How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

But smells mean science.

At home, on my nightstand, story time has been waiting for years. There’s a bookmark a few chapters shy of the end of The Return of the King, right as they’re approaching Mount Doom.

And that’s not to say we’re not still studying him ourselves, and that I didn’t see fame and fortune when I first heard him speak. But reading to him every night, getting to know him a little more each day has changed everything. He loves belly rubs and having the back of his ear scratched. He prefers Star Trek to Star Wars, and after we took him outside to the little Japanese tea garden behind our building, he asked me about the sky.

I probably should have returned home at some point to patch things up before my dad died. Instead, I did what my mother told me to do: I left and never went back. It was easier pretending I was alone.

“Love you for light-years,” I told her.

It’s strange how the discovery of an ancient girl in Siberia and viruses we’ve never encountered before can both redefine what we know about being human and at the same time threaten our humanity.

The inhabitants likely knew for a long time that their world was dying. Perhaps this is both comfort and despair, a reminder that we are not alone, that we are still here.

I know I can’t survive alone. Maybe this will be lost in a stack of your unopened mail; maybe you’ll read it and throw it away, saying it’s too late. Or maybe you’ll peek out your window and wonder about coming over and saying, Hey, me too. I’m hollowed and cracked and imploding. All I do know is this: I will continue to wake up and tell my family I love them, something I never did enough when they were alive. I will go grocery shopping at midnight. I will tell strangers online that I’m sorry for their loss, and I will eventually wash the bedsheets and their clothes and be okay with a quiet home. Maybe, with help, I will wave at you when you cross the street. I will begin setting the table for one. Your neighbor, Dan Paul

He wonders what proportion of happy moments to sad ones is necessary for a person to sincerely want to keep living and hopes he and Yoshiko can get there together.

You told me sometimes people and places serve a purpose for a finite amount of time to help you think and grow and love and then you move on.