Everything's Fine

by Cecilia Rabess

She feels her pulse quicken and grief well up in her chest, a sadness so heavy that she has to lie down. This keeps happening. It comes in waves. As if she’s swimming in the sea while a tsunami rises. Everything calm and then a giant wave slams her sideways: her dad. Gone forever. She thinks of him dead and she cries or screams or kicks things. And then as soon as she catches her breath, comes up to the surface for some air, there’s another wave crashing behind it: Josh. It doesn’t feel like hyperbole to say that she’s lost everything. Has anyone ever been this lonely?

Flattened by an anvil of grief sitting on her chest. She stops listening to the internet chatter, and even mutes her friends online. It is easier this way, she figures, to just pretend that everything is fine.

She doesn’t get up the next day or the next day or the next, until the days and nights begin to pass in one unbroken blur. She doesn’t change her clothes, doesn’t shower, doesn’t read, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t even really eat—she draws down slowly on a sleeve of saltines that she keeps on the pillow next to her, like a lover. She just stares up at the ceiling, while her sheets go stale and life goes on outside.

She doesn’t want to die, she just wants to disappear.

And it works. She disappears into a fog, a dreamless fugue state, taking pills and drinking water and setting an alarm to go off every two hours to make sure her heart is still beating and in this way days, maybe a week, pass. Jess, alone, bathing in her grief, ignoring everyone and everything, the outside world, the ringing phone.

Jess feels pretty. She piles the braids on top of her head and then lets them fall. She twirls one long braid around a finger and then another. She tips her face to the ceiling, feels the swish-swish of the hair against her back. And she ignores the fact that she could have looked like this the whole time.