I'm trying something a little different with Love Notes. For the next 12 Fridays, I want to tell you stories (and work on my fiction writing ;)). Stories about the same things I normally write about here ... life! The roles we play, the stories we tell ourselves, the ways we lose ourselves trying to belong, and how we find our way back when life does its life-thing.

I've been calling the way back to ourselves the Love Map. It's made up of the things I've learned that help us navigate a chapter we didn't plan for, and rather than just tell you about them, I thought we'd explore them through a little fiction.

Which brings me to Isabella Blu ... the daughter Larry and I never got to birth.

We had her name all picked out. Larry even wrote a song about her on the piano. I've carried her with me all these years, so I started wondering: Why not give her a world? Let her exist on the page and see where she takes us.

Who knows, maybe she's out there somewhere, in another reality. Because she's certainly still here in my heart, if only as a seed.

I don't want to tell you too much about where she's going because, well, I don't know yet. She'll show us in her own time. And if I know her at all, she doesn't know either.

So ... here we go.

Isabella Blu went to a school for "princesses." That's what everyone called it, anyway. The real name was longer and had the word "Academy" in it. It was the kind of place with a crest on the blazers, traditions nobody remembered the beginning of, and a gate that seemed to know which cars belonged on the other side of it. Isabella never felt like a princess. Most days she felt like someone who had wandered into the wrong movie and was too polite to leave.

Her parents were kind, hardworking, and a little tired from the hustle. No castle. No important last name. No car the gate recognized. But they had built a good life, and they were proud to give Isabella opportunities they'd never had themselves.

Her father was a tailor and a carpenter. He could hem a dress, fix a broken chair, build a bookshelf, or make something old useful again. Her mother could make a meal out of almost anything, and lately she'd been cooking for other families too, taking extra work to help pay for Princess School.

Isabella was their everything. She knew that. She also knew her father worked later than he used to. She knew her mother was tired. She knew things got repaired instead of replaced. She understood enough to understand what the school cost them. Which made it very difficult to admit that she hated being there.

The girls at Princess School seemed to understand rules Isabella couldn't remember anyone teaching. Which group chat mattered. Which shoes were already over. Which boys were worth liking. Which girls weren't. Who to follow. Who to follow back. Who definitely not to accept.

They walked into rooms as though the rooms had been expecting them. Isabella walked into rooms wondering where she should put her hands. It wasn't that she wanted to become one of them. That would have been easier to understand. She just wanted to stop feeling like being herself was somehow the wrong answer.

Isabella noticed things other people seemed to walk right past. A cloud changing shape. A heart hidden in a leaf. The dog tied outside the coffee shop who looked like he needed someone to say hello. Nobody at Princess School seemed particularly interested in any of that. At lunch, the girls talked about parties Isabella hadn't been invited to and people she didn't know well enough to dislike.

So she learned to nod. To smile. To fake laugh half a second after everyone else laughed. She learned that you could be in a room full of people and still spend the entire time trying not to be seen. And she wished more than anything that she had a sister. Someone who could look across a crowded room at her and know exactly what she was thinking. This was just another thing she kept to herself.

Every afternoon, her dad waited at the bottom of the hill to walk home with her. Most days they stopped at the little market on the corner, and he let her choose one thing they didn't need.

"Something unnecessary," he'd say, as though it were the most important thing on the list. Isabella loved this ritual. A peach so ripe you had to eat it over the sink. Flowers for her mother, even though they grew their own. A piece of cake for no one's birthday. Something beautiful, delicious, or ridiculous that had absolutely no argument for why it needed to exist.

Those walks were different from school. She didn't have to be impressive. But even with him, there were things she couldn't bring herself to say.

"How was school, Blu?" her dad would ask. And every day, she knew the truth.

I ate lunch alone again.
I don't think anyone likes me.
I don't think I belong there.

She'd look at her father's hands. Hands that built bookshelves and repaired chairs and stitched hems and worked late so she could walk through that gate every morning. So she decided her truth could wait.

"Good."

He'd look at her. "Just good?"

"Really good, Dad." And they'd keep walking.

One afternoon, as they reached the house, Isabella caught her reflection in the front window. For a second, she saw two girls. The one standing beside her father, who had gotten very good at looking fine. And the one in the glass, who looked exhausted from the effort.

"Coming, Blu?" her dad asked. Isabella kept looking at the window.

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"It wasn't good ... today."

He waited.

"School. It's not good."

There it was. A tiny sentence she'd been carrying around like it weighed a hundred pounds. She waited for his face to change, but it didn't.

"I don't like eating lunch alone. But it happens a lot. Like today. And yesterday. I don't think I belong there."

She waited for the disappointment. For him to wonder how she could be so ungrateful after everything they had done to get her there. Instead, her father sat down on the front step. "Come here," he said. "Tell me more."

So she did. She told him about the group chats and the parties. About laughing when she didn't know what was funny. About constantly trying to figure out the right way to be.

Her father listened the way he fixed things. Slowly. Carefully. Without rushing to the end. When she finished, Isabella looked down. "But you work so hard for me to go there."

"I do."

"And Mom does too."

"She does."

"So what if I hate it?"

Her father was quiet for a moment. "Then you hate it."

Isabella looked at him. "After everything you and Mom have done?"

Her father nodded. "Blu, we worked hard to give you a life. Not to tell you how you're supposed to feel about it."

Isabella hadn't known how badly she needed to hear that until she did. Nothing was solved. Princess School would still be there the next morning. The girls would still be the girls. Isabella still didn't know where she belonged. But she wasn't carrying it alone anymore.

As they stood to go inside, her father looked at her. "Market?"

"We don't need anything."

"I know."

Isabella smiled. "Something unnecessary?"

"Obviously."

As they walked back down the path, Isabella caught herself in the window again. Same girl. But now there was only one.

~

Truth is one of the tools in the Love Map.

It doesn't fix anything right away. It didn't fix Princess School for Isabella. It doesn't magically fix the parts of our lives that aren't going the way we hoped. But we can't find our way out from somewhere we're pretending not to be.

The hardest truths are the ones we think we're not allowed to feel because we should be grateful.

I love this person, and I'm unhappy. I worked hard for this, and I don't want it anymore. I have so much to be grateful for, and I'm struggling. I don't know how to make this work.

Gratitude doesn't require us to lie to ourselves. We don't have to know what comes next. We can start with what's true.

What do you already know is true that you haven't wanted to admit, even to yourself?

Until next Friday,
Jenn