Fairy Mode

Ella tripped down the ramp toward the ferry with just two minutes to spare. She could feel the engine grumbling beneath her feet as her phone vibrated in her pocket: a message from Catherine.

________u back yet?

Ella scanned her ticket in the box, swung her bag over her shoulder, and tapped out a response with one thumb as she pushed through the turnstile:

im on the ferry rn________

________do they have food??

Ella made her way to a glossy padded bench toward the bow, stowed her backpack overhead, and sat with a contented sigh. The ferry smelled like Pledge and tide pools: salt, fish, and damp halfway masked by a sharp lemon scent that punched the back of her sinuses and dared her to sneeze. She imagined it was the last place on earth she’d want a snack:

there’s a little bodega thing with like walmart bananas and red delicious apples. hard pass.________

________at least there’s service, i’d be so bored

my phone is on airplane mode but it automatically connected to the wifi from last time________

________ferry mode

fairy mode________

One of Ella's clients had recommended her for a housesitting gig on a nearby island. For the past three late-summer weeks, she'd taken care of a small but bright cottage and an old orange cat named Fever, who drooled excessively when he purred. Ella had taken full advantage of the solitude. She unplugged the wi-fi router, meditated, journalled, and listened to a non-duality podcast as she rode a beach cruiser bicycle around the island. It was the retreat she’d been calling in for months.

Ella's aunt had died in January. Since then, as she'd helped pack up and sell a lifetime of stories and belongings, Ella had felt more responsible for and curious about her own memories. She had longed for a chance to figure out what they really meant: which were helpful, and which ones weren’t doing anything but clouding the present with doubt and blame. She wondered: if she could remember things differently from one moment to the next, then maybe none of her memories were actually real at all.

Her reflection was interrupted:

________i’ve never actually been on a ferry before

one time i was on a ferry in costa rica and i dropped a brand new bottle of THC-infused oil on the deck. my friends and i got on our hands and knees and slathered as much of it on our bodies as we could and were blazed out of our minds for the rest of the day.________

________LOL that’s wild

Ella turned in her seat, taking in the other passengers as the ferry gently lurched into its route. She recognised a family she'd seen a few times at the natural foods store: twin boys and their parents, presumably on their way back from vacation. One of the boys was holding onto a balloon. She nodded and smiled as they spotted her, waving kindly.

________how long is the ride?

about an hour, this thing moves pretty slow________

Ella looked out of the window at the water, steely grey with tangling ribbons of white foam. The clouds were thick and dark, the horizon blurring with distant rain as the ferry powered further and further from the dock:

when we see clouds, are we looking at like the bottom of the cloud, or the side??________

________sounds like a flat-earth debate LOL

i should ask Wolfsbane________

________he’ll be mad you don’t know

and at the same time, so glad that i asked________

Ella smiled. She and Catherine met as neighbours four years ago in a small town that was more or less defined by psytrance raves, cannabis farms, and drama. They had accumulated a bizarre clutch of mutual friends: conspiracy theorists, flow artists, militant vegans, self-proclaimed shamans, and young runaways who changed their name every time they dropped acid. Wolfsbane checked every box:

i saw him in town the day i left. he looked good________

________aw Wolfsbane.

gobbless Wolfsbane________

Ella could smell rain rolling in over the channel. The ferry dipped over the crest of a wave and she felt her stomach turn:

tbh i feel a little nervous about seeing Stephanie________

________seriously?

yeah________

________well she’s not your friend. this isn’t new information.

Ella hesitated. She and Catherine had discussed and even argued about Stephanie for the past couple of months.

________dude she’s so toxic. you said so yourself

Ella frowned, frustration mingling with regret and twisting across her face. She felt like that term was neither fair nor correct, however much it echoed her own sentiments from just a few weeks ago.

Stephanie was a yoga therapist, eleven years older than Ella. The three women had all worked in the same natural health clinic. Catharine and Stephanie rarely crossed paths, but Ella and Stephanie had developed an intimate and even edifying friendship over the years.

Ella had flown to her childhood home for Thanksgiving to support her family through her aunt's final cancer treatment. Ella stayed through Valentine's Day: she cooked, cleaned, organised an estate sale, went with her mother to church, and returned a few months after the funeral.

By then, Stephanie had moved her practise to a new clinic. Catharine threw Ella a small welcome home party, which Stephanie did not attend. Ella noticed that Stephanie wasn't watching her story on Instagram regularly anymore, and sometimes left her texts on read. She seemed distant, or distracted, or… disinterested?

