In the Face of Tragedy

Things are beginning to hit a little too close to home.

I distinctly remember the Columbine shootings.  I was ten years old, and it was my sister's sixth birthday.  I was fascinated in a way that only little kids can be about something so gruesome.  I didn't understand what it meant.  I knew we had family in Colorado.  We had vacationed there two years before, and were planning a trip for that very summer.  That didn't bother me, for some reason.  I wasn't scared.  I remember feeling like that could never happen to me, to the people I know.

Flash forward to high school.  I was barely sixteen when the school shootings at Red Lake High School in northern Minnesota happened.  I remember thinking... I'm in high school.  That guy is my age.  What... what is happening to the world?

Then, in April of 2007, I was two months shy of graduating from high school, of leaving home to go to Michigan for four years of college.  And someone opened fire at Virginia Tech.  The silliest of thoughts popped into my mind - Oh.  I thought that it was only high schools where people were losing their shit.  Now it's colleges too?  Will I ever be safe?

I could keep going.  Last summer, I was in Colorado when someone opened fire at the midnight showing of the newest Batman movie.  A lot of my friends are elementary school teachers now, which is all I could think of when someone shot and killed students at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  I run four or five days a week with dreams of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, and that was targeted with bombs in the spring.

I love movies.  I work at a university.  I run.  Should I be afraid to do these things?  When I am handed a ticket stub at a theater, should I say a prayer that it isn't the last thing I do?  When I turn my key in the lock at work in the morning, should I be telling my family how much I love them?  When I wake up before the sun rises to get to the starting line of a race I've been training for for months, should I be kissing my boyfriend goodbye, possibly forever?

These are things that I shouldn't have to think about.  It's too close to home, for me.

But it has gotten worse, if that's even possible.

Yesterday, I was walking to work, be-bopping along past TCF Bank Stadium, checking my email on the way.  When I opened up the CNN Breaking News email, I faltered.

No.  This can't be.

I was sent back three years, to the summer I spent in Washington DC.  My memories of that summer are scattered, chaotic - I hardly slept, I wore heels everyday, I ended a relationship, I had a military intern ID.  I was a Summer 2010 Naval Criminal Investigative Service Intern in the Biometrics Department, stationed in the Washington Navy Yard.  I couldn't even walk through the front gate with headphones in my ears.  How did someone get automatic weapons inside?  How did this happen?

I am still Facebook friends with most of my fellow interns from that summer, and I knew that one of them had been stationed back in the Navy Yard.  My heart sank.  I logged into Facebook as I approached the busiest intersection on my walk to work.  All I could think of was, is she ok?  This can't be happening.  Please tell me she's ok.

She was, and is.  (Grace, if you're reading this, I am so thankful that you updated Facebook right away, and that you and everyone you work with are safe and sound.)  But that didn't really calm my heart down.  I felt so safe in that base.  I was surrounded my military personnel.  The whole place was streamlined, orderly.  Just... how?  And why?

I'm not sure we'll ever know for sure, to be honest.  In this day and age, where we can get information at the tap of a screen or the touch of a button, we're not used to the unknown.  Conspiracy theories are surfacing.  I don't know what to believe, when it comes to news.  Is anything 100% accurate?  Is anywhere safe anymore?

Probably not.

I'm afraid of everything.  I can't watch episodes of Criminal Minds before I go to bed, for fear that I will have nightmares.  Heights.  Falling.  Snakes.  Spiders.  Clowns.  Mascots.  I'm afraid of the strangest things.  But, for some reason, I'm not scared to go outside, which would, logically, make more sense, with the state of the world.  No, I'm not afraid to go outside.  Why?  Because, even after all of this tragedy, I'm not afraid of living.

It would be so easy for me to say that I'm going to go straight from work to home from now on, that I'm not going to speed through yellow lights, that I'll never jaywalk again.  But I know that I would be lying to you.  So I won't say those things.  I could just as easily get jumped while walking to work, or get rear-ended while I am stopped at a red, or picked off by a careless driver while I'm in the crosswalk and have a walk sign.  Life doesn't work like it's supposed to.  People's lives get changed by random acts of violence.  People die.  How are we supposed to honor those people if we never go outside?

