I Hope This Finds You Well

by Natalie Sue

An empty feeling flows through my chest. No matter what, I’ll always be a factor. Every conversation. Every event. Every time I try to talk in a meeting.

He actually cares. So much. Did I lose that part of me? I definitely had it once.

Everyone in the world is thinking right now, and there’s far too much thought floating in the air.

How can everything that we are disappear so quickly?

This was real. I want it to be real.

“You don’t have to shake it off. Guilt is heavy.” And maybe it’s because of everything today, or because everything feels surreal after Larry, but I say the words that I never thought I’d say out loud. “It can change you forever.”

After all this, if I save my job and everything, do I just go back to my life here? The one without you in it?

“It’s so, so tough loving someone who is sick. Sometimes it feels like he’s already gone.”

This is who I am—despite everything I’ve tried, I’ll always be the same person.

I put both my hands on her shoulders, letting her lean some of her weight on me as she straightens herself. Her warmth from being alive, from being a human being, draws into me.

I stare at the faces around me. I’ve made them hurt. My throat is like a vise holding back the sobs that won’t come. After all of it—these people were never nothing. This is my whole life, right now.

My eyes fall closed and heavy as I wait for the void to give me mercy and take me away again. They were right about me.

It would all be so blissful to just be there with him, instead of alone here forever.

I do want to start somewhere. It somehow feels like things can be okay, now that they’re so broken. Now that there’s nothing left to hold together, I can just deal with what’s in front of me. Where I’m going, I don’t know, but I can put some garbage away. That’s all I have to do.