The more Ella focused on the shift, the worse she felt. She slogged through confusion and panic, and then grief, and then into a place so dark that it could only be described as terror. She lay awake at night anxiously -- angrily, even -- replaying conversations and re-reading text threads: who reached out first more often? What had she meant by that? What did she think I meant? Why didn’t she come to the party? Why didn’t she respond? Doesn't she care what I just went through? What did I ever do to her?

The more Ella pushed to reconnect with Stephanie, the farther away Stephanie felt. As they crossed paths organically around town, Ella grew more awkward, more defensive. She desperately wanted Stephanie to notice how upset she was, to text her and ask, “did I do something to hurt you?" so that Ella could lay it all out: the confusion, the sense of abandonment and betrayal, the paranoia. She yearned for Stephanie to not only participate fully in her drama, but to save her from it.

Eventually, a heartbroken Ella had decided that the best way to protect her own heart was to send Stephanie a lengthy “good riddance"-type text and to block her on social media. She had felt powerful behind her angry little boundary for a few days before doubt began to creep back in. The next time she saw Stephanie, they had completely avoided eye contact:

yeah, maybe. but i think i made her that way.________

________what do u mean

i saw her the way i needed to see her for my drama to be real. what if i saw her the way i needed to see her for my PEACE to be real?________

Ella continued:

i’ve been on this kick of really trying to perceive everyone and everything as innocent. and then i went and decided that she’s the one exception to the rule? i stopped being curious.________

________you shouldn't have to be curious if people love you. and she should know better: she's way older

maybe old enough to trust that Love doesn't go anywhere? like mature enough to actually know how to go with the flow________

________you can go with the flow and still text people back

that kinda thinking is what hurt me in the first place. i really want to forgive the whole situation, even if we never like get back together as friends________

________imo forgiving her just enables her to do the same shit to other people. i bet you're not the only one she ghosted

i think forgiveness is admitting to myself that she never did anything to hurt me to begin with ________

Ella felt a tear spill onto her cheek, which had reddened with sudden shame. She kept her eyes closed, waiting until that nagging, damning voice in her head quieted. It seemed very natural, very human to resist when relationships expired. But, month after month, she'd found herself more interested in unnatural, even divine processes. Her phone screen buzzed back to life again:

________LOL how can you say that? she definitely hurt you.

maybe i used her to hurt myself __________

________idk it just seems like your standards for friendship are super low

haven’t you ever grown out of a grudge? or like realised that you misjudged a situation?________

________sure but this is more than a grudge. real friends talk and validate each other, and she literally refuses to. you didn't misjudge that.

Ella rose from her bench and walked through the smeared glass doors to the lower deck. More often than not, she and Catharine traded complaints and criticism, validating one another’s respective fear as opposed to bolstering one another's faith. As funny as it could be, and as normal as it seemed, Ella was becoming disillusioned with gossip.

________you’ve been complaining about her being a shitty friend for months. i thought you were making progress?

Ella slipped her phone into her pocket and held onto the railing with both hands, feeling the steel with her palms and resisting the urge to pick at the stiff, metallic bubbles of peeling maroon. Her own insecurity had begun to peel back like paint exposed to decades of saltwater spray, uncovering a strong, raw, and gracious heart.

Ella felt a small but victorious smile begin to spread over her face. A compassionate and hopeful gesture, free of pity, sarcasm, or embarrassment. She had never considered forgiveness as anything other than letting someone off the hook for something they did wrong. Now, she felt a wild sense of conviction and clarity that she was in fact letting herself off the hook for taking their behaviour so seriously and so personally to begin with. She took her phone back out:

seems like my options are 1. keep trying to make the conflict real or 2. admit that nothing actually happened ________

Ella watched Catharine’s message bubble … and then stop. Ella appreciated that Catharine was trying to protect her; she also felt that Catharine was clinging to the very part of Ella that she desired to surrender.

A determined sunbeam suddenly cut through the clouds and Ella turned to the left and raised her phone to take a selfie in front of the now-sparkling water. Another message came through, the notification briefly blocking Ella's face on the screen:

________honestly sounds like stockholm syndrome. kinda disappointed.

In an instant, the twin boys ran by laughing, their balloon jumping behind them like a kite. The string caught on Ella's wrist and flipped her phone onto the deck. It spun and scuttled across the boards and neatly over the bow into the water below.

And Ella laughed.