The Return

by Rachel Harrison

“We’re so fucked-up,” she said, giggling into her beloved puffer-fish pillow. “If I die first, will you give the eulogy?” I asked. “You know I will,” she said. “And I’ll make it all about me.”

thought about what it would be like to give Julie the letters when she came back. How she would hold them in her hands, then up to the light like diamonds, then tight to her chest, as if they might absorb through her clothes and into her skin. The precious evidence of how much we missed her.

Standing on the city sidewalk, with drunk college kids stumbling past, good-looking couples holding hands and eating ice-cream cones, I wanted nothing more than to call Julie. She was the only one who would understand. She knew what it was like to feel so lonely you could die. I wouldn’t have to explain it to her, or how being in this city of millions of people was worse than being alone in my apartment. I could say all of that, and she would relate. Then I wouldn’t be lonely anymore, because she was out there. She existed.

said, “You’d think after being stuck in the same room for days, the room would seem smaller, but it doesn’t. “You forget what it’s like to leave. To be somewhere else. “We’re adaptable,” I said with a definitive nod. Outside, the wind howled like somebody dying. “Stay somewhere long enough, it becomes your world.

You can’t erase your past when there are pieces of it scattered inside other people.

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.