Chapter 7: Elsewhere text
The honeymoon was a week in a coastal town where no one recognized our names and the morning paper did not carry cathedral stills.
We walked early, before the heat. Ethan bought too much fruit from a stall and joked that he was practicing being the kind of husband who returned with bags instead of arguments. I wore scarves some days and nothing on my head on others, according to wind and mood, not according to anyone’s camera. When a stranger’s glance lingered too long, I looked back until the glance moved on. The old flinch was still in my muscles. It no longer ran the schedule.
At night we sat on a rented balcony and spoke about ordinary logistics: lease renewal, his next rotation at work, the date of my following scan. We did not perform healing for each other. We stacked small facts until they made a shape that felt like a life. Once he started to apologize again for the aisle. I stopped him. “You put a jacket on me in front of three hundred people,” I said. “You don’t owe me a monthly penance for her hands.”
May you like
He nodded and let the apology go. Learning what not to carry was part of the trip’s work.
Lena texted a photo of her cat asleep on the box of unused wedding stationery. I sent back a picture of the sea. No captions about strength. No captions about survival. Only the evidence that we were, in fact, elsewhere.
