You take everything, she’d cried. And she didn’t even know about Joel.
Was it true? Did I try to take things from a life I envied? I don’t even know anymore.
We seem to always make our way back to each other, but is there a tipping point where our friendship breaks so completely that it can’t be glued back together?
As if my thoughts called her, my phone screen flashes Phoebe’s face. For a moment, I’m not entirely sure I’ll answer. My emotions and my memories are so tangled I hardly know what to think.
But habits die hard. The news hits me in the middle of the chest like a fist. Juno was such a light, alive with a burning that came through her voice and her songs. She couldn’t have been thirty. Phoebe gives me the details, and images blast through my protective layers, the blow to my head, the fall, the kicks. I close my eyes. Take a breath. If they’d chosen to shoot, I would now be dead, and the first thing that makes me think of is Joel, that I would not have had a chance to be with him one more time. She urges me to come down but I need to do what I’m doing.
I hang up.
I think of Nadine Truelove. Juno Gerhert.
I think of my father and the fact that the LNB failed to kill me. It comes to me that I’ve been looking at all this the wrong way. My father tried to break me and he failed. The LNB tried to kill me and they failed.
What will I do with that gift?
In a rush of emotion, I bend my head over the page. And begin.
I’m still here.
The only way through the morass of thoughts is writing. I’ve never lost the diary habit. I call it journaling now.
I pick up a blank Moleskine, connect my phone to Bluetooth, and settle at the banquette overlooking the ocean. I write the date at the top of the page and pause, wondering how to address it. I think about Joel, about the feeling of him against me, the way I felt when I saw him standing on the porch after such a long time, as if the world had righted itself at last. How he smells just the same. Below the enchantment lurks a darkness I am not ready to face, the things I told Phoebe I need to be here to finally let go of.
Another flash of Joel, eyes closed as he kissed me, plays across the screen of my eyelids. His hands on my body. His laughter in the middle of the night when we found ourselves exhausted and shaking.
How was that possible, that someone could not be part of your life and then suddenly they were so huge, right in the middle of it? But I can’t write about that right now.
Nor can I write about the LNB. I don’t even want to. My heart yearns toward the light, toward something bigger.
I write:
Edwina sent me a bunch of scripts and I am bored by all of them. The women are all the same—over fifty, struggling with families or lonely after being widowed or with husbands who are sick. Why don’t they move me? What am I looking for?
They have no agency, these women. They’re acted upon, not making their lives their own. Which might actually be true, that many women feel that way, but—
What I want are stories about women who are doing all the same things a woman does at every other stage of her life. Setting goals, having adventures, learning new things, having sex with a man （or woman） she finds hot, discovering new things about herself. Maybe I should write my own movie, write a part I’d like to play.
Huh.
What might that be?
I pause and tap my pen against my lips.
Maybe she would be an adventurer. Maybe a biography about Georgia O’Keeffe, striding through her life, living it her way until she died at 98. I’ve always thought she must have had an affair with the young guy who came into her life so late, and maybe that could be a good topic. Why not?
Because people might judge her as being ridiculous, allowing herself to have big feelings for somebody who clearly took advantage of her.
Or did he? Maybe they used each other.
But maybe a different angle. Maybe her decision to start traveling at age 60, going to India when she was in her 70s. What would that have been like back then?
Or maybe I could just make somebody up. An adventurer in the 1930s who went to North Africa, who had an adventure and a love affair at age 65. （Omar Sharif! Too bad he’s gone, but there must be a similar actor out there.）
That would be a fun part to play. And I’d want the sex on screen, no fading away. Normalize it.
When Joel returns, I’m still pouring my heart out on the page. Music plays on the speakers, and I don’t even realize hours have gone by until he knocks. I look up in surprise, and clouds have moved in heavily over the Starfish Sisters. My arm is very tired. I’ve filled many pages.