Love Always, Paige Angel

Karen’s mouse hovers on an opened email – it has been four months now, and her “Paige Angel” column in the Bulletin has grown, complete with reader letters asking for advice. “Wondering in Wanderlust” is asking her about leaving the city behind in search of something else, something less colored by the painful memories of the past. She sharply inhales and hesitates over the back button. She’s not sure she can deal with such a personal question – not in print, at least. Sighing, she stares out the window of the train speeding past the evergreen landscape of Vermont, carrying her closer to home with every second.

When her mom had called about coming into town for her father’s birthday, she was hesitant – she had been back to visit exactly once since she moved to New York. Her parents always say they understand she’s busy, but what they don’t say is that they know the town is haunted for her now. They saw her behavior last time she visited, which was, quite frankly, the definition of a shit show; they thankfully didn’t press the issue of visiting since then. Until now.

She knew her mom wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t a big deal – so, here she was, on a train, ready to spend the weekend in Fagan Corners, Vermont. Well, not quite sure if she was ready, but she can deal with this. Maybe. She turned her attention back to her laptop – she was not ready to deal with writing about it, not right now at least. Karen shut her computer and slid it into the padded sleeve of her bag. Maybe she’d write her column on the train ride back, besides, according to the time, they were set to arrive at the station soon.

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It’s funny how you can look back and it seems like life turned on you in an instant. Relationships can implode with a few short sentences, people can be gone in a second; everything in life just seems so fragile and fleeting.

Karen Page remembered back fondly to what seemed like yesterday, the muggy east coast summer catapulting her back to practically another lifetime. The endless summer days spent lying on the lawn, or cliff jumping out at the lake, and the cool, lazy nights with friends piled into the back of the old faded red pickup truck that her brother was unbelievably proud of, despite being a banged-up stick shift. Driving out to the bluffs with some blankets and a bottle of cheap Canadian whiskey, they were all chatter about how they were going to make something of their lives and had everything planned out. So much for that one, Karen thought morosely, life’s bitter unfairness jarring her out of the past memory into reality, which was arguably more painful.

She could hear the grating voice of Nancy Grace blaring from the TV downstairs – as good as it was to see her parents, she couldn’t quite deal with all of it right now, so she told them she was going to turn in early. Karen shut the door to her old room, then froze in thought for a second before walking over and sliding the window open, wide. She smiled, her parents had never bothered replacing the screen in it – she had taken it out back when she was in high school; she and Kevin would sit on the bit of roof it opened onto and talk late into the nights about everything from cartoons to philosophy to bitching about their parents’ rules.

Being back here, it stung. Karen crawled through the window and onto the roof; she leaned back and gazed up at the sky – the Vermont nights were a lot clearer than the smoggy city ones she’d gotten used to.

Peeling her hair off the back of her neck allowing for the balmy evening breeze to cool her skin, Karen twists her hair neatly into a bun and sighs. How did things end up this way, were we really just that naive as teenagers to take for granted that we would all still be here, that we all still deserve to be here? Rolling her eyes, she silently answers her own question – yes, of course we were. Nobody expects to have the rug torn out from under them, much less the entire town you grew up in turn poisonous. Every curve of the only house she knew, the streets she learned to drive on, the faces that populate every single memory – now even the tiniest minute detail brings back a flood of memories, ghosts, and guilt; especially guilt.

It doesn’t matter what triggers the floods of old memories and the fresh sting of feelings anymore – maybe the weather, maybe the siblings picking on each other on the sidewalk - it still rushes over her in new waves of guilt and grief every damn time. Everyone told her it would get better with time, that he was in a better place, that he would want her to move on. Karen rolled her eyes and shook her head at just the thought of such bullshit.

The way she sees it, it doesn’t matter what he would have wanted, he’s dead. Gone. And the only thing he left is a slew of unanswered questions, all of which are too painful to go digging for, at least for right now, maybe forever.

