Your Shadow Half Remains

by Sunny Moraine

As it turns out, for no apparent reason, something can break in your world, and suddenly, all around you, people are dying bloody and screaming every fucking day. It’s horrifying. Then it’s weird. Then it’s inconvenient. Then it’s just every fucking day.

But in strange times, we do strange things. And sometimes our selves aren’t so interested in preservation.

In the end, maybe it’s disturbing how easy it was to adjust. How easy it is for the worst things imaginable to become normal.

She’s seen so many horrible things by now, she believes herself numb, her emotional landscape eroded into slatey flatness by ceaseless storms.

She won’t be able to look at her mother’s face. She still hasn’t fully come to terms with that, that on a deep level she’ll never really see her mother’s face again.

Riley? Honey? A pause. Heavy breathing. You can come in, sweetheart. You don’t need to bother with covering up. Why wouldn’t she? Why the hell? Why is her mother inviting her to take on a deadly level of risk? Maybe Mom has simply taken leave of her senses, sunk into a swamp of denial; she wouldn’t be the first one. It’s okay, sweetheart. I promise. It’s all safe now.

Last times are last times. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether you remember when specifically they happened. What matters is that everything stopped then, and nothing came after. Only they did. That’s the truly crazy thing. Somehow they did. Somehow it all just keeps on going.

You make things normal by being normal in the midst of them. That’s a lesson everyone had to learn on a whole new level. You make things normal by sheer force of will. You make things normal and then you don’t have to be freaked out all the fucking time. And after a while, you could be amazed by how many things become normal, how many things you simply learn to accept and fold into what passes for your life.

Speaking of normal. How extraordinary it can become to hang out with someone.

And sometimes something smashes into us, does a lot more than minor damage, and the changes are tremendous, and we listen to ourselves from the time Before and we no longer recognize what we hear.

It wasn’t her main takeaway, but it was one of them: do not ever assume that you will be okay next time merely because you were this time.

If is doing some work there. Because you can take precautions and it can end up still not being enough. She’s heard about it. She’s seen it.

“You get it, how someone can love someone else to where that—where doing it peacefully, painlessly—seems like the best option. Because you can’t bear to watch the worst happen to them. Much less be the worst that happens. And you feel like it’s just a matter of time before it does.” Ellis pauses a few seconds. “In any case, I did, too. I guess probably all of us did.”

Some of us come apart right away, but for some of us, it takes a long, long time. Maybe, when we finally do go to pieces, we still like to have a little company in the midst of it. Maybe we just don’t want to dissolve into that seething internal chaos alone. Alone.

It’s too easy, with people, to find yourself doing things you can’t take back. It’s too easy to fuck up and discover that you’ve done something that undoes everything forever. People get inside you and they change you, and then the old you is gone forever, and you have to live with the new you, whom you may or may not even recognize.