this is alexis. thank you to everyone who commented/contacted me about my last post over the weekend. your words mean more to me than you could ever know. i’ll try to express that to you tomorrow in my own inadequate and imperfect way. but for today, here’s olivia:

if this is your first time reading the olivia chronicles, feel free to start from the beginning. just click on the “olivia” link in the multimedia box at the top of the sidebar to the right. enjoy!

dear dimestore therapists,

if i could name one regret, only one regret among the many that litter my life like so many rocks in the pile of rubble that is my history, it would be that i wasn’t at my mother’s funeral. i didn’t get to touch her face one last time, couldn’t whisper my sorries into her cold ear. there was no gentle parting, only a tearing of souls that had been joined wholly for the last sixteen years. i never got to say goodbye.

in fact, i didn’t even know she had gone for a full two weeks after she’d left; i was sleeping silently in a hospital bed, muscles atrophying. when i woke up to find i could barely move my legs due to prolonged disuse, i was confused. i knew i had been in an accident, but couldn’t figure out why i was having such a hard time moving, and my first instinct was to call out. you’d think i would have called for my mother, but hers was not the first face that floated into my mind. i wanted aidan.

i couldn’t say anything, though; my voice was stopped dead in my throat by a large tube that felt as though it took up all the space in my neck. i could feel it sliding in my windpipe, smooth and obtrusive. as soon as i realized i was attached to a breathing machine, i started to panic. i turned my head first to one side, then the other, and i could feel my hair scraping the sheets of the bed beneath my matted head. the sound was so loud in my ears, like sandpaper on wood, and for some reason i remembered the sound Aidan’s jeans had made on the night of the accident, when he’d run after me into the cold night air.

as i thought of aidan tears began to build behind my eyes, and i tried to push them down, struggling to control the upwelling of anxiety that threatened to fill me. as i scanned the room, i noticed a slumped figure in the chair next to the window, chin lowered to chest. aidan, sleeping.

i couldn’t figure out how to wake him, seeing as i couldn’t say anything, but thankfully my problem was solved for me when his phone started ringing from his pocket. i watched as he started awake, rubbing his eyes a little, then fishing his phone out. he looked at the caller i.d., then pressed a button to silence the ringing. he was about to settle back down into the chair when he noticed that my eyes were open and i was looking directly at him. i’d never seen him move so fast; he jumped so high out of the chair, he probably could have touched the ceiling if his arms had been raised overhead.

“liver!” he yelled so loudly i winced, feeling my brain rattling from the echoes in my head. i couldn’t talk because of the tube in my throat, so i just nodded a little bit to acknowledge his excitement, which i thought to be a bit hyperbolic. at the time, i didn’t even think to be worried that he’d called me liver, which was one of his nicknames for me, one he used when he had bad news. for example, when we were ten years old and he came to my front door to tell me that he’d found my hamster in his pool’s drain, he’d said, “hi, liver.” same for the time he’d run over my skateboard with his dad’s car when he was learning how to drive.

“liver, i can’t believe you’re finally awake,” he said, lowering his voice. then he started crying, quite noisily, i might add. he was still standing in the middle of the room, and i felt so awkward at seeing him cry that i looked toward the door, trying to find an escape route.

and there, in the doorway, backlit by the white lights streaming from the hallway, stood a man i thought i’d be happy to never see again. he was wearing a slightly rumpled but expensive-looking suit, and he held a paper cup from the hospital cafeteria in one hand, and a folded ny times in the other. his face was a little more lined and his hair a little more gray than i remembered, but his eyes…i could never forget those eyes.

they were my eyes.

“ollie. thank god, you’re up. i’ve been so worried, baby,” he said. then he started crying, too. and there i was, lying immobilized as the only two men i’d ever loved cried like children while i looked on, completely helpless.

i couldn’t even say what it was i wanted to say, which was this: “dad, what the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

yours,

olivia

— Alexis