9 - Bittersweet Symphony

~Holly’s Point of View~

Slade always used to say I had a poker face that drove him nuts, he never could quite tell what I was thinking. What he was always thinking … was pretty obvious. Thinking with only one part of his body as a teenager with a girlfriend.

But now he’s so different. It’s like he’s walking on eggshells with me, and maybe he is. It seems like he says just as much as he needs to, no more … no less. He’s carefully choosing what he says and I don’t like that one bit. We used to have conversations that lasted hours, just about anything and everything. Mostly … our dreams.

We both wanted three kids, and two dogs. We both wanted to feel validated in our careers, to feel like we were doing something important and that mattered. It was obvious to us both pretty early on though that college wasn’t in our world view. The idea of extending high school sounded like absolute torture. If my mom hadn’t absolutely pushed me into nursing school I have no clue what I would have ended