Why We Stayed; Why We Stay.

I know, I know. We need to take action. We need to leave. This burnt-out city holds no future for us.

When people ask why X and I stay here, I usually only talk about the original reason: my firm sent me here on a temporary basis. It was a great opportunity to cultivate a new practice area that I could bring back west. A sweet deal, at the time: they even paid for rent. For a while.

Most people accept that version and leave the questioning at that-- if they're still here, they read the economic winds wrong too.

Closer friends know the more fundamental reason: after Annie's ReDS diagnosis, we couldn't move back. On the CDC's recommendation, the Feds forbid us from boarding airplanes or crossing state lines. Among other forms of quarantine.

Technically, we are free now-- X and I. We've had a clean bill of health for months. Socially, we are still treated like lepers-- anyone who has been in contact with a ReDS patient knows the experience-- but the TSA has removed our names from their "no-go" lists. Or so we've been told-- the bureaucracy there remains as byzantine and secretive as ever.

No, what's kept us here for months on months longer than we should have tolerated is the feeling-- unspoken, to each other and to the outside world-- that to leave here would be to leave her: for real, for good, for ever. Her ashes are here, so we can't help but feel some last essence of her being is as well.

Annie, Annie. Will you forgive us? If you were a little older, maybe I could imagine you wanting us to move on. But it's hard to know what a two-year-old would wish for their parents. You didn't know what death was, yet. Except as whatever was happening to you.

I guess we didn't really know, either.