Where She Went

The electricity in the air has changed; it’s like you
can smell the ions dancing. “I still wake up every single
morning and for a second I forget that I don’t have my
family anymore,” she tells me. “And then I remember.
Do you know what that’s like? Over and over again. It
would’ve been so much easier . . .” And suddenly her
calm facade cracks and she begins to cry.

the lava leaking out, this great explosion of what, I guess to her, must look like grief.
But I’m not crying out of grief. I’m crying out of gratitude.

But still, I listened for the sound of her voice.

But you’re my freak.”

safer in her custody than I do in any bouncer’s.

She left for Juilliard the day after Labor Day. I drove her to the airport. She kissed me good-bye. She told me that she loved me more than life itself. Then she stepped through security.
She never came back.

Scratch your head or you’ll be dead.

The idea that nothing’s sacred.

Even if I were forty-one, and Bryn and I had just celebrated twenty years together, I wouldn’t want a kid with her.

Except even at the start, when we were in that can’t-
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get-enough-of-you phase, there was like some invisible
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wall between us. At first I tried to take it down, but it
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took so much effort to even make cracks. And then I
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got tired of trying. Then I justified it. This was just how
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adult relationships were, how love felt once you had a few battle
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scars.