Where She Went

The electricity in the air has changed; it’s like you
can smell the ions dancing. “I still wake up every single
morning and for a second I forget that I don’t have my
family anymore,” she tells me. “And then I remember.
Do you know what that’s like? Over and over again. It
would’ve been so much easier . . .” And suddenly her
calm facade cracks and she begins to cry.

Except even at the start, when we were in that can’t-
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get-enough-of-you phase, there was like some invisible
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wall between us. At first I tried to take it down, but it
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took so much effort to even make cracks. And then I
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got tired of trying. Then I justified it. This was just how
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adult relationships were, how love felt once you had a few battle
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scars.

When Bryn said that, uttered out loud the thing that
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to my never-ending shame I sometimes felt, I’d fallen
in love with her a little bit. And I’d thought that was
enough.

But I’m still standing. I’m still breathing. And some-
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how, I’m okay.

And the voice grows stronger and stronger, and it’s my
voice this time and it’s asking a question: How does she
know?

And
as I battle with invisible waves and imaginary vortexes
and demons that are all too real and of my own making,
I actually feel something in my chest open, a feeling so
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intense it’s like my heart’s about to burst. And I just let
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it. I just let it out.

Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it’s the easi-
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est thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your
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hand is open. But my hand has been clenched into a fist
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for three years now; it’s frozen shut. All of me is frozen
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shut. And about to shut down completely.

I think of all the girls whose backs I couldn’t wait
to see in retreat. How once their sound and smell and
voices were gone, I felt my whole body exhale. A lot of
the time Bryn falls into this category. That’s how my ab-
sence felt to Mia?

blush. “Quitting’s not
hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that men-
tal leap, the rest is easy.”
“Really? Was that how you quit me?”
And just like that, without thinking, without saying it
in my head first, without arguing with myself for days,
it’s out there.

“You should quit,” she says, touching me gently on
the shoulder