Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
“You’ve taken time,” Lola says. “And you’ve done a lot of work on yourself. When are we ever done working on ourselves? I believe wholeness is not a destination, but a lifetime process. Something that instead of waiting for, you could be living for.”
“Hey.” Nayeli touches my shoulder, prompting me to look at her. “If he makes you happy, be happy now. You deserve it.”
I cover her hand and smile up at her. “Appreciate that, Sis.”
“Okay. Back to work. If we gonna sit around chatting all day, we’ll never get this done,” Lola says. She stands and walks over to her phone, which is resting on one of the sealed boxes. “Music makes everything go faster.”
Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal’s “Saturday Love” blasts from Lola’s phone, ushering in memories of Saturday mornings cleaning this house under Mami’s watchful eye. She loved this song, and I can’t help but laugh remembering her dancing around the kitchen while dinner was cooking. We’ve reached the Sade stage of the playlist, with “Smooth Operator” crooning over us, when I find one of Mami’s leather-bound journals with her initials engraved on the front. There’s nothing more than loosely tied string protecting its secrets from prying eyes. I glance up, checking to see what my sisters are doing. Lola walks a box out to my Pilot, which is parked in the driveway.
“Quick potty break,” Nayeli says, rising and rushing back into the house, leaving me alone with Mami’s leather-bound memories.
I glance around the empty garage as if someone might catch me pulling the curtain back on my mother’s inner thoughts from years ago.
“Fuck it,” I mumble, and crack open the journal.
For the most part, it’s mundane stuff, literally a record of life events. She wrote about things we achieved, like Lola getting on the honor roll and Nayeli winning first-chair flute. Me making cheer captain. She wrote about petty office politics at the library where she and my father had met and both worked—a stream of consciousness veering from the lofty to the base and banal, encompassing her everyday and her daydreams. On the rare page, she wrote about him, Lola’s father, who was a mystery in shadows most of my life. But more than anything, she wrote about herself, revealing things that I’m not sure I ever knew.
My heart is not split in two. My heart is whole. When I’m with Jason, he has all of it. When I’m with Bray, he accepts nothing less than everything, so as much as I want him, our time has passed. He cannot come around anymore because his eyes betray him, and he is the kind of man who makes you burn your life to the ground. I won’t do that to Jason, and I won’t do that to my daughters and I won’t do that to myself. Not even for him, the one who tutored my soul in passion.
I never thought I would forgive Bray for cheating on me, and there is a part of me that maybe never will. We were too young for all that emotion. It was like wrapping yourself around dynamite, reckless and exhilarating. We exploded, hurting everyone in our blast zone.
Lola is so much like him. Her heart is big and her spirit is free. Maybe that’s why we clash. It crushed me to see her leave, but she is with Mami. It is best for now.
There are so many ways to break a woman’s heart. Her children. Her lover. Her body when it betrays her. Life is clever that way, devising plans for our demise from the moment we’re born. Death by a million heartbreaks, a thousand regrets, a hundred goodbyes.
When I dropped Lola off on the island, Mami asked who my one true love was. I knew what she meant. Was it Jason or was it Bray? I told her I am the love of my life. I have learned to love myself without judgment or condition. It’s the only way I have enough love for everyone who needs it—to love myself. No one can love me like I do. No one knows me like I know myself.
I read that Richard Bach book everyone at the library was raving about. He said what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. I know what he meant. When we have hard times, huge changes that seem to be the end of the world as we know it, it’s actually an incubator for metamorphosis. For a new beginning.
To me he misses the point, as men so often do. When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through.