Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

That seemed only right. If a man cannot say, Will you have sex with me, then you shouldn’t have sex with him. If a man cannot say, Will you have sex with me, then he is probably just a boy, and he will probably stay a boy, wearing stripes, forever—that’s what you would have said, isn’t it? Or maybe this is something Jillian Williams would have said. Either way, it made me want to leave.

Billy always wanted to know what I was thinking. He asked me all of the time. And I often considered lying, as I usually did when people asked me because what I was thinking was strange. That is what Peter taught me. But pretending to be normal in front of Billy suddenly seemed like a giant waste of time. I was tired of lying. There’s no point in lying. The truth always rises, like a bloated body in the water.

I was thinking that there was nothing better in this world than to discover someone who was weird in exactly the same way I was weird. To be weird and then loved for it.

Hurricane Kathy. No matter how many times the weatherman says it, it doesn’t sound right. A Kathy does not flood canals. A Kathy does not, would not, flip over a tractor-trailer on 95. It’s like a Mildred shooting up a convenience store. An Edith severing heads. An Adelaide snorting coke. It’s a joke. That’s what it still feels like, like the violence of it all is just a joke.

All we can ever know is that we know nothing,” the therapist says. “Do you know who said that?” Billy? A long time ago, Billy once said that. “Socrates,” she says. “Socrates said that.” My therapist is always quoting important people of antiquity during our session, people like Ovid and Horace, and this doesn’t bother me as much as you might think. I like knowing that my problems exist within a large and respected tradition of problems. That ever since the beginning of civilization, humans have been very upset.

you can stop loving someone if you need to. You can stamp love out of your brain like a tiny fire.

We laughed a lot, but I don’t remember about what. I just remember laughing. And wasn’t that the most important thing? Wasn’t that all a person wanted to remember? I was in love by the time we docked. And that’s what I was like in Europe—in love with everybody by the time the night was over.

Their careers are all about pretending to know things they don’t really know that well. Knowledge is power, including knowledge a person pretends to have.

He is making it sound like something is really happening. Like he needs something to be happening. I get it. Too many days go by where we just eat chicken and vegetables and forget about it. Too many days feel like nothing. One week without a bill or a phone call and I start to wonder if I’m even really a person.

“That’s what happens when parents die,” he says. “All of a sudden, you want an answer to every question you never thought to ask them.”

The solution was always the opposite of what we expected it to be. The solution was to stay here, to plant a rosebush in the middle of Main Street. To wait, to have patience, to watch new life grow up all around him. And now, it’s been years. Now, our town depends on Billy. Our town comes to him for help. They ask him to line the walls of the church for their weddings. They ask him to cover the graves of their dead. They have forgiven him.

Billy is so close to me and the desire is strong, a giant wave pulling me out to sea always, but I won’t. I won’t stand there, with your boyfriend, and act like he is mine. As if the joke is ours. A joke is nothing to own; it is not a house or a family or a small white dog. It’s just a wave crashing over my toes, weakest just after it’s strongest, gone as soon as I feel it.

Maybe you are thinking this is a perfect picture, a perfect day. Maybe you are seeing Billy as I see him. He is wet in the face. He is smiling. His sweater is soaked, and I can see his fine bones through the cotton, and I know that I will love him forever.

and for teaching me how much fun it is to spend an afternoon talking about nonsense with someone you love.