Cold Comfort: Wednesday, July 3, 2024 – Agatha

Dear Diary,

I had lunch with Emily and Jane today, completely by accident. I waited for them to leave the lodge (spying, guilty) so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, especially because it’s always so damn obvious when I’ve been crying, but I have to pass Dickinson on the way back to Christie and I heard someone call my name.

Well. My July name.

“We’re having a picnic!” Emily told me, giggling like maybe there was alcohol involved. “Join us!”

She’s got enormous blue eyes, and she knows how to use eye liner to make them look even bigger. Her lips are painted the perfect shade of pink, even out here, and there I am, in old baggy clothes and no makeup and my hair falling out of a ponytail, and I said yes.

She caught me off guard. Seriously off guard. Emily is clearly a popular girl. Jane looks like a ballet girl, tiny and delicate, but Emily’s a popular girl. I’m a nothing sort of girl, especially lately, so washed-out I’ve started to disappear, but Emily asked me to eat lunch with them.

And I did.

Jane was out in front of the cabin. I think that’s the front. She was on the lake side, anyway, in the shade, on a red gingham tablecloth. Is there one of those in the closet in my cabin? Did they ask Alyssa for one? Or did Emily bring a picnic blanket along with her?

Life is full of unanswerable questions.

They had beer, bottles of stuff I’ve never heard of. Apparently you can only get it in Wisconsin, so I’m not sure if one of them’s from Wisconsin, but I accepted the offer. Alcohol’s a depressant, but I’m not on any meds right now, so at least whatever I feel is an honest reaction. Plus I only had the one bottle, so it’s not like girls gone wild. I’ve barely had anything since entering hell, so hey, I might as well drink as I wander around here, right?

It’s hard to talk when you’re not going to talk about yourself. Emily giggled about Edgar and Jane helped her list off all his recent roles and awards and stuff, but for some reason I haven’t paid much attention to the entertainment industry lately. You get accused of a few things … you get separated from the man you love … who cares who’s got what fake beef with whom over supporting actor whatevers?

“Okay, Agatha’s actually obeying the rules,” Emily finally said with a smile. I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me like a mean girl or like a friend. “Subject change. Maybe we have some hobbies in common.”

Jane snorted into her beer. “Henry knits.”

“Oh, God, I saw that.” Emily rolled those big blue eyes again, and this laugh was definitely mean girl. “You didn’t ask him about it, did you?”

Jane shook her head, her own brown eyes wide but not nearly as big. Seriously, everything about her is tiny. “I am not approaching him. There’s something weird about him.”

“There’s something weird about all of us.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud.

Jane nodded first and then shook her head. “I think the weird thing about him is that there isn’t something weird about him,” she tried to clarify. “Or it’s not the right weird.”

It sounded like nonsense, but then we were all nodding.

They got into it a bit more, and I did some more nodding, but it’s true: you don’t come here because everything’s perfect and normal. It’s a retreat, which means you’re retreating from something. Something’s driven you here, so you’ve run away in the hopes that it won’t find you. Jonathan goes out of his way to make sure it won’t find you.

“There is no weight on that man’s shoulders,” Jane declared, pointing her small finger very dramatically down toward the Longfellow cabin.

“Yeah? What’s the weight on yours?” Emily asked, the sort of challenge that meant her face changed half a second later and she slouched a little. “Sorry. I didn’t … sorry.”

I think that’s the entire point of me writing this right now: it came out of nowhere, and it hit her, and she’s this total Amazon woman with blonde hair and makeup and strappy sandals and a complete Look. She’s gorgeous with perfect skin and basically seems like a Barbie doll brought to life, and she still got completely blindsided by her own heavy thing.

It’s not just me. How weird and wonderful and awful is that? It’s not just me.

Maybe it’s because it hasn’t hit him the same. God, my own private diary and I’m going to burn it and I don’t even want to name him here. What, just in case someone breaks into my cabin and finds this book and reads it? I don’t want to write about what I did, the things I did for us, and how he reacted to those things, and how somehow the solution to our problems is me being away from him now, and how I’ve been walking through hell alone.

But the question, the thing I really need to ponder, is if I do actually want to tell anyone here. I might want to tell Jane, maybe, because she’s so elfin and not nearly as intimidating as an Amazon warrior, but that doesn’t really seem fair. If I’m going to share, it should be with both, and they can’t tell, anyway. They’re not allowed. I don’t need to name names, but I could just tell them about love, and the things we do for love, and the way men sometimes just don’t understand how much we love them. I could at least tell them that.

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Cold Comfort: Wednesday, July 3, 2024 – Alyssa, coming July9