Inside, Outside

Those three little words are stuck in limbo beneath my thumb. I desperately want to send them, but trepidation crawls like spiders through my muscles, their legs scratching against the inside of my skin. It’s been three months since I’ve talked to Adrianna—not for lack of wanting or lack of thought. The ache in my chest for her runs deep like an ancient river, so why, at something as infinitesimal as a text message, does my resolve dry up?

Between the anxious thoughts constantly chipping away at the fringes of my mind and the mental ticks that count down like time bombs in my skull, I’ve let the distance between us metastasize into a cancer I can’t cut out. She’s the ghost of someone not yet dead, and I find myself haunted by the hollows of her absence.

Meeting her was like seeing the sun for the first time. Her uninhibited spirit withdrew me from my Nautilus shell, and from grade school on, we were inseparable. With her by my side, the dark, looming shadows within never seemed insurmountable, and if I’d had to bet on how long Adrianna and I would be friends, I would have put every cent on forever.

And I would have lost it all.

The three words stare at me with wicked grins, and I cave under their taunts, locking my phone and tossing it onto the kitchen counter with a groan. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. There’s always tomorrow, I tell myself, though the daily mantra withers in its resilience with each failed attempt.

Defeat devouring me from the inside, I snag my tea mug from the kitchen counter and traipse to my desk a few feet off. My studio apartment isn’t much—even the window faces a brick building nearly an arm’s length away—but I’d rather be inside this small room than outside in the ever-expansive unknown. I call it knowing my limits. My therapist calls it agoraphobia.

Taking a seat and reaching across my desk, I shimmy open the timeworn window, flecks of cream paint breaking off and drifting like snow to the alley below. Though the proximity of the opposing building stifles the breeze, the view, and the sounds of the city, for an hour and a half each day, the sun slips between the buildings in a way that bathes my entire desk in light.

I check my desk clock—8:47 a.m. Thirteen minutes until the workday and four hours until the sun.

I remember the days when the sun was mine; the days in which Adrianna and I took on the world outside. How can two people so close end up so far apart?

The literal answer, like for most, is college. For the first time in our lives, our interests drove us in two separate directions. Our daily phone calls and messages slipped into comfortable weekly check-ins, then regressed further as our schedules conflicted and life chugged on. However, I cannot blame our disconnect on the cliché of growing up.

The nonliteral answer, unlike for most, is I’m me. I’m a collection of raw nerve endings coiled far too tight, my phobias like feral creatures lurking in the shadows and creeping closer each time I glance away. My anxieties are medicated but not cured, and they spread like fungus in my chest cavity, constricting my heart and lungs with every decision.

And without Adrianna to help fend off my demons, one by one they overcame me, taking up residency inch by inch until—three years later—I find myself locked out of my own head.

Thwump!

Peering up with a start, I tear free from my spiraling thoughts to find a paper airplane resting against my tea mug, its nose partly crumpled.

“About time I got your attention,” a boisterous, weather-worn voice declares from seemingly thin air, and I whip my head around the room—Please don’t tell me I’ve officially lost it.

“What are you looking at? Over here.”

Following the voice, my gaze traverses out the window to the brick building, where a middle-aged woman leans precariously on her windowsill. She wears dark, oversized sunglasses that conceal too much of her face to guess her age, though creases line her forehead.

“You must be a dreamer, huh?” She chuckles with a lopsided grin, teeth yellow with age and thin lips outlined in wrinkles. She drapes her large, leathery hands out the window, their veins like indigo worms wriggling beneath her skin. “I was doing everything shy of screaming bloody murder, and here you are snoozing away.”

Being trapped with my thoughts is anything but a snooze, I want to correct, not that it’s her business anyway. “My apologies,” I reply, the words sticking in my throat as if my rarely warmed vocal cords are too brittle to let them out.

The woman swats my words from the air, then extends her gnarled hand out the window to me. “Jenny Greems, photographer.”

I stare at her hand like she’s plunged it into an acid bath. While our buildings are close, the prospect of reaching beyond the security of my apartment sends my mind into a nauseating spin cycle. I settle for raising my fingers in a limp wave instead and fight the bile rising in my throat.

“What, do you hate the sun or something?” Jenny grunts, though she holds onto her good-natured smile. “It’s good for your skin.”

Scattered words tumble in my head like marbles, and as I scramble to collect them, I panic that I’m taking an eternity to answer. “It’s more… the outside,” I find myself saying, though I can’t comprehend why I bother telling her.

She harrumphs, puckering her lips. “Outside is good for you, too,” she clarifies, and I repress an ebb or irritation. “Since you don’t go outside, whatcha got inside that’s so special?”

Pinpricks of unease stab through my skin and bleed my face of color. I wonder how this lively woman could ever understand—though she has every right to wonder—why I prefer it inside. The truth is, I don’t prefer it at all.

Jenny wags her hand in the air again, though I’m certain I didn’t say any of that aloud—right?—and she drops her weight to one leg. “Fine, fine, keep your secret,” she teases. “I wasn’t asking so I could rob you, you know.”

