We Are Okay

by Nina LaCour

Go ahead and listen to that same song on repeat until its sound turns to nothing and you sleep the winter away.

There are many ways of being alone.

And in our house, we enjoyed our togetherness but we enjoyed our apartness, too.

It wasn’t the ghosts. It was the hauntings that mattered.

Everything is despair. Everything is suffering. What I mean is don’t be a person who seeks out grief. There is enough of that in life.”

the exhaustion that comes with knowing that something will have to happen next, and then after that, and on and on until it’s over.

But I know that there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now. I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.

I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.

I was alone, just like I’d hoped, but it felt terrible.

I needed a warm place, music, sweet-smelling rooms.

I want the thunder of ocean, a day that’s cold but dry, the feeling that comes with heavy clouds in the distance. Relief from the drought.

I will learn how to be okay again.