Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

I hated how this happened, how certain audiences could turn something wonderful into something humiliating. How they can make you look at someone and suddenly, for no reason, hate them. “It’s just a funny story,” I said. “Interesting,” Dad said.

After, in the morning, I had watched him smoke his last cigarette out his bedroom window. I had watched him pack his bag. But then he said, “Goodbye, Sally,” with such a finality, such a seriousness, I felt like he was departing for the moon.

Interviewing people for the paper, I learned, was not so different from our conversations at night across our beds. I was good at it—trained since birth to be curious about the lives of others.