the prologue

I told my friends that I wasn’t depressed. I had spent the day before laying in my bed, alternating between scrolling on my phone and staring at the wall. I’d had a jar of canned peaches for breakfast, pulled straight from the cupboard. One of the ones with a pull tab lid where the fruit inside sat in a sugar-sweet syrup like concoction. I’d eaten nothing but ice cream for dinner, scraping at the sides of the paper container while sitting in my bed. My computer laid next to me, unopened. But I felt better about myself because then I could at least pretend that I was going to start doing something productive. I’d met them at a movie theatre. We were seeing the sequel of some science fiction fantasy that I’d never seen the original for. I made jokes about reading the Wikipedia page and pretending that I knew the plot line. I’ve always been good at pretending that I’m fine. They already knew the truth, of course, but we were our own little bubble of existential crises, sitting there in the parking lot. They were just nice enough not to call me out on it.

But I lived a fine line of grief and spite, and with a determination not to lose any more people. That was the part that I wasn’t very good at. I feel like the girl in a cliche movie, complaining that everyone around her dies. But I was only two years into my twenties, and I’d already lost more people than I’d had fingers, and less than half that had been older than 30. Three suicides, one overdose, one surgery gone wrong, a little girl only eight years old. Two grandparents, too many friends. I’d gotten used to planning carpools to funerals. I carried life on my shoulders like Atlas, afraid to drop the world- knowing that all their stories now were mine.