When I get home from work today, the first thing I'm going to do is change my clothes and lace up my running shoes, because I have a seven-miler ahead of me.  It's going to be just like any other day, except I'm planning on leaving the headphones at home.  Because, while I'm not afraid of living, I don't want to miss out on anything.  So I'm going to run those seven miles along the Mississippi River, taking in this beautiful fall day, breathing in the relatively cool air and thanking God that I've made it this far.  Tragedy could always strike when I least expect it.  But you can't live worrying about it.  What happened in the Navy Yard was a complete and utter tragedy.  It was.  There's no denying that.  The Washington Nationals ballpark is only a couple of blocks from the Navy Yard, and their game versus the Atlanta Braves was cancelled yesterday.  On the MLB website, it simply said "Postponed:  Tragedy."  To me, that is the epitome of the American spirit.  The game was postponed, so that everyone can understand the magnitude of what happened.  But it wasn't cancelled altogether.  The game is still going to be played.  We are resilient.  We are not afraid of living our lives.

the song of the broken-hearted

I've been staring at this blank screen all morning, because I don't know how to put my scattered and hyper-emotional thoughts into words.

Obviously, I don't know Cory Monteith personally.  If only I had been that lucky.  But I have never had a celebrity's death strike as much of a chord with me as his has.

Glee premiered in the fall of 2009.  I sat down and watched the whole first-half of the first season (it was released in halves, for some reason) while I was on Christmas break that year, half-way through my junior year of college.  My mom and sister fell in love with it as much as I did.  I laughed.  I cried.  I cared way too much for those characters.  And no one appealed to me like Finn Hudson.  Something about the character stuck with me long after the episodes ended.  He was dopey.  He was not the brightest bulb.  He was uncoordinated and the epitome of the jock in high school that I never gave the time of day.  But I loved him as a character.  He was my favorite, by far.  I felt I understood him, and on more than one occasion, I wanted to reach through the screen to give him a hug.  He was the star and the heart of that show.

I went to Scotland for a semester soon after that.  That semester sticks in my brain as the most difficult thing I have ever done, but also the best.  But aside from castles and Nessie and taking classes at an institution older than the country I live in, what I remember most is Glee.  Because I watched the entire first half season at least two more times while I was abroad, and then illegally watched the new episodes online as well.  I introduced my friend Jesse to the show.  The soundtrack was on repeat on my iPod all the time, carrying me across Scotland and back, to and from class, everywhere.  I knew the words.  I sang along when I could.  It carried me back home.

Why do I remember that so much?  Because I used more than a healthy amount of available energy to root for Finn and Rachel Berry.  She was obsessive.  Type A.  A complete control freak and borderline annoying.  That's how I felt, most of the time I was there.  Finn and Rachel had a ton of things working against them, especially in high school, where popularity is the most important thing.  And at the time, I was in denial about the imminent end of my current relationship.

I wrote a lot about that breakup, back in the fall of 2010.  Don't reread those posts.  They're messy.  They're raw.  I'd say they were embarrassing, except I'm not embarrassed by them at all.  They're my version of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed.  I gave everything I had to that relationship, because it was my first real one, where I was an adult and we actually took the time to plan out a potential future for us.  And I'm a writer.  What better way to deal with loss than to write about it?

But what I didn't write about was how I think I already knew it was over when I was in Scotland.  We were drifting apart, spending less time on Skype and more time doing what we (separately) enjoyed.  I got close enough to another guy to realize that my relationship wasn't satisfying me in every way it should.  And he wasn't fighting for me.  So it ended during the following summer.  And while the circumstances were very different, Finn ended his relationship with Quinn for a similar end goal - he realized there was something more out there.  He found Rachel.

Glee sang and danced its way into my heart early on.  I stopped watching it regularly after the second season, mostly because of time and my lack of it.  I kept telling myself that this would be the year I caught up, so I could watch again in the fall.  But now... I can't decide if it's more or less important to do that, now that Cory Monteith is gone.

