AJ was sitting in his kitchen thinking about his conversation with Alissa the night before when his mother stopped over to check on him.

“AJ? Where are you?” Denise called.

“I’m in the kitchen Ma!”

“Hi sweetheart.” Denise said as she leaned over to give her son a kiss on the cheek. When Denise pulled back, she noticed a sharp change in AJ. He had been so moody the last few days and all of a sudden, there was a light in his eyes that his mother hadn’t seen in weeks.

“So……anything you want to tell me?” Denise winked at her son and sat down across the table from him.

AJ smiled. “Had a good day yesterday. Well, maybe not a great start but a really good end.” He proceeded to tell his mother everything that happened the day before.

“Oh my god AJ! Is she ok?” Denise worried.

“She’s fine Ma. I talked to her last night and she sounded fine.”

Denise nodded. “I’m glad you were there. She must have been so scared.”

“She was but I made sure she got back to her car and home safely.  I was going to call her again in a little while. She agreed to get coffee and maybe take a walk.” AJ grinned.

“See! What did I tell you! Maybe the circumstances weren’t the best but I told you that if you could get her to talk to you, you might be able to resolve this. You can finally get her out of your head and relax.”

AJ paused for a minute. “What if I changed my mind? What if I don’t want to get her out of my head?” he said quietly.

Denise looked at her son and noticed another change. “What didn’t you tell me the other day when we talked?”

AJ looked down at his hands for a few minutes and then looked right into his mother’s eyes.

“The biggest part of what got under my skin so much about that card wasn’t what it said but the way it made me feel.  I hadn’t felt close to anyone in such a long time and rehab was miserable.  All I wanted was that connection to someone.  Reading that card when I got home was the connection I needed. The problem was, there was no one to connect to, just a card.”

“Oh AJ. Why didn’t you tell me how you felt?” Denise said.

AJ shrugged. “What was I supposed to say Mom? I couldn’t really say “Hey this is the connection I’ve been wanting! Maybe this is the person who can finally make me feel like me.” He paused and then continued. “I wanted to know the person on the other side of that card and I wanted her to be in my life. That sounds ridiculous but it was something I thought about a lot.”

“Why didn’t you try to do something about it?”

AJ laughed. “What was I gonna do? Call around to find some random woman and tell her how I felt. For all I knew she could have been 80 and married with 10 kids! I figured it would better to just ignore it and the way it made me feel. The only problem with that was that it ate at me every day.”

Denise sat back and stared at her son. “Is that why you went off on her that night?”

AJ nodded. “Yeah, that was part of it. I saw her sitting across the table from me all of sudden and she was my age and so pretty. I was so angry that she made me feel this way about her and I was mad at myself that I waited ten years to do something about it. Something inside of me exploded and I lost my temper.”

Denise didn’t even know what to say. Hearing her son admit to all of this was something she never expected.  She didn’t really understand how her son was feeling but her heart was breaking for him.

“Well, I guess the question now is, what are you going to do about it?”