterns we danced around for a decade and a half.
She had owned my heart since the day I laid eyes on her.
And since then, we have long past broken those boundaries.
Side by side, night after night, we’d brush our teeth together – she’d apply a sheet mask over her glossy skin and I’d watch her do it with wonder and admiration.
We won.
We found normalcy in chaos.
And I’ve been the luckiest bastard in the world to witness Scarlett Emory-Blake in all thesimpleways that made up her.
Me,Ihave been the only person to peel the stone layers, climb the mountain and dine with her at the top.