There's more to it than just Glee, though.  He was great on Glee.  He was the star.  Finn and Rachel's performance of "Pretending" never gets old to me, and I honestly tell people that I prefer the Glee version of "Don't Stop Believin'" now to Journey's, as wrong as that sounds.  But there's more to the story of why I am so devastated by his sudden death.

He and costar Lea Michele started dating in early 2012.  He played Finn, she played Rachel - how could you not get on board with that?  They would tweet pictures of each other at events and on vacations together, and they looked so incredibly happy.  Everything I heard and read made it sound like they had found their other halves.  Now, I'm a romantic, and having watched the show from the beginning, I was giddy.  It's the happy ending that Finn and Rachel may not ever get, because of plotlines and all of that nonsense that keeps people watching a TV show.  It was the real life Finchel.  And it was beautiful.  I always admired them and watched out for pictures in People.  They didn't care that they were celebrities, because they were also people.  And I love that.

But... now what?  Cory is gone.  He died.  And Lea was left behind.

It hits me hard because I admired their relationship so much.  And if God can take away someone who was so happy in a relationship, someone that people knew and looked up to... what does that mean for me?

I'm cynical.  Always have been.  I believe that good luck is a myth, and it's just the calm between storms of bad luck and misfortune.  But here I am, happy in a relationship with someone.  Here I am, in love.  God took away a ray of sunshine, an optimist, when he took Cory Monteith.  That's clearly not me, but it does fit my boyfriend a lot of the time.  He's the more optimistic of the two of us.  And I've gotten to this point in my life where I don't want to be away from him.  I'm an introvert, and I like to be alone, but I've started thinking of my time alone as my time with him.  Because I don't want to be alone anymore.  But what if the impossible happens?  What if he gets taken from me?  You're not supposed to think about that, I know.  And if it were to happen, I'd obviously have to deal with it.  But... what if I can't?  Can't deal with it, I mean.  What if I don't have it in me?  Cory was healthy, aside from his history of drug use.  No one knows how he died, because there was nothing wrong with him, and foul play has already been eliminated.  But my boyfriend has an anaphylactic peanut allergy.  It could be something so simple, and all of a sudden... Nope.  I can't.

He doesn't understand why I've been reading everything I can about Cory Monteith's death.  He doesn't get why I care so much about someone famous.  Someone I don't know.  But I care because it hits close to home.  I care because I have no choice.  Glee is a part of my history.  And Cory Monteith made it that way.

No, I didn't know Cory Monteith.  But his sudden death has affected me all the same.  It's made me see what I have.  And more importantly, it's made me realize what I have to lose.  I am cynical.  But I can't lose this one.  Because it would mean losing the happiness that I've found.  It would mean losing the person I've realized I could become.  And most importantly, and most terrifyingly, it would mean losing Andrew.

I haven't felt like this about anyone since... well, since I dated the guy I was with while I was in Scotland.  But this is different.  I am a real adult now.  I see Andrew in all of the visions and dreams I have for the rest of my entire life.  I see a wedding, and a house, and kids who look like bits and pieces of both of us.  And I see a swing on a front porch, and two gray-haired people rocking and laughing 70 years from now, still happy and in love with each other.  I'd be losing that.  That future that I see in my head.  I'd be losing him.

If I could reach through the TV right now, I'd pull Lea Michele in for a long hug.  It wouldn't matter that I don't know her.  It wouldn't matter that she's famous and talented and nothing like me at all.  It would be a gesture, something to tell her that I can't possibly fully understand the pain that she's in.  But the reason that I can't understand is because I have what it appeared she and Cory Monteith had.  I just haven't had it ripped from me, suddenly and tragically, without warning and without the ability to cope with it.  I would hug her, because I am praying constantly that I'll never have to feel that pain.  I would hug her because I'm sure she needs it.  She probably needs someone to hold her together.

