But I Can't

This story was very intense for how short it was, and even though it wasn’t a full memoire like the others it still seems like a piece of someone’s life was portrayed. The way the story began threw me off a little bit because of the way Lucy is illustrated. For some reason it looked like she was an older woman who might be the others’ teacher. Over the course of the story her face continues to look aged in a way the others don’t, which makes sense in the context of her relationship to Harriet. They grow apart because she takes interest in presumably more mature subjects like science and loses interest/belief in their pursuit of aliens and UFO’s. Maybe Lucy’s face just looks like someone who couldn’t believe in anything like aliens, which means the truth would have weighed on her mind: “she was a defenseless sixteen-year-old girl.” The things she “KNOWS” are those that look like they weigh her down the most. On the last page there is a frame of her looking as though she’s struggling to stand up from the bed, holding what looks like a beer. It seems like the certainties are worse than the possibilities.

The frames with Harriet against the night sky stood out because it looks as though she could be swallowed by the dark. On page 3, where she is all hunched over her tools and equipment, her back is sort of turned to the darkness and it feels like we’re actually looking in on her through the car window. The next frame literally shows her in the midst of a swirling darkness that looks as though it could cave in on her. Harriet is so small and faint compared to the surroundings. In a way it really is the night that swallows her up, however it actually happened. The end of the story is one large frame of Harriet walking through one of the fields at night, but she doesn’t look so small anymore, or “defenseless” as Lucy is saying in the frame over. Harriet looks almost like she belongs out there, the way she is walking determinedly with the man on the moon looking after her. It’s Lucy who looks like she is out of place, in her new apartment with the people she can’t tell things to. The last frame looks like it’s just what Lucy is imagining, almost like she hopes that she doesn’t “KNOW” everything.