Things I am not emotionally prepared to see in the post-rescue timeline (but are inevitable):
•Shauna getting pregnant with Callie and being haunted by constant flashbacks/hallucinations of her pregnancy with Wilderness Baby. Giving birth to Callie but feeling a cold, hollow disconnection because she’s terrified to love another child.
•Nat in a string of relationships/hookups with toxic men who treat her like shit because that’s what she’s been conditioned to believe she deserves. Watching her relapse after being sober in the wilderness. Enduring drug overdoses, failed rehab attempts, and nights in jail. Watching her live a lonely, nomadic life with no home.
•Travis returning home and having to lie to his mother about how his brother and father died, swallowing the knowledge that she believes the wrong son survived. Having to walk past Javi’s room everyday and see all of his pictures and belongings still strewn all over the house.
•Taissa and Van breaking up, with Van privately wondering if staying in the wilderness like Tai wanted would have meant they’d still be together. Van having to watch Tai move on publicly and act like she’s unaffected by it all.
•Lottie slipping into catatonia and being shuffled through psych wards for most of her adult life, which is exactly what she feared would happen and why she never wanted to leave the wilderness.
•Misty losing contact with the other survivors and returning to being the desperately lonely social outcast. Filling her time hanging pictures of her and the team on her walls and keeping tabs on the other YJs to maintain the feeling of belonging she once had with them.
•Nat and Travis locked in toxic cycles, pulling each other back into relapse, unable to stay apart even as they both know they’re poison together, being both each other’s refuge and ruin. Seeing the how their suicide pact comes to be.
•Shauna losing all of her potential when she marries Jeff and assumes the facade of a quiet, docile housewife.
•The survivors returning home and having to face the grieving, questioning families of the people they killed and ate.
•Media scrutiny, invasive questions, and the survivors seeing their trauma turned into tabloid headlines.
•Cutting contact with one another to avoid the pain of shared memories, leaving each survivor isolated and deprived of the rare bond with people who actually understand what they endured.
•All of them wishing they could go back.
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