OUTLANDER
CLAIRE:
People disappear all the time. Young girls run away from home. Children stray from their parents and are never seen again. Housewives take the grocery money and a taxi to the train station. Most are found, eventually. Disappearances, after all, have explanations. Usually. Strange, the things you remember. Single images and feelings that stay with you down through the years. Like the moment I’d realized, I’d never owned a vase. That I’d never lived in any place long enough to justify having such a simple thing. And how at that moment, I wanted nothing so much in all the world as to have a vase of my very own. It was a Tuesday afternoon, six months after the end of the war.
Somehow,in my mind, V-E Day, the end of the bloodiest and most terrible war in human history, grows fainter with each passing day.
But I can still recall every detail of the day, when I saw the life I wanted sitting in a window.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I‘d bought that vase and made a home for it. Would that have changed things? Would I have been happy? Who can say? I do know this. Even now, after all the pain and death and heartbreak that followed, I still would make the same choice. We were in Scotland on our second honeymoon. Or at least that’s what Frank called it. A way to celebrate the end of the war years and and begin our lives anew. But it was more than that. I think we both felt it holiday would be a convenient masquerade for the real business of getting to know the people we’d become after five years apart. When the war ended, we both thought things would return to the way they once were, but they had’t. I’d never put any stock in superstition and my Catholicism was nominal at best. However, couldn’t shake the feeling that Mrs. Graham’s words had a ring of prophecy. The war had taught me to cherish the present because tomorrow might not ever come to pass. But what I did’t know at this time was that tomorrow would prove less important than yesterday.
Sex was our bridge back to one another. The one place where we always met. Whatever obstacles presented themselves during the day or night, we could seek out and find each other again in bed. As long as we had that, I had faith everything would work out. Once,traveling at night, I fell asleep in the passenger seat of a moving car, lulled by the noise and motion into an illusion of serene weightlessness. Then the driver took a bridge too fast. And I woke to see the world spinning outside the car windows, and the sickening sensation of falling at high speed. That is as close as I can come to describing what I experienced, but it falls woefully short. When confronted with the impossible, the rational mind will grope for the logical. Perhaps I had stumbled onto the set of a cinema company filming a costume drama of some sort. But, there was no logical reason