The Return

by Rachel Harrison

She couldn’t tell if she loved him but wasn’t in love with him or was in love with him but didn’t love him. She knew something was missing. Something had gone wrong.

“Free,” she says, “is my favorite feeling.”

Being in the woods, she realized she had let her husband brainwash her into thinking she was outdoorsy. He was the one who liked to hike and camp, to rub sticks together and eat freeze-dried food. He was the one who could identify poison ivy and true north. Not her. She liked air-conditioning and lattes and clean bathrooms. Being outside made her itchy. She hated being itchy. She hated bugs, and outside is where all the bugs live.

She reconsidered leaving. She had come for a reason. She didn’t want to bail. That was her habit, wasn’t it? When things got hard, she left. When they weren’t hard, she got bored and she left. She didn’t want to be that way. Always leaving.

She didn’t want to give in to negativity, but the truth was, she was fighting a losing battle against escalating dread.

People disappear. It happens all the time. They leave to pick up bread or soap or cigarettes or AA batteries, and they never come back. Their families are left to wonder. They can’t eat toast or wash their hands or smoke or use the remote control without it coming back to haunt them. Kids wander off at the playground or in grocery store parking lots or waiting for the bus, and they’re never seen again. Their parents plead on the news, put up posters. They’re dead, she used to think. Do they know, or are they delusional with hope?

When she was a kid she pictured her own face on one of those posters. It didn’t scare her. She always coveted attention. She imagined her classmates crying, hugging one another. People searching with German shepherds and flashlights. Calling out her name over and over again.

She was being hunted. She knew, by the severity of her panic, by the tenseness of her body, that she was prey.

She says she prayed. She prayed to a god she didn’t believe in until that moment.

Her thoughts were familiar. They were her thoughts. Julie’s thoughts. Only it was like she was reading them off a cue card, or they were being fed to her through an earpiece. There was a disconnect in how she thought, what she thought and what she felt. A detachment. The truth was, she didn’t feel much of anything.

She’d always been someone with strong emotions. Sensitive. She walked around feeling like a raw nerve. She couldn’t watch the news, because it would make her hysterical, send her into an existential crisis. She couldn’t have a weird dream without it ruling her day. A rude barista at Starbucks could keep her up at night. All of that was muffled now.

“Really, I think I chose for myself,” she says. “My whole life, I wanted to be something else. Wanted something more. To escape my body, my life as it was. It could sense that in me. My hunger, my longing. My fight. My strength.”

There are many reasons why bad things happen to young women, and at the same time, no reason at all.

“Remember that time we saw that stupid horror movie in the theater, the one with the machete guy? And you asked us all if we were in a horror movie, who would die first, and we said you, and you got so mad?”

“And the best part is, you wouldn’t be like everyone else anymore. Not like you’re like everyone now. We’ve always been different. We’ve always known we were special.”

Or maybe I’ve made some assumptions of my own. Maybe I only ever saw what I projected onto her, what I wanted to see. Maybe I never really knew her at all.

“Our friendship is special,” she says. “I know it is.” “You’re my favorite person. You know that, right?”

“I think you like being unhappy. I think you enjoy it, feeling sorry for yourself. It’s safe.”

You’re afraid of happiness. You’re afraid to really live,” she says.

She’s right. I’ve made some big mistakes, and now I’m so terrified I’ll make another one, I’d rather punish myself for the rest of my life than try to be happy and risk fucking it up more.

“This is your problem. You make everything about men. You think everything is about a man, a man, a man.

“You just do things, don’t you? Then you feel guilty about them but don’t think about why. Why you did what you did or why you feel guilty. You’re so perceptive, and yet you’re the least self-aware person I know. I don’t get it.”

It’s a mean thing to say because it’s true. And of course, I, not self-aware, didn’t know this about myself until now.

I guess I love her that much. I was willing to take the scraps. Any piece of her was better than nothing. It was better than conceding I didn’t recognize this person in front of me.

“I do love you. I always have. But I was jealous of you. I know it’s an ugly thing to admit. I know I’m not supposed to tell you. But it’s the truth. And I resented you because your life turned out so much better than mine. I want you to know I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about Tristan. I’m sorry about all the things I’ve done to let you down. I guess there’s a lot of them. But you should know, you let me down, too.”

We’re each other’s witnesses, sole witnesses to so much that will now be lost. Gone forever. I will never stop mourning the future we were supposed to have. I will never get over losing my best friend.

I can’t remember a time when I felt like I belonged in the world, but I’m not ready to leave it. I’m suddenly drowning in affection for everything.

That’s not true. I probably wouldn’t do any of those things. But I would try harder. I would do better. I wouldn’t waste so much time. I’ve wasted so much time, and now I have none left. I’m not ready.

The pain is searing, but I’m in love with it, because it means I still have my body, I still have my life.

Honestly, I don’t care what the future looks like, however wonderful or mediocre or disastrous. I just want it.

“We’re not old!” She’s right. We’re not. But I welcome the years. I will take as many as I can get. I look forward to them, to the life I have left to live. There’s only the one thing.

She used to wear a perpetual grin, subtle, almost smug, like she knew something you never would, but if you did, man, you’d be grinning, too. It was part of the DNA of her face, but I didn’t really notice until it was gone.

That’s what intimacy is, I think. That’s love. Knowing the smell of someone else’s head. I get whiffs of it sometimes, randomly. What a funny kind of ghost. A phantom scent.

She’s with me. In my fear, my loss. Wherever I go, I know. She will follow.