Dark Things I Adore

<spoiler> It's 3:56 a.m. ...The house is silent. My room and the hallway outside are dark. It's been over an hour since Max hanged himself. I was smart enough to do some research on his computer in the lead-up to this, asking the internet how long it would take to die by hanging. I'd erased his search history each time I trespassed over the past year of course, lest he might see somehow what had been searched. But the police would look at his hard drive if they got any weird feelings about it at all. And there the key strokes would be. My hard drive would have keystrokes about autumn recipes and best gifts for a thesis advisor. My computer would show that I was looking toward a celebration with my mentor. His show computer would show he wasn't looking toward any of future. </spoiler>

A sad thing, really. She—she tried really hard not to be sad. But it was in her. It was in her. Part of what made her.

Pieces of myself from a time I have long put in the rearview mirror are resurfacing through the muck, resurrecting against my will.

She didn't appear much at all during her first semester. I began noticing her at parties and soirees in the spring of her first year. She was a mirage: you would see her, but it was hard to get close. She'd disappear. I would feel her eyes on me during these shindigs. And she would continue to look, even after our gazes met. She was not cowed. Her confidence and her silence reminded me of myself when I was younger. She seemed to show up to these events primarily to drink deeply of the unfolding scene and its improbable people and its hyperbolic talk and then retreat to her own inner world, as if the whole thing was an exercise in reconnaissance.

The way she offered her hand. The way he accepted it and followed her, without a word. And of course they would feel this quiet closeness; they grew up in the same small town. Have overlapping friend and family circles. Went to the same schools. They know each other in a way none of us could ever know them.

...grand oaks, maples, and chestnuts muscle in on one another, flared in their autumn robes; a motley conflagration under the dazzling mid-October sun. We are in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, digging into sprawling hinterlands, into territories of wild earth. The rolling, winding roads away from Bangor took us through towns with names like Charleston, Dover-Foxcroft, Monson, and Shirley, all with their own quaint, beautifully cinematic set dressing. It was like each was curated from grange hall flea markets and movie sets rife with small-town Americana. Stoic stone war memorials. American flags. Whitewashed, chipping town hall buildings from other centuries. Church bell towers in the actual process of tolling, gonging, calling. To me, the sound was ominous in a remote sort of way, unnamable.

How bizarre to be here once again. The scene conjures itself before me like a terrible magic trick, a palimpsest. There had been fewer cars. The lot wasn't paved then. The supermarket had been smaller, less modern, and named something else. But the general angles, the spatial arrangements, the site at the top of the hill: yes. Déjà vu ripples through me like a bad lunch beginning to announce itself hours before the final disaster. My stomach twists, and I feel an unease settle. I never thought I would return. I told myself I never would.