A Broken Crutch

I have been trying to write this book for almost a decade now. An anti-romance if you will. For the first time in all these years I've decided to share a small snippet of the book. Just one chapter that I feel gives you a little idea of what I'm going for. So, without further ado... I give you (the start of) Chapter 7 - A Broken Crutch.

A Broken Crutch

Trey. Trey was my person. It’s late and I’m in bed. I still sleep on my side as if I’m trying to immortalize his. Tomorrow is the improv class I promised Jess I would go to for reasons I still don’t understand. I hate doing things like this. I feel so out of my comfort zone. It is awkward and painful. I forget how to be me. My mind goes blank, paralyzed with fear. I’m too introverted, too much of an over thinker to go do something like this. There have been many a night I’ve lied awake. In this bed. On my side. Staring at the ceiling. Stomach in knots. And all it took was a turn. A turn not to be alone. A turn to see him there. In this bed. On his side. Ready with a comforting word or a hug or a snuggle to make all the worries screaming in my head go quiet, all the butterflies in my stomach go still, to make the world less scary if even for a moment. It is nights like these I wonder why I made the choice that I did. I wonder why I walked away. Why I would choose this life where when all the big scaries come crashing down on you late in the night, you have only an empty side of the bed to turn to.

The thing is, as much as Trey was my person, he was also my crutch. The thing that felt familiar, comfortable, safe, and steady. For years I relied on him to be there as a pillar to help hold me up, even though I knew I could do it on my own… I just didn’t want to. For years he, us, is all I knew. I thought without that I would go tumbling down to the ground. It was only recently I began to see that he was my broken crutch. He wasn’t keeping me steady; he was keeping me in the same spot. Stuck in place, frozen in time. In that one spot we were fused trying to rely on a cracked foundation, waiting for it to split open and swallow us whole. We would rather do that than face the truth. I’d outgrown him, and he couldn’t support me anymore. The weight of us, what we had become, was just too much.

Knowing all that still doesn’t make any of this easier. I lay here whispering to myself repeatedly “broken crutch, broken crutch” to keep my hand from grabbing the phone and dialing his number. To hear his voice and have him tell me it all be okay. I need to be able to tell myself it will all be okay and believe it. So here I lay in the dark quiet scary night and whisper to myself “You will be okay, you will be okay…” until it felt like I had finally let my white knuckled grip on that broken crutch loose, set it down… and went ahead. Out of that spot I was so eager to be stuck in before. Maybe you don’t have to be all that steady on your feet, maybe the important part is to just keep moving froward.