𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄 ❸

𝟓. ✭ 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒 ✭

I drove and I drove. Then I drove some more. And I continue to do just that— drive.

With no particular destination in mind. No particular place I want or need to be, at least consciously. There is no destination set in my GPS. It's just me and the open road with a bottle of whiskey in the front seat. Food in the back. Trunk full of clothes, shoes, and two fat duffel bags full of cash I'd stopped and picked up along the way.

I haven't felt this free in a very long time.

With no ties and no strings...

All of them cut and severed in the most brutal of ways. But would it even be a relationship of mine if it didn't end in the most painful of ways? Likely not. That would be too simple, too easy. Nothing in my life has ever came as such. So why would it end as such?

In with a bang! Out with a bang!

Should be the motto of my life.

People came in like a whirlwind and left in a whirlwind. And I suppose I do much of the same. I should probably look at that and temper it, especially with the type I typically attract and am attracted to.

The 'broken' ones. The 'fixer uppers'. Although that may be my type, I need to remember I am no carpenter. It isn't my job to fix everything and everyone especially since I typically do it at the expense of myself.

Images of Daniela in her kitchen looking at the knife in her hands flashes behind my eyes. Alongside that is my sister's over-self-indulgent death. Which brings me to Torey snorting drugs, drinking, and satiating himself with multiple women to cope. Well, that, or him beating the absolute fuck out of someone.

Suicide. Death. Substances. Abuse. They're things that I am all too familiar with. They're all things that feel like... home.

I shivered at the thought of the parallels I'd just made. How the toxicity is something I am drawn to, to try and fix it, because that's what I had wished for myself in my own life at one point or another; especially in my childhood. That someone would just... fix it.

Again, I am not a carpenter. Nor am I an electrician or a plumber. I can't fix a home and I can't fix a person. No matter how much I want to. No matter how much I try.

When it comes to people's emotional damage I need to view it as such. It's theirs— not mine. Their pain is not on me— it is not mine; it's theirs. And burdening myself with carrying that under the guise of 'love' well... it's not been an easy road for me. Nor has it been a healthy one. No, it's a road on which I have been repetitively injured on. One where I've been let down.

My sister. Dani. Torey... all examples of 'projects' I'd been unable to fix. And, if I'm honest with myself, jumping into the military at such a young age was to escape my own problems. It helped me escape the fixing I had to do for myself; within myself.

But when someone grows up hearing one plus two equals five then they're likely going to believe that in the future. One plus two just equals five. And when we learn that one plus two actually is three, well, that's not going to sound right. It's not going to feel right. We won't believe it, even if it's true, or at least we'll have a hard time choking it down.

And this is why people tend to stick to unhealthy patterns of behavior; because they feel right. Even when they're wrong. Because that's what we were taught. That's what was molded for us; how we were shaped.

I sigh heavily as I spear a hand through my hair in frustration at the thought of my shaping. What a fucking shit show. Which is why my sister ended up in a pill-riddled grave. Why Dani and Tristan are wrapped up in and around one another. Why Torey is the way he is. He may have grown up in a good household, with parents that were more than accepting but his years with the FBI and Dedaj... that broke that man's psyche in two. I'd venture to say it was even more broken than that. With that last thought I blow out the deepest of breaths because how I'd so longed to fix it; fix him. As if I could.