North & West

Twenty-Five

6 Months Later. . .

I wouldn't have pictured myself seated around a table with West and his family, his mother looking at me with a smile on her face and his sister gushing on about her new life. It felt so strange to me, the past year seeming like a distant memory.

“That's really great, Krissy. Really.” West told his sister, listening as she talked about finishing her first semester of veterinarian school.

When she had mentioned going to school to be a vet to me, I had immediately smiled and pictured her owning her own practice, maybe even owning a house full of all the misfit animals that she'd been able to save, but not able to give a good home. Just like humans, once they were too broken or not as appealing to the eye as another animal, pets were left behind to make their own way through life.

Working with Krissy at the animal shelter had opened my eyes to just how kind she was. It made me happy to see her going through with what seemed to be a dream of hers, seeing as I'd begun to see her as an extension of my own family.

“I'm proud of you, honey,” Melissa said, holding her daughter's gaze, her voice coming out a bit strangled as if she was trying to hold back tears.

The waitress stopped at our table, asking us what we'd like for a drink and when West's mother ordered a glass of red wine, West and I exchanged a glance. His dark eyes were fixed on mine, momentarily making me want to reach out for some sort of contact with him.

Melissa, oblivious to the unspoken words between West and I, called our names to get our attention and asked what we wanted to drink.

“Uh,” West cleared his throat, “I'd like a glass of water.”

The waitress looked over at me, as if to say, “and you?”

I bit my lip before shrugging and replying, “I'd like a water, too, please.”

She nodded, jotting down our food orders next and then heading back off toward the kitchen where she'd hand in the slip of paper with what we wanted.

West slid his hand over mine, his large hand completely overlapping mine as his gentle touch brought a little, barely there, smile to my face.

Sometimes I wondered if he'd changed me or I'd changed all of my own accord. Sure, that messy, confused girl was still somewhere in me, but pushed much farther down than she had once been. I never felt like stepping into the street and seeing if I could get away with dodging through the moving cars. I'd never been welcoming death, never hoping or even anticipating it, but I'd never feared it either. I'd always been much too indifferent towards things, maybe so much so that I'd damaged another little piece of myself, but over the course of the year since I'd started going to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – and since I met West, of course – I'd begun to find myself caring a whole lot more about things.

I now looked both ways before crossing a street, checking the dosage on a pill bottle before taking some medication for the pain – most of all though, I was trying.

That really was something, at least in my eyes.

When our drinks came, Melissa's red wine was sat down in front of her and West and I were handed our water. Krissy had ordered a hot coffee, but the waitress said the pot wasn't quite done yet.

Our drinks quite resembled us, if you were to look at them from an odd sort of view. Krissy's was coffee, the sort of drink that people used to wake up in the morning and the sort of drink a person used to get moving – just as Krissy was. She was moving on, going on with her life and hopefully leaving behind the bad part of it.