Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

and they won’t look twice at you because they’re only paid to look once.

and I worried that what I had seen in the driver was something I’d seen in myself, that it took me to know me. The bus driver said, You’re welcome, and I wondered if he knew what else I was.

I wished that I could point to some colonizer and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had made me misunderstand myself—but I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself,

which made me think, again, of Ruby on that Thanksgiving night on the swings, or maybe it was another night like that night when she was talking, I thought, about how predictable she felt—I’m Asian so I’m supposed to be good at math and skip grades

and I tried to tell her she wasn’t predictable, she wasn’t a cliché, she wasn’t a s...

I was sixteen or seventeen and didn’t have the kind of brain that Ruby had and this was becoming increasingly obvious, that my brain couldn’t absorb as much as her brain could, that I couldn’t expound with her about free will, that I was making a C in French and failing algebra and she had mastered both those classes during weekends one summer, and now here we were, she a teenage adult and me a teenage child and she wanted to talk about free will and I didn’t have anything to say.

or else I have forgotten some or many of those moments, which is probably true because memories are so often made by one hand and deleted by the other, and living is a long churn of making and deleting and we all forget so much of what we could be remembering,

I’m the child of a child, I thought, and I may have said that to Ruby and she may have laughed, or maybe I didn’t speak that thought at all.

I have never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she’d be better off not living—

that my husband’s loss was what I had really fallen in love with, and maybe that loss was locked up in my husband like a prison and this was our once-a-year meeting and so I had to press myself against the Plexiglas to feel the blood and body heat of his loss, stare hard at the loss so I could remember how its face was shaped, the exact color of its eyes, something to get me through the next year of living with my husband and not his loss, but the lack of his loss, a bleached-out version of it, a numb heart that hosted something with a real pulse and wildness

But part of the point of this study was that I not know the study’s point, which made it seem a lot like everything.

Ambiguously familiar pop music was playing, an excited woman singing like a maniac, an excited maniac, about something exciting, about how good it all was, how good it would always be.

from Husband: apologies for whatever he had done, demands of apologies from me, apologies for the demands of apologies, demands—again—for some kind of sense to be made of everything, for me to pay him what I owed him, pay him in my time and life, to pay off the hurt I’d done by stealing myself—I was his, he said,

and I was thinking of how terrible it is that everyone has to be a child of a person, and why would someone want to make more people when it all just leads up to sitting in an expensive midtown restaurant on an overcast Tuesday trying to eat a poached egg that’s gone cold under hollandaise

And I knew that it was possible he wasn’t entirely right for me, but I also knew, in some way, that probably no one was right for me

It’s depression, honey, you’re just depressed. You just need to have someone give you something.

We went to a diner and tried to eat but couldn’t, so we mostly sat in silence and a woman came around refilling our coffee to a constant brim and we just held each other’s hands and we seemed to know something that we had not previously known.

and we fucked like our lives depended on it,

And this went on for a while and I became a haver-of-authentic-emotions,

and read the newspaper like a grown woman without thinking of the sentence I am being a grown woman, eating off a plate, and reading the news, because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just was instead of a person who was almost.

but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love—and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria—and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame—

I couldn’t remember why I had ever wanted to go anywhere at all.

That night, what was supposed to be a romantic dinner became a silent dinner.

and I wondered if there was a side of my husband who wanted to demolish me, who wanted to turn me into a fine dust, who would bring his solid hands against my throat, who would rend my muscles from the bone without a flinch, in a moment of passion, if he had that kind of passion in him, if that kind of passion was quietly growing in him like an undiscovered tumor.

everyone walks around thinking nothing is going to happen right up to the moment when something does happen, just like time, how it’s here one minute and we don’t notice it till it’s gone—

Now I know how to sit still, how to accomplish my job, how to walk home, how to order a sandwich at the diner, how to pay a bill, how to sleep in a cold bed, but I still don’t know how to fix my brain, make it turn life information into calm feelings, responsible actions.

You’re one of those women who thinks nothing is good enough for you, the entire human experience is not good enough for you and you want something impossible.

Elly, talk to me. But what was there to talk about? What could I say? I had seen how a corner of my husband wanted to stop all the air in me.

And he’d keep staring, waiting for me to say what I knew he needed to hear, something I said so much I wondered why he didn’t just say it for me after a while. I’d say, I know you didn’t mean to.

As we walked home that night smelling like the bourbon that had drizzled onto our knees, I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love

My husband and I were no longer the people that fit easily into each other’s life, but we suggested those people, and this was why I would often catch him looking at me as if I merely looked familiar to him. We did not exist, the we we thought we’d always be.

I read Mrs. Bridge again, or, rather, just moved my eyes over the words and wondered where I was going or what I should do now or how I was going to find a way to disappear

Don’t get into the car with someone who looks like they might be able to chop you up. No one can make decisions based on hypothetical knife skills, I didn’t say.

A seagull walked up and looked at me as if we had known each other for years

and nothing was new about this year because it had shown up just like all the rest of them

because he didn’t care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his.

And because I was still thinking about my half-dead husband as I took the half-burned vegetables out of the oven, I just scraped them all into a big bowl instead of taking the burned ones out first because I was trying to count how many days it had been since my husband and I had died to each other

was taking the burned ones out because they weren’t edible, I ate them because, at the moment, I thought it would be better if everyone learned to consume their own mistakes.

is there any possibility that we could become, again, the kind of people who have a future instead of just a past and could we reach some kind of clearing in that future, some grassy patch of many-years-from-now where we are just fine being just fine?

Maybe we could decide to get a dog or a child or just a good bottle of wine and maybe we’ll sit at a sidewalk café, sipping it, sipping our lack of responsibilities, watching mothers bumble by lugging their children and babies and unhelpful dogs, all the weight and moan of their decisions hanging on them and asking, always asking for more, to be fed, to be watched, to be loved,

it makes me feel the least unwell to believe that we could become dog people, not children people, in that distant patch of grassy future. Because I believe we can follow the simple repeated emotion of a dog, the predictable needs of a dog, the gentle forgetfulness of a dog—and you may have w...

and perhaps I just wanted children but couldn’t manage to admit it as anything other than a wanting of a want because I feared the burden of a plain want...

there is a future and I am in it. There may be a tomorrow when I might come home and maybe it won’t be too late for me to become the kind of woman who doesn’t feel her life is irrevocably complicated, and maybe I can slowly forget what happened to my brain,

realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been

and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.

I couldn’t tell how long I had been there. My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don’t have anywhere else to put,

but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn’t know what else to do with.

I thought, what a lucky woman she is to have a drugged-up puppy for a mind and I was momentarily happy for that woman and her irrevocably wrinkled face and there just was no revoking the time she’d been through because the things she’d done to herself and the things that had been done to her would always be the things she did or had done.

he drove me to the same place he was going, a small and almost empty beach, without raping or killing me, which I appreciated, and when we got out of his van he said, Take the care, and I said, Take even more, and pretended like that was the way people spoke in this world because what difference did it make?

did I realized I had witnessed the moment when this girl found out that nobody (not even Papa) knows what’s going to happen to her or him or anyone and that’s called Dramatic Tension and that’s called the Suspense of Life and that’s called Being Alive.