always an angel, never a god.

am i dying?

A car’s horn shakes me from sleep.

Third time this week something small had roused me from an uneasy slumber where my dreams have been plagued by ghosts of my past with tight-lipped smiles and barbed insults. I should feel relieved to wake, stare at the expanse of my ceiling, and come back into myself.

But it doesn’t quite feel that way.

The moonlight bleeds across the blanket, spilling over my hands. I know that even if I roll over and curl up again, sleep will evade me. Instead, I reach for my phone. I shouldn’t, I know. I have been preaching getting off the phone, but I’m weak, and the thoughts scrabbling around in my brain are begging to be released.

I am 23 and also 89 and also 5 and also a tree and also a very old rabid cat and also a goldfish swimming, swimming, swimming in constant circles.

Am I dying

I’m walking to the mailbox during the day again, watching every day as the leaves and acorns paint a decaying portrait across our driveway.

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Loneliness creeps behind me like an old, sick dog, desperate for my attention. I’m too busy to tend to it during the day, while I huddle under covers with the woman I love, while the screen shows me a world I’ll never see. But then, at nighttime, when I am alone and the world is quiet, there is the dog. It curls on my chest and whines with something so deep and hurt that I want to cry. It nudges me until I wrap my body around it and hold it close to me, trying to give it comfort that I can’t seem to find myself.

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I’m on my back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling through slitted eyes. A song that I loved at fifteen plays low in the background, a sticky wave of nostalgia crawling up my limbs.

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The tape measure sits dormant in my top desk drawer. I know where the scale is. I can still feel the cool surface under my feet and the knots tightening in my chest, daring me to look down, to see. When I pass by it in the bathroom, I feel the urge like bile rising in my throat – I know it will rip me up inside with white-hot claws and leave me raw and exhausted and dizzy, but what’s the harm in knowing? Won’t it make me better?

It did, once. I think. But now, I can’t really remember.

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2/12/22 couldn’t leave my dorm today. ate cheerios this morning, brushed my teeth. went for a walk after dark. talked to amelia about what’s going on. therapy tomorrow. i am always tired. i tried to write my paper but nothing i say is good enough. everything i do is hollow hollow hollow. this is not what i thought twenty-one would be like.

What happens when you die

I worry that I may always be waiting for a train, freezing cold on a platform, staring into the distance for a light that will never come.

Is God real

When I was nine, I fell off of the uneven bars.

The world was very small when I was up high, dangling with bony legs swinging me into a soft rhythm, like a pendulum going back and forth. The chattering of the other kids; the whoops, the hooting and hollering, the laughter; it disappeared for a moment. The coach was right below, her beady eyes peering up at me. She yelled something — probably move, Grace, you’re wasting time — and I should have been swinging my body all the way around, like she said, but I propelled my body halfway up, so my eyes were facing earth and I could see the mat below.

And then I let go of the bar.

When the nurse was through with all the concussion tests, she fixed her gentle gaze on me and asked, “Why did you let go?”

I shrugged. “I wanted to know what it would feel like.”

Why do things end

The drive back from my high school became a reflex, filled with stops and starts at the same series of traffic lights, the playlist I timed down to the minute, the same curves in the road that I eased my car along.

There was the convenience store painted bright red just beyond the train tracks, the sign mangled from years of rain and wind and snow and high school kids who thought the funniest thing in the world was smacking it as hard as they could.

I almost slid into the telephone pole right next to it, the night after my eighteenth birthday, when the snow was fresh on the ground and glittering under the streetlights. There are still marks from my nails in the wheel.

There was the abandoned gas station that they brought back to life over the years, turning from desolate and haunted to buzzing on my drive in. The owner used to sit outside in the mornings on an old folding chair with his dog, puffing on a cigarette and watching the traffic crawl by. When I drove by during my fall break, the chair was empty.

There was the restaurant with the arcade with peeling red-and-orange-and-yellow booths, the other tables and chairs shoved haphazardly to the side, forgotten by the kids who were rushing towards the games or the bathroom. The fourth booth from the door was where I had my second first date, the night I didn’t get a call on the way home as I deflated. It closed down after the pandemic, but the booths and the arcade are still there beyond the dirty panes of glass, gathering dust as they sleep.

There is the open field where I grew up running with kids that now scatter across the country like dandelion seeds, clutching fast to buildings in cities I’ve never seen. When I stepped out into the world for the first time without them, I felt naked. I wonder if they ever think about me.

The streets seem to breathe with me as I turn the wheel, press the gas.

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The heat in Paris left me restless most nights, tossing and turning in a bed that was not mine until sleep dragged me down for a few blissful hours of forgetting. The window was thrown open to let in the air, the curtains flapping, and I was trying not to die.

Every night was a fight, and every morning I returned a soldier soaked through with cold sweat and exhausted muscles and chattering teeth and no appetite. This is normal, said the doctor. This is an adjustment. You shouldn’t have stopped cold turkey.

I never wanted to die, but I felt it like a bruise, sprouting beneath the skin and making its way to the surface, tainting, wanting. And some little, tiny part of me whispered, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

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There are pieces of me tucked in the pockets of people I haven’t seen in years.

In some parallel universe, I’m still dozing on the tan couch in an old friend’s living room at noon, our legs tangled together. I’m still on my high school’s gym floor in the sickeningly tight uniform with my hands in pom poms, watching the boys wrestle for the basketball, listening to the girls snicker as they trip over each other. I’m still in the airport bathroom, sobbing to the stranger in red heels who was the first to ask Are you okay? I’m still on my back on the floor of my high school English teacher’s classroom, holding back tears. I’m still walking under streetlights in the rain, something aching in my chest when I watch her run ahead. I’m still watching as they get in the car and drive away, hand pressed against the window pane.

I miss them, but only when I forget how heavy my chest felt. Only when I forget that I never felt whole.

White noise for sleeping

Some part of the reason for living is left in the parking lot under orange lights on a worn out green bus seat with a crude heart scrawled in pen, flesh wandering over the eternity in ink, the gentle rush of morning sunlight seeping into wounds that are long forgotten now. The words are quiet and unknowable; they move like moonlight, crawling up your ribs and burying their fingers in your flesh, just enough to chill.

There’s remnants of it in the kitchen, where hundreds of pairs of shoes have walked, where my dad kisses the top of my mom’s head, where the dog crawls into my lap and burrows her face in my elbow. Where my mom makes cups of fruit and carries them up to my room when I sleep late, leaving it with a Post-It note heart attached. Where I convince my brothers to dance to old songs, when they move like puppies, confused in their newly tall bodies. Where we sit and watch each other in silence, love lingering in the ellipses.

Life exists in the temporary moments, in the greys and in betweens and moments where you catch your breath. It exists in the place where the sky meets the earth. It is much easier to simply breathe and watch that spot, where the blues and pinks and oranges of the sunset bleed into the horizon, where the earth inhales so deeply you can no longer keep up.