To fellow Glee fans - don't expect the cast to say anything about his death.  How can you expect them to feel anything but shock?  And to everyone who thinks it's stupid to be affected by celebrity deaths - it's not.  They are people, too.  They are role models for situations that ordinary people find themselves in.  Everyone needs a chance to grieve.

And to Lea Michele, and Monteith's family, who will never read this - I'm so sorry for your loss.  I can't understand.  But I can sympathize.  Because if I lost what you now have, I'd unravel.  I'd break.

I would break.

demons

so much has happened since i last wrote.

we won a battle on election day, for starters.  and i actually feel like i brought some good to the world.

i wrote a book.  i've sent it to some friends and family for feedback, and so far have heard good things.  and some constructive criticism, which i appreciate.  but mostly encouraging things.  i'm thinking of trying to get published.  how crazy is that?

i met someone.  i got a new apartment to myself in the city.  i started a math class that has been driving me bonkers ever since.  i'm happy.  life is good.

i haven't written in a while.  i've always found that i have the tendency to write more when i am unhappy, when life isn't going as i wanted it to go.  i guess that isn't necessarily true.  i write all the time.  but i blog more when i get low.  just before writing this, i reread a post from back in april.  when i took a hiatus, because i wasn't getting treated like i deserved to be treated.  i couldn't help but feel for the person who wrote that, because it's not me anymore.  i've grown a lot since then.

i don't know if my skin is necessarily thicker, but i think i'm just more content in my life.  i like where things are going.  and i can see very clearly that some things are the exact opposite of what i thought they were.  i've always been a people-pleaser.  it's who i am.  but i know now that i can't do it anymore.  why put up with people who don't deserve you when there are people out there who do?  that's what i've discovered.  i'm not a mean person, by any means.  but communication is a two-way street.

in that post from april, i was very caught up on whether or not i allowed people to treat me badly.  i was adamant in the post that i didn't.  because who would allow that?  but looking back... i think i did.  just not in the literal way that i had been thinking about when i wrote it.

here's the thing about life that took me a while to realize.  you can't control how people treat you.  that's up to them and to their morals and conscience.  but you can control how you respond.  i used to just ignore the nasty remarks and treat these people like i would everyone else.  but i don't do that anymore.  unconsciously, i started putting up walls.  now, the people who don't respect me don't receive something in return - me.  they don't get the real me.  they get a fake version, a nice version who doesn't actually tell them anything about what's going on in my life or what things are really like.  they get a ghost, a shell.

my best friend and i have been communicating by email since we both graduated from college and moved to our respective homes in different states.  and to keep things interesting, we have been exchanging questions back and forth, so we are constantly learning about the other.  it's fun, and it appeals to that part of both of us that wants to know people in a deeper way than just what is presented on the surface.  well, one of my questions was "if a movie was made about your life, who would you want to play you and the people close to you?"  when he answered it, he cheesed up the entire thing by saying that he thought i could only play myself.  probably because i'm admittedly weird, and there's probably no one out there like me.  i took it as a cheesy compliment, haha.  but lately, i've been thinking about it more.  i laughed because i can't act worth a damn, or so i thought.  i think i was wrong.  i think i'm acting most of the time, pretending to be the me that the people i'm with want to see.  who am i, really?  when am i truly myself?

when i'm with my sister, and my family, and my best friends, and the guy i'm seeing.  when i'm with the people i trust.  a person can't act all the time.  that would be exhausting.  but i get it now.  i understand why actors are so often typecast.  because it's hard to not slip in little glimpses of who you really are when you're acting.

and if you really want to know who i am, read what i write.  that's where i express everything.

there's a song that i recently discovered by imagine dragons called "demons."  the chorus says it all:

when you feel my heat, look into my eyes.
it's where my demons hide, it's where my demons hide.
don't get too close, it's dark inside.
it's where my demons hide, it's where my demons hide.

i'm really happy with where my life is right now.  i'm not sure if this post has expressed it like i intended, but i truly am.  but everyone who has some demons will understand what i mean when i say that you can never completely outrun them.  i have my share, even when it's something as insignificant as people who have treated me like a doormat for years.  you learn to cope.  i've taken up acting as a side occupation.  and writing.  and it was through my writing that i discovered that you can't run forever.  you might as well stand up on your own two feet and face it.  so i act.  because i have high standards.  and if you don't deserve me, you're not going to get me.  it's as simple as that.

