Someone Once Loved

Jim,

Can I call you Jim? It’s been so long since I’ve called you anything at all that I’m not sure how to address you now. You have had so many other names, so many other faces. I guess it doesn’t matter what you look like, or what I call you since I don’t even have an address to send this letter.

I am writing because I just can’t help but think of you, and it surprises me to find you here in my head. You are supposed to play a big role in this day. I’m supposed to want you here.

Your absence will be jarring to some of those in attendance. They will note that I am without a chaperon to escort me on this well-worn path. They will say it’s a shame - she grew up without. It’s a shame - she doesn’t have someone now. They expect a man who loved me to lead me into the arms of a man who promises to love me forevermore.

The details of the day are committed. The tables and chairs have been arranged on the rooftop terrace. They sit waiting for us to feast and celebrate, above the city and under the stars. I will be on his arm. I will wear a white dress and a smile. I will be watched by all who love me and some who will learn to.

I will take a new name again.

The first name I wore was the one you gave me. That name belonged to a different girl, one I find hard to recognize now. She was small and quiet – a splintered girl, who never spoke above a whisper. She had started out whole before being broken by your indiscreet hands. She used to laugh and chatter incessantly – sweet toddler giggles, hushed by poison secrets.

If my mother had walked away after making love to you that night near Stanley Park, would I have had a different name? Would I have been a different girl?

I took a new name in high school - just walked in and introduced myself as someone else. I left you behind. I was not going to be defined by your actions anymore. You were a past better forgotten, and I was ready to start fighting for myself. I needed a new name to match my new strength. A new name and a new voice - I was done with choking on my tongue, done with whispers and secrets.

I would let them say what they needed to say, but their words wouldn’t touch me anymore. They toss around sterile adjectives used to categorize, to give them some ownership over my life. They sit in their voyeurs’ castles and know that they have done well. They have labelled me appropriately. Let them stroke their own genius ego; I wasn’t going to define myself by the slippery touch of their saliva slick fingertips. They can keep their fickle praise and condemnations and apply their literary interests to a new sad story.

I was finished with being their survivor.

Now I am ready for a new name. I stand in my white dress, on the cusp of reinventing myself. A third name, a third girl. This new name I will borrow from my best friend. I want it to change more than my signature. I want the goodness of him to seep into me - to become mine, like his name.

I wait to enter the room and walk through their collective gaze - alone. I try not to think of you. Instead I want to imagine her – the woman I will become once I reach the end of the aisle. She is a wife and mother. She is careful and kind. She will build a good life - the sort of life your influence had denied her so long ago. She will be ready to face you and then to let you go. She doesn’t deny that you were, and she knows your hands helped to shape her. The blunt force of you left its marks and they are now her marks.

I try not to think of your absence – after all this time I shouldn’t mind. I try not to think of the kind of girl I would be had I grown up with you. A ghost of a girl, a blindly swollen shape like the white asparagus we will serve to our guests tonight, pale and bloated, grown in the dark. Instead, I try to remember that the best thing you ever gave me was that absence. You left, and green came back into my life, thick and sweet and full of hope. You let me go, you let me grow and blossom away from your greedy hands.

If I saw you now would I know any part of you? Would you know me?

I have the same freckle on the corner of my mouth that I had back then. I have decided it is pretty. I know my bad back comes from you, and my fidgety nature. I know you also left me the nightmares that return every August, cutting my summer short. My eyes are the same green as the toddler you knew – almost yellow. Would you see yourself in them?

The tables are set, the cake has been iced. The guest are all assembling in their colourful dresses and silk suits - tropical birds, perched above the grey city. I will smile and converse. I will hold his hand and kiss his mouth, prompted by the clinking of crystal glasses.

I will walk alone down the aisle.

I will stand tall while I do. I know that I am better able to give myself away than you ever were. I never belonged to you at all.


Sincerely,

Someone once loved.


Written by: Sarah Scott
Photograph by: Sophie Stuart

One Little Push

The floorboards wheeze with each step, an asthmatic echo through the attic. Grace nudges a flimsy cardboard box with her toe, testing whether it will disintegrate on contact. It remains intact, but sighs a dusty breath. Grace sneezes and wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

Blankets and old, worn clothes sit in lazy piles. Mattress pads are like discarded melon rinds after a picnic. The whole place reminds her of a garbage dump, unused things collected to decompose and die.

