I'm Not Missing by Carrie Fountain

Author:Carrie Fountain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2018-07-10T07:00:00+00:00

II

11

In April I marked the four-month anniversary of Syd’s disappearance by driving on I-10 until I came to the place where I could see the graveyard from the highway. It was still there. I didn’t know if Ray and Tonya had moved away and left the graveyard for the next tenant to deal with, or if they just hadn’t left town yet. Tonya could’ve been using the mere idea of moving as an excuse to throw away Syd’s stuff.

I pulled off the highway and sat in my car looking down at the graveyard. I could still make out the divot in the earth my butt had made in front of Manny and the one Syd’s had made in front of Isadora. If I wasn’t so scared of Tonya and her gun, I’d have pulled over and put on my hazards and climbed down the perilous embankment and sat there and wept.

I didn’t know why I thought it was a good idea to drive by. It wasn’t. I hadn’t seen the graveyard in four months, and though I still thought about Syd all the time, the definition of our relationship—the specific texture of it, the deep familiarity—had begun to fade. Looking out my car window and seeing the graveyard down there made everything fresh again, the sadness and the anger and the giant stomach cramp of not knowing where she was and if she was okay. And it made me miss her more than ever. I noticed, sitting there with my hazards on as the traffic whizzed by, that when I thought of Syd now, I felt a pure kind of grief. It was uncomplicated, uncorrupted. And, for whatever reason, whenever that grief for Syd surfaced, it always brought up with it the ancient grief for my mother.

What I’d learned from the two of them was that grief wasn’t about someone being gone. It wasn’t final like that. In fact, it was the exact opposite. It was about wanting them so bad and knowing that your want had no end—there was no one there to receive it, to stop it. It just kept going and going, seeking endlessly.

* * *

I would’ve characterized the four months after Syd left as the worst time of my life, if it didn’t happen to also be the best time in my life. Everything was as perfect as it was terrible. If someone had told me that night at Ten Thousand Poles that in four months Syd would be gone and Nick Allison would be my boyfriend, I’d have laughed. It was ludicrous. Absurd. But then it happened. It actually happened. And now the idea of being separated from Nick began to hurt as much as the reality of being separated from Syd already did. College loomed, a distant galaxy we were hurling toward at light speed.

After hours of negotiations with my dad and a few thousand pros-and-cons lists, I decided I’d apply to Brown, Vassar, Reed, and Smith. If I didn’t get into any of

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