Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

Our father, who still wouldn’t let our mother buy furniture with glass edges despite the fact that we were teenagers. Our father, who put yellow masking tape at the top of the stairs so we would never forget that it was the top of the stairs. Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. That’s what I repeated as we drove home, as I walked the stairs to our bedroom and put your gold earrings back in the tiny drawer of your jewelry box, so you’d know exactly where to find them.

Holy shit

But I didn’t want to set the table. I didn’t want to be civilized. Civilization, I was learning, was not all it was cracked up to be. “Man’s attempt to be civilized,” Mr. Klein had said, “has produced more massacres, holocausts, and genocides than any barbarians ever did.” This upset a lot of the kids at school—especially Valerie. Valerie didn’t like to hear that simply by sitting there, wearing the shoes and the shirts and the socks that she was wearing, she was oppressing children in Indonesia. Valerie was like, “I’m just, like, sitting here. I’m not doing anything. I didn’t even buy these sneakers. If you want to point fingers at the oppressor, point them at my mother. She’s the one who buys this stuff for me.”

Lmao i love the way she writes these terrible situations

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.