FICTION

My Heart Says “Yes,” and My Mind Says “No”

With a difficult past, Lucy tries to understand why she can’t fully trust happiness

Photo by Andrian Melnic on Unsplash

In the beginning… which is really the middle

So how long will it take?

It depends on how long it takes to tell your story.

Quiet…

I don’t know how long that will take.

Of course.

Quiet…

Do you know what you hope to answer?

Yes. My boyfriend wants to marry me. My heart says yes, and my mind says no.

And…?

I want my heart and my mind to agree.

So let’s start there.

Ok…but where exactly?

You get to pick. Your heart or your mind… either would work.

K. We’ll start with my mind. That’s where I think I need the most help.

And to be clear, it’s not that I’m helping you. You’re helping you. You are figuring out why your mind might be putting up a fuss.

Yes…

And I am listening.

Yes. My boyfriend’s daughter — her name is Hannah — told me I should write through my pain. Hannah said keeping a journal could be helpful.

It can… if it suits you. It has helped many. You’re in charge.

Ok, let’s begin. We’ll find out.

It starts with my broken home

I am not a writer. I fix hair and make people look pretty.

Hannah taught me about the word “ironic.”

“Isn’t it ironic,” she’d say, “that your world is so focused on beauty when your life has been anything but.”

Hannah is right. She usually is.

She also told me that I seem able to beat expectations.

“Look how far you’ve gotten and with such a rough start. Why not try your luck with writing?” she asked.

So, I’ll start there.

I’ll give the big storyline, and then dig into each part. As I’ve told Hannah, it’s always the details that matter, whether it is how you cut hair or how you understand a sore that you’ve been trying to heal.

I never thought about our “sores,” but then a friend of ours — Ellie — told us about her sores and how they’ve started to heal. Her son, Alfred, who is also Hannah’s best friend, told his mom to start a journal and find a coach. She did exactly that, and then she put her attention on her unhealed sores. She seems happier and healthier, if you ask me.

But my sores have been given no attention. And it’s not only me who wants to understand them, but my boyfriend, Marvin, does too. He wants to reassure me that, as he says, “You are pretty inside and out, but I don’t know how to help you see that.”

So about my start…the first thing to say is that my parents should never have gotten married. They also shouldn’t have had kids. My father was an alcoholic who had trouble holding a job. My mom suffered from deep depression and anxiety — the kind that meant the curtains were always closed in our house. My mom either didn’t want people to see her or she didn’t like the light streaming in.

It took me a long time to realize that most people didn’t live like this. They wanted to see what was outside their windows. But then, their view was probably a lot better than ours.

If you looked outside our windows, you would most likely have seen my brother smoking a reefer. He’d be kicking some dirt and talking shit with his friends.

You would have seen one lonely boxwood shrub — the only green thing in the yard. One time, I wrote an essay for school. I said that God put a boxwood there, surrounded by dirt, to show me that anything could grow anywhere. Even me…here.

Sometimes my dad’s truck was parked near the boxwood, right on the dirt. My dad’s excuse for a truck was on its last legs, noisy as shit, and sometimes leaking fluid… probably oil. He most likely would have been drinking the night before, and he’d come rolling in on empty — both him and the truck.

So, the curtains being closed was just fine. There was nothing worth seeing.

And here is where we begin…

Author’s note: This is roughly the beginning of the fourth book in my Alfred series. Book 1 (Alfred’s Journey to Be Liked) focused on a teen building up social muscle and developing greater self-awareness. Book 2 (Hannah’s Journal to Be Happy) explores the anger of Alfred’s best friend, Hannah, who doesn’t understand her anger… until she does. Book 3(Coming of Age at Forty) dives into the story of Alfred’s mom, Ellie, who is having a midlife crisis of confidence and purpose. The fourth book will explore the story of Lucy, 36, a hairstylist who grew up in a very broken family and is Hannah’s dad’s girlfriend. The goal is to write Lucy’s story over the next year.