Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

She finds herself thinking about her mother’s books. Years earlier, when Olive was in seventh grade, Billie had given her a dog-eared collection of Lois Duncan novels that she’d found at a yard sale. “These were my favorite books when I was your age,” Billie told Olive,

That grief isn’t something you can walk away from after a finite amount of time, but is something that washes you along, tumbling you in and out with the tides?)

Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.

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.”

She wasn’t good or bad, he decides: Life is more complicated than that, there are endless shades of gray that comprise a human being.