them or the look of them and I can tell they’ll be a lot of work, something to push up my nose and hold in place on the monkey bars. I’ve decided that they’re an obstacle to the important work of childhood, but I quickly learn that they’re the gateway. I walk out into the parking lot afterward and I can see. I can see so much more of the world. There are bits of glitter on the parked cars and ten-color puddles underneath them. Noticing the silhouettes of birds floating miles up in the sky, I realize they’re dozens of shapes, there are dozens of different bird shapes! I point and squeal and let my jaw hang low, in awe of the beauty all around me. My mom giggles and glows and the sky gets brighter and brighter. Everything is clear.
It’s time to go to the airport. I look in the mirror once more, patting a ribbon of hair and rubbing my lips together. For the second time in my life, I’m starting to see again—pain, beauty, truth—and I want to share all of it with Jack.
* * *
I get back to Nashville in the early evening. The Honda is covered with leaves and sitting in its special spot by the curb. I call Lile as soon as I open the door like he made me promise to and I take myself on a tour of home.
The pretty yellow house is stuffy and strange, as though it’s been left for an entire season instead of just five weeks. The kitchen is empty, the dining room table is dull and gray, and the couch is stiff. I walk into the bedroom and flop on the bed. There are little crumbs from all my snacks and my computer sits open like a dead clam. I roll onto Jack’s side and trace a little heart into his pillow. I imagine our bodies lying side by side. It has been so long since we’ve been next to each other and so much has happened. The pills I have left rattle around in the bottom of their canister as I take them out of my purse and set them on the table where they’ve always lived. I can see a perfume bottle. It’s been obscured by orange plastic and candy wrappers and it’s so pretty, angular and made of thick, expensive glass. I fall asleep feeling guilty about it, about all the horrible things it must have seen as it stood watch there all of these years.
Jack arrives the next morning at half past nine. My body is yowling from yesterday’s plane ride but I do my best to deaden the noise with hope—today isn’t about me, it’s about us. I hear him lug his suitcase onto the porch and catch a glimpse of the top of his head out the window. I’m anxious and nauseated and consumed by a lovely kind of fear that I remember from the first time I climbed into the passenger seat of his car, not knowing where we would go but wanting to go anyway.
The door opens slowly and I squeal when he crosses the threshold, covered in backpacks and rumpled in all the right ways. He’s exhausted from twenty-four hours in economy, flight hopping from Sydney to Nashville, and maybe just a little bloated from a touring diet of beer and Rold Gold pretzels. I am happy to see him, I think.
He throws a rigid smile at me through the jet lag and we hold each other for a long time. It’s more of an awkward stuckness than an embrace. Our limbs loosen every so often, but we let the history of eight years hold us together and convince us that we are not strangers in this moment. Eventually, he steps back and the sounds of our breath bounce off the walls.
“You look really good,” he says.
He doesn’t really look at me, though. His eyes dart from my face to the floor to the back window. For two people who have been to opposite ends of the earth and dug into the deepest parts of themselves, we have very few stories to tell. There’s a heaviness about him. I’m not sure he wants to be here, and I’m not sure that I blame him.
I giggle as he tries to untangle himself from some of the backpacks and he jumps a little, shaken by the sound of joy from me. A long pause happens and I smile at