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“That’s not a career, that’s a hobby.” She’s quoting someone, maybe her mom. “Tell that to Taylor Swift.”
“You’re kind. Probably the kindest person I know. You’re also forgiving, at least a little, but I’m hoping a lot, and in my book that’s a superpower.” Her eyes are on mine, and there’s a lot going on there. “You’re smart as hell, and you don’t take people’s crap, least of all mine. You are who you are. You know who that is, and you aren’t afraid of it, and how many of us can say that.” She’s not smiling, but it’s not about what her mouth is doing. It’s about her eyes. “You’re strong too. It’s not just a matter of being able to knock down a guy with a single shot to the jaw.” (Everyone laughs,
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The way I feel when I’m with her. Like I just swallowed the sun and it’s shooting out of every pore.
Meanwhile, I’m here on the outside—always on the outside, even as the world crumbles around me—face pressed to the glass that divides us, looking in.
So I do the only thing I can do. I walk over, shut off the music, and say to the entire room, “I have a rare neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, which means I can’t recognize faces. I can see your face, but as soon as I look away from it, I forget it. If I’m trying to think of what you look like, I can’t conjure an image, and the next time I see you it’ll be like I’ve never seen you before.”
She brushes past so now she’s walking ahead of me, leading me away from the party, and I catch a whiff of something—sunshine.
“All of it.” That was my answer, even though I knew my dad was expecting something more specific. “Everything. It was you. Me. Aneurysms. Death. Cancer. Murder. Crime. Mean people. Rotten people. Two-faced people. Bullies. Natural disasters. The world has me panicked. The world did this. Especially the way it gives you people to love and then takes them away.” But the answer was actually simple. I had decided to be afraid.
“It’s not moving on, Libbs. It’s moving differently. That’s all it is. Different life. Different world. Different rules. We don’t ever leave that old world behind. We just create a new one.”
This is what I know about loss: • It doesn’t get better. You just get (somewhat) used to it. • You never stop missing the people who go away. • For something that isn’t there anymore, it weighs a ton.
the loss was already so big it felt like I was carrying around the world. So carrying around the weight wasn’t any heavier. It was trying to carry around both that got to be too much. Which is why sometimes you have to set some of it down. You can’t carry all of it forever.
“Your identifier is you. I remember your eyes. Your mouth. The freckles on both cheeks that look like constellations. I know your smiles, at least three of them, and at least eight of your expressions, including the ones you only do with your eyes. If I could draw, I would draw you, and I wouldn’t need to look at you to do it. Because your face is stuck in my mind.”
“I know the way you move. I know the way you look at me. I see you see me, and you’re the only one who looks at me that way. Whether I’m with you or away from you, I don’t have to think about it or put the puzzle pieces together. It’s just you. That’s what I know.”
“Libby Strout.” His mouth and eyes are serious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so serious. “You are wanted.”
I take her hand under the gray-blue sky and I’m home.
