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“You know I’ll never understand this whole grieving thing,” Gabriel said as he laid out the blanket in front of TJ’s headstone.
“Eventually you’ll have to learn how to grieve when I die.”
Gabriel snorted,
“Yeah can’t wait to visit your expensive fancy dirt pile every year.”
I smirked up at him,
“At least you’ll be able to keep me up to date on all the latest drama.”
“Only the juicy stuff.” He winked back at me and we each took a seat on the scratchy flannel blanket.
“Does it ever get easier? The grieving?” He asked.
I placed a stone atop the headstone before I replied,
“Some days it does, some days they are all you think about and the idea of physically getting out of bed to face the world seems impossible without them. Some days you are so happy that you forget they aren’t there with you until something pulls you back.”
He glanced back at me,
“So what’s the point in grieving if you don’t know how it’ll make you feel.” I smiled up at him and said,
“To remember.” I rested my head on Gabriel’s shoulder and we stayed like that for a while.
Remembering him was hard. Sometimes memories would flood my mind out of the blue. I could be sitting in the grass and the memory of us rolling down the hills at recess would enter my mind. I could be drifting off to sleep and the memory of him giving me his stuffed animal at nap time in kindergarten would keep me up.
“Do you think he’d be proud of me?” I looked up at Gabriel and found him staring down at me,
“I do not doubt that while you’ve had your ups and downs over the years, he would be incredibly proud of you.”
“I ran though. I ran from my family. I ran from my problems. I ran from everything and everyone.”
I ran. I always did yet no one had ever cared enough to come after me. To fight for me.
No one until him.
“You ran because you were going to die in that household. You ran to survive. You wanted to get out of that house and live. And you did.” Gabriel said
“Does it make me a coward though? For leaving when things got bad.”
Gabriel pulled me in a little closer,
“You made a decision for yourself, and you got away from someone that was causing you more harm than good, you are not a coward for running from that. You are not a coward for deciding to live. You are not a coward for deciding to do what you want.”
Maybe he’s right.
“So you think I’m better off making my own decisions, no matter what anyone thinks?”
Gabriel chuckled as he pressed his head against the top of mine,
“You’ve always been capable of making your own decisions Catalina, now you’re learning to stand by them.”
For so long I had either done what other people wanted me to do, changed what I wanted for them, or if I had done what I wanted to do I was always worried about the consequences and punishments that would come along with them. I was always doubting myself and wondering if I had made the right choice or not. I was always worried about what other people would think about the decisions and choices I had made. Maybe it was time to learn to do things my way and to make my own decisions and stand by them despite what others might think. And what I wanted was Lucifer.
* * *
After another hour we began to slowly pack things up.
