The Project

by Courtney Summers

And now I am beyond that pain, Lo. But you—you live inside yours. You live inside your accident … and you are so afraid of the next.”

His silence is powerful, intimidating at the best of times, but this … this reminds her of coming home two years ago to a quiet, dark house, to the swing in the front yard unmoving, and knowing deep in her bones that something had changed in her world and there would be no going back from the moment it revealed itself to her.

The clean, unadorned lines of his property strike me as lonely in the same way my apartment sometimes strikes me as lonely, a space its inhabitant doesn’t quite know how to occupy.

Sometimes, when I step inside my place, it feels like a language I’ve forgotten how to speak and the days I feel that way are the days I most remember what it was like to have a home and a family—and what it means to not have those things anymore.

In two years, a darkness will settle over our nation, brought by a man who wears no masks. He is who he claims to be. He will call for a wall built on the promise of greatness, but the foundation is rot. The first brick laid will be fear. The second: ignorance. The third: hate. Your neighbors are no longer your neighbors. Their masks will come off, and they will spread the darkness. They will rally in hate. Innocents will die. Children will suffer.

There’s an unavoidable performance that attaches itself to anyone who knows they’re being observed and I want to know what the day-to-day really looks like—if every breath in and out is prayer and gratitude, serenity, if you wake up constantly feeling a part of something. What it’s like to wake up feeling like that.

I didn’t open this door. I have no say over how long it might stay open, who closes it and when. The most control I can have over this is whether or not I step through it. I need that control.

You live inside your accident … and you are so afraid of the next.

There’s still time. Maybe he just had to get this close to the other side to realize it was there all along because sometimes that’s the moment life brings you to. But more often than not, it feels like it’s this one: you lie down on the tracks. You lie down on the tracks and the train is coming.

This is not a state of being, it’s a halfway place between awake and not quite asleep.

The difference between thirteen and fifteen can be astonishing. Bea didn’t fully appreciate it until she was gathering photos for her parents’ funeral and caught herself at both points in time. Still painfully a child in one, and still painfully a child in the other with the soft curves of a woman’s body making their first tentative announcements. It terrified her then and to see the contrast so plainly was almost nauseating.

Having a sister is a promise no one but the two of you can make—and no one but the two of you can break.

The absence of response is a weight I can barely breathe against.

There’s nothing Bea has been through that compares to being pregnant. Time marches forward and she measures it in symptoms of life.

There’s a grief she didn’t expect and doesn’t know how to put to words. She never got a chance to say good-bye to herself. She stares at her body, naked in the mirror, and she’s sorry she never made note of it before it belonged to anyone else. She can feel all the ways this child has claimed her even if not all of it is visible yet. She knows it’s there and that’s enough.

She thinks that if being a sister is a promise you make, then being a mother must be a promise that you are.

Then that sudden, pronounced absence in her body and the flood of euphoria at what it signified: that she had brought something into being. Bea doesn’t know if she’ll ever feel so powerfully complete in her life again.

She remembers Mom and Dad telling her the NICU was a special place when Lo was born; It’s because she couldn’t wait to get here and see you. But it’s not a special place. It’s a special kind of hell where the waxen, devastated faces of new parents stand over incubators to witness firsthand the fragility and unfairness of life.

To see a baby made more helpless by the universe than the universe has already made it is so profoundly wrong.

It’s one of those strangely dissonant moments where it almost feels like the life inside is real, yours, and before you can decide how you feel about that, it all fades away.

“You’re very restless,” he says, his eyes trailing over his blankets twisted around my legs. “I can’t help but wonder if you ever wake up feeling like you slept at all.”

My heart can hardly make sense of finally being handed something I want and it’s too much.

“If you tell a story—something real, something true—you get to be alive in other people. And writing feels like the most … the greatest chance I’ll ever have at being—alive.”

I tell him I only believe in things I can see.

when a want burns itself into you that deep, it doesn’t all go away at once, but everything that’s replaced it is louder.

It’s sobering to see my incompleteness as a person so undeniably in front of me, the lies I told myself to exist within its emptiness—as though it wasn’t a reflection of my own.

They both stare at me with pity, like I’m some tragic thing. I don’t want their pity and I’m not tragic.

There are so many stories and I see myself in some, less in others—yet we all ended up under the hold of the same man. How does that happen? I don’t know how that happens.

I can’t stand it, anymore, when people touch me and I find it hard to explain. It’s not because I don’t want to be touched. It’s because I do—so much—and I’m afraid I’ll give away what’s left of myself to feel less alone.

THE PROJECT by Lo Denham

It has to be the truth. I’m not the only one it’s keeping alive.