Every Single Secret

by Emily Carpenter

no matter what kind of person I might be, no matter what I’ve done up to this point, I am a person who wants to live.

“No one tells you that you never get over losing someone you love, do they?”

His voice was barely louder than a whisper. “You can pull it close, wrap your arms around it, embrace the anathema you’ve been led to believe by all the experts and book peddlers and TED Talkers that you should erase.”

I’d read enough self-help books to know what I was doing was called catastrophizing. But what if this was an actual, real-life catastrophe? Sometimes they did happen. Sometimes the signs were all there, right before something went terribly wrong. And the people who didn’t heed the warnings—who didn’t evacuate or board up their windows or brace themselves for the storm—were usually the ones who got swept away.

And the truth was, I knew I should be reacting—just standing here had to look suspicious, so I buried my face in my hands. My eyes were dry, though, and my mind raced.