Too Late

Content warning: The story contains mention of substance abuse, domestic violence, and mental health

For the first time in maybe four decades, I had let myself hope. The walls had come down, I looked the universe in the face and accepted that it was my turn. 

I’ve been alone for a long time. The vast majority of my sixty-eight years. A large part of myself has always felt undeserving like I'll never be able to make up for my past mistakes. I feel more foolish than ever for thinking that God had forgiven me and would finally allow my life to unfold in the way it was originally supposed to. I guess I’m still repaying for old sins. I had been allowed to live past my unsavory young adulthood but only if I agreed to sit put in a dull and lonely limbo spending all my remaining moments feeling remorseful. 

    Her voice had been like sweet dripping honey. It sang in my ears whenever I let my mind wander. She had the same southern caress that my mother had once had. I hope my mother is happy in heaven, the lord knows my father made Earth a version of hell. It still hurts me to think about all the ways in which I added to her pain. She died watching me burn down the world around me. I need to believe she can see me now. She’d be proud of how I managed to become someone useful. All she wanted was for me to be someone who helped instead of hurt. All she wanted was a son who wouldn’t end up like his father. Is it too late to show her I didn't?

   The short hallway from my kitchen to my bedroom displays an array of proof that someone thinks I’ve done something worthwhile with my time. Eleven Bayside County Educator of the Year Plaques, four Philadelphia Excellence in Education awards, one National Humanities Educator prize that came with a $10,000 grant, and a handshake from the first lady. Underneath all of these hang my ten, twenty, and thirty years in education certificates, the place where forty will go is already marked. 

    Jolene had felt like my saving grace. A release from any old wounds that remained from the chaos of my youth and young adulthood. If we could be happy together then I could finally just be a good man with a good life. Instead, I’m forever a story of someone who was able to turn their life around and dig themselves out of the trenches of addiction the cycle of harm. People feel bad for me. They see a somewhat successful, somewhat attractive man living alone in his one-bedroom apartment, with no family to be found. They wonder what went wrong in my life. I can't even begin to tell them. 

    Jolene saw me for who I had been trying to be since the day I got out of St. Andrews Rehabilitation Center on August 16, 1984. She listened to my thoughts with intent, shared my love of the weekly journal, and could go back and forth with me for hours over cups of Earl Gray with two sugar cubes. She knew how to console me when a student became frustrating. I knew how to speak to her when her son was yelling at her over the phone. She held me in a way I hadn't realized I had never experienced before her. She was good, so good and I told her this. I told her she didn't deserve anything she had been through and that she deserved to find joy because she gave so much of it to other people. I would have followed her across the globe, given her every ounce of my heart and soul. She knew this. She hadn't seemed frightened by it. 

     We had both been loveless for a long time. All of my relationships had been short and shallow and by the time I had reached forty, I had lost the will to search for love. Her husband whom she married at twenty gave her many years of narcissistic arrogance with a dose of alcoholism and the occasional physical abuse until he died of brain cancer at fifty-three. He left behind a red Cadillac and a 24-year-old son who held the same sense of pompous adversity that he projected on his mother, the same way his father had because he knew she would never stop caring for him. She had given up everything for that child, and she couldn’t bear to face the fact it had amounted to what it had. He had so much of his father in him and held so much pain from all the years begging for his praise and affection. He was now a thirty-three-year-old asshole, with a lousy computer desk job, and way too much dependency on his mother. 

   The day Jolene and I met, we both seemed to breathe in for the first time in years. We had been set up by her cousin, a colleague of mine, and had been officially introduced at the high school's annual fundraising gala. I was supposed to have been speaking with potential donors that night but instead, I spent four straight hours sitting and laughing with her, drinking champagne out of clear plastic cups and eating pigs in a blanket of silver trays. 

