We Were Never Here

Just because a feeling is real doesn’t mean it’s true.

Power is a funny thing. You know how they say that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference? Like, we’re looking at the scale all wrong.” She tapped her nail against the glass. “I think it’s the same thing with fear. The opposite of fear isn’t safety. It’s power.

All the hand-wringing about women tempting fate by going on adventures, how it was our responsibility to protect ourselves…wasn’t it simply a way to keep women’s lives small? To keep us cowering at home, controlled, contained?

I'd been so focused on running away, I'd almost missed what I was running to.

Edit the feed to limit the hysteria.

I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.

Breathed louder, harder, both of our breaths rhythmic and sultry, until all that existed was the feeling, deep and tender and raw.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is kind of the same thing: You examine your thoughts like a scientist so you can challenge the ones that don’t hold up. So let’s look at this fear, this belief or, or thought pattern you’ve noticed. Just because a feeling is real doesn’t mean it’s true.

Who knows what else is unwittingly documented in people’s phones and hard drives and dusty photo albums, background noise that would swell with meaning to a different audience?

My brain was like minnows in a pail: Thoughts crisscrossed and swarmed and bumped into one another.

My cry scattered through the trees, reverberated around the lake, rose toward the umbrella of stars.

Or even a solo trip - if the yoga teacher was correct, wasn't it my duty as a human being with eyes and legs and a beat-beat-beating heart to experience things, to explore? All the hand-wringing about women tempting fate by going on adventures, how it was our responsibility to protect ourselves... wasn't it simply a way to keep women's lives small? To keep us cowering at home, controlled, contained?

The irony: I'd been thrilled when Aaron noticed me, and when, tonight, he called me his girlfriend. But on the street, I tried to creep past any other male gazes, ghostlike. That's womanhood, I suppose, both craving and feeling repulsed by attention.

But my best friend, she lives in Australia, but even so, she was there for me every single day during that period. Piecing me together until I started to feel like myself again. But then…

I think it’s the same thing with fear. The opposite of fear isn’t safety. It’s power.

But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain.

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to bury a body we go.

In a particularly creepy twist, Kristen’s former employer revealed that the company’s Australian branch had fired Kristen two weeks before our Chile trip. Why? Because she’d assaulted her boss, Lucas, at a company outing. Apparently she shoved the tiny man into a shelf of liquor bottles following an altercation. Another disturbing detail:

The face of a fighter, a boxer. A Spanish-American man beaten to death by a beautiful American visitor.

So much power. So much confidence. Confidence—that was another item on the list of traits the modern woman is supposed to exude. Not vanity, not Kardashian bluster, but a deep fearlessness, Lizzo Vibes, Beyoncé Power. Big Dick Energy.

Would she really be that self-destructive, blowing up both of our lives like an extremist with a bomb strapped to her torso?

One, two, three, four, five dead bodies. My subconscious kept counting, kept scraping at our friendship like an art restorer chiseling the grime off the truth.

Some people would say that hijacking your birthday plans is not respecting your boundaries.

For starters, she refuses to even acknowledge the wealthy developer teaming up with the LAPD to find us. Her behavior when we’d found the CNN article had been so bizarre that a part of me kept whispering, Was that insincere?

How could she remain so blasé about the discovery of Paolo’s body? And our conversation on Thursday, when she’d briefly convinced me she was as shaken as I was—why did that now feel like a trick, a trap?

Nice girls don’t walk around with anger brewing in their chest. With blood on their palms and dirt under their nails from participating in their own late-night horror story.

My problem-solving instinct clanged on, the same knack that makes me so good at escape rooms and brainteasers and my job as a project manager. Maybe focusing hard on this simple problem—door is locked; we need what’s behind it—would distract me from the larger and more horrifying issue on our hands.