Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that’s the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

We’re not separated from the world by our own edges.”

“We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.

molecules dancing between them,

Under Charlie’s gaze, Sylvie had been whole; now, in front of her mother, she was porous, disappearing.

she felt tangled in a net of grief.

Everyone Sylvie encountered seemed to sense that she was wearing death, so they gave her a wide berth.

With no sleep, the days took on the emotional cast—and the loud losses—of the night.

“We look out the window, or into ourselves, for something more.”

they shared a smile occasionally when Julia talked with a lot of exclamation marks.

Since Charlie’s death, she’d felt like she was spilling out of her edges and messily trying to scoop herself up at the same time.

She and her brother-in-law were both struggling to inhabit their own skin, a goal that would sound absurd to almost anyone else.

The air in the room felt strange: heavy yet about to move, as if on the threshold of a storm.

Three of the four Padavano girls were left gripping the dining room table, as if everything were being pulled away from them at once.

He could see tears trapped in her eyelashes, and he lost his breath. He could see her sadness traced across the lines of her body, overlaying her arms and legs and the oval of her face.

“I didn’t expect”—she paused—“for it to be part of everything, every minute. I didn’t know that you could lose someone, and that meant you lost so much else.”

Were they watching and listening to her mother and sister stab each other in the heart?

Her voice was dim in her own ears, and these would be the last words she would say out loud for a while. She could feel some kind of vast power pulling her within herself.

Did Julia still have to be a wife, in a worst-case scenario, to a man she no longer recognized?

The baby looked drowsy now, which pleased Julia. That meant her child wasn’t hooked up to her mother’s adrenal system.

She would never forget it; she felt marked by the experience, as if she’d gotten a tattoo.

She sat in silence, a book open in her lap, willing the man in the bed to restitch himself to life’s fabric.

Sylvie felt trapped within herself, as if she were snowed in with secrets.

Loss and ghosts were his shadow, and his darkness was spreading across the small apartment.

She wanted to speak the words manacled inside her.

She tried to memorize her sister’s voice and the sound of her love.

When Sylvie spoke their family history into the air, all she heard was love.

Sylvie knew this was because she’d been looking at the painting for too long; its meaning was lost, the same way the meaning of a word is lost when repeated fifty times. She knew the hope was still in the painting; she just could no longer see it.

He felt the news only in his body; it moved in and out of his lungs.

Julia habitually turned her daughter over in her mind as if she were a Rubik’s Cube she couldn’t solve.

Julia had closed off her past as if it were a water pipe, and the creak of the valve opening was noisy.

Julia’s past had just reached through a phone line and grabbed her heart out of her chest.

He’d gone back to needing levers and pulleys to make his face do what he wanted it to do.

She was newly aware of a drain—like in a bathtub—deep inside her, through which her energy was escaping.

She wondered if dying was simply going to be an exercise in letting go of one thing after another.

She was aware that she had recently begun to think instead of speaking out loud, as if the two were the same thing. As if both carried the same weight and crossed the same distance.

The static inside her had grown loud.

After a week of sleeplessness, Julia felt like a Picasso painting—her eyes didn’t match, and her shoulders were at different heights.

The act of living had exhausted them.

“I love this hallucination. Nothing this wonderful has happened to me in a long time.”

This wasn’t on her calendar, which meant this moment could exist as a barnacle on the outside of her real life. She was here and yet not here, in a state of quantum uncertainty.

That collection of weeks had pulled her life out from under her like a rug.

Julia felt a shot of joy rise through her like bubbles to the surface of a glass.

The stock market had crashed earlier that fall, and Alice thought the ladders her mother valued so highly were made of rotten wood.

Alice ran this sentence through her head, but there were too many errors for a copy editor to fix. The structure buckled under its own weight.

She could feel her friends’ love pushing past her skin, into her body, and she cried too.

She was in her life now; simply boarding that plane would detonate the safe, careful, calm young woman she’d been constructing since she was a child.

He’d always assumed openness was synonymous with danger and that if he wasn’t holding on tight to the new life he’d built, it would blow away. But with the barriers down, he’d discovered that life became bigger.

His father-in-law had found a way to shine his affection across distance and time. And Sylvie’s love, once William let it out of his hands, had shown itself to be exponential in its power. It had expanded to fill all the space around him, which was his entire life.

Sylvie’s death would dislodge her from Florida; they would all be dislodged from everything they’d known before.