Don’t you even notice me slipping away?
Can’t you see that glass is shattering all around me?
151.
now
The sun is setting. It’s slow at first, the gold ebbing away almost imperceptibly, a filtering and loss so incremental you have just begun to notice it’s going when suddenly
it’s all
the way
gone.
152.
once, that night
I was still standing alone in the family room of my house.
I was still standing.
My phone buzzed with a text. My heart leapt in spite of myself. Was someone reaching out? Did someone care? Syd? Sam? Alex?
Ella.
I’m sorry.
I know you said you couldn’t be my friend.
But I had to tell you.
I’m going to do it.
Now.
For a second, I wasn’t sure what she meant, but then it hit me like a baseball bat to the stomach, like a sharp shard of glass to my heart:
She’s going to jump.
153.
now
I am almost through the wildflower preserve. Almost to the trees, their black shapes printed against a sky whose sun has just set.
Once, my therapist asked me, “What if you could sit down everyone you wanted to talk with, and ask them all the questions you’re wanting to ask?”
That is what I have been doing in my mind, over and over again, since everyone disappeared. I’ve been asking them all the questions I never got to ask.
I know them all so well.
I don’t know them at all.
Do you really know me?
Did I really know you?
