Page 50 of The Rom-Commers

I promise, if there were any way to skip it, I would.

But you have to know what happened first to understand what happened next.

Until you know the before, you can’t grasp the after. Why leaving my dad was so excruciating for me. Or why I never went away to college—getting a bachelor’s and a master’s online instead. Or why I’d squandered so much promise, or why I was willing—evenpreferred—to give up so much for my sister, or what a big deal it was for me to attempt to start my writing career in earnest.

Not to mention why it was extra-douchey for Charlie to refer lightly to my “failed career” as if his hot take was the only possible read on it. As if a cursory glance at anything could ever be the whole story. As if my life—my sorrow, my grief, my sacrifices—was something some ill-informed casual observer had any right to judge.

I have to tell you the thing I’ve been putting off telling you.

Stick with me. We’ll get through it—and we’ll be stronger on the other side, as all of us always are, for facing hard things and finding ways to keep going.

Plus: Bearing witness to the suffering of others? I don’t know if there’s anything kinder than that. And kindness is a form of emotional courage. And I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but emotional courage is its own reward.

Lastly, I promise: everybody was okay now. Sort of. Mostly.

With obvious exceptions.

Iwas okay now, at least. Really. Honestly. Truly.

Okayenough, at least.

I’d had almost ten years to recover, after all.

Wow—had it really been that long?

Ten years since we took a family camping trip to Yosemite to celebrate my graduation from high school—and the writing scholarship I’d won to Smith College.

Ten years since the rockfall that ended our family as we knew it.

Ten years since I was sitting on an outcropping of rock while my dad belayed my mom, keeping the ropes on her harness tight while she worked her way up the rock face, and my sister, Sylvie, and I sunbathed—smacking on strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups as she begged me to tell her that seventh grade would be better than sixth.

But how stingy I was. “I can’t promise that,” I said. “Middle school is supposed to suck.”

“Emma,” Sylvie said, pouting. “Come on.”

But I didn’t give in. “Lean into the misery,” I told her, feeling wise and grown-up and cocky. “It’s good for you. It bolsters your emotional immune system.”

So smug. So foolish.

That morning—the last morning of our normal lives—is weirdly vivid in my mind to this day. I can see the honeyed yellow sunlight falling across our legs. I can see the mismatched purple and pink socks poking out of Sylvie’s hiking boots. I can see the frayed Band-Aid onher knee, and the Hello Kitty earrings I kept teasing her about, and the half-scratched-off hot-pink polish on her nails as she took a swig from her water bottle.

Such a goofy little kid.

I remember myself, too—that stranger I used to be. How the breeze was tickling my neck with escaped wisps from my ponytail. How I couldn’t wait for summer to end and college to start. How my high school boyfriend—Logan—had suggested we stay together even after leaving for opposite sides of the country for school, and I told him I’d “think about it.” How eager I was to grow up.

More than anything, I remember that feeling I kept carrying like a sunrise in my body that my life was really, genuinely, at last, about to begin.

I can place myself in the moment of that morning in vivid 3-D, as if it’s still happening somehow, over and over, on an endless loop—my dad still holding the belay rope, and my mom working her way ever higher on the rock face, the sound of the wind high above in the background like a rushing river nearby.

All of us totally fine. Better than fine. Happy.

If my life were a screenplay, I’d end the story right there and roll credits—and then maybe rewind and watch it again.

But real life’s not a loop, is it? There’s always another moment that follows.

What I remember best after that issounds.

A series of clacks coming from high on the rock face almost like fireworks.

---