We Could Be Rats

by Emily R. Austin

At the time, I had no idea how few days like that we get. When you’re a kid, you assume you’re just getting a taste for all the memorable experiences life has in store for you, but the truth is, most people don’t spend countless nights running through the streets with their friends. They spend a handful of nights doing that if they’re lucky.

I don’t want to find myself rolling around in my grave while you discover how frequently I googled “Dame Helen Mirren Bikini,” or any of the other humbling aspects of my search history.

She said, “Creeps like us have to stay alive.”

was carrying a bag of grievances. I knew that even the slightest addition could break me. I felt like a shaken bottle of Coke, dodging the Mentos everyone was trying to toss inside me, already liable to explode. I needed to escape.

She and I used to talk about how a lot of life felt like that, like we were never the target audience for any of it, like we were always on the outside of something.

think if I hadn’t met Greta, my whole life would have felt like going to prom—like I was in a costume I hated, but on the outside, secretly pretending to feel what everyone else does.

Do you think the right thing to do is to live out your life, even when you feel like you’re becoming a swamp-monster? Should I have stayed alive, been a grown-up, and tried to fix things? Do you think the reason most people with bad lives don’t kill themselves is just because they’re afraid of dying? Is that really it? I think dying is less scary than growing up. I’d rather die than grow up to be a shitty person.

I wonder if old people are often crotchety because they’ve dealt with so many atrocities, they can no longer tolerate anyone. Maybe they ask to speak to managers, hold up lines, and drive at a snail’s pace because they’re at the end of their ropes. Maybe all their people have died, gotten sick, or tried to kill themselves, and it’s irksome to see the rest of us tottering around, breathing air, taking up space.

We just gravitated toward each other as friends because, on some invisible level, there was a special link between us.

used to joke, “I wish we were rats” because, if I could choose how the world worked, we would all be rats at a fair. We would all live well, sampling every possible ounce of happiness. We would roll around in garbage and suck on sour keys.