The conversation from thereafter usually was short as I attempted to walk away. I often underestimated the persistence of people. Sometimes it took as much as walking into a building and shutting the door, or shouting loudly for no reason to get them away from me. They all thought I was nuts, anyway.
The wedding was beautiful. Extraordinary, even. Alexis couldn't have been a more wonderful bride when I finally saw the dress, walking down the isle in my direction. Some say your wedding day is the best day of your life then it all goes down hill from there, but for me, the marriage tied us together with a bond that was ever stronger. Once we had made the decision to be one, we could not be permeated.
I was nervous on my wedding day, butterflies were fluttering freely in my stomach. I thought about Zac when I was standing at the altar, holding her hand. I had wondered long and hard about how I would feel about marrying Alexis, when I knew he should have. Getting married was unreal, and right before I said "I do," I almost choked. Our kiss, and the sudden realization that "this is it" made it all flow away like water. She was mine, and it was okay. It's all right, Tay. It's alright.
We weren't planning on having a honeymoon, our lives were busy and we had Theo to devote our attention to, but my Mother had insisted, and offered to keep Theo for the week that we were gone. We thought about it, and came to the consensus that Theo was probably in better hands with my Mother, anyway.
I asked Alex where she wanted to go. "Anywhere in the world that you would like to go," I had said, "and I will take you there."
Her response took a few days, but eventually she came up with Greece. So after our wedding reception, hardly having the time to change, we were on a flight out to Greece. We were truly a pair; me, blonde hair, blue eyed, and her, red hair, green-eyed - together in the center of Mediterranean culture, staring out into the blue sea, alone for the first time ever. We were isolated in a Greek village, free of responsibility, free of my family, free of the entire continent back home. It was the most wonderful feeling; total isolation, total relaxation.
We did what all other honeymooners do: drank champagne and had sex in between sight seeing and beach visits. The ocean was so beautiful at night. We were staying right on the sea, and every night we watched the sun go down over the water. Late one night, I ran out to the beach, my feet carrying me full speed into the ocean. I was wearing dinner clothes but I didn't care. I knelt down in the water and allowed the waves to wash over me.
I was so happy I could have cried, and Alex just watched me from the shore as I laughed and shouted words and rhymes.
"For him alone life's worse than worst
is better than a mere world's best
whose any twilight is his last
and every sunrise is his first"
"Cleanse me, I am open now!" I called, "Keep me safe under your waves. My emotion. My heart." The clean waters spilled over my shoulders and I cried. Complete relief. When I ran to the shore, Alex took me in her arms and whispered in my ear, reciting poetry back to me. Words I never knew she would remember.
"But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And I knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart-
Open to me!
For I will show you the places nobody knows"
We crashed on the beach, our limbs tangled, sand in my hair. It was all right now, everything seemed to make so much sense. It was just us in the moonlight by a wide-open sea and underneath all of the stars in the sky. Such a wonderful feeling, such a perfect moment. Clarity. Her perfect skin under my fingers and the rope of her braid hanging over her back, the strands intertwining, a thousand stories to tell.
"With you, I could never fall from grace."
When Los Angeles greeted us, dirty streets and smog, I began to wonder why we had lived there at all. LA was too busy, too trafficky, too trendy, too material, too-many-fucking-people. Red smog skies blanketing the inner city, and crowded shit hole beaches on the outskirts, who needed it?
I didn't care much for the city, and Alex just wanted to get out of the hell that existed there. I needed new surroundings, we needed to blend in somewhere else. Become a part of something completely separate from our old lives. So we took Theo, got in the car, and drove. We stopped in small towns and cities everywhere from Vermont back to Seattle, and finally we found San Francisco.
We bought a beautiful house right in town, with big windows that overlooked the beautiful lush park across the street. We only returned to LA once to move, and we quickly escaped to settle in our new city, cleaning the slate from all of the ghosts that hung over the city of angels. San Francisco was everything we needed. A small city, pretty houses, pretty parks, comfortable weather, and no red smog skies. It was small, but it was enough to blend in, and astoundingly cleaner and safer than LA.