We met up three days later for lunch, then three days after that when I took her out on my Catalina 38. Sailing has been one of the few true releases I’ve found in life. On the water there’s no past, the future changes form, it’s just you and the horizon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful than her on that boat, the sun starting to sink into golden orange paint strokes. Her brown curly hair blew with the sail, a full smile sat on her face, and her kind eyes kind of squinted in the light. We shared our first kiss that day, and I truly believe we shared our first moment of seeing a glimpse of what our lives could become. Living happily, enjoying the little things, having someone to share it all with, and make it worth it. 

   I would have married her that day. I knew I wanted to from the moment I held her hand to help her step off the boat, her blue pashmina shawl fluttering around her with the breeze. We saw each other almost every other day from that day forward. If we didn’t see each other we would talk on the phone for hours. We got in the habit of blending our futures into one. With a sense of how limited time is, it becomes important to not put off joy. I thought we both felt this way. I know we both felt this way, at least at one point. 

   The beginning of the end was marked by her inviting me to stay with her at her sister's old lake house three months into our romance. Her sister had died two years prior and the lake house garage was filled with old memories there had been nobody to go through. Marlene asked me if I would want to spend the weekend with her sorting, bagging, and lifting dusty old boxes. Nothing had ever sounded more appealing. On a genuine note, I always loved a good project. I thoroughly believed It would be good for us to tackle a task like this. To work together through something that could be emotional and laborious. 

We drove up Saturday morning, laughing together the entire four-hour car ride. We got to work promptly at 10:00 AM and only stopped once for chicken salad sandwiches at 3:00. The day had gone well, or so I believed. We went through 32 boxes, took three trips to the dump, and packaged up six boxes of things to send to her other siblings. Jolene had been her typical talkative bright self only changing her demeanor when she found a box of her old wedding photos and some Christmas cards with her son's smiling four-year-old face on them. She let me rub her back and kiss her head, tell her she had done everything she could and then she seemed to be alright. We went through a few more boxes and then at eight she suggested we order Thai and call it a day. 

Maybe she was a little quieter than usual that night. Maybe I didn’t notice because of how tired and idiotically bliss I had been. Sitting with my arm around her on the couch that night watching Seinfeld all I had been thinking about was how perfect everything was. I can barely fathom a world in which she didn’t feel the same. The way she kissed me before bed, the way she played with my fingers while watching TV. It doesn't make sense to me that she was doing that while seeing the end in sight.

I woke up the next morning at 7:30, a smile on my face, ready to keep working. I came down to the kitchen to make us both some coffee and found her sitting in the living room. She looked like she had been sitting there for hours with dark circles under her eyes and puffy red cheeks. The world became hazy and distant as she drew me over holding my hand as I sat down next to her on her sister's old blue loveseat. Tears came to the brim of her eyes as she said to me, “Stan, I love you, I really do, but I don’t… I don’t think I can be in a relationship right now. My son needs me, and I owe it to him to be there until he can get his life settled. I’ve put him through so much with Mark and everything. He doesn't deserve to have to watch me abandon him like this.”

I tried to interject but by the look on her face, I knew it was pointless. She was already gone, her brain fogged by the guilt and damage her ex-husband had left her with. So instead, I didn't say anything. I just gathered my things and went. The drive home was lonely and silent. I kept looking over thinking I would jolt into reality and she’d be in the passenger's seat next to me but she never was. I was once again coming home alone, maybe the way I was supposed to be. 

I haven’t cried as hard as I did that day sitting in the parking lot of my apartment complex since the day I wasn't let into my mother's funeral because I was high on meth. This felt like a deeper rock bottom than the times I’ve been inches from death. A hole bore into my stomach, my chest ached, and it was hard to get a breath. I stayed home from school a full week, sitting in my misery barely turning a light on, barely eating more than toast and canned chicken soup. 

   She shattered my heart sending the pieces in every direction. Another reminder the universe still didn't trust me or think I deserved the companionship of another human. I think maybe some people just have to be alone.