"when the days are cold, and the cards all fold, and the saints we see are all made of gold.  when your dreams all fail, and the ones we held are the worst of all, and the blood's run stale.  i want to hide the truth.  i want to shelter you.  but with the beast inside, there's nowhere we can hide.  no matter what we breed, we still are made of greed.  this is my kingdom come.  this is my kingdom come."
- imagine dragons, "demons"

Straight But Not Narrow

Some stories are just waiting to be told.  I didn’t realize that I had one of them until it was sitting right in front of me.  There is nothing left for me to do but tell it.  The world (or at least those of you who read this blog) needs to hear it.

Last week, I went on a Hunger Games binge.  I reread the books in less than a week, watched the movie several times, creeped on Hunger Games themed blogs on Tumblr, and memorized quotes from the books.  I just love everything about it.  After all of that, I started looking up interviews with the cast on YouTube.  That’s when I stumbled across an interview with Josh Hutcherson, after he became the youngest winner of the Vanguard Award for his work with the organization Straight But Not Narrow, presented by GLAAD.  Now, I already loved and respected Josh as an actor – no one could have embodied Peeta like he did.  But this raised my level of respect by about a million percent.  And it made me see that I have a story to tell, too.

Let’s back up two decades.

My family and I moved to a new house when I was three years old.  I distinctly remember peeking out from behind my dad in our garage, talking to the neighbor across the street about his son, who was also three.  But he was taking a nap, so he couldn’t play right then.  From that day forward, we were basically inseparable.  He got me into trouble, and I tried to get him out of trouble.  He explored every inch of our neighborhood together.  We laughed, we cried, we fought.  He was the brother I never had.  And I loved him the way only a child can love a friend. 

Certain memories stick with me more than others.  The day we got detention for leaving school grounds and straying into someone’s yard to pick violets at recess.  Singing the Power Ranger theme song while riding in the bed of his dad’s blue truck.  Making snow forts for our Beanie Babies for hours.  Sledding down the small hill in our neighbor’s yard.  I smile, because no one will ever be able to take those from me.

As we got older, we didn’t stay as close.  But there was something about our bond that couldn’t be broken.  I remember crying when I didn’t get asked to prom, and he told me that he would go with me.  I remember long conversations about people we both hated, because you just can’t face hating someone alone.  He was there for me when people were mean.  He was my first line of defense, always standing up for me.  He was selfless, really.  My friends didn’t really care for him, but I always told them that it didn’t matter what they said – he would always be my neighbor, my childhood companion.

Flash forward to high school graduation.  Our moms teared up as we stood next to each other in our gowns.  We were obviously going to share that moment together, and his name actually happened to be directly after mine in the alphabet.  We walked across the stage and got our diplomas back to back.  I don’t think it could have happened any other way.  I was reading the cards I received at my open house about a week after that, and I saw that I had one from him.  It was hand-written in his sloppy script, and I think I would have been the only one to ever understand what he was talking about in that card.  I just remember laying on my bed and sobbing.  Because what I didn’t think about when I picked an out-of-state school and left our sleepy town behind was that I would be leaving him behind, too.  I couldn’t picture it. 

Jump another two or three years ahead.  I was home from school on a break, and he came over to have lunch with me.  We talked, caught up, and laughed like nothing had changed, like no time had passed.  I remember needing to get ready to go somewhere, so I went upstairs to brush my teeth.  He followed me and leaned on the door frame of the bathroom and watched me for a while.  Then he said, “There’s something I want to tell you.”  I said, “Ok,” as best I could with toothpaste in my mouth.

“I’m gay,” he said slowly, quietly. 

