by Kelsey Liu
The room—her new bedroom—is still empty except for three cardboard boxes and one unpacked nightstand. She picks out three silver framed photos from a box and places them in a semi-circle, fidgets and adjusts as she smiles down on her little sister at her graduation, her mother and father at a New Year’s party, and one of her classmates, Anna, perched in a black polka-dotted one-piece at the side of a small white waterfall.
She unpacks two more boxes and loads the kitchen cabinets with bowls and plates. The view outside her window is spectacular. The sky blushes over a still, gray ocean and the white beach churns with tracks and wandering footprints.
Australia sure is scenic, she thinks, as she hammers nails into the drywall of her new living room. She’ll hang up diplomas and photos on those later, after she makes a mental list of all the things and places she came here to do and see.
Scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef, of course. Surreptitiously collect a sample or two of pastel colored coral. Drive a dusty, blue, open-top jeep through the outback. Get kicked by a kangaroo. Or maybe avoid getting kicked by a kangaroo. Find one of those crazy giant lizard-dragons Anna used to mimic with hissing demonstrations and claw-hands. Learn to surf, build an uneven tan, spend days window-shopping for the perfect striped bikini top and waste away weeks lounging in it on the beach.
She picked this apartment building for a reason. It would be comforting, probably, to look inland and spot her apartment window as she’s surrounded by the unapologetic sun and the loud golden bodies littered along the coastline. She’ll put a plant on the balcony, something distinctive, to make it easier to identify the place as something she could anchor down and call home in a strange new land, something heavy and plain to settle her still-green stomach and steady her shaking adolescent hands.
She anticipates struggle. It’ll difficult to willingly burn herself away, but she’s ready, she thinks, to peel away the old skin of the girl who always kissed back but never kissed first, who always clapped but never shouted from the sidelines, who always told Anna it was okay if she wanted to go out with friends. I’m fine—I’m fine, just going to have a quiet night at home. I love you, too.
She wants rebirth, craves it with the small quiet spark that survived being wrapped up in all the resignation and disappointment and waiting she’s subjected herself to for all twenty-two years of her life. She craves it with the same silent love she has for Anna’s collarbones and her vibrant red hair and her brash, sparkling voice in their dorm room on the nights they both had midterms the next morning. She craves regeneration, searches for it within the sweet sadness of regret.
Anna laughed as she jumped off cliffs and dove under unmerciful waterfalls, laughed for the picture by her bed, the one she allows herself to keep even after their break-up.
She starts big. She goes swimming with sharks. She’s so terrified and nervous she almost shows up late to meet with the random tourist group she booked the experience with, and when she tells herself it’s an adventure, an adventure, she starts feeling so sick she barely escapes the compulsion to curl in a ball and hide away until everything remotely exciting passes her, again. She thinks of her little sister in her cap and gown. She catalogues the boxes of novels she still has to unpack and tells herself to breathe. She centers herself and walks into the cage.
The great white sharks, thankfully, ignore her so completely she eventually finds the courage to snap exactly two pictures with her specially purchased underwater camera. After that, she declares her attempts at exciting-new-bold successful enough and huddles in the middle of the cage and waits. Her vision tunnels in and out, pride and fear and panic tangled in a bright, pulsing mess behind her eyes and in her belly.
When she uploads the photos onto her computer, she finds a picture of the powerful curve of an exiting shark’s tail and another of a gray and white blur that might resemble a shark, if she squinted.
She keeps the glass covering Anna’s polka-dotted swimsuit smeared with fingerprints.
She takes a couple weeks just tanning on the beach afterwards, and finishes buying little things like coffee tables and flowers to make herself a home. Learning to surf is infinitely easier, and so is scuba diving. The small size and non-carnivorous nature of the angelfishes and damselfishes and all the little quicksilver streaks play a big part in her relative comfort. After twenty minutes, she relaxes enough to admit that it’s gorgeous. The sun filters through the water and plays on the back of her hands, and she could see her apartment just by swimming back to the beach not that far away, and everything is so mobile and vibrant, yet muted by the dull weight of seawater in her ears, and it’s almost perfect.
For the first time in weeks she thinks about Anna again.
She used to think she did all this for her. That she moved to a new continent to prove herself worthy of more than the desk job and an old cat and a rock-steady routine. That maybe she even wanted to be Anna. It would make sense. It would be understandable. It also wouldn’t be true.
She remembers the soft, tender places on her belly that Anna used to poke and nuzzle on, and those parallel soft, tender places inside her, less physical, that had ached when Anna left. She spent a lot of her hours curled up in a thick blue blanket she had taken with her from home. She thought about calling her parents and playing like she was six years old again, and her mom’s spaghetti that was better than any chicken noodle soup from a can, and her dad’s steady hands on the handle of a shovel, working in the backyard. She knew her parents would take care of their baby. They loved each other, too—went steady—steady as could be, steady like dirt and sun and rain and everything that she thought she could draw and enjoy from life.
But then she dated Anna, who had never planted cherry tomatoes or found anything better than spontaneous road trips or accumulating frequent flyer miles to canyons and mountains and Paris. She dated Anna, and it was thrilling and terrifying and sharp and soft and not quite as unexpected as it should have been, and four months after she graduated and six after Anna left, she moved to Australia. It was time.
When she finally returns to Missouri, she does it to attend Anna’s wedding to a lovely woman she met at her cousin’s bachelorette party. She arrives, clasping lilies, with pronounced tan lines, freckles on her nose, bleached hair, and a happy certainty in her chest that yeah, bring it, she can do it, because she already has.