She had hoped to remember the experience, the way things felt when he first touched her face, but later, she was only able to tell it as a story, words that wrapped around her like his arms did, but that only felt like shadows of his actual presence.
She tried to tell him the story the way it lived in her heart, but he remembered something different, still tender, but not the same. That was the moment he first disappointed her. That was the moment her heart began to break.
She learned this during his deployment: there are several kinds of missing, some sharp as glass shards, others deep as a slot canyon. She also learned missing arrives at different times of day, depending on when it is least wanted. Sometimes it burns a little, sometimes it stings, sometimes it becomes something dark and grasping, pulling with a force like a vortex, spinning and drawing down on threadlike currents. Lacking distraction, she counted the nights, dozens on dozens of them. She sat in the park, wondering whether she missed the man who left, or the man who would return.
She had walked to the end of the long, dark pier, and listened to the water lap its base. She settled down onto damp wood beneath stars, beneath bats wheeling overhead. This was just the sort of place she had been told was unsafe for her to be alone.
But she found comfort in the inconstant nature of this spot, in the quiet tempered by night noises, in the fact that everything could change at any moment. After all, she knew he would not find her there, even if she had told him exactly where she would be.
She had always wished for alchemy, for one thing to turn to another without explanation, without prodding and experimentation. She liked rabbits from hats, cards identified without vision, bodies sawed apart and put back together without apparent surgery. She subscribed to sleight of hand because it was so much more spectacular than the plodding of the days.
But she didn’t ask for miracles. It wasn’t as if she had asked to drink from the Fountain of Youth—she didn’t mind growing old, after all, but she wanted to grow old with him.
Alright, alright, he said. I have to go. And with that, he walked down the long block to his car, just another missed opportunity, just something else to regret.
In that neighborhood, people walked faster than normal, and they never made eye contact. She lived there longer than she should, which meant she unlearned how to hold a steady gaze.
In the place of that, she learned these things: To wear dark clothing so she was less visible at night; to keep her hair just slightly unkempt so it didn’t draw attention; to move from street to bar as if she’d sidestepped through water.
Watch your money, little girl, said the woman at the door. You don’t want to see what happens when you run out.
The bench at the edge of the beach was so high her feet did not touch the ground. They dangled as if she were much younger than she felt.
It’s time to go, he had said when he woke her. We have to get back to the city.
She’d defied him for the first time. No, she said. I want to see the ocean before I go.
She considered curling up on that bench and sleeping awhile. After all, her mother had always told her that when one is lost, one should stand still until they are found.
100 Proof 