I remember spitting the toothpaste out.  I remember looking him in the eye.  But I don’t remember what I said in response.  I imagine it was something simple, like “ok,” or “cool.”  Something to make him see that it didn’t matter to me.  What he didn’t know is that I already knew.  At that point, I had known him for almost twenty years.  I knew him forward and backward, inside and out.  He was my childhood best friend, my playmate, my confidant.  My brother.  He didn’t need to tell me.  But I am so glad he did.

When I hugged him goodbye that day, I knew that it was going to change me somehow.  Knowing him was going to make me a better person, a stronger person.  I wasn’t sure what to do with it yet.  I spent a couple of years keeping silent about it, only defending him when someone else brought it up.  But it was always nagging me, eating at me.  I needed to DO something.

Stumbling across Straight But Not Narrow was a game-changer.

I watched all the videos on the website, I read everything I could about it.  It was perfect, exactly what I was looking for.  What I had needed was a platform that I could get behind, something that I could fight for.  And this was it.  This is it.

It’s so simple.  I like men.  I like how they move, how they smell, how they talk.  I am attracted to them.  I am straight.  But I love my friend.  I love him more than I love myself.  And he also likes men.  That’s cool.  He’s still the same person.  He will always be the little boy I met twenty years ago in my driveway.

In just over two months, the voters of Minnesota (my home state) will be faced with the decision about whether to add an amendment to the state constitution.  This amendment would officially define marriage as between a man and a woman.  Permanently.  Written in stone, as they say.  I can’t let that happen.  Not while I have the spirit to fight it.

I know that one single person can’t change the world.  I’m quiet, sometimes timid.  I’ve been known to shy away from a fight.  But this is my time to DO something.  This is my chance to try to change the game.  This is it.

I have two months to do everything I can to combine the spirit of Straight But Not Narrow with the means of Minnesotans United for all Families, an organization against the amendment.  I have two months to make some small difference.  I have two months to get my voice heard.

Tomorrow is September 1.  A new month.  A new goal.  A new beginning.

My name is Amanda Gernentz.  I am straight, but not narrow.  And I am going to fight the Minnesota Marriage Amendment with every fiber of my being.

Let’s go.

(If you are with me on this and want to help me out, please visit my fundraising page.  Thank you!)

i wrote something today.

as the title implies, i wrote something today.  i can't decide if i want to keep going with it.  i have some ideas for plot development, and if so, this would probably actually be the middle of the story.  but this is what i wrote today.  any and all comments are welcome.  

happy reading!

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It’s hard not to notice the way he looks at me.  Like he knows me.  Even though we’ve never spoken to each other.  Even though I didn’t notice his existence until he sat in front of me in one of my English classes earlier this week.

At first, I wracked my brain.  Do I know him?  Have we met before?  No.  We don’t know each other.  His name is Connor James, I learned during roll call on that first day of class.  I looked him up on the student part of the school website.  He’s my year in school.  He’s from the area, where as I wanted nothing more than to escape my home, many states away.  And I don’t recognize anything about him.

So why does he look at me like that?

Finally, after seeing him watching me at every meal this week, pick up my tray and walk over to him.  I slam it a little too loudly on the table.  He flinches, but never breaks eye contact.  His friends all stare at me like I have two heads, and the girl sitting next to him tightens her grip on his upper arm.  They think I’m crazy.

So why does he stare at me?

“What do you want?” I ask, too harshly.  I am looking only at him, but the girl makes a noise of obvious disgust.  Like she can’t believe I think that he wants anything to do with me.

“Nothing,” he answers evenly.

“Then stop looking at me like that,” I spit out between clenched teeth.

His mouth twitches in response, but he says nothing.  I start to walk away.

“Not everyone is out to get you, you know, Isolde.”  I stop short, whipping around to face him again.  The girl is glaring at me, since she obviously didn’t know that he knew my name.

“What?” I hiss.

He smiles, which makes me madder.  “Nothing.”  He shrugs.  “I just thought you should know that it’s not just you against the world.”

I glare at him.  But my hair is standing on end.

He knows my real name.

I decide not to waste any more time on him as I stalk out of the cafeteria, leaving my half empty tray sitting in front of him at the table.

