Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

and all this was telling me in many ways that I was, in fact, a risk of some sort, that I had been putting a part of my life or the lives of others at risk because immigration officers don’t go locking unrisky people into hospital rooms and mental health assessments

I wanted to be responsible for destroying a small-to-medium-sized part of him, and this was a somewhat-sick and somewhat-normal thing, I think, everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them, though not everyone can see that ugly want sleeping under the blankets of love and affection and secure attachment that we try to smother that ugly want with

Elly, I am not yet sure what to do with you or myself, if there is still a context in which we can exist. You have complicated all the contexts in which we had formerly existed, Elyria, you have tested their outer reaches. There are limits to what a man can stand, to how much being treated unlike a husband he can take before he is, in fact, no longer a husband, no longer willing to be the half of the life that he had thought he was living in.

and he said, It’s something Virginia Woolf wrote: Moment, stay because you are so fair, or something like that, and I said, So this is how you feel? How Virginia Woolf already felt?, and he said, Yes, and what I felt then was partially agreement with him because, yes, I was also in love and wanted to stay in it, but also a kind of sadness, a kind of anger, a kind of disappointment, because as soon as he had asked that moment to stay, it was gone.

Is it all right if I call you Elyria? Sure, I said, thinking of how I’d always be sitting under that word, my name, the terminal noise of me.

The assessment was just a few basic math problems like nine divided by three and four times five and other lines like this, problems that weren’t really problems at all, problems that were so simple they made my life problems seem unbearably complex.

after I had written my nine answers to the nine problems I felt a little exuberance because I knew at least nine things in this world to be just so plainly true, limbless facts.

I wished, for a moment, that I had become a mathematician or an accountant or a factory worker so I could just have part of my day be full of NO or YES, ONE MILLION or TWO MILLION, or SAME, SAME, SAME, SAME. But instead I had this life that was populated with so many MAYBEs or ALMOSTs or PERHAPSes or I DON’T KNOWs

I wondered if it would be possible for my husband to shoot me with a microscopic bullet that would make me make sense again, a bullet that could send the proper wants through my body: the want to be in this nice apartment with this reliable, honest man who had paid bills and who came home and did the things he’d said he’d do and sometimes more,

and the want to have a family because it was time for me to continue the march of people that I belonged to

and if there was no one to notice these things about my husband would my husband even exist anymore?

And where would all the me that he had housed in himself go if I wasn’t there to be with him and see what he kept of me in him, and did the versions of each of us that we had crafted so exactly and precisely for the other person, did those versions just evaporate, just die,

but also I knew that I wasn’t free, because running from something isn’t freedom, it’s just a way to flee,

and it was clearer to me than it had ever been that all there is on earth is the eternal now and nothing else.