Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

Still, it’s hard to be from Before when you are in Now.

everything else that’s made the last few months feel like something I’m carrying around and not something I’m moving through.

Sometimes I think feelings are bigger than people. More powerful. They make people do things that can’t be undone. I used to think feelings were part of a person, but lately I’ve been thinking they are separate beings, that they come like aliens and invade people’s bodies and cause destruction.

I remember everything, because when something happens I turn it over and over and over in my head a thousand times until I am sure I understand it.

It’s uncomfortable, like the whole world tilted just the tiniest bit to the right and gravity and all the other laws of the universe aren’t working quite right anymore.

“If roots are so important,” Naomi says at last, “why are we moving ours around?”

It feels like the beautiful sunset we watched last night is inside me, like it lasted so long that I swallowed it whole and I get to carry it around so I can feel golden-pink and toasty.

Sometimes it’s extra-lonely to look so much alike but be so different inside.

Back in Juniper, the school counselor said some people feel anger easily and some people feel sadness easily and some people feel fear easily. I told her I want to be a person who feels happiness easily. She smiled a funny smile. And that smile made me feel angry too.

Even when they’re attached to me, I can’t feel them, but I still know they’re there. Like ghosts.

And it feels good, to run and laugh, but something is missing. A piece of me. I’m trying to be as brave and free and careless and questionless as the butterflies, but my brain won’t stop asking questions, and my heart won’t stop its missing.

“Hope,” she says. “The opposite of worry is hope.”

“The bonfire is my favorite night of every month,” Ms. Butra says when she pours us big glasses of lemonade after the game. “Everyone all together. The world’s even prettier when you see it by firelight, don’t you think?”

It tastes terrible, mostly. But good, too, for the way it reminds me of before. Good, for how wrong it is. How imperfect. How uneven.

Stories she was supposed to give away. She’s holding on to them.”

Some people think they can have a fresh start while still holding on to their past. But it doesn’t work like that.

Love, in the way we take care of each other when we’re hurting.

Love, in a town covered in vines and thorns and roses and color. Love, strongest in the worst, scariest, most painful moments. Love, even better when the sky is gray and your heart is breaking.

There’s an ache in all of us, I think, where we wish we’d talked more about how hard it all was. And the ache will make us talk more now about the things that hurt or confuse or twist us up inside. But an ache isn’t the same thing as guilt. An ache doesn’t mean we were bad sisters or parents or people.

An ache is just an ache: something that settles into your heart and reminds you that love is there even if the person you love isn’t.

But memory is like that, I guess. Not quite the same as it was when it was alive and happening. Delicate. Something you have to care for, tend to, love gently, and hang on to as hard as you can.