Grace remembers coming up here with Ava when they were younger, trading scary stories and contorting their hands like origami figures, trying to cast the best shadow in their imaginary menagerie.

Ava always won. Grace could only manage birds, but Ava could bend her fingers and twine her arms together to make rabbits and camels and once, with the clever integration of tortilla chips, a dragon. It wasn’t cheating, it was damn clever.

Next-door neighbors, best friends, practically sisters. And Grace is the good one in the equation, coming home to take care of an ailing mother: Ava’s.

Grace ignores the fact that she’s being paid as a caretaker, and that coming home was her only option after she flunked out of med school and racked up student loan debt. She’s not a selfless, dutiful pseudo-daughter. She’s broke and desperate.

Grace plops down on the floor and begins her search for an old turntable and vinyl records. It’s to satisfy the latest in a string of odd requests, regret masked as nostalgia. Ava’s mother thinks classic rock and folk music will take her back in time, back to before she was a mother and when she was untethered, unclaimed, unencumbered.

Grace can’t blame her. She wants to go back in time, too.

The first box reveals a stack of photo albums, decorated with Ava’s signature glitter-glued spirals and squiggles. Grace opens the first one, even though she is not supposed to be looking for old photos.

Junior year. There they are, two mismatched twins joined at the hip. Grace’s long, tanned arm thrown over Ava’s shoulder. Short blonde hair, pulled back in a half-braid at her crown. Eyes the color of a foggy morning, deep and inquisitive. Ava’s long, dark hair tumbles down to her slim waist, her hazel eyes looking through the camera, looking into the future and meeting Grace’s eyes. Grace runs her thumb along the curled edge of the photo and blinks back tears. Her father’s sharp words ring out in the attic.

That girl’s trouble, Grace. You won’t get anywhere hanging around with her. She’s a bad influence. I don’t want my daughter turning out like that. You’re on the edge. She’ll push you off if it means you’ll go down with her.

And where’s Ava now? In Reykjavik, where her latest script is being lovingly shaped into a film. She doesn’t have to be there of course; the cruel twist of it is that she can be.

And Grace, good Grace who didn’t run around with boys or smoke pot or sneak sips of Bacardi her senior year, who buckled down and focused and told her best friend she was too busy studying or going to prayer group? She’s in that same attic from her childhood, and those scary stories are her life: sleeping in the same bedroom back home, single and not loving it, caretaker to her best friend’s mom, listening to her own father lament why she isn’t more successful.

Be good, but not too good. Have fun, but not too much. Grace was never good at chemistry or fractions or anything that required her to mix parts of a whole. She couldn’t find that balance.

She’s full-on crying now: loud, angry sobs that make her body shake.

What happened to that girl? The one that stood in the center of every photo and commanded attention? Grace didn’t know if she could ever be the girl she once was, but she hoped so.

“I wish,” she chokes out, and something by the window moves.

Grace looks over and watches something roll itself up from the floor. What she thought was a heap of old clothes was actually a figure sitting on the floor. A figure now in front of her, with dirty, scaly skin and copper eyes peering from under a navy hoodie.

Ava used to tell her the attic was haunted. A cute prank, one that neither believed. Grace would play along, pretend to be scared and nervous.

The figure feels too corporeal, too present to be a ghost. It stands, not floats; shifts, not wavers. And Grace is neither scared nor nervous. Something supernatural is before her, and all she feels is a beautiful lightness like endless possibility, like a balloon being filled with air and sailing up into forever.

“What do you wish?” Its voice sounds like the creaking floorboards she previously ignored.

“How long have you been here?” Grace asks, hoping the figure does not ignore her question.

“I don’t know,” the figure admits. “Maybe forever. Maybe no time at all. It does not matter.”

Maybe Ava wasn’t joking.

“What do you wish?” The figure asks again.

“To go back,” Grace says. “To do it all over again, from junior year until now.”

The figure lingers, considering the request. An appendage reaches out for her and Grace does not hesitate. Nothing claims her here. There is no post to which she can hitch herself. She is grounded entirely in the past.

Grace wraps her hand around what feels like soggy leather, a spongy knob protruding that could have once been the bone in a wrist. Grace nods, the unspoken question hanging in the air between them.

The figure siphons itself into her, a shadow in reverse. Grace feels the tight embrace of something curling itself around her, and the sick, sweet pain of release as she tilts forward and falls into infinity.

Written by: Erin Justice

Photograph by: Skyler Smith