Young Writers Society

From the time she was young, Caroline’s parents had always told her to work hard, and the rest, they assured her, would figure itself out. And for a while she had a lot of good fortune.She had always been a smart child. School came naturally to her. Four years of straight As, a perfect ACT score and a wide range of extracurriculars from spending the second semester of her sophomore year in Italy to captaining the Varsity soccer team culminated with an acceptance to Harvard in late March of her senior year. Caroline remembered those last few months well.

“Did you hear that Caroline Craig got into Harvard?” she’d hear someone say in the hallway.

“Damn,” their friend would respond. “Is she going to go there?”

“I think so. She’s so smart, you know she got a 36 on the ACTs, right? And she took AP Physics as a junior.”

She’d been so sure of everything then, so focused on her future and her dream of becoming an environmental lawyer that she’d shut everything else out. She wondered what her classmates must have thought of her. “What does this girl know about suffering? She has everything.” Probably something along those lines.

“Caroline, hello?”

Ivy’s voice snapped her back to reality. “Yes?”

“Hey, are you okay? Can you do this trip?”

“I’m fine.”

Ivy looked at her with worry. “I’m going to go get us some food, okay? We probably don’t board for like, another thirty minutes.”

“That would be great.”

“Chipotle sound good?”

“Ivy, sometimes you read my mind.”

Ivy smiled, grabbed her wallet, and walked off. Caroline looked out at the wide windows before, watched the airplanes on the runway as they ascended into the sky, as they touched down in search of their gates. In the horizon the son

Caroline had been many places and had traveled on many airplanes, but for the first time she began to realize how fascinating the whole concept was. That in a few short hours, you could be in another part of the country, or even the world, when less than a hundred years ago such a voyage would have taken days or even months.

By the time Caroline would wake up in the morning, she and Ivy would be in Rwanda to conduct research about the dwindling population of mountain gorillas. It had been a dream of hers ever since she was a little girl. For five months she’d looked forward to it with increasing restlessness. But now that it was her, all she felt was empty.

Max’s words to her still rung in her head. “If you walk out that door, we are done, you hear me?”

“Max, I have to do this trip.”

“Fuck you. You’re such an insensitive bitch.”

Five years they’d been together. Five years of thinking that he was the one.

Relationships were one thing that Caroline never had been good at. When Max came along, everything was good for a while. Then the baby had come. Nine months of pregnancy only to give birth to a baby that was already dead.

Reality set in. Caroline poured herself into work, pushed Max away. Then she met Ivy when she’d arrived for her first day of work not a year ago, twenty-two years old, just out of college, so bright and optimistic about the opportunities of the world. Their friendship had really gotten her back on track to realizing what was important. But by then their relationship had already been irrevocably changed.

“Max, I carried this baby, don’t be so fucking selfish.”

“I’m being selfish? You’re the one who got so wrapped up in your job that you did absolutely nothing for our relationship. I’m so fucking tired of being the one who initiates everything. Do you even care at all about our relationship? Baby, I love you, but I don’t think I can do this anymore. Especially if you’re going to be gone for six months.”

Caroline hadn’t been able to answer. She did love Max. She wanted to marry him. After all, she was still only twenty-seven. Plenty of time to try again for kids. But so overwhelmed by her emotions, she’d run off. As if losing the baby wasn’t enough, she had to lose Max too.

Then the tears began, right in the middle of the crowded airport.

Ivy returned with the food. “Here’s your chicken burrito.”

“I love you.”

Ivy sat down, noticing Caroline’s tears.

“Hey, it’s okay. Come here,” she said, letting Caroline cry into her shoulder.

“I messed up. I really fucking messed up.”

“No, hey. I can’t imagine going through what you went through. Something like that is going to be difficult for anyone to deal with. Don’t blame yourself.”

Caroline searched for something to say, but only tears came.

As the sun set further into the horizon, Caroline watched the planes rise and descend. People going to a new reality, far from the one they had now and in their specific place in time. Not even possible a hundred years ago.

“Max hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you.”

“I’m doing the same thing all over again. I’m running away from difficult things.”

“Caroline, hush,” Ivy said. “You’ve wanted to this trip forever. I get where Max is coming from, but he should be able to respect what you want too.”

“I feel like such a bitch.”

Ivy sighed. “Sometime life isn’t easy. You can plan and plan and plan for everything to be great and it all goes to hell. We’re going to have a great trip. This is going to be great for our careers. And then we’ll go back. Look, I’m twenty-three. There’s still so much I don’t know about the world. But what keeps me going is that I know there are good things ahead. And maybe Max wasn’t the one.”

Caroline sighed. It was hard to imagine meeting someone else she loved the way she’d loved Max. And as much as she wished she could have gone back and made better choices, she knew she could only move forward. And that future would be without Max. She’d lost him through no one’s fault but her own. It stung a lot to think of it that way, but maybe there were better times ahead. She was only twenty-seven. That was still a lot of life to live.