Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

Learning how to speak Chinese is difficult. Winning a Pulitzer Prize is difficult. Losing the love of your life in an inexplicable act of carelessness, listening to your daughter sobbing herself to sleep every night, wondering if your wife’s skeleton is still rotting at the bottom of a ravine somewhere: That isn’t difficult. It’s the fucking end of the world.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.

marched out to the street to tell the guy off. But Billie grabbed me as I passed and held me back. “Oh, let him get his kicks,” she said breezily as the guy scuttled off down the street. “It’s probably the highlight of his day. Sad little man.”

“They’ll cry when you leave and buy you a Costco cake with your name on it and then forget about you ten minutes later when they replace you with someone younger and fresher and cheaper.”