Wish You Weren't Here

by Gracie Ruth Mitchell

Alaric snaps his stupid British fingers

I just narrow my eyes at him instead of responding. I’m trying to take the high road, mostly because he lives in a teapot.

I’m getting the sense that Flossie simply does what she wants and tries to make it seem official by wearing a foreboding facial expression.

I’m not going to use a wish.” It feels like cheating, somehow. Like asking the smart kid in class to do your math homework for you.

The smart kid in my math class was Humphrey Sandoval, and he ate a sprouts-and-caper sandwich every day for lunch. He moved out of Carousel Cove the day after we all graduated, and as far as I know, he hasn’t set foot here again since. I wonder if he’s doing okay. I kind of doubt it, just based on the sandwich thing. Then again, I ate peanut butter and jelly every day, and I’m not doing so hot either. So really, who knows.

it occurs to me, for the first time, that no one has ever asked me the questions I’m asking Alaric; no one has ever asked if I want out of my teapot. No one has ever asked me if I like where I am or what I’m doing, if I want to change, if I want something different.

I’m not generally a silent person. Even if I’m not talking, I’m humming, or shuffling my feet, or dancing around. They’re not things I do on purpose. But I so often feel like there’s too much of me inside—more of myself than can fit beneath my skin—and so I bubble over. I leak through the cracks. Little parts of me escape my body and find their way into everything I do.

“Don’t touch anything you don’t understand.”

She’s an odd woman. Just as chaotic as I expected she would be, with more emotions than I can name or process, but she’s joyful, too—content. She wants, but she never demands, and she understands in a way no one else has that I am as thinking and feeling as any human being.

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.”

“See? I’m fine.” It’s not strictly true; I’m uncomfortable. But as I expected, it doesn’t feel like innate discomfort. It’s the discomfort that arises from lack of experience—discomfort that arises from my body’s reaction. And the only way to overcome that is to move forward.

there are two levels of handholding: fingers woven and fingers not woven. When your fingers aren’t woven together, your hands are simply hugging each other. But when your fingers are woven together, each individual finger is being hugged, too. It’s different.

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

It’s not enough to understand how other people feel. You have to care. And when it’s possible—when it’s safe—that care should lead to action.

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?

Maybe at some point we simply have to stand up, bloody knees and all, and move forward anyway—step after step after step with our rattling souls,

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?

I’m very sure my expression is not neutral. How can it be when my heart is thundering in my chest? The wildebeests that killed Mufasa—those are the animals stampeding through my veins right now.

“Hi, Orson,” Clementine says when we can no longer avoid speaking. Her voice is tentative, her expression hesitant. “Uh, how’s it going?” I raise my brow at her—Obviously it’s not going well—and she pinches me with the hand she has wrapped around my torso—Shut up, Tangerine; what else was I supposed to say?

“I think it could be really lovely again.” And into my mind, unbidden, comes the image of my fading body and my tangled brain—the parts of me that are broken, that don’t work properly, because they’ve forgotten how. But…perhaps they could. They could work properly. I could have a life, a real life, as a human. And I could spend that human life doing good things—becoming lovely again. Couldn’t I?

For the first time in centuries, something suspiciously like pure, golden hope rises in my chest. And for the first time in even longer…I let it. I don’t swallow that feeling down; I cradle it in my hands and look closely at it, the tiny wings of a fledgling bird that needs to be nurtured and fed so that it can one day fly. Could I fly one day?

in that moment, the briefest flash of understanding hits me. 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.

“Everyone is allowed to bake,” Clementine says as her hair drifts lightly in the warm breeze. “You just do it best.” “This might be accurate,” I say. “I’m a superior being in nearly every aspect, but my blueberry muffins aren’t perfect.”

“I felt…” He narrows his eyes, searching for the word. “Alive,” he finally says. “I felt the same as I feel when I’m standing knee-deep in the tide. Breathless and wonderful and confused about how something like that could exist.”

How do humans carry such weight? I thought they were fragile, but the longer I’m here, the more I realize that can’t possibly be true.

there’s power in names, in naming—in defining someone in a way that’s purely theirs. A name gives you a sense of self.

I knew that I was receiving the same fate I had bestowed on someone else.”

it’s not stupid or lame or dumb to be content with the way things are now. I don’t have to want more.

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

“And what did you decide?” He meets my eyes. “I like you very much, despite your oddities and general lack of class,” he says. “I imagine I would have liked you no matter when I met you, or no matter who I met before or after.”

You’ve been human all your life. But as a genie there was a sense of being an essence, even in my physical form. I was in a body, yes, but I was also in the sky and the ground and in the world around me, because my magic was in those places.

I want you to be happy always; my heart breaks when yours does. I don’t want to live without you. You’re frequently obnoxious, and somehow I want to be around you anyway. I find you the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. What is that if not love?