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After Rachel disappeared, it was easy for Chloe to resent her, and to feel a spark of hatred towards her.
Her whole life, she felt, had been a saga of people leaving her. And while a rational part of her knew that her dad’s death was not her fault, nor was it him choosing to leave her, in the face of Max abandoning her as well, it was not possible for her to feel no resentment towards him. For Rachel to be another person who abandoned her without any rhyme or reason felt just like the confirmation of this trend that was her life. Even Max whose abandonment of her was without discernible reason and done at the worst time in Chloe’s life, this at least had happened with her parents forcing her to move to Seattle.
But for Rachel, who had for years been her whole world, and who had made Chloe feel like maybe she was not totally worthless. For her to also leave without saying anything felt like a cargo ship container worth of salt in the wound. Chloe could understand the impulse to leave Arcadia Bay without a word to those around her, and indeed Chloe had dreamed and schemed with Rachel that one day they would do just that. But for Rachel to leave her without a second thought felt like confirmation that she truly was worthless.
While Chloe made constant efforts to find Rachel, with her spending all the measly savings she had on countless missing persons posters, and trying to find any signs of where she might have gone, this was in many ways a bandaid on a bullet hole. Sometimes there are things that you do, which are pointless efforts to maintain composure, as otherwise the only future that you are able to conceive of is oblivion. For Chloe, these fruitless efforts to find Rachel, and to make her explain why she left her were that. But as the days went by and as the world gradually started to move on from Rachel, with her disappearance transforming from a major event in a small community like Arcadia Bay that galvanized efforts to find her, into just an event that happened in the recent past, which people were starting to move on from and to form their own narratives of what happened to Rachel Amber. Chloe increasingly found that all she had was oblivion. And in the face of this oblivion which signaled that her future was not to be an escape from her shitty life alongside Rachel, but rather confirmation that all her worst fears about herself were true, Chloe found that this sparked a hatred for Rachel within her.
Hatred for someone who used to mean the world to you is a strange feeling. While on some irrational level she resented her father for dying, it was hard for her to truly hate him. She knew that it was not his fault and that he did and would have done everything in his power to prevent that from happening. She first truly felt this hatred towards Max. Initially when her thoughts about Max turned from sadness at her departure to feelings of resentment and hate, it made her feel sick. She struggled to understand not just how Max could do this to her, but how she could feel hatred for Max. The person who had meant everything to her what felt like seconds ago in the grand scheme of things. It felt like a rot at the very core of her being, where what had previously been a lode-bearing part of her life crumbled into dust. While she still clearly and acutely felt that she needed Max, she knew that Max in her abandonment was making it clear that she neither needed nor wanted Chloe as part of her life. It was the worst feeling that Chloe had ever known.
When Chloe began to feel this rot in her being in the absence of Rachel, she did not feel sick, but angry. Rachel knew what Max leaving had done to her. Rachel knew how much Chloe loved her and depended on her. Chloe had thought Rachel loved her. Chloe had thought that Rachel wanted to be with her, and that she wanted for them to share a future. And yet she chose to leave without a single word, nor was there a single discernible sign of where she went or why. It was so much easier to hate Rachel than Max.
What made Chloe hate herself alongside Rachel is that at the same time she felt all of these things about Rachel. She also knew that if at any time Rachel called her, showed up at the junkyard or showed up at her house and apologized, she knew she would forgive her. When she felt these things it was easy to tear herself apart. How could she possibly feel this way about Rachel, who left her? Even though Rachel was all the good that Chloe had left in the world, if she let Rachel do this to her and let her back in, would that not just be a confirmation that she deserved such a thing? Or at the very least that it was acceptable for Rachel to leave again at any point in the future without any fear of blowback?
~~~
It felt easier to imagine Rachel returning, apologizing, and Chloe retaining a shred of self-dignity when she reunited with Max.
Even though Max saved her life, it was still easy for Chloe to hate her initially. The fact that Max had been back in Arcadia Bay for a month before she saved Chloe had to mean that she had truly hated Chloe and that was why she abandoned her. Or else she would have tried to find Chloe, and mend what she had broken. When Max explained how she had stopped Nathan and saved Chloe from him shooting her, Chloe wanted to ask why she had even bothered.
‘You don’t give a shit whether I live or die, so why did you stop him when he was going to finally end this disastrous experiment of a life,’ Chloe often thought after she initially reunited with Max. ‘You would have saved my Mom and Step-Douche, the embarrassment of when I finally die in some fitting and explosive way.’
When Chloe tried to express some version of these thoughts to Max in those early days after they reunited, Max had cried and between her sobs apologized again for abandoning Chloe. She sobbed that Chloe was wrong in her fears that she did not give a shit whether she lived or died, and that all she wanted and indeed had ever wanted was for Chloe to be happy, and that was naively why she had stopped talking to her after she moved to Seattle. She had been afraid that her inability to be there in the same way as before for Chloe, in the wake of William’s death would only be insufficient and hurt Chloe.
Chloe found this a hard pill to swallow, in the face of reality, but she had a hard time saying this to Max. Once she had come to hate Max, Chloe had often fantasized about a future where they would see each other again, and Chloe would let her have it. Let her know how Max had destroyed her and abandoned her. But watching Max sob, after she saved her life, she found that this impulse died in her throat. It felt cruel, just a vindictive act that would not fix the past or make her feel better. And on a more selfish level, Chloe feared that if she yelled at her, maybe Max would realize she had been right to leave Chloe and would leave her again.
It was in this unexpected sensation and decision not to castigate Max like she had fantasized, that Chloe found herself starting to feel her old sense of love for Max. And a wish for them to be like they had been in the past. Sure, Max had left her, and the scars that caused would never completely leave her. She knew that even if Max never left her again, she would always worry that she was disposable to Max, and wonder if she might choose to leave again.
