237 - Two Hundred Thirty Seven

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[TRANSCRIPT]

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“Dead over there. Where you’re from.” 

So. Junior is…supposed to be dead? In the—the proper timeline or whatever you want to call it? So if he…if he died here…

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Nope, I can’t think about that. Not—not right now anyway. Maybe later, Harriet and I can…

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I guess I haven’t really said much about our grand reunion. Well, it wasn’t that grand. I told her where to go, she remembered enough about the song to figure out where it was, and she showed. 

It’s…it’s fine. It’s good. It’s terrible. I don’t know. We—

Well, we’re not really talking about anything, you know? Everything that happened before I left, everything that’s happened since, her being alone this whole time, me finding Donnie and then… 

Harriet actually—well, unlike Donnie, she wanted to come on the radio with me, “if I insist on broadcasting still”. But I…

I told her no. I don’t know who’s listening to this anymore—or at all. I never know if Birdie is going to drop off the face of the earth, or if Fox gave up, or if there are other people out there who can hear my voice and just not speak back. But this is…this is mine. And maybe it’s selfish, but I’m not—I’m not gatekeeping the radio waves from Harriet. She has her own radio, if she wants to broadcast, she can. 

But I don’t want to argue with her on here. I don’t want to have my thoughts and feelings and perceptions called into question when I’m just trying to get all those things out, work through them. And she hasn’t done that so far, not yet but I— I can’t think straight around her. And I need to be able to…I need to keep a level head. I need—

We still haven’t talked about Don. She started to say sorry, but I cut her off before she could finish. I couldn’t bear to hear how to finished it. Would it have been “sorry for your loss”? Or “sorry you blame me for Don’s death”? “Sorry I betrayed you”? “Sorry I led you on for years and we still haven’t—“ 

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It is both harder and easier to be angrier at her when I’m with her. Easier because I have something to aim at, because sometimes I’ll look at her and I’ll see her face in the moment that I told her I—

And then other times, she’ll enter a room and I’ll get that whiff of lavender and turpentine and everything inside me just…melts. 

I want to be able to make her the villain in my story—I remember thinking…those first few days I was driving around, I remember thinking that if I found someone, if I really found someone else and we got to talk and get to know each other and really form a bond…well, you know how you practice conversations in your head? Ones you had ten years ago, ones you’re planning to have, ones you know you’ll never have. Well, I would practice talking to this imaginary person and telling the story of my life. It would be so easy to make Harriet the villain—rival into turncoat into nemesis. There’s a clean narrative there, one that I wouldn’t have to lie about to tell. Leave certain things out maybe but…that imaginary person, they’d believe me. They’d be on my side. 

But I didn’t find anyone. I just kept talking to the open airwaves and it was so much harder to keep the story straight when I wasn’t telling it all at once. When my feelings on the subject changed every day. When I hadn’t seen Harriet in months and I started to miss her so badly I’d get in my car and start driving back to Pennsylvania only to turn around when I had to stop to refill my gas tank. 

I never told you that, I don’t think. I spent so much time, wasted so many miles driving back to her. I always turned around right back around again, had to watch the same road go by. 

So maybe I haven’t done a good job of making the story simple, me as hero, her as villain, but the story I’ve been telling is still mine. And I don’t—I’m not ready for her to tell her side of it. 

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