All the Missing Girls

by Megan Miranda

But here’s the thing I’ve learned about leaving—you can’t really go back.

all I’d see was a caricature of it in my mind: a miniature town set up on entryway tables around the holidays, everything frozen in time.

A Polaroid fading from the edges in, the colors bled out; the outline of a ghost town full of ghosts.

The ghosts of us gaining substance:

She would always be thirteen to me. And Tyler would be nineteen and Corinne eighteen. Frozen at the moment when everything changed.

We were a town full of fear, searching for answers. But we were also a town full of liars.

I could see us, the shadows of us, a decade ago, telling ghost stories on that porch with the dancing light.

I hated that the ghosts of us lived here, always.

Everyone had his or her own demons, including me.

Believing the world would bend to her will. Must’ve torn her up something good the first time she realized it wouldn’t.

It was coming with a vengeance, like the leaves in the fall. Turning colors in warning, and then, with a strong wind, they all fall down.

It’s what the guilty do when the guilt threatens to drown them.

I could feel them surrounding me here before things changed— like the past was alive, existing right beside the present.

the rain was just another part of the landscape. Like it was the thing that lived here and we were merely visitors.

Because the thing about standing here in the middle of the mountains with the rain coming down, in a house your grandfather built, is that it’s too easy to notice how insignificant you are.

It wasn’t in church but in moments like this when I maybe believed in God or something like that. Some order to the chaos, some meaning. That we collide with the people we need, that we meet the ones who will love us, that there’s some underlying reason to everything.

There were tiny moments, like this, when the grief came on strong out of nowhere. It was sneaky, and tricky, and you couldn’t see it coming until it was already there.

You want to believe you’re not the saddest person on earth. That there’s someone worse, someone there with you. Someone suffering beside you through the unfathomable darkness.

I’ve just understood how fragile everything is, how paralyzingly temporary we all are,

Tomorrow I’d pick myself up. Tomorrow there would be no more crying. Tomorrow I’d remember that I had kept going.

There was a small part of me that was still childish, stubborn in her hope, thinking I could somehow have everything. That Tyler could become Everett, that Everett could become Tyler. That I could be all the versions of me, stacked inside one another, and find someone who would want them all. But that’s childhood. Before you realize that every step is a choice. That something must be given up for something to be gained. Everything on a scale, a weighing of desires, an ordering of which you want more—and what you’d be willing to give for it.

I’ve got you, at sixteen; I love you, at seventeen; Forever, at eighteen—but

The woods have eyes.

When I remembered that the world would not bend to my will, that it never had, and it certainly wasn’t about to start now.

There is nothing more dangerous, nothing more powerful, nothing more necessary and essential for survival than the lies we tell ourselves.

I know what it’s like to leave, to come back, to not fit. To feel that distance between you and everything you’ve ever known.

The woods have eyes and monsters and stories. We are them as much as they are us.

Nothing stays lost forever here.

If there’s a feeling to home, it’s this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried: not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms.