How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

I’m embarrassed and alone on a little island.

movie about a girl and boy who both have cancer. They go to Amsterdam to see a famous writer, but they really go to Amsterdam to have sex.

one of them was the book they based the movie on.

His parents, Louise and Mary, run a coffee shop/diner/bookstore

We’ve got the

moon,

I push my book in my backpack. “I’ll go anywhere for cookies. You know me.”

maybe some women lived their whole lives in heavy black clothes, grief turning into a permanent kind of perfume.

How does a brain just…explode? She wasn’t sick. She had a headache. Just a headache.

A walking ghost.

But your dreams are just slabs of gray and black, lumpy clouds of nothing. No people. No music. It’s like you enter a room, the door closes, there’s no light switch.

Brave, says the girl-bug. What’s that?

I haven’t eaten a real meal in so long my ribs are starting to press through my skin. Maybe I’ll gradually disappear into nothingness, my skin floating away, my body morphing into bleached bone in the desert. The animals will get me.

The only way I can describe this is for you to imagine that you’re sitting in a room and the lights are on, and then they go off. The lightbulb doesn’t flicker, you don’t hear a pop, everything just goes…dark. Gone.”

You have always been lonely and you have never admitted it.