Really Good, Actually(72)
I scrolled through the images of Jon and I, beaming and oblivious. Everyone says brides are too stressed to enjoy their own weddings, but I’d had the time of my life, swanning around my mother’s backyard in expensive silk, accepting praise and well-wishes and envelopes full of cash. It had felt so easy to be sure.
Merris had stayed at our wedding only briefly, leaving almost immediately after the reception kicked off in earnest. She wore a jewel-toned tunic thing with a necklace of unknown ethnic origin, and gave us an oddly shaped vase, though we’d asked for cash, ambitiously, to “put toward a house.” After the ceremony, she pulled me into a hug and said, “This is a good day. It’s important to carry the good days around.”
I thought about her now, in some dank room getting her bones photographed. I should have pretended to be her cousin, her younger lover, her daughter. I should have been in there. Instead, she was alone in some enormous, frightening tube, and I was out here smelling stale coffee and archiving my wedding photos in a folder labeled whoops. I started googling physiotherapists near Merris’s house, inputting various worst-case scenarios, learning about avulsion fractures and bursitis and labral tears. I wondered if I should go home and move out before Merris was discharged. I wondered if I should quit my job. I deleted Jesse’s phone number.
As night became morning, the people I’d arrived with were replaced with new pairs: mothers and sons, old married people, roommates, young couples, aging siblings. Everyone was waiting with or for someone. I hoped Merris wanted me to wait for her. I hoped my friends would wait for me. I wanted more than anything to text someone who cared about me, to talk things through with a loving entity, but I had quite literally exhausted my options. Across the room, a man rested his head on his partner’s shoulder while a woman horked something green onto the floor.
A Fantasy
I wake up one morning and start to dissolve. At first it’s only a shimmer at the ends of my hair, my split ends glistening as they transform into nothing, but the nothing spreads quickly, up each strand and down into my shoulders. By the time I’m out of bed, my hands are a million disparate particles. My forearms tingle and I know that soon they’ll be gone too.
Initially, of course, this fills me with fear; I am afraid to die. But this isn’t death. I’m still here, except I don’t have upper arms anymore, which is actually a perfect scenario.
My thoughts are there—my feelings too, my likes and dislikes, affinity for the color orange—but as I take what’s left of me for a walk down the street, I realize that I am unobserved. As my lower half begins to pixelate and fade, I find myself thinking it might be alright, even ideal, to live the rest of my life as a shapeless fog. Nobody gives fog a hard time for being what it is. Fog can’t have a hard time with midrise denim. Fog never said the wrong thing at a party and ruined the vibe.
I let my legs drift up and away, vein-mottled calves first. I will never think about them again. My friends and family will have to adjust to this new way of knowing me. Over time they will come to like that I am everywhere and nowhere, instead of disappointing them emotionally, or forgetting to bring my own wine to the event and then drinking most of theirs, or getting weird about the group photo. Rather than being smothered or put off or bored by my big, stupid feelings, they will find the atmospheric experience of me calming. My presence will be a warm breeze, like Mandy Moore’s after she dies in that religious movie about singing.
A glowing light fills my torso until it explodes, shooting outward like the universe at the very beginning (probably). I feel only relief: I do not have to know what to do about anything. It doesn’t matter that I do not stretch in the morning and have never successfully meditated, or that my face is round and my body decaying, or that I am a bad friend, an ungrateful daughter, and functionally useless in the face of society’s many problems.
I am a delicate mist. No one can look at me or touch me or see me. I do not want to be held, which is fine—no one wants to hold me, and even if they did, it wouldn’t help. I am a murmuration, a lightly undulating spray of particles, moving easily around the earth without impacting it. I don’t miss anyone and have never fucked anything up.
Chapter 17
Merris’s hip was bruised but not fractured. She would need rest and a few months of rehabilitative exercises, and to avoid falling again. When she finally emerged from the hospital’s interior it was almost five a.m. and she was using a walker. Despite pounding back-to-back Dasanis for several hours, my hangover had set in properly, and I felt as if the waiting room’s fluorescent lights had somehow seeped inside my body.
“You didn’t have to wait,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was touched or aggravated.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “I’ll get us a car.”
Our Uber pulled up, and I folded the walker into the trunk and helped Merris into the front seat. I asked the driver to be careful, to do his best to avoid bumps and potholes. He said, “Sure,” and did no such thing. We jangled along Dundas in the wintry predawn fog, the street populated by the odd shift worker and a few guys sitting outside an encampment. A couple walked past us at a stoplight, apparently having an argument. (The girlfriend was employing that peerless rhetorical tactic, “speed walking a foot or two ahead of your opponent, in heels.”) I decided I would speak only if I had something good to say. I tried to think what that might be and came up with nothing. Wind basically whistled through my empty skull.