“I never thought that,” I respond too quickly, which makes it seem like I was definitely thinking that.

“I’m just wondering because I’m gonna need something to do inside soon, too. Figured an expert like yourself might have some pointers.”

“Inside soon?” I echo, my social cogs in desperate need of oil, or better yet, replacement.

She nods. “I don’t wear these glasses to attract suitors, Honey,” she remarks, withdrawing them from her face. She points at one of her bottle-green eyes. “They call it Late-Onset Stargardt Disease. Ironic, right?”

I don’t respond, partly because I don’t know what Stargardt Disease is, and partly because she talks too fast for my untrained brain to keep pace.

“A photographer losing her sight. Sure, I won’t go blind—probably—but I’m not gonna see much for much longer. I already don’t see half as much now. There’s little, gray dots everywhere, like I’m surrounded by gnats but can’t swat them away.”

Dread pools in my veins as my mind sounds with alarm bells, demanding to know the indicators of the disease, the causes, if it’s avoidable, if I’m already symptomatic, if—

“How did you get it?” I blurt, anxiety bypassing manners, and I bite my tongue.

“Hereditary,” Jenny states simply, interrupting my meltdown as she replaces her glasses. “That’s fancy doctor speak for ‘we don’t know how to cure you.’” She perches her hands on her hips, then returns them to the windowsill as if she can’t handle being inside more than a minute. “Sunlight exacerbates it, unfortunately, which is why I’m taking a quick break.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, but again she bats away my words like a professional tennis player.

“Save your sorries. I’m not sorry you’re stuck in there, am I?” she asks with the shake of her frizzy hair. “Not one bit. It’s just life, and if I had to follow life around and apologize for it all the time, I’d want nothing more than to run and hide from it.”

Her words suffocate me, and I struggle to find my next breath. “So,” I choke, “you, uh, take pictures?”

“Not just any pictures,” she corrects, smile glowing with something like sunlight from within, before she scrambles out of sight. There’s rustling from her apartment, a loud bang, a crash, a string of swears, and a second later she returns to me with a short stack of glossy photographs held together by thick string. “Can you catch?”

Before I have time to tell her no, she tosses the photographs out the window. They ascend in slow motion, lustrous pages waltzing in the summer air, and then all at once, the packet drops. Jenny’s throw is just shy of my window, and the photos descend toward a ruined fate on the alley floor. Without thinking, I lunge forward, left hand gripping the windowsill for balance as I stretch forth and snatch the bundle before it’s too late. Sunlight illuminates my skin from above, and peering below, I find four defunct paper airplanes in the alleyway.

I’m outside.

The realization unleashes exhilarated butterflies in my chest that metamorphose into moths eating holes through my momentary joy. Thoughts of, What if I fall? and, What if someone’s house plant drops from the floors above and kills me? flash through my mind, and I suck myself back into the vacuum of my apartment.

“Attagirl!” Jenny hoots with a clap, and I unbind the photographs with trembling hands.

The photos that greet me are not the raging seas or perilous mountains I’ve read about in novels. What greets me is a stray dog smiling on the street corner, awaiting scraps. It’s a boy wading through tall grass and cattails. It’s an ancient oak tree with a tire swing. It’s little moment after little moment of all the wonderful, little things.

I run my fingertips over the luxurious paper, vibrant colors transporting me from my apartment to the streets below. I’m where the inside cannot get me—I’m in the reasons why I followed Adrianna outside all those years ago. It was easier to go with her, but I wasn’t there for her. I was there for me. I was there despite the fears and the creeping anxieties because what awaited me outside was worth it. And just like that, I gain an inch of ground within myself.

“You like ‘em?” Jenny asks at the sight of my smile.

“I love them,” I all but whisper.

“Then keep ‘em.” Her words snap my attention back to her. “What do I need ‘em for? If I wanna go see it, I can, and by the time I can’t, a picture won’t help anyway. Speaking of,” she adds, withdrawing from the windowsill and stretching her arms, “it’s about time for me to get back out there.”

“What’ll you photograph next?” I implore, hungry to share in her adventure.

She shrugs. “Who knows. That’s the beauty of the great unknown, my friend. But when I get back, I’ll trade you the pictures.”

“Trade for what?” I ask, and she grins that big grin.

“How about we start with your name?”

Shutting her window before I can tell her, she escapes from view, and her apartment goes dark. Dropping back into my desk chair, I spread the photographs like a deck of cards and admire them once more. My eyes drift from the last photo to my phone beside it. Unlocking my screen, the message sits like an immovable boulder, and I stare at it again.

Not yet, I realize, though this time the defeat doesn’t get me down. My little demons came for me one by one, and all the same, I will regain myself one at a time. Grabbing a blank sheet of paper from my workstation, I fold my own paper airplane, and once satisfied, I rest it at the edge of my desk to await its maiden voyage. I let my fingers dance atop the paper wings as my computer whirs to life, hand gliding along the outskirts of the windowsill and catching the early morning light.

I check my desk clock—8:59 a.m. One minute until the workday, but the sun is already mine.