* * * * *

If you were to look at me, and then look at him, it’s pretty easy to see that we are not friends.  He often wears boat shoes and polos and looks like he just stepped off of a yacht.  I’m much more likely to be caught in ripped skinny jeans tucked into worn out boots.  My nose and eyebrow have metal posts through them, and even more rings line my ears.  My hair is a mousy brown color that I cut short and choppy.  And he looks like he’s about to tie a sweater around his shoulders and board a boat destined for Cape Cod.

Nevertheless, he is waiting for me outside the door when I leave English the next day.  I brush past him, but he grabs my arm, forcing me to turn.

“Can I talk to you?” he asks.

“Why?” I ask, loudly.  “Your girlfriend won’t like it.”

He chuckles.  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

I sigh, annoyed.  “What do you want?” I ask again, quieter.

He opens his mouth as though he’s going to say something, and then stops.

“Just come with me,” he asks, almost pleading.  I can’t really say no.

“Fine,” I respond, feeling defeated.

He takes my hand and leads me to the stairs.  We climb and we climb, until I know we’re at the landing to the top floor of the building.  But he turns and goes up another flight of stairs.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Somewhere we can talk,” he answers, squeezing my hand.  It is then that I feel them.  The bolts of electricity that pulse back and forth between our palms. 

Then he’s yanking on a door and pulling me into darkness.

He finds the cord that turns on the bare light bulb and pulls on it.  Light bathes the room, and I see that it’s a storage room.  We sit on an old loveseat together, mostly because he won’t let go of my hand.  It tingles, as if the current between us is palpable.

“Isolde,” he says.  I flinch, averting my eyes.

“Don’t call me that,” I say, shaking my head.

“Why?”

“I thought you had something to tell me,” I look at him pointedly, trying to change the topic.

“Why can’t I call you by your name?” he asks again.  I sigh.

Now that I look at his face, I can see why he’s always the center of a crowd.  His eyes are the brightest blue I’ve ever seen, like the sky on a sunny summer day.  His eyelashes are long and blond, the same golden color as his shaggy hair.  He’s beautiful.  It renders me momentarily speechless.

“I changed it,” I say, barely above a whisper. 

“To what?”

“Izzy.”

“Why?”

I shake my head.  “There’s too much tragedy in that name.”  I say it before I can catch myself.  I turn away from him.  “Can I go?”  I am distinctly uncomfortable.

“Izzy…”  The soft tone of his voice makes me turn back to him.  And when he kisses me, it takes me completely by surprise.

“What are you doing?” I hiss, backing away from him.  He still has a grip on my hand, so I can’t get very far.

He shakes his head.  “I’m sorry.”  His eyes are so sad.  So defeated.  “I don’t know why I did that.”

I sigh again.  “What do you want, Connor?”

His head snaps up again.  “You know my name?”

I let out a strangled laugh.  I can’t believe his question.  “You’ve been stalking me for the last week.  I looked you up.”

“Oh,” he says, sounding relieved.  “That’s all…”

My brow furrows.  What does he mean?  What’s all?  Is there more?

“Please tell me why I’m here.  I have other things to do,” I whisper, because I’m getting creeped out and I want to get as far away from him as possible.

“I know who you are,” he says quietly.

I’m glad his blue eyes aren’t trained on me.  I think my resolve would weaken even more.

“Oh, really?  Then who am I?”

He fixes those eyes on me again, and I’m frozen, captivated by his mouth as it tells me the things I’ve been hiding from everybody since I ran away from home all those years ago.

“You are Isolde O’Rourke.  Only daughter of Patrick and Cecelia O’Rourke.  After your father’s imprisonment, your mother was sent to a mental hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota.  You ran away, took her maiden name, and lived with foster parents in Boulder until you came here.”  He pauses, as if sizing me up.  “I didn’t know you legally changed your first name, though.”

I am staring at him, still as a stone.  A tear rolls down my cheek, and he gently wipes it away with the pad of his thumb.  I let him.

“How?”  It’s all I can get out.

“My mom was Jane Vander Gras.”

