how to keep existing when your reason for existing is now just a name in the papers.
January 4th
my parents found me lying on the cool tiled floor. there was a drone. a humming. voices and phone calls and silence. so much silence. my body was limp. i was very sick. i was very cold. i wasn’t fully alive after that call. after that text. four words. then - chloë. are you there?
are you there?
i vaguely have flashes of memory of meeting my roommates for the first time. they saw a ghost and she looked like me. my hands shook. i collapsed again. i felt my body limply being moved into a car. onto a couch. my socks were taken off. i rattled off the words. the truth that was not the truth. the truth that couldn’t be the truth. nightfall. sobbing tears on paper and pens. i started writing to you, already. staring at the ceiling with the lamp light still on because i couldn’t bear any more darkness.
5. january fifth.
it couldn’t be true. it couldn’t be real. but it was. and i woke up and sobbed and screamed at the universe, at the Lord. how could you take the best part of my life away from me? how could you take the man who had saved me -from me- away from me?
it was the first morning waking up knowing i couldn’t talk to you today.
it was the first morning in history where i was on earth and you weren’t. that had never happened before. you were here first. you were breathing for months before i took my first. so how was it possible that i was breathing still?
i sobbed and shook and wailed and moaned like a dying cat. i begged for mercy. it would not come. you weren’t here anymore. i talked to you a lot last night. i yelled and i cried. i plead. i went through every stage of grief in my subconsciousness of sleep only to wake up back in stage one. pain. i moved through a blur of breakdowns and tears.
but i kept moving.
i laughed for the first time and my chest felt hollow. but i laughed.
i sobbed at the sunset until my skin was purple and my throat was dry. but i could see you shining through the clouds. and i sobbed harder.
i was embraced by my best friend as i shook and soaked her shoulder in my tears. but i was embraced by my best friend.
my mom hugged me and my dad asked me, “how are you doing sweetie?” they talked to me constantly. they were worried about me. but they cared. and they were there.
6. january sixth.
i got up and showered and did my hair and did my makeup and made myself feel beautiful to hide the sickness beneath my skin that had been created by the contamination of my spreading sadness. but i did look a little bit pretty. and i went to class and none of it mattered. nothing i was hearing was processing. it didn’t matter, how could i care about any of this. and i read the papers and LA was on fire but none of it mattered because i am a selfish person whose life was already destroyed and in some way it all made sense. of course the world was on fire. if you weren’t here, there was no longer an equilibrium in my life nor in nature and nothing was right. of course nature was fighting. i was fighting. and so were the fighters in LA, working hard at saving the people who had saved other people’s lives and people whose hearts beat for one another. all of us have someone like that. and those people are eachother’s whole worlds, and they are all that matters to one another. what means most to each of us are the people who made us who we are, and we can care in a theoretical sense about other peoples’ loves and lives but when it comes down to it, we will die fighting for the people that saved us, for the people who keep us alive, and will prioritize them with our minds and thoughts and energies and prayers.