Old gangsters never die, except for the few that fall asleep in cinemas at midnight. Lay there sprawling in the footlights for the usherette or the ice cream girl to find. And if I die, God knows I might, don’t let me die in black and white, don’t make me share a haunted screen with every other ghost boy who stood trembling in the foyer drinking
“But you are my first choice, Aria. I’ll burn down the world if I have to. I’ll kill and maim and blackmail. I’ll do anything for you. Maybe love is a risk, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take and as you said, it’s not a choice. I never thought I would, never thought I could love someone like that but I fell in love with you. I fought it. It’s the first battle I didn’t mind losing.”
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“So promise me.”
“Promise you.” I nod, my neck in his grip, my head feeling heavy.
“Promise me this is the last time. And maybe one day…”
“One day what?”
“One day I can meet someone and I can fall in love with him. I want to fall for someone. A different guy. A good guy. A guy who doesn’t hurt me like you do.”
The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life.
Crumbs are the audaciously small tokens and gestures that people throw us, in order to keep us under the illusion that they deserve a place in our lives– despite bringing very little (or no) value to it. We often allow this kind of behaviour because our low self-esteem leads us to believe that this is the kind of love we deserve, and over time it becomes normalized to us. When we continue to accept crumbs from someone, it enables them to dip back into our lives when they’re bored and treat us like a doormat because technically, no one “closed the door”.
