I didn’t want to write books myself, but I loved the idea of some long-dead or long-forgotten travel guide waxing about cathedrals of old and shrines of forgotten gods. I loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organized in the exact right order, made you miss places you’ve never visited, and people you’ve never met

It still smelled the same as I remembered. Of old books and weathered leather and crinkly paperbacks with broken spines, romances and adventures and fantasies and travel guides, paperweights to picture books. When she wasn’t traveling, my aunt read. She pored over stories, drowned herself in words. In the summers between our adventures, she’d build a pillow fort and crawl underneath it, lit with fairy lights and lavender-scented candles in mason jars, and we’d read together. Sometimes I spent entire weekends adventuring with Eloise or solving mysteries with Harriet.
There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever.

And, in turn, that monster didn’t let her see all the things she would miss. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The sunsets. The bodega on the corner that had turned into that shiplap furniture store. The monster closed her eyes to all the pain she would give the people she left—the terrible weight of missing her and trying not to blame her all in the same breath. And then you started blaming yourself. Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you even knew to ask, if you could just read between the lines and—
If, if, if.
There is no easy way to talk about suicide.
Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

Change wasn’t always a bad thing, like my aunt had convinced herself to believe. It wasn’t always a good thing, either. It could be neutral—it could be okay.
Things changed, people changed.
I changed, too. I was allowed to. I wanted to. I was.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.
Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.
And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.