But I Can't

I was left kind of speechless once I finished reading this piece due to how moved I was, and how deeply I resonated with the story the writer tells. Not just because obsession with extra-terrestrial visitations/abductions formed much of my own childhood and adolescence for the influence of a parent (who didn’t run away but wanted to)… but that’s another story.

In this reflection I’m in part interested to explore how the writer uses different renderings of the human body to convey emotion and information.

Let’s start here:

The first image of Harriet appears after a photo of her mother. Immediately drawing the strong connection between the two as both are depicted with their eyes shifting to the right. This, juxtaposed against the panel where the narrator as a child is looking directly at her mother heightens our sense of Harriet’s loss. This is again emphasized when the narrator says, “Her [Harriet’s] father wasn’t exactly there for her either” accompanied by a depiction of her father’s back walking out of a door, the wind blowing his hair. He seems untouchable. The narrator doesn’t tell us how Harriet felt about this, the images implying absence communicate this perhaps more powerfully than words might.

I’m also interested in the unique layering of panels on page two. The placement of Harriet’s research, beside the panel of them together at school, beside the panel depicting the low fi receptor, beside the active research in Harriet’s bedroom, beside the panel where Harriet looks longingly out into the sky. The action within these panels demonstrates how deeply intertwined these two girls were – in life and in imagination – and how strong Harriet’s internal world influenced the world of the narrator. Further these panels give us a sense of how all encompassing this obsession became for Harriet. They are together in Harriet’s imagination at school and at home, their worlds become consumed. Harriet’s longing for her mother, which pulls her away from the world and into the world of the imaginary is powerfully conveyed in the fact that she is in every panel looking away from the reader and towards something somewhere else – that we can never see.

On page two as Harriet and the narrator are walking at school Harriet’s shadow seems to be such a pronounced element of the panel. This seems as though it can act as a gesture towards her growing obsession with the occult

Even when Harriet and the narrator are together, Harriet’s isolation is highlighted by the way in which the two never meet one another’s eyes, even when they finally do face one another on page three –  as Harriet shows the narrator her photos from inside the ship. Their distance and Harriet’s own isolation is heightened by the intensely eager need for connection and affirmation conveyed in the way in which her face is depicted in this panel – which also gives us a sense of her spiral away from consensual reality.

The top panels on page three have a certain element of chaos and distortion perhaps mirroring the narrator’s sense of what Harriet’s internal world must have felt like as she went “walking out of town at night” performing “strange esoteric rituals, possibly satanic.”

The writer uses a curious and powerful strategy to convey the narrator’s sense of connection to, responsibility for and sadness surrounding Harriet’s disappearance by depicting her in blue-grey – very similar to the green-grey used to depict Harriet in the missing ad in the local paper. In making this choice the writer succinctly demonstrates the way in which they have both in a sense entered the unknown. The way in which both are now lost.

A deeply melancholic grief and longing are conveyed by the three panels at the top of page four which depict open empty landscapes, where the grasses are shifted in the direction of the breeze.

This story ultimately is about the narratives we adopt in the face of grief – narratives that sometimes have the potential to save us, or, consume us, when we are left without proper witness and support. This is punctuated by the way in which the narrator in a sense adopts Harriet’s own theory about her mother’s disappearance, but applies it to Harriet’s own, as she closes the story with the statement, “Still; sometimes I lay awake at night trying to believe.”