This cage was once just fine
Am I allowed to cry?
***
It hits her on a Wednesday afternoon. The twins are at school then. She’s managing things from her office in the back of Baker Men.
Millie has just brought her some tea from Karen’s cafe - told her Haley says hi and invites them all over for Game Night the following day - and, as she closed the door, Brooke took the first sip.
She doesn’t check the flavor but might as well go without knowing. Because it’s warm, but not steamy, and kind of sweet, but also… Bland. It irks her. Makes a chill go down her spine. She can’t name it, at first. But that chill stays there the whole day. It increases as Millie and her close the store and she drives home.
When she gets there, the lights are already on.
She knows Jude and Davis are already in with Julian - during breakfast, he said he’d pick them up from school. And Julian is steady. He’s… Predictable.
He’s peaceful.
A small voice inside her head, a Devil, whispers in a husky voice: he’s meek. Dull.
Brooke feels safe all the time. She has two boys she adores and who are funny and street-smart like her. And it should be enough. Even if she wanted a girl, too, but never got a daughter. She has a loving husband, an honorable man who comes home every night and is kind and sweet… But she never knows what to get him for Christmas. She ends up picking generic gifts, and she hates that he loves them anyways. She feels guilty, all of a sudden, for her longings. For the stuff she dreams about, sometimes.
She doesn’t talk about it. She hasn’t even mentioned it to her therapist.
She can’t think of leather jackets and plaid flannel shirts and blonde locks and big green eyes and toothy grins and messy top lip kisses anymore. She can’t say those things out loud. So she’s grown used to burying them.
She didn’t plan on ever mentioning it to her therapist.
But now– Now she’s seen it. How can she run away again, now she realizes her safety comes from locking herself inside a cage?
I wanted to go to her so badly I had to stop myself. I had to get married to someone else.
She left me and went on to marry Lucas and I was attacked and she didn’t notice and I thought we were… Something . She left the house as I was hurting. She had a baby and named her baby after me and looked at me with those eyes and said it was just like she had dreamt and moved away.
She doesn’t feel all wrong sleeping beside him.
She feels nothing.
She has been feeling nothing for a long time, and confusing it for something, and wanting to believe it, and then believing it.
But now she can’t do that anymore.
Because she drank that damn tea, and it was too bland, and she misses some spiciness.
She misses some contrarian attitude and electric guitars and indie music. She misses stubborn, pissed off smirks-and-eye rolls, she misses being challenged.
Julian is a good husband, a good friend, a good father, a good guy.
And she really believed, for almost a decade, that he was her guy.
Turns out a guy is not what she needs.
And, perhaps, it’s time for her to finally admit that it’s not what she wants.
***
What if I roll the stone away?
They're gonna crucify me anyway
What if the way you hold me
Is actually what's holy?
If long suffering propriety
Is what they want from me
They don't know how you've haunted me
So stunningly