I was not that girl anymore. I looked at my bookshelf then, at the fairy-decorated binding of the journal I had finished that night. I knew that if I walked over to it, flipped to the last page, and read that last entry, I would live again in that moment, and even if I could no longer believe in the magic, I would still remember what it was like to have believed in it.
But I didn’t. Instead of retreating into the fairy-tale past, I would remind myself of the reality. I didn’t grab the fairy journal. I kept open the plain brown faux-leather one. I flipped back aimlessly – no, deliberately – to that one entry in July, the one I knew would open all the old wounds because at the end of this year, I deserved to feel something, even if it was pain.
I don’t know how to start today. Months I’d been trying to get Alora out of that house, and it finally happened. I quit my job, isolated myself in my room (mostly), did everything to make her feel safe, and after just enough coaxing, she consented.
We chose Skidaway Island, mostly because everywhere else is packed now that Georgia opened up, but also because we still remember our childhood jaunts looking for pirate treasure.
We stayed mostly on the trails. Occasionally a stray hiker would pass us by, but the trails were wide, and we were both masked.
Maybe it was the masks that bothered me the most. I was right next to her, but we had never felt so far apart.
We took our lunch under the watchtower. She didn’t feel safe sitting at the picnic tables, so we sat cross legged on the ground under the shade, with too many mosquitoes and unbearable heat.
“This kinda sucks,” I apologized.
“Actually,” she said. “I kind of needed this.”
I stopped reading and stared. That was not what Alora had said. What Alora had said was “It beats Netflix.” That was what Alora had said and that is what I had recorded. I remembered it because it had sounded so flippant, another indicator that whatever intimacy they had shared before the quarantine was long gone at this point. I looked again at the page before me. I kind of needed this. It was vulnerable, honest. It was the kind of confession that would have changed everything.
What the hell just happened?