Those Who Adapt to Abnormality Struggle with Normality: THE STORY of TALLILAH

There is a certain kind of night that only shows up once in a long while, when the moon comes back around a second time in the same month and hangs low and orange over whatever place I happen to be. People call it a blue moon, though I've never once seen it turn blue. I always figured they had the color wrong anyway. For me the rare moon, the once-in-a-long-while moon, the one that comes back around and pulls the old ache up out of the ground, that moon was always green. Green like her eyes. Every blue moon has been a green moon to me for going on twenty years, and I doubt that'll change now. Tonight it's over my own back deck, a big deck on a big house, seven hundred thousand dollars of house, and me alone in all of it, and I did the thing I always do when the loneliness gets quiet enough to hear. I typed her name. I'm thirty-five years old and I live by myself in a house most men would call a dream. I have ridden a camel past the pyramids in Egypt and felt nothing. I have watched the sun come up over the water in three different oceans and thought about a girl from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. I have money now, the kind I couldn't have imagined at twenty, and for years I spent it running: Bangkok, Colombia, Peru, Spain, and more than thirty-five other countries. Every single stamp in that passport is a place I went so I wouldn't have to sit still and know what I know. Which is this: I loved a woman my whole life and never told her when it counted. Her page loads slow. There she is. Tallilah. Older now, the way we all are, but that same smile, that goofy crooked smile that never learned to be shy. Kids all around her, five of them, best I can count. A husband with his arm around her. A dog in the corner of the frame. And behind them not a mansion, not a big porch like the ones we dreamed about as kids, but a modest little modular home, the kind you drive right past, and it looks, near as I can tell from way out here on the outside, full. #Blessed. #FamilyIsEverything. Comment after comment about how happy they look. And I don't really know. That's the honest part. I only assume. I creep the page and I talk to Nessa, her cousin, and to Dre, who grew up two doors down from her, and I tell myself I can read the truth under the captions, but the plain fact is she's on the inside of that little full house and I'm on the outside of it, and all I've got is a guess and a lot of quiet. But I'll get to that. For now, understand this book for what it is. It's not a love story with a happy ending. It's a rich man alone on a big deck under a green moon, thirty-five years old, holding a phone with a picture of a woman on it, wondering the only question that has ever mattered to him. What if I had done it different? Let me take you back.