Travis

by Mia Sheridan

Weren’t all of us a compilation of the versions of ourselves we’d once been? Maybe if we were lucky—and insightful—we learned how to extract the good and leave the bad behind, the parts that hadn’t worked for us and instead brought nothing but pain.

Reality was never just the picture of events. It was the smells and the sounds and a hundred other small details that no one else would ever understand because they hadn’t been there, standing among the ashes as your world burned down.

“Maybe the terrible truth about love is that when it’s gone, it leaves a hole in your heart so big it feels like nothing will ever fill it. The idea of risking again feels fatal. A human being can’t possibly lose that much of themselves and still survive. And so you try desperately to fill it with things that never quite do the job.

“All the things that have brought us pain carve a distinct hole in our heart, and there’s someone else out there with the perfect something that will fill the void. And in turn, we get to do the same for them. And suddenly, it all makes sense. It all fits. Because we haven’t been forsaken. We’ve been prepared.”