Alex had taken up photography again... a pastime she had enjoyed in high school but had been left and forgotten with Zac's death. I even began writing again... words spilling from my mind fast and hard. Words I couldn't say for three years. My throat was opening, I felt the glow rising. I wrote poetry for her pictures, and every now and then I would hear the click of her camera over my shoulder when I wasn't paying attention. She took pictures of me just because she thought I looked beautiful at that particular moment when I was thinking, or writing, or paying the bills.
I sat in the park all day long, watching the clouds roll by. I wore sunglasses and old jeans and stared at the sky, my pen and notebook at my side. Songs, thoughts, poems, every word flowing out of me. I felt so refreshed, my life was so clear in this new, and wonderful city.
Every day the same people walked through the park. People with their dogs, following along shamelessly with pooper-scoopers and plastic bags. People with their boyfriends, girlfriends, families. People jogging with their Discmans strapped to their hip. People whistling taking a leisurely walk. I watched them go by, as I recycled the countless soda cans that surrounded me while I worked. The people in the park knew me, and I knew them, we saw each other daily. We never spoke, except for the occasional man on the bench next to me, or a hello from a girl walking her dog near my spot in the grass. Conversation was short, friendly, and non-substantial - I never grew particularly attached to anyone - they were people, and I was a person, and I didn't even want to know their names, and they didn't care to know mine. I'm just the kid with his notebook and she's just the girl with the feisty Terrier.
"What are you writing, a novel?" The old man that came at three o'clock everyday to feed the pigeons asked me.
I looked at him and smiled, taking the cigarette away from my lips. "No, but perhaps I could..."
Before I could bring my cigarette to my face again to take another drag he flicked it out of my hand and stepped on it. I was surprised. "Don't smoke, kid. You'll kill yourself."
I laughed. I smoked less, but that didn't say much. I knew already that if I didn't get me, lung cancer would. If only he knew what he was truly saying. "Sorry." I said, "I didn't realize it bothered you."
"It doesn't bother me." He said, "But you, it should bother you. You're too young and pretty to be polluting yourself with this filth. So what are you writing for, anyway?"
I looked down at the half filled page, a line cut short mid-sentence where I left off. "I'm just writing." I said, "Aimlessly, really. Whatever comes my mind. Songs, poems... memories... that kind of stuff."
"You got a job?"
"No."
"You homeless?"
"Nah - I live over there." I pointed to the series of houses overlooking the park, "With my wife and son."
"I always see you here." He said. "Why don't you spend your time with your family?"
"I spend a lot of time with them." I said, with a shrug. "I just... I come here to clear my mind, I guess. They're okay. My son's taking his nap right about now."
He sat silently tossing bits of bread on the ground in front of us, the birds all flapping wildly toward the free meal. Everyone in this city was scraping for a free meal. "So if you don't have a job, and your wife is obviously home with your kid - how do you pay for that house over there? You an author or something?"
"A bit of one, maybe."
"What do you write then?" He asked, a slight hint of exasperation in his tone.
"About life," I said, "Escaping my child rock star status."
I paused to see if he caught on, but it doesn't register. He thought I was joking. "Who are you, Michael Jackson?"
I smiled. "Nah. Not Michael Jackson." I chewed my pen cap, and he glanced up at me. "Taylor Hanson."
The truth about getting away is that you never really "get away." Walking away from Los Angeles did us a lot of good, but emotional scars are forever. I felt worlds better, and quite honestly, I don't think I had ever felt so clear as I felt in our new San Francisco home. At least, not since my adolescence.
I often thought about Annissa, and all of the things that happened in the weeks leading up to her suicide, and after. I had never grown quite comfortable with the thought, not that I ever really thought I would - but I had grown used to its existence in my mind.
I stared out the huge window with a cigarette in my hand and my legs hanging over the edge of the windowsill. It was so wonderful here in San Francisco, I could see the sun. I could stare right at it until I was blind.
