Chapter 1
“I don’t want to make anyone sad, not even you.” Those were the words she started with, the only words she could think to write. A ton of possible words, explanations, and reasons bombarded her brain before she actually sat at the kitchen table to compose a letter.
She wanted to write about the accident and how it had inwardly changed her and how she should have acted sooner. But in front of the blank white paper she froze. Instead of pouring out her heart to Nick, her own thoughts and feelings, the ones she hid in her locked journal, she looked out the window in a daze fixated on the rain hitting the pane. Nick’s words reverberated in her head, the ones he used so often, “Isa, you sadden me.” Those words rested like an anvil on her heart each time he sarcastically spit them from his mouth. Those words came after every argument.
What was the point in writing anything? She couldn’t express herself like the authors she read. She was a reader, not a writer. Besides, she and Nick were beyond what words could fix. The marriage was broken. So, she wrote,
“I don’t want to make anyone sad, not even you.”
Isa
She left the note on the kitchen table, ripped the pages out of her journal, burning them one by one, watched the ashes disintegrate down the garbage disposal, picked up her suitcase holding a week’s worth of clothes along with a new journal and her laptop. Tomorrow she would begin divorce proceedings. She would return for the rest of her stuff when she figured out what she was going to do. But she already knew what she was going to do. She had been Googling Europe for months, in particular, France.
J. Schlenker 