Kallie Nikkala - Love and War

that I needed to have control. Though now I'm just wondering if I have always been fooling myself. I don't know anything, I don't know anything about Eli, or Brock, or the world. Most of all I certainly don't know anything about myself. I don't think I want to know about myself.

I don't know my daughter. She hates me, and its my own fault. Who can blame her? Really, what kind of monster must I appear to her eyes. I am the woman who did not want her, plain and simple.

Maybe that is the truth. Maybe... maybe I panic so much, so quickly because I do not know how to feel emotions, because I am a monster. What else but a monster would not understand emotions. Even my parents - my own personal visions of monsters - knew what emotions were. They let themselves be overcome by them, a fault I can never forgive, but they felt them. Even they were not so monstrous as to be unable to even feel.

So what else can I be, but even worse than them?

Maybe it just took seeing Evelina again to see the truth.

is a saint. I honestly do not know how he puts up with me, or why. Time and time again I put him through things that no person should have to deal with, and yet every time he forgives me with such unwavering trust that I'm not sure how I got, nor am I entirely sure I deserve. How can I deserve it when I lie to him? I lied about Evelina - I lied about her to everyone. I pretended that she did not exist.

Sometimes I'm wondering if I'm lying about Brock. But when I wonder about that... I don't even know which of us I am lying to. When had my world become so convoluted? I use to think - I honestly thought there was no place in my life for love, that there was no use. Then, then I changed my mind, only to lose it again, and in light of finding myself loveless with no prospect of bringing it back, I reverted back to my old ways.

I had completely given up hope when I had walked into that bar. Work, I had just been doing what I always do, work. And yet I'd some how come away with so much more than that. Eli awakened things I thought I'd never feel again. Things that I thought were dead, not asleep.

always was a pain. Even when he wasn't, he really was. He knew exactly how to get under my skin, it drove me insane on every level. I wanted kill him so many times, it wasn't even funny.

And yet I never could stay mad at him. He just had this way of gazing at me every time that he thought he'd really gotten into it that looked like a lost little puppy. I couldn't do it - I couldn't stay mad. I always went back.

Except for the time I didn't.

I hated myself every moment afterwards - every second I wanted to go back. But my insecurities didn't let me. Somehow in the haze of self caused abandonment, I convinced myself he hadn't really wanted me all that much to begin with. That I was just affection born of conveniences. After all I was there, lonely, needy - I was easy to catch, I was begging for attention even if I didn't know it.

I was lost - even more so after I let Evelina go - and I gave up on love completely. I was so lost until I found Eli. Eli made everything better.

Even though part of by brain would always still wonder... Brock had left a giant hole in my life. A giant hole, that I couldn't fill exactly with Eli. He wasn't quite the right shape - like fitting a square within a rectangle. I knew I could live with the gaps, that I would rather live with Eli and the gaps than nothing at all. Until the rectangle showed up again.

I love Eli more than anything else in the world.

But there was a time when I felt the same about Brock, and I'm not sure if all of that feeling is gone. Is it possible to love two people, just as much at the same time? How am I even supposed to tell?

Eli changed my life, saved me from myself. But that doesn't change the bare truth of the matter. For years,