She also started to feel a hope for a future beyond the oblivion that she had found herself staring into for months since Rachel had disappeared. She started to hope that if Max could return to her, maybe Rachel would also realize she had been wrong about Chloe and she would return. Maybe there would be a future where she would have both of her best friends back. Maybe she could be something still and this would just be a chapter in her life where things were bad, and in the future she would be able to laugh at the dramatics of the past.
~~~
Resentment towards the dead is distinctly different from resentment towards the living.
Resentment towards the living is about countless different things. Chloe had resented Max for abandoning her after the death of her father. She had resented the way that Max chose to stop talking to her. And initially after they met back up, Chloe resented that Max had chosen not to try to mend things once she returned to Arcadia Bay. Chloe resented her Mom for allowing David to terrorize her and the ways in which she saw her Mom seemingly try to forget that her dad had ever existed.
Resentment towards the dead is about time and about what could have been if life had been different, or if there was more time. Chloe resented her dad for a long time after he died. She resented that there would always be a hole in her life, where her dad would never again be. He would never be there for her when she needed him for advice or love, and he would never be there for the important moments in her life. She also resented him for this resentment. She did not want to feel this way, she wanted him to be there.
When Chloe and Max found Rachel in the junkyard, initially all Chloe could feel was an all encompassing grief and anger. A grief that the world and Chloe had seen all there ever was and ever would be of Rachel Dawn Amber. There would be no future moment where Rachel would take the world by storm. Everything that she would do she had done. A grief that their dreams of the past of the future, would now forever be the dreams of the past. And a general all encompassing grief that her Rachel would never again make her laugh, would never again brush her hair, would never again eat breakfast with her at the diner, and would never again make her feel loved.
Alongside that grief she felt an anger about the bullshit and unfairness of it all. She felt an anger that anyone would ever do something like this to Rachel. And she felt anger at herself for hating Rachel. While Chloe knew Rachel was far from perfect and it was increasingly clear that she was very good at keeping secrets and lying to Chloe, she felt she should have known that Rachel would never leave her like this. Rachel was many things, but she would not want to be cruel like this to Chloe.
The fact was that as Chloe knew, Rachel did truly love her. That did not mean that Rachel was incapable of cruelties towards her, as Chloe knew increasingly clearly, there were many things that Rachel did that were cruel, intentionally or not. But Chloe truly knew and felt Rachel’s love to be the fundamental truth. It just was not possible for them to have done all they did together and for it not to be based on how Rachel genuinely felt about her.
She did not feel this all so clearly at the time that Max and her discovered Rachel, as in that moment all she could feel was extremes. It was how she came to feel increasingly as the initial wave of extremes crested and receded with time. It was how she came to feel as they morphed into a new resentment and a never ending feeling of anger at the world.
This resentment, like the one that she felt towards her father, was not so much a resentment at anything that Rachel did, but in the lack of time. She resented that she did not have the time to learn the things about Rachel she only learned in her death, and that any wish for real closure was eclipsed by Rachel dying. She resented that Rachel could not leave her with simple and uncomplicated feelings about their relationship.
The anger, much like the resentment, was not at what Rachel did, but what was done to her and what it meant. She knew she would feel angry for the rest of her life that Rachel died at 19, at the hands of two monstrous psychopaths who did not feel remorse or care that she died. She knew she would feel angry for the rest of her life that instead of getting the respect that she deserved, that she had been buried in a shallow grave in the goddamn junkyard for months and months. She knew she would always feel a sense of anger whenever she reached an important milestone in her life, and could not share it with Rachel. And she always felt especially angry when she realized that she had forgotten something about Rachel that once she would have been able to remember without any hesitation or doubt. First it was the smell of her shampoo and body wash. Chloe had found that she struggled to remember these smells even before she knew Rachel was dead, but it only felt crushing after she knew would never have another chance to reacquaint herself with them. Then it was little details of conversations that they had, or what they had done on certain days. What made her the angriest was when as the years began to go on, she found that she struggled to remember bigger details like the sound of Rachel’s voice. She felt an anger like a forest fire that this foundational part of what was one of the most important people in her life, had been extinguished and was gone from her life and her memory.
In moments like those, Max would always try to comfort her, which often gave Chloe a weird sense of almost an inverted déjà vu. It once had been Rachel who had in different ways comforted Chloe about Max abandoning her.
Chloe struggled to know whether this feeling of déjà vu should comfort her or serve as a source of pain, as a reminder of what can no longer be. This only served to feed the resentment that she felt towards the complicated mix of feelings that defined her time with Rachel.
But at the same time, it pointed towards a future worth something. Yes, it was not the future that Chloe had dreamed of with Rachel, back when that was a thing she could do. But it was not the oblivion she felt after Rachel disappeared. And it was a future in which she would never forget Rachel and would know that there was something in her that was made up of what had been Rachel. It was a future which she hoped Rachel, wherever she was, or whatever remained of her, would approve of. While the shell of their plans together had been for them to make a life together and make their way up in the world. There had been at the core more fundamentally a hope for a future where things were happier and there was love, which had been for both a rare resource at the time. And while Rachel was gone, in the aftermath of finding her and the Storm, eventually the future did become brighter and there was greater amounts of love in Chloe’s life. While Chloe could put that as being due in large part to the love and care of Max, she felt in this a reminder of Rachel and what she had meant and would always mean to Chloe.
Resentment towards the dead is certainly different than towards the living. While resentment towards the living is often driven by anger, jealousy, or hate. Resentment towards the dead is often driven by love and the anger at what was lost. As time went by that was more important to Chloe to remember, not the flaws in Rachel, but the love that they shared and the life that was lost.