Our Hearts Begin to Crumble.

My mother was the first person to tell me that people never change. We were watching one of her documentaries about drug addicts or convicted murderers. We were both curled up on the sofa, a bowl of nuts between us. Our drinks set on the glass coffee table daringly, each one avoiding the near by coasters.

She shook her head at the television, looking at the screen with disappointed eyes.

“People never change,” she said, in reference to the murderer, who was giving a monologue about how well the past ten years in prison had treated him. “They can try and hide who they are all they want, but in the end the old them is still there, creeping in the shadows, waiting for the perfect opportunity to leap out and stage a comeback.”

I looked at her, my eyebrows furrowed in confusion. I was thirteen, and I didn’t fully understand her overly emotional, philosophical words.

“But what about rehab? And jail?” I questioned, turning my body slightly to face her. “Doesn’t that change a person?”

She shook her head, her artificially red hair swinging around her face. Her glasses were perched on the edge of her nose and she strained to see through the prescribed bifocals.

“Jail and rehab only do so much.” She explained. “You can take a person out of a bad situation, but you can’t take the bad out of the person. Once they have a foot firmly locked into place, there is no uprooted. It’s like quicksand, pulling you in faster than your muscles have the strength to resist.”

“So, that means that if I was suddenly bad, like I stopped doing my homework or started mouthing off, I wouldn’t be able to change?” I didn’t fully grasp her words. “I would be bad forever?”

She shook her head, smiling softly at me. She looked amused at my childish analogies. “No, because you’d be a good person doing bad things. Bad people are the ones that can’t change, because they’ve always been bad.”

I still didn’t fully understand what she was saying, but I nodded anyway, in an attempt for her to think that I was grown up and sophisticated. Her words meant nothing then, just a little drabble during commercials. I spent a few minutes trying to grasp at her meaning, but when I came up short, I simply filed the words away for later examining.

It took me five years to figure out what my mother really meant.

People don’t change - they can act differently, they can speak differently, and they think differently, but the shards of their inner personality will still always remain. The cracked, abandoned pieces might be hidden, way behind blockades and caution tape, but they’re still there, deep inside a person. Old habits are hard to break, and even when broken, they are easily fallen back into.

When John leaned across the dashboard and said, “Kennedy’s changed, you know,“ I didn’t believe it.

I simply stared back at John, trying to decipher the hidden meaning behind his eyes. Was he telling me this because Kennedy told him to say it, or because he sincerely thought that I needed to know?

When my phone vibrated in my hand with a text from Pat saying, “He’s different now,” I still didn’t believe it.

It was hard to believe. How could someone change in twelve months? How much could fifty-six weeks do to a person?

It seemed impossible, in my eyes, for someone to change drastically in the course of a year. More time was needed for real progress, and even then the change couldn’t be totally complete. Not wholly.

After all, human beings spent their entire lives changing, their opinions altering and their tastes differing drastically from second to second. Habits were the hardest to change, after all. Once you got into the familiar swing of things, it was near impossible to break out.

Even now, as I stood in front of the living room, my cell phone balanced carelessly in my shaking hand, my heart dangling from a delicate string as I surveyed the 5x9 room, I couldn’t believe it.

Actions spoke louder than words, and if we were going to base our assumptions solely off of Kennedy Brock’s actions, then my declaration was going to be that no, he hadn’t changed.

As he stood in front of me, his hand stroking the side of a heart-wrenchingly beautiful brunette, I heard my mother’s words.

As he leant forward, whispering delicate sweet nothings in her ear, I knew that they had lied.

As he looked to the left, his eyes widening as he saw my blank expression, I knew that I had been foolish.

The entire time that I stood in the doorway, the music pumping through out me, the adrenaline from earlier show settling in my system, my mother’s words rang clearly through my ears:

“People never change. They can try and hide who they were all they want, but in the end the old them is still there, creeping in the shadows, waiting for the perfect opportunity to leap out and stage a comeback.”

Even as I knew this, even as I stared at John’s face and Pat’s text message in disbelief, I had still let my heart squeeze stupidly.

I had still hoped.