The Unmaking of June Farrow

by Adrienne Young

It was one thing to miss her when she was gone. It was another to miss her when she was still here, in this house with me.

In the end, I lost her to wherever that other place was. She faded. Disappeared.

I’d refused to feel sorry for myself.

I’d kept the secret not because I didn’t trust her. It was because the moment I told her I was sick, things would change.

how fortunate I would be to have something as simple as a heart problem. There were surgeries for that. Clinically proven medications to prescribe. Transplants, even. Labels identified the organ’s components in words like chamber, ventricle, atrium, valve. It all looked so simple. Like the parts of a machine.

trapped in a museum of another life.

was the kind of handsome that was carved from forests and rivers.

The inside of my head was a maze, one I couldn’t find my way out of. And the more I tried to escape, the more lost I was becoming.

What was it called? It was on the tip of my tongue, the very edge of my thoughts. But every time I tried to bring it into focus, it only blurred, floating farther away from me.

I was so homesick for him that I could cry.