Like It Never Was

by Faith Gardner

I thought I was a good person. But like love, goodness is never really unconditional.

In the end, I’ve accepted I occupy a strange space where I’m not quite sane and not quite insane, not quite sober, not quite an addict. I’m just a professional dropout. I’ve got commitment issues. I’m nearly thirty years old and I’m ten miles wide and one inch deep. And know what? That’s all right. The world keeps moving and so do I.

I love this first stage when cities, jobs, and people are brand new. Like the beginning of a passionate affair—a place of pure potential, where anything can happen. Nothing will crash and burn. No, never.

I can’t tell if it’s because she’s lonely or she thinks I’m incompetent, but it helps the time pass and she’s interesting as hell so I can’t complain.

“Being alone is the bare-naked truth,” she says, brushing a piece of my hair out of my eyes. The motherly gesture of it is comforting somehow, even if her words are not. “We’re born alone and we die alone. Company is temporary.”

Furthermore, my father taught me an important lesson at a young age: memories are nothing but lies we tell ourselves.

A crime confessed to a therapist is protected by confidentiality, I repeat in my head, like a mantra. Google assured me of this last night. I did my

The worst kind of unhinged—sane enough to be aware of how insane I’m acting.

You’re the worst kind of liar, the voice says, so loud it buzzes my eardrum. Because you lie to yourself.

But there’s no way to heal without discomfort. If healing was easy, no one in this world would hurt.”