Inside, Outside

“I miss you.”

Those are the three little words stuck in limbo beneath my thumb. I desperately want to send them, but the 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. I want her brilliant conversations always, and I think of her constantly. Adrianna’s the Sherlock to my Watson.

You might wonder why I’m not the Sherlock of my own story, but truth be told I’ve never been protagonist material. Between the anxious thoughts constantly chipping away at the fringes of my mind and the mental ticks that count down like time bombs within my chest, I’ve never conjured an adventure worth having or a story worth telling. But with Adrianna by my side, the dark, looming shadows within never seemed insurmountable.

Her boisterous spirit withdrew me from my Nautilus shell, and ever since grade school, we’ve been inseparable. Even the most mundane chores were better together, and if I had placed money on how long Adrianna and I would be friends, I would have put everything on forever.

And I would have lost it all.

The three words stare back at me with wicked grins, and I cave to them, locking my phone and tossing it onto the kitchen counter. Sighing, I press my palms to my eyes. There’s always tomorrow, I tell myself, though the daily mantra withers in its resilience with each failed attempt.

A sharp knock cracks against my apartment door, and sliding off my stool, I sidestep around a wayward stack of books on the floor and peer through the peephole. Trish—the teenager from two doors over—stands on the other side, right hand scrolling mindlessly on her phone and left hand coiled around my mail.

Sliding the chain lock and unbolting the door, I inch it open. The hallway’s stale air is a toxic gas that leaks across my face and seeps into the room. I shy away, distancing myself from the outside.

Glancing up from her phone, Trish’s cerulean eyes meet mine as I peek out from behind the safety of my door. She drops her too-cool-for-you persona just long enough for me to catch a glimpse at the girl underneath—the one who’s been bringing me mail since before she was allowed to dye her hair and pierce her nose.

“Special delivery,” Trish greets, extending forth my mail with her slender, bracelet-lined wrist. She reaches past the threshold of my doorway, knowing all too well that I don’t dare go beyond it.

“You’re the best,” I reply, retrieving the cluster of envelopes and junk fliers from Trish with a polite smile that I hope masks the guilt in my gut. While I pay her weekly for mail deliveries and trash pickup, it doesn’t change the reality that a fourteen year old must do for me what I have been unable to do for myself in some time.

She leaves me with little more than a halfhearted wave goodbye, footfalls growing distant down the carpeted hall as I shut my door. Rifling through the miscellaneous bills and ads, I snag my tea mug from the kitchen counter and traipse to my desk only 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 white paint breaking off and carrying like snow toward 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 a day the sun slips between the buildings in a way that bathes my entire desk in light.

I check my desk clock—8:53am. Seven minutes until the work day, and four hours until the sun.

I remember the days when the sun was mine; the days in which Adrianna and I spent all of our time together. How can two people that were so close end up so far apart?

The literal answer, like for most people, is college. For the first time in our lives, our interests drove us in two separate directions. While I stayed behind for an IT degree, Adrianna moved across country for film school in LA. 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 people, 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 inching closer each time I glance away. My anxieties are medicated but not cured, and they spread like fungus in my chest, constricting my heart and lungs with every decision.

And without Adrianna there to help fend off my demons, one by one they overcame me. University struck me like a punch in the mouth, and I found myself overwhelmed by a teeming sea of new faces. Without Adrianna there to throw me into the throng, my first little demon convinced me I didn’t need new friends, and so I let it stay. By the time I finished school I was barely speaking, and the next little demon convinced me a telework position was better for me, and so I let it stay. I let my little demons persuade me and take up residency one by one, until three years later I now find myself locked out of my own head. Though they began as small voices, they’ve conjoined together, and there’s no real estate left in my mind for me.

Thwump!

Peering up with a start, I search for what’s torn me from my spiraling thoughts and 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 a middle-aged woman leaning on her windowsill from the brick building across the alley. 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 real dreamer, huh?” she chuckles with a sideways grin, teeth yellowing with age and thin lips outlined with wrinkles. She drapes her large, leathery hands out her 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.”

