“I really am sorry,” I said into her shoulder.
“I know,” she said, calmly extracting herself from my clutches. “Hey, did you do cocaine off someone’s dick?”
I told her the coke had not been on the dick as such, but someone’s dick had definitely been out in cocaine’s vicinity. She said both scenarios were equally gross and that I was objectively terrible at being alone. In fact, she suggested, I had never done it before, ever, in my adult life, and she and the rest of my friends felt that I was clumsily running from solitude, rather than facing it with bravery or grace.
“I’m trying,” I said. “I know I’m doing a bad job, but I am actually trying.” One perk of being in the hospital was that everyone looked like they were going through it, so it wasn’t weird that I was crying like this. Amirah handed me another tissue.
“Try harder,” she said. “So much stuff is happening and you’re missing it. I have to go. Drink water, okay? And text me. Not soon, but text me.”
Amirah walked away, and I slid back to the floor.
I sat alone with myself for either three minutes or nine hours, ruminating on the ways I’d disappointed my friends and what kind of stuff I was missing. Maybe they’d break up with me too. Certainly Amy would be within her rights to never speak to me again. I wondered if I should send an apology email to Emily, or even to Jesse and Darragh. I seemed to spend half my time doing things and the other half apologizing for having done them; it was not a dream ratio.
My phone vibrated under the bench, indicating it had a charge. I took the athlete’s now vacant seat and opened Twitter, where I deleted （thirty-seven?!） tweets I could not bring myself to read. I opened my photos folder and flipped through pictures from the wedding I’d just been to. Emily looked gorgeous and happy, dancing with her husband while he stared at her with genuine awe. My phone had compiled the images into a slideshow it called a “New Memory,” lumping some pictures of the three-year-old flower girl sticking out her tongue with a series Jesse had taken of me and Darragh flashing our tits, setting the whole thing to jazzy music.
The other Memories were a mixed bag: a collection of every picture I’d ever taken of food; a slideshow of photos from a cottage trip a few years ago, where a terry cloth leisure suit changed Lauren’s personality for the weekend; last Christmas with Ed, Hannah, my mom, and sweet, weird Jeff; my own wedding.
I scrolled through the images of Jon and I, beaming and oblivious. Everyone says brides are too stressed to enjoy their own weddings, but I’d had the time of my life, swanning around my mother’s backyard in expensive silk, accepting praise and well-wishes and envelopes full of cash. It had felt so easy to be sure.
Merris had stayed at our wedding only briefly, leaving almost immediately after the reception kicked off in earnest. She wore a jewel-toned tunic thing with a necklace of unknown ethnic origin, and gave us an oddly shaped vase, though we’d asked for cash, ambitiously, to “put toward a house.” After the ceremony, she pulled me into a hug and said, “This is a good day. It’s important to carry the good days around.”
I thought about her now, in some dank room getting her bones photographed. I should have pretended to be her cousin, her younger lover, her daughter. I should have been in there. Instead, she was alone in some enormous, frightening tube, and I was out here smelling stale coffee and archiving my wedding photos in a folder labeled whoops. I started googling physiotherapists near Merris’s house, inputting various worst-case scenarios, learning about avulsion fractures and bursitis and labral tears. I wondered if I should go home and move out before Merris was discharged. I wondered if I should quit my job. I deleted Jesse’s phone number.
As night became morning, the people I’d arrived with were replaced with new pairs: mothers and sons, old married people, roommates, young couples, aging siblings. Everyone was waiting with or for someone. I hoped Merris wanted me to wait for her. I hoped my friends would wait for me. I wanted more than anything to text someone who cared about me, to talk things through with a loving entity, but I had quite literally exhausted my options. Across the room, a man rested his head on his partner’s shoulder while a woman horked something green onto the floor.
A Fantasy
I wake up one morning and start to dissolve. At first it’s only a shimmer at the ends of my hair, my split ends glistening as they transform into nothing, but the nothing spreads quickly, up each strand and down into my shoulders. By the time I’m out of bed, my hands are a million disparate particles. My forearms tingle and I know that soon they’ll be gone too.
Initially, of course, this fills me with fear; I am afraid to die. But this isn’t death. I’m still here, except I don’t have upper arms anymore, which is actually a perfect scenario.
My thoughts are there—my feelings too, my likes and dislikes, affinity for the color orange—but as I take what’s left of me for a walk down the street, I realize that I am unobserved. As my lower half begins to pixelate and fade, I find myself thinking it might be alright, even ideal, to live the rest of my life as a shapeless fog. Nobody gives fog a hard time for being what it is. Fog can’t have a hard time with midrise denim. Fog never said the wrong thing at a party and ruined the vibe.
I let my legs drift up and away, vein-mottled calves first. I will never think about them again. My friends and family will have to adjust to this new way of knowing me. Over time they will come to like that I am everywhere and nowhere, instead of disappointing them emotionally, or forgetting to bring my own wine to the event and then drinking most of theirs, or getting weird about the group photo. Rather than being smothered or put off or bored by my big, stupid feelings, they will find the atmospheric experience of me calming. My presence will be a warm breeze, like Mandy Moore’s after she dies in that religious movie about singing.
A glowing light fills my torso until it explodes, shooting outward like the universe at the very beginning （probably）。 I feel only relief: I do not have to know what to do about anything. It doesn’t matter that I do not stretch in the morning and have never successfully meditated, or that my face is round and my body decaying, or that I am a bad friend, an ungrateful daughter, and functionally useless in the face of society’s many problems.
I am a delicate mist. No one can look at me or touch me or see me. I do not want to be held, which is fine—no one wants to hold me, and even if they did, it wouldn’t help. I am a murmuration, a lightly undulating spray of particles, moving easily around the earth without impacting it. I don’t miss anyone and have never fucked anything up.
Chapter 17
Merris’s hip was bruised but not fractured. She would need rest and a few months of rehabilitative exercises, and to avoid falling again. When she finally emerged from the hospital’s interior it was almost five a.m. and she was using a walker. Despite pounding back-to-back Dasanis for several hours, my hangover had set in properly, and I felt as if the waiting room’s fluorescent lights had somehow seeped inside my body.
“You didn’t have to wait,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was touched or aggravated.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “I’ll get us a car.”