Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

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.

But I knew then that anybody who chose to be alone had no idea what it really meant to be alone.

It was certain—you were dead, and we were just people in a car again. How could this be? The world was over, but we still had to do things like obey street signs and traffic lights. Dad held tightly to the wheel, and Mom kept looking back at me with a teary face, squeezing my hand. But then she faced forward, and it became really quiet, and it was still possible to pretend like none of this was happening. Like maybe we were on our way to the movies. Maybe we were going to the mall to buy you a dress for Billy’s prom.

I wish I could have stayed at the funeral forever. At the funeral, you were still with us, right there in the middle of the church.

“Knowing you didn’t get hurt,” he said. “Knowing you came out without a scratch. And thank fucking God for that.” “That’s funny,” I said. “That’s the thing that makes me feel the worst, sometimes.”

When nothing bad happened, nobody even noticed. When nothing bad happened, it was just an ordinary day. Sometimes, when Dad was yelling his loudest at me, this was what he seemed to be saying: Do you people know how many ordinary days I’ve provided for you?

We were teenagers now, and we preferred, when given the opportunity, to suffer.

Wendy and Mom were both extremely depressed, and if there was anything that depression gave you, I learned, it was the freedom of not giving a shit.

But I knew enough by then to know that it was unfair to use a woman’s past self against her.

Suddenly, it was the ease of the conversation that made everything so uncomfortable. The awareness that talking had become too easy between two people it was supposed to be difficult between. We had admitted our possible coexistence in some near future, where we might be buying each other gifts; he would never get me concert tickets and what would I never get him?

“College was important to me,” he said. “But I wouldn’t say that I liked it. I was too unstable.”

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.

He nodded. Billy, he would have given me anything, I knew. He would have given me his skin if I were cold. If I asked for it. But he couldn’t ever give me the one thing I wanted, which was him.

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.

Their careers are all about pretending to know things they don’t really know that well. Knowledge is power, including knowledge a person pretends to have.

This is how adult conversations begin and end: with the weather. Like the weather is the only thing that binds us. The weather is the only great battle we have left. Something we are all preparing to fight until death.

“That’s what happens when parents die,” he says. “All of a sudden, you want an answer to every question you never thought to ask them.”