Wish You Weren't Here

by Gracie Ruth Mitchell

Sure, you hug and kiss and whatnot, but real intimacy is complete comfort. It’s wrapping yourself in your partner like a cocoon and facing the rest of the world together.”

All children are rude and annoying; it’s in their nature. They want to consume the world without thought of order or repercussions, voracious and hungry. Children dream not big but gigantic. Do they lose those dreams? Do we lose our dreams? Or do they stay buried in our hearts, our souls, waiting as we grow older for the day we remember them? Do they wait for us to water them so they can sprout?

“I’ve existed for much, much longer than that.” “Existing,” I tell him, “is not the same thing as living.”

“I like ugly things. I like to treat them well so that they don’t feel left out.”

“And regardless of what you’ve done in the past…it really doesn’t have to define you.” I swallow and then go on. “Humans are more complex than that. We have weaknesses, but we’re not weak. And you may have done a bad thing, but I don’t think that means you’re a bad person.”

And can we ever really leave behind the things we’ve done? Because no matter how sorry we might feel for doing something horrible, it’s still happened—and most horrible actions have consequences that can’t be undone with regret. What about those things? What happens to them? Do they just rattle around in our souls, making noise, keeping us awake, long after our knees have grown bloody from kneeling in sorrow?

Because slipping my arms around her waist, gathering her closer, turning my face to breathe deeply everything she offers—it’s the most natural thing in the world.

My heart, at this moment, is the most human thing about me.

And what does normal mean, anyway? I have lots of different kinds of normal. I have anxious normal and grumpy normal and happy normal and tired normal. Aren’t we all multifaceted, prisms that shine different colors depending on where the light hits?

“Sometimes the heart just wants what it wants, Orson,” she says. “And my heart wants this obnoxious British man. Have a lovely day.”

She makes me feel like maybe, someday, I could deserve my humanity again.

“You do not need to apologize for asserting your boundaries.

She needn’t have worried; all I can see when I look at her is Venus rising from the water, a goddess stepping forth from the sea, hair borne on the wind, eyes shining.

Because in the human world, I’m discovering, there is a single grand and final decision. And no matter the situation, it is the same: Do we step forward into the unknown, or do we remain where we are?

“I’ll kindly invite you to take all that bossiness and shove it.” “Shove it…where?” I say. She looks quickly down at the phone as her cheeks turn pink. “Just—somewhere,”

“I didn’t know you knew what kissing was.”

“At my age you can’t afford to be picky. Everyone else is dead.”

But me? I don’t have an excuse. No magic is holding me in her thrall. I’ve found my way there on my own, and now my head is full of my little

genie—her boundless compassion and rude hand gestures and the scent of sugared strawberries.

They’re magical, these humans, because they have no magic to use. Everything they do, they create themselves; they rise themselves, they shatter themselves, and they have nothing to fall back on. They don’t use magic only when they really need it, like I was trying to do. They are their own magic.

Perhaps that’s what being human really is, I think as I go into the bathroom and stare at my tattoo-free chest instead—feeling things, all the time, and never conveniently.

The waves, I know, will never be the same; the sand will always bear witness of different people, different footsteps, different lives. If I had to return to a teapot, I might miss the ocean the most.

Is this all penance is, in the end? Remembering and moving forward and trying to do better?

Does she realize her hands have found my waist? Or that we’re standing the way lovers all over the world stand—intimate, close, teetering on the edge of something beautiful?

And there are moments you know you’ll remember—moments that crawl by quickly and slowly all at once, hypervivid. Your heart beats caged and desperate, expanding in your chest until you can hear the cracks in your ribcage, and time becomes little more than a ribbon wrapped around your spine, lovely and tied in a bow but ultimately insignificant. Those moments exist on a plane of their own, and no matter how much you clutch at them to stay, they can’t—sand through your fingers until you’ve wasted the last seconds trying to prolong them.

There’s simply nowhere else for me to go but to her.

I will kiss her forever, until the end of time, and then after that too.

Every time the heart makes space for something beautiful, it also makes space for the loss of that beauty.

Because there’s power in names, in naming—in defining someone in a way that’s purely theirs.

“I don’t know what I deserve or don’t deserve, but I want this too badly to stand down now.”

“To you, I am always safe.”

Right now he needs me, and that’s not how I want him in my life. I want him to want me, in whatever capacity that might be—but he has to choose me of his own free will.

“I’m allowed to be brave in little ways instead of saving the world all the time!”