Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

“How can you be wrong about someone for so long?” Jonathan marveled. They were sitting on the back sunporch, drinking manhattans, watching night set over the garden. At this, Billie set her drink down on the arm of her chair and squinted at him with an expression of amused disbelief. “Easy. You can be wrong if they want you to be wrong. Look. All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”