More or Less Maddy

by Lisa Genova

She looks into the pupils of her expressionless eyes, a bottomless muddy-brown swamp of nothingness. No shimmery sparkle, no amusement past or present skipping along a laugh line.

Emily’s a model citizen of whatever world she inhabits, quick to understand her part and all its unspoken rules. Everyone loves Emily.

These people are all breathing miracles of DNA in bodies that took 13.8 billion years and an impossibly unique and unbroken chain of events to be here, and this is how they choose to spend the days and nights of their precious existence before being snuffed out forever? It all feels so pointless to her.

She wouldn’t say she looks pretty when she checks herself out in the mirror, but her clothes fit again, and she’s no longer disgusted with her reflection. She feels good. Or at least, good enough.

The incident is over, and she has her back to him now, but her body’s not done with the experience, as if she’d been exposed to a toxic pathogen and her physiology has waged an ongoing war against it to protect her, or she’d stubbed her toe and holy hell, it still hurts.

She’s tired of Instagram but can’t stop scrolling. As she views post after post, she senses a different kind of tired, a presence encroaching at the edge of her consciousness, familiar but not yet discernable, like the shadowy shape of someone she knows approaching from a distance at twilight, closer than it was yesterday.

At nineteen, she is well practiced in the art of ending unwanted conversations with men in a smile.

To her mind, the better question would be “Can there be happiness after sadness?” Actual, lasting happiness. Again, fuck if she knows.

She has no idea what day it is. The passage of time is an exhaled breath on a winter morning, a rapidly dissolving vapor trail, impossible to follow.

The thought is a spark that wants to light her brain on fire, but the drugs in her system are like a SWAT team on high alert, and her heartbeat is the tell that gives her away every time. Tickled by the thought of the DM, her heart rate skitters, and the whistle is blown. The quiet pills swarm in on the thought, wrestle it to the ground, and smother it. Spark extinguished. Heart rate restored. No firestorm. Nothing.

The invitation requesting her presence at a normal life has been rescinded. In its place, she’s been invited to an abnormal life, the box for WILL ATTEND already checked, leaving her no choice.

She doesn’t deserve to be heard. She’ll have to settle for screaming on the inside.

Before her hypomania ripened to rotten, there was a delicious sweetness to her thoughts and life. She had a massive amount of unearned confidence in her ability to do anything that struck her fancy. She made big dick energy look flaccid by comparison. It embarrasses her now to think about being this way,

but her amped-up swagger gave her the absolute freedom to do whatever the fuck she wanted without permission or second-guessing herself, without worrying what anyone would think, whether it was good or bad. And it all felt so good.