Honestly, she has no idea if time or moving on will ever make anything better, but she’ll be damned if she doesn’t at least try. It’s why she moved to the city and doesn’t mention it to anyone – nobody needs to know the consequences she lives with. She doesn’t want pity, and if somebody tells her it’s not her fault again, she’s likely to scream. Karen knows that on paper, and in practically everybody else’s eyes, it’s not her fault; she quit trusting people when they say that though – she knows her guilt, and doesn’t need people to skew the situation and lie and make her feel better. We all have things we have to live with, she figures, this is hers.

Besides, how does that conversation even come up? Karen sighed, she figured it was a lot like Matt’s vigilante activities – not exactly something that’s easy to drop into a regular, everyday conversation. She quickly hated herself for likening the two – of course they were different, Matt should have made the effort to come clean instead of continuing to lie to her, and Foggy too. It’s not like she can be angry at him for trying to make Hell’s Kitchen a better place, she’s too proud of him for that, but he didn’t have to lie to them to do it. That’s not what friends, or what whatever more they were, do to each other.

She knew that running away wasn’t a fix, just a band-aid attempting to cover a glaring mental trauma that was practically bleeding. Ignoring it and telling herself that everything was fine because she needed it to be wasn’t working for her anymore – maybe the time had come to actually face her feelings.

The email she read earlier today – the one about leaving what you know behind because it’s haunted by unbearable memories, it’s been eating at her. Maybe she will print a response. She climbed back through the window and sat on her bed, opening her computer. The email was just how she left it – asking for advice on what to do to escape a city steeped in painful memories. Karen folded her legs under her and pulled her laptop on top of them.

Dear "Wondering in Wanderlust" - The truth is that nobody tells you is that leaving is easy – taking just what you need, and walking away from all the crap you don’t, it’s a great feeling. The trap lies in going back. Once you get used to running, the harder it is to stop, the harder it becomes to return to that place, be it a city, an apartment, a person, or even a mentality.

Maybe it’s a lie, and there is no going back, not really. Things change constantly, and they won’t ever be in that same spot just as they were again. The best we can do is try to move forward, even if that means not doing anything differently. Things change enough on their own; we can either accept the way they are now or fight them. Memories are painful, especially when they remind you that there is no chance of going back to how life was then, to the person you were then, in that moment.

I had someone tell me once that we can either learn a lesson in life and move on, or keep being put in the same situations until the knowledge finally beats its way through our thick skull. The real question in all of it isn’t how to escape painful memories, or whether or not to leave a city because of them, but what lesson is to be learned in all of this? How can we learn something and use it to move forward?

I hope you find your lesson, be it here in the city or wherever you have to run away to – run away and join the circus to find it, if you have to – because at the end of the day, the demons don’t reside in one set location, they’re in your head. No matter where you run, there will always be different things that set off a flurry of the past. It’s terrifying, but it gets easier – the memories get easier each time they’re dredged up, and eventually, it gets easier to think about, to come to terms with.

The past is painful, and the future is a terrifying unknown – the present is somewhere in the middle, fueled by the pain, and unsure of the future. The uncertain part of the future is hope – there’s always the hope that there will be plenty of good times ahead that make the past a little easier to bear. That’s the trick though, you have to keep believing that things will get easier; the shine of the future doesn’t erase past darkness, but it can keep the path ahead illuminated so we can keep moving forward.

Love Always, Paige Angel

Karen leaned back against the headboard and glanced over what she wrote – the words had just kind of leaped out of her brain. She wasn’t even sure if she was writing for the column or more for herself; it didn’t particularly matter aside from her feeling like a hypocrite for giving advice she was still figuring out herself. It was like the blind leading the blind, she thought, as she smirked at the fact that the only blind man she knew spent his nights leaping off of rooftops.

Though coming back here, seeing everyone again, was a whole new level of painful, she oddly felt a sense of having moved on. She had found her own way – her own path in the city. Despite the things that drove her there and all the shit that she’s been caught up in, it’s still home. Karen glances around her room in the house she considered home by default for so long – this hadn’t been home in a long time. Even when she had lived here, it wasn’t everything she had figured a home to be. When she moved to the city, sure, she was alone, but it felt comfortable, and then when Matt and Foggy found her, things illuminated and everything about it felt like home.

Maybe that’s what really makes going back to somewhere more bearable – the knowledge that it’s not forever; it’s really just a way to keep moving forward.