No Two Persons

by Erica Bauermeister

“Sometimes I wonder,” he said, his back to her as he did the dishes, “what it would have been like, just to be in the water by myself. Nobody else in my head.”

Considered the fact that she hadn’t even known Professor Roberts was a father, a grandfather, not because he hid it, but because there are things you can’t see until you are ready to look.

We’re all caretakers of the stories, Alice. Writers are just the lucky ones that get to know them first.”

“What is a story if we don’t tell it?”

Lara was tired.

i felt that ._.

and when she woke up a few months later, the deadlines for grad school had passed and she had to wonder—if she’d really wanted that, would she have let this happen? Or had it just been a thing to do, a road to follow that was clear and lined with billboards that said things like Good Job! And Wow!

It was astonishing, Lara thought, the sheer outpouring of human desire. The need to record, to create, to be acknowledged.

Wandering is a gift given only to the lost.

We can never truly know another person, the point of view said. It breaks my heart, said the voice.

Is it always like this? he wondered. Can we never truly connect? But this was his job. So he kept reading, until he reached the last sentence and the voice spoke quietly to him, through him. All that matters is that we try.

Because wasn’t that what art was all about, in the end? Mentally shoplifting your way through the world around you, the thoughts inside you? Looking for the thing that makes it all click. Makes it all start. Makes it all worthwhile and whole and good again.

But hell, you could be hit by a golf ball, just strolling around a course. Get knocked flat, crossing a street. You might as well do what you want, right? What calls to you. What you couldn’t not do anyway.

Books answered the questions she couldn’t ask people. Why can’t I save my mother? Why can’t she save herself? How can I love so much and be so angry at the same time?

“Maybe she’s not a good mother,” Nola said slowly. “Maybe she’s just human.”

“Life,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Sometimes it just lands on you.”

“Everything’s fine,” he said to her. “It doesn’t have to be,” she said. “Sometimes fine gets in the way.”

but that was the beauty of books, wasn’t it? They took you places you didn’t know you needed to go.

he needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere so completely else that the grief wouldn’t find him. Ignoring the fact that grief is not a stalker but a stowaway, always there and up for any journey.

Guilt is easier to drown in than any ocean.

There were no fireworks, no steamy glances across a room. Just two human beings, falling together like puzzle pieces, which made sense because both of them were broken, their edges not the smooth arcs or straight lines of others, which fit easily into so many situations. No, there was only one place each of them belonged, and that was with the other. It sounded dramatic, but wasn’t. More like an animal finding its natural habitat.

Anyone can love their mirror image; it’s the easiest thing in the world to love what you already know. But how do you love difference as if it’s a part of you?

Picking up a book was a decision: I’m going to go away. The exciting possibility: I may not come back the same.

It was a quiet ending. No villains to conquer, no fight scenes to choreograph. Just two people, finding their way out of the thorns that were their lives. Seeing a path before them. It was a beginning more than an ending, and likely to be a complicated one—but that, the book told her, was okay.

All that matters is that we try,

Books spoke to specific people for specific reasons, and it had everything to do with where they were in their lives.

“How are you really, though?” Lara asked

If anyone at the office understood her, it was Lara.

“Maybe that’s why people want it in a book,” she said. It was basic marketing—give readers what they don’t get or can’t have in regular life. A safe brush with evil. A flaming romance. Certainty.

People think it’s me, he’d said. It’s all of us, she’d replied. A book always is.