I can feel the blood drain from my face.  My extremities go cold.  I’ve been running from this for so long, but it caught me.  The tears are flowing freely now as I blink. 

“Why did you bring me here?”  I barely choke out the question.  I have a sudden and intense pang of fear.  Fear for my life.  Fear for my future, for my own sanity.

His lips turn up in a half smile.  A sad smile.  “I knew you were out there.  Initially, I wanted… vengeance.  I wanted you to pay for what happened to my mother.  It was hard to find you, since you dumped the scumbag’s name.”  His tone has a hard edge to it, and I can hardly look him in the eye.  “Our lawyer found you.  And you were here.  In the same place my dad and I sought refuge after the hell we went through at the trial.  In the clean air of the mountains, where you see how small you are.”  He pauses again, forcing me to meet his eyes.  Those sad, beautiful, blue eyes.  “And then I saw you.  You radiated your pain, wore it on your sleeve.  You’ve been running, too.”

My brow knits together, and he looks at our hands.

“I’ve been following you for two years, trying to get up the nerve to have this conversation with you.  And after all this time, you came to me first.”

We sit in silence until I can find my voice again.  “But your last name is different,” I whisper.  I had no idea who he was.

“James,” he answers softly.  “My mom didn’t take my dad’s name when they married.”

I shake my head, confused.  “Why did you bring me here?” I whisper again.  I can’t stop the tears from falling.  I don’t want to hurt anymore.

“Because in following you, I fell in love with you.”

His words are simple, but they have a distinct effect on me.  I yank my hand out of his grasp and stumble into the corner of the room.  Curling up into a ball on the floor, I sob.

Love is what did this to my family.  Because of what my dad chose to love.  And because my mom loved my dad. 

“Izzy…” Connor says softly.  He hasn’t left the loveseat, but he’s watching me.

“You can’t love me,” I choke out between sobs.  “You don’t know what’s inside me.”

“You’re not your parents, Izzy.”  The words are familiar, spoken to me once a week at my psychologist’s office.  But they have never sunk in.

“You don’t know that,” I respond.

“Yes, I do.  I’ve been watching you, remember?  You’re kind.  You keep to yourself.  You care about people.”  He slowly eases himself onto the floor and scoots toward me.  When he lifts my head onto his lap, I don’t object.

“You can’t love me,” I say again, my voice sounding impossibly small.  “Your family would hate you.”

“My dad already knows.”

This brings me enough out of my reverie to look him in the eyes again.

“Your dad?”

“I told him that I found you two years ago.  He told me to keep my distance, that I shouldn’t take out my anger on you.  But I just… couldn’t.  I couldn’t stay away.  Every time I saw you, I wanted to touch you, to feel you next to me.  My anger disappeared.  And then I just wanted… you.”

I sit up to look at him.  This is a lot to process. 

Love is not something I have ever been looking for.  I had vowed to never repeat my parents’ mistakes.  I don’t know what to tell him.

“You can have anyone,” I say simply, quietly.  “Why me?”

His bright blue eyes meet mine.  He shakes his head.

“You can’t tell me that you don’t see how they all look at you.  All the other girls.  Like the one at dinner yesterday, for instance?”

He gives me a wry smile.  “Someone was watching me, too, I take it?”

I elbow him in the ribs and he laughs.  The sound fills the room and makes me smile.

He shakes his head again.  “Those girls… they don’t know pain.  The worst pain they’ve ever felt is a bad hangover.”  He takes my hand in his.  “I can see your pain in the way you carry yourself.  We’re alike in that way.  There are things that the rest of the world will never feel, but we have already felt them.”

“But what if I am like my parents?  What if that madness is in my blood?” I whisper the words out of fear, the fear that I have been carrying with me for almost ten years.

“You won’t be.  I would never let you.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh.  He sounds so crazy.  “I don’t know you.  You make it sound like we have a future together.”

“Maybe we do.”  He is so sincere that I find myself looking into his eyes again.

And when he leans in to kiss me again, I meet him halfway.

I wasn’t looking for a future.  I was just looking to escape my past. 

And maybe, with Connor, I have a shot at both.