This is very beautiful, very poignant, Caroline. I love the way you write the story in the first person from Clark's POV, how he is just married - I love this:
Do I really look like the same old Superman to them? I can’t believe I’m that good of an actor, because the old Superman, who had left an empty apartment behind, and the new Superman, who has Lois Lane at home sleeping in his bed, hardly feel like the same man.
Clark is just married, and there are many other little things in your story that testifies to this:
I know the apartment is cluttered with all of our things, but we haven’t quite figured out what to do about it. I like my stuff, she likes hers, and there just isn’t room for everything. And there’s a part of me - a really stupid part, I know - that kind of likes seeing her stuff and my stuff side by side, even if it is a complete mess.
Isn't this an absolutely beautiful "Just Married" feeling - you love seeing your own stuff and your loved one's stuff side by side.
And Clark isn't the only one in love. Lois is in love too, and that's why she is prepared to show Clark some of her most personal stuff - the secret stuff that little-girl Lois kept in her ballerina jewelry box.
So Clark is allowed to look. And after he and Lois have looked and laughed at some charms she got from her very first boyfriend, and after they have bantered about when they got their respective first kiss - (and I love the fact that Clark feels unreasonably jealous when Lois tells him of that first smoochie) - Clark finds an odd, beautiful crystal razor-sharp chunk of glass among little-girl Lois's secret things. And Lois tells him about the night when her childhood was shattered like her parents' marriage and their fancy wedding present of a crystal bowl. The horror of that night makes her squeeze that crystal piece and cut up her hand so badly that it may have been a bad thing that they didn't go to the hospital.
Out of love, Clark does everything he can to make things better for Lois. He bandages her hand and does
not insist they go to the hospital for stitches. He flies to Paris and buys her favorite croissants. He rents just the movie she's been wanting to see. He stops fussing when she asks him to. He does not throw away her little-girl things, not even the piece of crystal, even though he so much wants to. But because he loves her, he can't dispose of her things as if he owned them, because when you love someone, you respect their wishes and don't treat them as your property.
And Clark can't reach back in time and comfort the eleven-year-old girl huddled under the covers of her bed with her sister, too stubborn to cry. But as if she had suffered a mental rape at the age of eleven, Lois's (and Clark's) white sheets now bear witness to the brutality that little-girl Lois knew about twenty years ago:
But as I’m picking up her things, I’m arrested by the sight of her blood staining the white sheets.
I feel tears come to my eyes as I think of innocence lost, and an eleven-year-old girl huddled with her sister under the covers, determined not to cry.
This is so sad, Caroline. And so poignant, and harrowing. But your vignette is about the love and security that Lois lost when she was a child, and that she is getting now. Of course, there are things that can never be recovered once they are lost, and one such thing is a happy childhood. But even so... this is a story about love, and moving from a time where there was little love, to a time when there is a lot of it.
There was no need for a WHAM warning.
Ann