I certainly wasn’t snoozing, I want to shoot back. Being trapped with my thoughts is anything but a snooze, not that it’s her business anyway. “My apologies,” I remark instead, though the words stick in my throat and tussle with my tongue until I’m unsure if I said anything intelligible at all. This is what you get for never being social, the little demons scold, and I struggle to discredit them.

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

I stare at her hand through the open window. While our buildings are close, they certainly aren’t close enough to shake hands. Instead of attempting something as nausea-inducing as reaching out the window, I raise my hand in a limp waive, all the while a lump rises in my throat. I don’t have time to talk, I’m no good at conversations anyway, I only have a few minutes before work—

“What, 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 replying, 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 of irritation. “Since you don’t go outside, whatcha got inside that’s so special?”

I’m not wired for conversations, especially not personal ones. 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 again, although I’m certain I didn’t say any of that out loud—right?—and she drops her weight to her hip. “Fine, fine, keep your secret,” she hoots. “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 you 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. The space where they resided is a few shades lighter than the rest of her sun-tanned skin. She points to one of her bottle-green eyes. “They call it Late-Onset Stargardt’s Disease. Ironic, right?”

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

“A photographer losing her ability to see. 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. It’s all little, gray dots everywhere, like I’m surrounded by gnats but can’t swat them away.”

“How did you get it?” I blurt, anxiety bypassing manners, and I bite my tongue. My mind summersaults with alarm bells, demanding to know the symptoms of the disease, and if I can get it, and how to avoid it, and—

“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.”

“Why not just stay in?”

“I’ve got a lot of pictures left to take before I’m through,” she answers. Her open nature is a stark contrast to my well-guarded exoskeleton, and I can’t help wondering why she’s chosen me of all people.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” I ponder aloud, and again mortification races through my veins like ice water. Leave it to me, who only ever talks to herself, to not know when to shut up.

“Why not?” Jenny responds, as if wearing your heart on your sleeve is instinct. She leans toward me until I fear she might fall out the window. “Believe it or not, I don’t have much of anyone else to tell. Sure, I told my editor and my agent, but that’s business. What I say is I’m losing my sight, but what they hear is they’re losing money.” She sighs. “Always being on the road taking pictures, I didn’t realize until the doctor gave me my diagnosis that I was gonna have to figure this out alone.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, 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 hide from it.”

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

“Not just any pictures,” she beams, then 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 register her question, she tosses the photographs out the window. They ascend in slow motion, glossy pages dancing in the air, and then all at once the packet drops. Jenny’s throw is just shy of my window, and the photos descend toward a crumpled fate on the alley floor. Without thinking, I lunge forward, left hand gripping the windowsill for balance as I reach forth and snag the packet 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 and eat away my momentary joy. Thoughts of what if I fall, and what if someone’s houseplant 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 cheers 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 books. What greets me is a stray dog that sits on a street corner, smiling and awaiting scraps. It’s tall grass and cattails at a small lake. 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 easy to go with her, but I wasn’t just 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 calls out at the sight of my smile.

“I love them,” I all but whisper.

“Then keep them.” Her words direct my attention back to her, and she says, “What do I need ‘em for? If I wanna go see it I can, and by the time I can’t see it anymore, a picture won’t help anyway. Speaking of,” she sighs, 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, excited by the prospects of anything she might discover.

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 my view, and her apartment goes dark. Dropping back into my desk chair, I admire the photographs once more. As I spread them across my desk, my eyes drift over to my phone. I know the message is still sempiternally stuck in limbo, and unlocking my screen, I stare at it again. Not yet, I realize, though I don’t let it get me down. My little demons came for me one at a time, and all the same I will regain myself one at a time.

Grabbing a blank sheet of printer paper from my work station, I fold my own paper airplane, and once satisfied, I rest it at the edge of my desk to await its maiden voyage. As I boot up my computer for work, I let my fingers dance along the paper wings, hand gliding along the outskirts of the windowsill and catching the early morning sunlight.

I check my desk clock—8:59am. One minute until the work day, but the sun is already mine.