Page 12 of Feels Like Falling
ELLISON
“The Whiskey’s Gone” By Alli Walker plays loudly for the fourth time through the speakers of my car as I drive the last hour home to Blackstone Falls. The energy drinks and candy bars are wearing off faster than the miles ticking down, and we’ve passed jittery and are headed straight for loopy.
But it’s the good kind of loopy. The high-on-life kind that can only come from being so close to something you’ve dreamed would be your forever.
And now it’s finally within my grasp.
I‘d thankfully been able to terminate my rental agreement with the stipulation that I wouldn’t be getting my security deposit back. But joke’s on them because I probably would have given them my kidney if it got me out of Savannah.
The thought should be troubling but it’s not.
I’d made any number of excuses over the years for why I couldn’t come back to Blackstone Falls. I was mad at Montana for seemingly throwing us away, giving up on a future I wished could be ours. The abruptness from loving to indifferent had destroyed me, making it impossible for those wounds to heal.
And in the dead of night, I was mad at myself for not fighting harder—against himandmy parents. Those nights, whispers of doubt played through my mind, hinting that I’d missed something and that Montana would never have let me go.
Not like that.
But they’d always been gone before morning, disappearing like dew on the grass when the sun comes up.
The anger had eventually morphed into hurt, and I’d been too ashamed to come back to the only place that would ever be home. Somehow the longer I stayed away, the easier it was to push Blackstone Falls, and Montana, from my mind.
Deep down, I knew I couldn’t run forever.
But shame still tried to swallow me whole, knowing that Nan’s death was the only thing I couldn’t ignore. She may have been Montana’s grandmother, but she’d made me feel like hers too. Our relationship had been too precious, too full of love, for me to not. It’d been the catalyst for rearranging my life—for taking a stand for myself and purging the things that no longer suited me.
My parents—my mother especially—had been part of that. Or at least as much as I could manage.
But Nan’s voice had been so clear in my head the day I’d donned all black and stood next to Montana, my hand clenched in his at her gravesite. I never said a word about it, but I’d bet the trust fund I couldn’t access that I’d heard Nan saywelcome home, my darling girlas if she was standing right next to me.
I’d always teased her about the nickname and the way she always said thegin darling when so often her accent was heavier than her homemade poundcake. It made me feel special and I’d loved it. I loved the care and the adoration I felt whenever she greeted me. I feltfancybeing herdarlinglike being in one of those old black-and-white movies she loved so much.
Nan and Grandad taught me so much about love and life and the kind of person I wanted to wake up next to every morning. My young girl heart didn’t understand back then the complications of the world I’d grown up in—the things that would prevent me from being able to fall in love with my best friend.
I’d confided in Nan—more during the years that Montana had been achingly absent from my life. My heart had broken when I left Blackstone Falls for college, but I was still so hopeful we could make it. We weren’t dating, but that didn’t mean I didn’t consider him mine.
And with high school behind us and my eighteenth birthday in the rearview mirror, I thought we could finally break free of the things holding us back. But I’d been wrong.
And to this day, I still didn’t truly understandwhy.There’d been no dramatic falling out or declaration of distaste toward each other. He’d simply been there one day and had all but vanished the next. I’d wanted to go home—to leave Georgia and return to Tennessee—and finish school where I could see Montana every day, but my parents had put a stop to that real quick. They’d somehow managed to make a new life down the road from my school in Georgia, renting our house in Blackstone Falls in the next breath. I hadn’t left my life behind—the parts I hated most had followed me.
And the parts I loved had stayed away.
Montana stayed away.
The distance between us obliterated what was left of the organ in my chest and with it the hope of home.
Nan had filled the void the best she could, never giving up on me even when I wanted to give up on myself. She loved me more when Montana loved me less, making weekly phone calls and video chats with her a priority.
A lifeline.
The abrupt end to our Tuesday night ritual left a hole in my heart that was still gaping two years later.
He’d lost his grandmother, but it was me who needed the support and strength to get through the service. I owed it to her.
There were a million things I should have been here for, but the longer I was away, the harder it was to come back.
I missed so much.
Swallowing the regret, I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly as I try to let Cole Swindell sing me sweet nothings in the form of “She Had Me At Heads Carolina.”
