Page 119 of Eleanor & Grey
He tilted his head toward me. “Are you OK, Ellie?” he asked. “I know how hard days like today can be...”
I smiled and placed my hands on the log. “Yeah, I’m OK. I mean, for a long time this day was hard for me. But as the years go by, it stops hurting as much. You start replacing sadness with gratitude. You just kind of become grateful for the memories. It becomes easier to breathe when grief is replaced with thankfulness.”
“I can’t wait for that day to come,” he said, placing his hands on the log too. Our pinkies kind of brushed, and I felt the touch deep within my soul.
“No need to rush it,” I promised. “Just feel what you need to feel, and over time your feelings will shift into something else. Something beautiful. The best thing about death is that it can’t take away your memories. Those live on forever.”
He lowered his head and took a deep breath. “You always know what to say when I need it the most. Even when I don’t want to hear it, it’s as if you know the words I need.”
I snickered. “That pretty much describes what you were for me when we were younger. You were my safety net that kept me from drowning.”
Greyson grew somber for a moment, looking up at the darkening sky. “I still don’t understand all of this...”
“Understand what?”
“Us. You and me. You showing up when you did. I don’t get it.”
“It does seem a bit wild, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife,” he confessed. “I watch Lorelai talking to her mother, and I pray that it’s real, for her own sake. But I don’t know if there is a God, or angels,or anything of the like. Yet when I was at my lowest... when I was so overwhelmed and broken, I went to her. I went to Nicole, and I sat in front of her gravestone, and I fell apart. I begged her for help, for guidance, for anything at all... I was searching for a reason to smile...” He swallowed hard, clasping his hands together, and looked at me. His eyes were so gentle, and calm. Those gray eyes... He sniffled a bit, shrugged his right shoulder, and softly spoke, “And then came you.”
Oh, Greyson...
“Sorry,” he breathed out, growing a little red in the face.
He was nervous. I was nervous too. To be honest, I wasn’t certain if it was his nerves I was feeling, or my own.
“I’m glad I could be here for you,” I told him. “Besides, I owed you.”
“For what?”
“Keeping me from drowning.”
He smiled and stared out at the pond. “I think now we can call it even.”
We sat there for a while longer, not really saying anything at all, not needing words.
We were just there in the wilderness, calming our souls. And every now and then, a dragonfly buzzed by.
“You know how you always worry about Karla?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
“That’s how I worry about my father. All the time. I just have this bad feeling that he’s falling deeper into his depression, and even if he needed me, he wouldn’t reach out. It terrifies me every single day.”
“And you’ve tried to help him?”
“So much, and every year he pushes me away more. He’s drowning in loneliness, and he won’t take my hand.”
“It’s hard,” Greyson confessed. “It’s hard to take people’shelp. And the more days that pass, the easier it becomes to push people away. Most people just fall off too. They realize that it’s a hopeless cause—helping the broken souls. I know that’s what I did. I pushed everyone away, and only the ones who meant the most to me stayed around. You want my advice?”
“Please.”
“Keep calling. One day he’ll decide to pick up, and if he doesn’t, then go and kick down his door. If that doesn’t work, then know that you at least tried everything. You didn’t give up.”
I nodded. “Thank you, Greyson.”
“Always.”
