The Bachelorette Party

by Camilla Sten

They had aged, their hairstyles had changed, they’d gone to university and found jobs and rectified youthful mistakes like piercings and boyfriends in bands, but out here on Isle Blind, time seemed to stand still. Someone always cried. Someone always threw up. Someone always had a life-changing realization.

When you were a teenager, all you needed to have in common was time and circumstance.

Sometimes she wondered what she’d lost, leaving that girl behind. It hadn’t been dramatic. It had been incremental, piece by piece, a haircut here and a blazer there. She liked who she was now. She liked her life. Sometimes she even loved it. But that untamed quality, that feral lust for something else, something different—that she could miss.

At the first sight of care or kindness, I can feel my fragile façade start to crack. It’s easier, and more comfortable, to stick with solitude and self-loathing, to keep trying to build an exoskeleton of feigned indifference.

I have successfully turned the worst thing that has ever happened to me into cocktail party conversation.

didn’t want a hug. Not really. She was sweaty, and her mouth tasted like puke, and she was so tired. She wanted her mom. She wanted to be five years old again, and to be in bed, sick, and to have her mom bring her minestrone with the beans picked out. She didn’t want to be an adult, didn’t want to have to go to work with her stomach still roiling and the world assaulting her with smells, didn’t want to have to smile bravely and pretend it was all okay since it was all for a small lump of cells that would, at some point, turn into a baby.

Real

Had we met as adults, they would have intimidated me. Annoyed me, and frustrated me, even. But I will always know them as the girls they were. I will always see what they were before they got their degrees, and their partners, and their apartments; before they figured out how to do their hair and dress for their body types. I know their awkward, hesitant inner selves, just as they know mine.

“The truth is, we’re human. Sometimes we do fucked-up things. You can’t keep mulling over every bad action you’ve ever taken, trying to trace the outcome of every single thing you’ve ever said or done. Just … try to look forward.”

“I didn’t even think you wanted kids,” Irene said, and Matilda wriggled her way out of her sister’s grip. “Well, I do now,” she said, forcefully, hating herself for the lie and hoping she could will it into truth.

Oof

Isn’t that so often the case with people who change your life for the better? Meanwhile, the ones who change you for the worse are the ones who stick around. Both in your life and in your mind.

I remember being seventeen and wanting a big life. Like all of you. We all wanted something different, didn’t we? Something that wasn’t what our moms and dads wanted. Something that we built for ourselves, rules written by us, rich in something that wasn’t money, a life that had some texture to it. So how did I fall into this? Did you do that, too? Did you keep making little decisions that didn’t seem to matter at the time that all turned out to add up to the exact opposite of what we all dreamed of?

“I look forward to seeing what you’re going to wear,” he says, with naked flirtation, and nausea and sudden, unwanted attraction swirl in my stomach.

OH NO HES HOT

And if I have learned anything, it’s that a lot of men—not all, but many—will try to hold you back, if they perceive you as a threat. They will try to tell you what you should do, and what would be best for you, and project their needs and desires onto you. It’s important to learn the difference between what you want and what others want for you.”

It’s so easy talking about it, so easy claiming I’m going to throw myself on him like a wild animal, buy them some time, but no matter how much I tell myself that he’s just a man, that I’ve got the element of surprise on my side, that I will do it to save my sister and my friends, the reality is that Adam has grown into the shape of a monster in my head.

Guilt and grief, she says, are intertwined. You don’t cure it. You learn to live with it, and little by little, it gets absorbed into your life and starts fading with time. Never completely. But enough to let you move on.