Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

It was death, I knew, waiting in the most unexpected places—inside Mom’s laughter, at the end of Dad’s toes, in the bright green leaves outside our bedroom window that couldn’t have looked more alive.

We changed our minds about what to wear, which you said we were allowed to do, and yet I felt bad for the rejected clothes all during breakfast, sometimes apologized to them before we ran to the bus. When you heard me doing this, you laughed. “Sally, they’re just shoes!” you said. “It’s just a shirt!” But I couldn’t stop feeling that they were more than that, that everything was secretly alive, which was why I also said goodbye to the radiators before we left.

You were too old to love forts—you were sixteen, a girl with a learner’s permit and a boyfriend now. But I didn’t remind you of this, because that was the fun of being sisters. Sometimes, you got to be younger than you were, and I got to be older.

I was thinking that there was nothing better in this world than to discover someone who was weird in exactly the same way I was weird. To be weird and then loved for it.

I like knowing that my problems exist within a large and respected tradition of problems. That ever since the beginning of civilization, humans have been very upset.