If You Were Wondering - Prologue

Prologue

 

It’s amazing how quickly time moves. One day, you wake up to the sound of an alarm clock, telling you to get up and go to school. The next day, you’re in the house you finally paid off, your wife of twenty-five years sleeping on the other side of your bed. So it goes. Time marches on, but sometimes you miss things.

Even now, I’ll sit at my desk in my apartment in Portland, 24 years old and a best-selling author, and I’ll take one of my books off the shelf. A book I wrote, with my name on it, and I’ll think to myself, When did this happen? I don’t even remember writing this. I’ll see my name, Michael Larson, and my picture on the sleeve in the back, and it would feel so surreal. And then I’ll notice that my bow tie is crooked and nobody bothered to tell me before taking the picture. I guess, like everything else in my life, I must have blinked and missed it.

But there are also things that you can never forget. Things that eat away at you for years; things that keep you awake at night, wondering if they could’ve gone differently. Sometimes I’ll see Hugh’s hand swing across my face, I’ll feel the sting where it hit my eye, and I’ll smell the alcohol and cigarette smoke on his breath. I see Amy look down at me, shock on her face, when she sees me bleeding on the floor. Sometimes I even see the long road ahead, covered in snow, and me, looking back one last time at that house, before I walk away and never return.

All of those things are crystal-clear in my mind. It doesn’t even feel like it happened five years ago. I had never seen those people since, and for a long time, I didn’t think I wanted to. But the thought of seeing how they are now kept eating away at me. I kept asking myself, Why not? What harm would come from going back for a day? A week even? Just to see where they are now?  That’s what I’d been wondering all those years. And if you were wondering, it was never the same as actually being there.