But I know that there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now. I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.
We were innocent enough to think that our lives were what we thought they were, that if we pieced all of the facts about ourselves together they’d form an image that made sense—that looked like us when we looked in the mirror, that looked like our living rooms and our kitchens and the people who raised us—instead of revealing all the things we didn’t know.
I think about spring, grass and flowers, hoofprints and movement and a body, intact. But now there is stillness and drips of candle wax and quiet. There are the ghosts of who we used to be.
“If we regret this tomorrow, we can blame it on the whiskey.”
But the sky was fading from black to gray; it was already tomorrow. And I didn’t regret anything.
“Hey,” she says, voice soft. “Are you okay?”
I nod but I don’t know if it’s true.
The silence of my house. The food left, untouched, on the counter. The sharp panic of knowing I was alone.