“Truth is not simply what happened, but how we felt about it when it was happening, and how we feel about it now.”
— Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By
The Lost Identity
When Randy returned home from Ethiopia, he came back to a world that looked eerily the same as it did when he left. The streets looked the same. The houses sat in the same places they always had. His parents still moved the same, talked the same, asked the same predictable questions. But Randy was not the same.
After many nights imagining what it would be like to drive down his street again, when the moment came, it was as if the comfort of nostalgia had been erased out of him. The relief he was reaching for remained just beyond his fingertips, and he wondered if he would ever feel like his old self again.
At first, he convinced himself that adjustment was simply a matter of effort. It seemed reasonable enough to assume that if he could be changed so much in three years, he could easily go back to what he always knew.
He tried to step back into ordinary life, pushing himself to become useful and engaged. He made attempts at conversations, and drifted through the motions of family life, feeling trapped inside the heavy, dark cloud that felt attached to his entire body.
Every normal thing seemed to ask too much of him. The everyday world felt oddly staged, full of people discussing errands, bills, jobs, church, dinner, and plans for the future, while none of that seemed important to Randy anymore. The mundane tasks of everyday life felt unbearable, and the fear that he was too broken to function inside normalcy stirred up his deepest wounds, leaving him very unsettled.
He had come home with too much inside of him. His body was there, but some essential part remained elsewhere, trapped in an experience no one around him seemed capable of entering. Even if he had the words to explain what he had lived through, he knew his family couldn’t understand, and wouldn’t really want to. Randy knew it would be easier for everyone if he could find a way to suppress and move on.
But that did little except bulk up his shame. Not simply because of what had happened, but because he was afraid he couldn’t master himself afterward. Randy had always seen himself as the one who could step into the spotlight as the vivacious one; the one who could soften the sharp edges of life and add color to the dreariness. With that part of him dulled, who was he supposed to be now?
The emptiness on the other end of that question scared him, so he withdrew. And while it felt like the safest thing for Randy to do, he became trapped in his loneliness. The more his parents pushed him to go back to school or find a job, the more misunderstood he felt. The more misunderstood he felt, the more he retreated from the world around him. If his pain was too dark for the world to handle, then he’d figure out a way to live so he didn’t need the world at all.
But he did need it. That was the tragedy. Behind the withdrawal was not emptiness, but an overflow of ignored truth. Behind the man performing indifference was still a boy aching to be understood without having to explain the memories that haunted him the most.
At 23 years old, he was tasting the bitter truth that he wasn’t as invincible as he hoped he was. It was as if his innocence had evaporated into a strange funk, and it was easy to listen to the nagging inner voice that reminded him that he would never be more than trouble.
Home had become another place where he could not quite belong.
Then Christmas came, and the only person Randy could think about was Susan.
Susan
Randy never knew how much Susan had also been changed by his deployment. Once it was confirmed that he would be leaving, something inside her cracked. She tried to continue college life in Knoxville, but the daily routines and schedules felt lifeless and empty. Some days, she could barely get out of bed, and she lost the motivation to do well in her classes. The weight was too heavy to hold. She decided to leave Knoxville and move back home, where life still seemed to make sense.
Her parents tried to remind her that she still had her whole life ahead of her, that time would soften the blow, and the future was yet to be seen. But their words felt less like encouragement and more like a dismissal of the grief that had split her open. A life that might never include Randy did not seem like anything worth looking forward to.
The last time they saw each other had been devastating. Randy’s face was draped in an expression Susan had never seen on him before, and as he told her the latest about his departure, she struggled to find the words for an appropriate response. It was as though everything inside her had frozen in disbelief.
Perhaps, in his desperation, Randy hoped there might be some way to soften the blow of such a cruel turn of events. Just as they were about to say goodbye, he asked Susan to marry him. Maybe he tried to frame it as an adventure they would always remember, or maybe he hoped it would give him a possibility of being excused from leaving. Or, more simply, maybe he was terrified, and the idea of clinging to love was his last saving grace.
But Susan knew better, and she said no.
She felt her heart crumble into a thousand pieces watching him drive away, knowing there was a chance she might never see him again.
When his letters arrived, her hands would shake as she opened them. The sight of Randy’s handwriting pulled her backward into a simpler version of life. One where that same familiar script had appeared on notes they passed in class, full of teasing, affection, and the reckless confidence of two young souls who hadn’t learned yet what the world could take from them. Her heart pounded as she read every word, and with the site of Randy’s name at the end, she would curl into herself and cry. Her grief became so consuming that her mother grew more concerned.
When the emotional wave finally settled, Susan would think about writing back, but like before, the words would not come. A letter from her could comfort him, wound him, encourage him, confuse him, or keep him tethered to a hope she didn’t know how to promise. She wanted to say something that would help, something kind enough, strong enough, true enough. But no sentence seemed equal to the weight of what stood between them. So she froze and said nothing.
In the silence where her reply might have been, Randy was left to believe in whatever narrative his pain decided to write.
…
Three years later in 1976, Susan had begun finding a way back to herself. She enrolled in the first nursing program at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and when classes resumed that fall, a friend mentioned seeing Randy around town.
Susan’s heart seemed to jump, stop, and sink all at once.
Should she call him?
No, she had been taught not to call boys.
But would he call her, after she had never answered his letters? Would he be hurt? Angry? Had he moved on? Had he convinced himself she had forgotten him? Had he, somehow, forgotten her?
Suddenly, she felt as though she were back on the same emotional roller coaster, caught once more in that familiar, frozen feeling.
Then, on the day after Christmas, just as her family was about to leave for vacation, there was a knock on the front door.
It was Randy.
December 26, 1976
Susan was shocked when she opened the door.
For a moment, she barely recognized the man standing in front of her. The small delay before her recognition returned cut deeper into what remained of their frayed innocence. Randy was used to feeling like an outsider at home. But to be unrecognizable to the only person who had once known him so tenderly was another kind of wound altogether. Randy had come looking for some sign that a piece of his old life still waited for him there. Instead, he was met with the sharp realization that even Susan didn’t know who he’d become.
Whatever he had imagined might happen dissolved as soon as he realized Susan and her family were about to leave for Florida. She was caught in an impossible position.
Behind her, her parents were urging her toward the car. In front of her stood the one person she had feared she might lose forever. The boy whose absence had changed the shape of her life, now returned to her thinner and worn down, showing the harshness of the last three years all over his face.
They stood there for a few minutes, while Susan asked the careful little questions people ask when the deeper ones are too dangerous to touch.
How are you?
When did you get back?
How’s your family doing?
But beneath those small words was everything they could not say.
I missed you. I was hurt. I was afraid. I thought I had lost you. I don’t know who you are now. I don’t know who I am with you standing here.
Before the conversation could move beyond the safety of politeness, Susan’s father called from the car.
“She’ll have to talk to you later, Randy.”
Susan saw the ache in his eyes as she promised she would call him when they got back. Then she turned and left with her family.
Randy remained on the front stoop, watching her climb into the car, feeling dismissed, embarrassed, and exposed in a way that knocked the wind out of him.
Her father’s matter-of-fact tone didn’t sit well, bringing back the old suspicion that the man had never really liked him; had never believed he was good enough; had always been waiting for the chance to put him in his place.
Having survived too much already, it was easy for Randy’s hurt to shift, again, into defiance.
Under his breath, he said, “I’m going to marry her, and you can’t stop me.”
Coming Soon: Something To Prove