Love Me Once, Love Me Twice

After dinner, when she'd returned to her room, she told Lissa she wouldn't require any help for the rest of the night and flopped directly onto her bed. Today had been — it had been too much. She'd learned the truth about Alex - or at least some of it. She'd run into Michael after spending years apart. She'd discovered Alex was a stress cooker - he'd apparently gone nuts in the kitchen when she'd left. And she'd learned that her frame of the world was inconsiderate of other people.

That last part really bothered her. Anna had always considered herself to be a fairly sensible person. Everyone worked because they needed the money to live. She'd never really considered the people at the top of businesses to be people, though. Even if they had meetings or other things to do, she'd never considered that they might purchase conveniences for themselves for practical reasons. Anna was still struggling to comprehend the novel idea. It was difficult to really wrap her mind around it.

She turned onto her side and curled her knees up to her chest, wrapping an arm around them even as she lay her head on the other.

"Who am I?"

"Who was I?"

"Who do I want to be?"

Anna asked these questions of herself aloud, unsure of how to answer them. She hadn't even gotten her questions for Alex answered because she'd felt so foolish at dinner.

She'd already decided that whoever she used to be didn't matter, but Anna was beginning to doubt who she was in the present. Her identity had been shaken. She'd thought so many things and found many of them to be wrong, misguided, or altogether foolish. When she considered the way people acted around her, she couldn't help but wonder how many of them were simply indulging her. Had she been rude the entire time without realizing it because no one had told her so? And if that were the case, why had she been so foolish?

It was a crisis of identity.

Exhaling harshly, she sat up abruptly, letting her long legs slip down to set her feet upon the floor. She tossed her hair behind her shoulders and stood up, stepping over to the vanity where she'd left her phone. Sitting in front of it, she checked to see if Michael had responded.

Anna wasn't sure what she'd been expecting. It certainly wasn't his duty to reply to her, but she might have felt better. Listless, she instead went through her contacts.

Didn't… didn't she have any real friends?

Scrolling through the list, she saw her sister, Michael, and some of her friends from college… Except, she couldn't imagine telling any of her old friends about her present situation. She didn't think they'd have anything useful to contribute and, if she was being honest, she didn't think they would be able to help her. They were too different from her, well on their way towards bright futures.

And she didn't want to talk to Laura.

Sighing, Anna returned to the brief message history between herself and Michael.

Would he listen to her? Or would he think she was crazy?

She started several messages to him, only to delete them in their entirety. This want on for several long minutes.

Suddenly, she saw several ellipses appear - Michael was typing a message!

'Just say what you're trying to say.' The text she received was straightforward and she giggled at it, feeling foolish. There was a hidden relief in not being the first one to say something, but she also realized that he must have also been looking at their conversation for him to have noticed.

'Sorry.' Anna texted him quickly. Then, she added, 'I'm just not sure how to start or even what to say and whether you're the person I should be talking to.'

'That sounds difficult. I don't know if I'm the person you should talk to, but you can just say what's on your mind.'

'Thank you.' Anna typed back, touched by his reply. There was a warm feeling in her chest. Michael really was reliable, wasn't he? Even when she didn't know what to do, he was still encouraging her. 'I'm just feeling a little out of it. The world is a big place.'

'The world is huge. You think you know everything and the path forward will be easy,' he texted back to her, 'And then suddenly the world shifts beneath your feet and everything becomes a mess, with the path breaking to pieces in front of your eyes.'

Realizing he was sharing his own feelings about his life, probably in relation to his little sister, she quickly typed to him, 'What do you do?'

'You just do your best to put everything back together. If you stop, you lose, so you have to keep going. You have to do the next best thing and build yourself a new road.'

'How do you do that?' she asked, recognizing the wisdom in his words. After sending the message, she felt foolish. How could he possibly give her an answer to her present situation? She wasn't even sure what was happening and he definitely didn't know anything about it.

The ellipses appeared and disappeared several times. Then, they disappeared for so long she wondered if he'd decided to stop talking to her. It was only when she'd set her phone on the bedside table and changed into some comfortable pajamas that her phone buzzed briefly and quietly.

'You have to be honest with yourself and you have to try to look at all of the facts. Once you have all of the materials, you have to decide what you want to build. What kind of new path do you want? The old one is gone, but you can still build a new road to the same place. Or maybe you have to go somewhere else now. Maybe you still need some time to think about it. Do it at your own pace.'

Anna stared at the message. Her eyes greedily read it over and over again, taking in the gentle words displayed on her phone's screen. She mouthed the words, finding a certain peace in them.

Michael was right. She didn't need to rush. She had plenty of time and could carefully consider her options. "Hah," she exhaled softly, somehow feeling relaxed.

'I really needed that. Thank you.' She typed out. Sending the message, she laid back on top of her bed, lounging for a bit while she stared at the ceiling. It was too early for sleep, but there were many things going on in her head and she didn't think she'd be able to concentrate on anything else.

She thought for several hours, turning over old thoughts and new thoughts in her mind. What did she know? What did she still want to know? She examined all of this information and more.

Change was a difficult process and she'd been placed into a position where she had to endure a lot of it, both in her surroundings and in herself. Only, she hadn't realized how very different she was from who she'd always thought she was. It had terrified her. The world was different from what she knew and so was she. What else would she learn was different from what she'd always thought?

Anna didn't know that in two separate bedrooms, far away from her, two men were also thinking about their day.

One was wondering what was going on in Anna's life that had her so nervous that she would confide in him after being separated from each other for so long. They hadn't been familiar with each other in the past, so her situation must have be very difficult if he was the confidant she had chosen. Michael set his phone down and let his room to go and see if his sister needed anything before bed. It had taken a while for her to get used to relying on him for so many things, but they'd come to a compromise where Mary would try call on him more and he would stop hovering around her like a concerned bird fluttering around her head.

The other man was thinking about everything that had happened during the day. The morning had been simple, with paperwork and the general upkeep of several small businesses and his properties. Then a simple lunch, followed up by some leisure reading in his study. Anna had come to see him and the truth had come out. His hands became fists at his sides as he stared out of his large window, gazing up at the moon. She'd been very upset. So was he, in his own way. It was perhaps the first time in a very long time that he had allowed himself to be so reckless and he did not know what the result of his indiscretion would be. He'd ended up in the kitchen for the rest of the day, shoving the remainder of his work onto tomorrow's schedule. Alex had been extremely relieved when Anna had come to dinner. It was a part of the contract, but she had been strange when she'd left.

And at dinner, he'd learned that her experiences of the world were small. Were his wife's experiences so small, too? He felt that they must have been for her to have limited herself to only him when she could have easily found someone much worthier and better. Still, he had promised himself that he'd find her again. He would find her and apologize to her for his past deeds and cherish her so thoroughly that she'd never have reason to shed tears of sadness ever again. Anna was strange compared to her former self, but not too different. Louder, more vibrant and bold, but still strangely earnest and kind. She was still herself in the ways that mattered.

He would never let anyone hurt her ever again.