It had become easier to speak about the things that troubled me, but there were some things I still felt that I never wanted to speak about again. Alex was the only person I had told about what Annissa's Dad had done to me. I didn't tell the doctors, just as I didn't tell the doctors about Steve in the showers. I thought about it, though. I thought constantly about Angel's eyes boring into mine as I stared vacantly back at him. I wasn't a person then, I was more like a bag. Empty and paper. I couldn't feel pain, or pleasure, or even self-pity.
Sometimes I felt I could feel hands around me, the bruises all over my skin and on my face. My parents saw that my cheek was bruised, but yet no one ever asked me about it. I thought back. Maybe they had asked me, but maybe I didn't answer. That night in the car, Annissa and I were shaking in physical pain as we struggled to seek the only thing we had left to give us pleasure. I felt sick to my stomach as I made love to her, the throbbing my crotch was nearly unbearable, but she wanted it. We were both crying, and she wanted it so badly, she wanted me so badly that she would lay on her back, on her bruises - just for one last kiss.
I remembered dropping Annissa off at her car parked in the parking lot in front of the convenient store that night, and watching her drive away. Then I remembered turning and walking behind the store where I threw up violently into a dumpster. My whole body wracked in pain, the events of the night making me ill. I remembered returning home that evening, my chest felt like it was caving in with the pain, but I didn't tell anyone where I had been and what had happened.
I was so ashamed, but I didn't know where the shame came from.
Sometimes I thought about Isaac. I was moping around my room all of the time and he was the one who told me to just go and see if she was at the store. I remembered him picking me up at the hospital, but then I remembered him pulling me and my bitter raisin of a mind into another. I thought about all I had put him through, and how he cried so hard every night. I thought about the tears and the rage on his face when he finally burst into our hotel room. I was still on my telephone and I started screaming at him when he came in. He tried to grab me and I picked up a hotel lamp and threw it on the ground. He threw my fragile bones to the floor just as fast and our fists connected fast to each other's faces. It was amazing that I only emerged with two black eyes and a broken nose, among the bruises all over my body. Isaac wasn't much worse off than I, but he didn't deserve what I did to him.
As time passed by, it became true that the panic attacks never went away forever, and that there would always be a time when these memories would flood back into my mind. I began to accept it as part of life, and stood on my own two feet, again. I didn't need assistance, anymore. I began playing the piano again, singing again.
Theodore was walking and would sing along to whatever he could. The boy was the light of my life. Alex and I took him on walks to the parks, and we had started to think about trying to have another child. We became the couple that anxiously bought pregnancy tests every time her period was a day late. But to no avail. Alex joked that I was just waiting until the right moment... and, maybe I was.
At night we laughed together. We were going to have a little girl and she was going to marry a prince and he was going to wear red. She took photographs of me sitting naked in bed after we made love, and threatened to sell them on Ebay. I did push-ups and took walks, and tried hard to be a good father to my son. I started to lightly teach him music when Alex wasn't around. (She didn't want him to learn until he was older.) Theo learned how to talk and sing at the same time, and I tried to convince Alex that he would be cooler than all of the other kids in school if he could sing. She rolled her eyes. "Two year olds aren't supposed to sing, Taylor!"
"Except this one!" I would shout back, but Theo was truly gifted. He could carry a tune better than he could talk, and music kept his attention going for longer than most of his toys and games would. I knew that he was going to be something, someday, but I just hoped that he would not take the path I had chosen. I wanted my son to be normal, to be free.
The woman at the corner store asked, "Is she pregnant yet?" Every time I went in there to buy something. I would blush furiously and stick my hands in my pockets and shake my head 'No.' It had been months, and neither of us understood what was wrong. We had unprotected sex nearly every day and still, nothing. Every time the results were negative I would sigh and say that I wished I didn't do so many drugs as a teenager. Still, the 'right moment' wasn't to come, not for a while. We decided to stop trying, stop thinking about it, stop looking for when it was right.
Then it all came down to one night. I made love to her in the dark, against the wall beside the huge windows. She pulled my hair when I came and when we were laying on the floor she turned to me and said, "I think this is it."
I'm lifting you up
I'm letting you down
I'm dancin' till dawn
I'm fooling around
I'm not giving up
I'm making your love
This city's made us crazy
and we must get out.
- Maroon 5; "Must Get Out"