When She Returned

by Lucinda Berry

Bad people can scare you quiet, and they can scare you quiet for a long time, even after help comes.”

“Sorry, I’m not,” I said. “Matthew twenty-five, verses thirty-five and thirty-six, sums up our entire philosophy. Jesus said, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me . . . Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.’ That’s how we live our lives, and it’s the closest thing we have to a creed.”

“It’s just the small-town mentality of people not liking change and being resistant to anything that doesn’t fall within their traditional ideologies.”

He said the same thing whenever I brought up how stagnant I felt—“I love you. Every part of you. I want you to grow and change, experience new things. I support you.”

But I wanted him to grow and change, experience new things too. His contentment with sameness was more maddening the older I got. How could we live our lives based on decisions we’d made when we were seventeen?

The problem with having a fairy-tale relationship story was how much other people were invested in keeping the fairy tale alive. It wasn’t just our story—it was everyone’s.

“You are tied to the life you created when you were a teenage girl to survive, but that life no longer serves you. Yet you can’t let go of it. Am I getting close?”

“I don’t know who I am without him. I’ve always wondered who I might be on my own. But I feel like the world’s most terrible person for even having the thoughts.”

One of the worst things you could do to someone in the midst of tragedy was to give them a cliché, because the intensity of the loss was too big. I’d heard it all after James died. Sometimes it was better to say nothing.

Traumatic grief was groundless, a free fall into space. Unless you’d been there before, you couldn’t understand what it felt like.

“It was like falling in love. Everything else fell to the wayside.”

His ability to bury his head in the sand over this was infuriating. If she was lying about being on the phone, then what other things was she lying about?

“Once you’ve told a story so many times, it just becomes the truth.”