Fate Book by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

Author:Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
Published: 2013-08-08T23:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

One Hundred Percent

Chance

of Rabbit Holes

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

By the time we arrived at his small beach house, I could barely breathe or move; the shock was taking its toll. Not only because of all that was happening to me, but because that sweet girl had died. I couldn’t stop thinking about how insanely precious life was.

But I already knew that. I’d known it from the moment I was five and my mother came home from work, blood covering the front of her scrubs. She hadn’t known I was there watching and listening from the hallway, but what she told my Aunt Rhonda would probably stay with me until the day I died: “He was just a baby,” she’d sobbed. “Just a baby no older than Dakota. What’s the point of being born if some asshole can just take it away in the blink of an eye?”

I never found out what happened to that little boy, but many weeks later, I remember asking my mother what she thought “the point” was. Why were we here? I recalled her warm blue eyes as she smiled and brushed her hand over the top of my head. “To live. And if we’re lucky, to love.”

From then on, “living” felt like a sacred mission, an unattainable state of perfection, some obscure mountain I would someday climb if I were good enough. It became a mild obsession. I constantly thought about what my future would be like when I started “to live.” I wanted to be one of those perfect people in the TV commercials who laughed and ran on the beach, holding hands with someone she loved, who was equally perfect. Silently sitting with Santiago in the car, I realized that was my hang-up. The source of all my dysfunction. That picture-perfect life and picture-perfect person I’d dreamt of being didn’t exist, nor would she ever. Yet I chastised myself for every flaw, every mistake. I called myself a loser. Queen Loser. The older I got, and the more I grew to know myself, the more I realized how imperfect I was. And the more imperfect I was, and the farther I got from my goal of “living” that perfect life, the more I hated myself.

What an idiot.

I’d spent so much time thinking about the future and about becoming someone I could never be that I’d simply missed the point: I was alive. Now. This very moment. And that’s all there was. It could be messy and horrible and consist of the most improbable circumstances, but that was all any of us truly had. One blink, and it could all be gone. Just like Christy.

So what should I do?

Brace yourself. Whatever answers were coming, and whoever would be giving the answers, I knew they were going to bulldoze over a lifetime of sandcastles. And I had to decide right then and there whether I’d let it ruin me.

Santiago turned off the engine. “We’re here.”

He led me inside and flipped on a lonely lamp in the entryway. “I’m renting this place,” he said quietly.

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