Things like—I can’t even—
We waited on the highway for an hour, and then the ice got covered enough with snow that we could keep going, Aza’s dad driving. By then it was way too late.
I rode in the back with her.
All I want to do since then is press my head against a wall and feel it on my forehead.
If I were in the living room right now, with my moms, they’d sit me down and have a sympathetic and nervous discussion with me about how she’s “gone.” Turns out, I hate that word. Also “we lost her.”
In the last few days, I’ve lost lots of things, just to check and see how losing feels. For example, I keep losing it.
I hit my head into the wall and bruise my forehead. I smash a window, with my fist wrapped in a T-shirt. Some kind of movie plan for fixing pain. Did not help.
People keep saying infuriating things about fate and chance and bad luck and how she had an amazing life despite it being only fifteen years, eleven months, and twenty-five days long. I don’t feel like this is amazing. I feel very, very unamazed.
I stay up at night staring at screens.
Since Aza, I kept looking for some analogy, something to explain this, some version of lost that made sense, but nothing was right. Then on a middle-of-the-night internet wander, I found something from 475 BC, a Greek cosmologist called Anaxagoras. At that point, math hadn’t thought up the concept of nothing. There was no zero. Anaxagoras hence had extensive ideas about the thing that was missing, the something that wasn’t.
This is what Anaxagoras said about lost: “What is cannot not be. Coming-to-be and perishing are customarily believed in incorrectly by the Greeks, since nothing comes-to-be or perishes, but rather it is mingled together out of things that are, and is separated again. Thus they would be correct to call coming-to-be ‘being mingled together’ and perishing ‘being separated.’”
That was the first time something felt accurate. I tried to explain to Carol and Eve, but it created concerns that I might be planning to perish.
“Suicidal ideation,” said Carol, “is what that sounds like.” I could feel her dialing a therapist in her head. She wasn’t wrong. It did sound that way.
“Straight up, kiddo, are you thinking of offing yourself?” asked Eve, clearly using unserious words to ease her way into talking about something serious.
“I’m fine,” I said. She looked at me, her eyebrow up.
“You don’t have to be fine. If you were fine, that’d mean you had no human feelings. I’m not fine. Neither is Carol. We loved Aza. But know that if you ever thought it’d be a plan to kill yourself, we’d come and find you and kill you all over again. Just so you know. So do NOT. If you’re thinking about it, come to us. We’ll figure out a better choice.”
“No,” I said. “This isn’t about suicide. This is about philosophy.”
They looked at me, with no intention of believing anything was about philosophy. Which, okay, I was touch and go. I’m still touch and go.
“Pills?” said Carol. “I notice you’re looking a little—”
“A little what?”
“A little pi,” says Eve.
I try not to make eye contact with her. A little pi. How does she know? I’ve been quiet.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’m taking them.” Antianxiety. Which do not work. Anything working right now would be a miracle.
Carol’s been trying to get me to see a therapist. Eve’s been trying to send me to yoga, the practice of which has semi-calmed her wrath about the state of the universe. I got her to desist by doing a brief, not-too-shabby, I-already-know-about-yoga crane pose. Aza made fun of yoga. It drove her crazy when I did that pose. That was the main reason I learned to do it—to crack her up.
FYI, that shit is as hard as it looks.
“I don’t blame you for that,” Eve said, looking at how I was all twisted around my own arms. “I’m mad about things I can’t fix too. Yoga doesn’t fix anything. It only dulls the aggravation. Ice caps, Burmese pythons, and floodplains are still a mess . . .”
And she was off. I briefly, briefly felt a little bit better.
Right now, it’s three a.m., and Eve comes into my room. The moms are on watch.
She puts a mug of hot milk down on my desk. I look at it, minorly tempted. Hot milk is one of the lesser evils, but it’s still an evil.
“Honey,” she says.
“I’m busy,” I say. “I promise I’m not falling apart.”
“You seem like you are,” she says. “And even if you’re not right now, if you don’t start sleeping, you will be soon.”
“What if Carol died?” I say. “How would you sleep?” I regret it the moment I say it.
Eve looks stricken. “I’d be awake,” she says. “For years.”
“Well,” I say. “It’s the same thing.”
“Yeah, but you can’t be awake for years,” she says.
“Even though you just said you would be.”
“Even though.” She’s whispering.
“I can be awake for three days, and I slept before that. I slept for four hours on each of the days after it happened,” I say. “I’ll sleep after tomorrow. I’m on it. I’m working.”
What I’m working on: I’m planning Aza’s funeral.
After a while, Eve goes. I feel mean. I send her a text telling her I’m sorry. I hear her phone buzz down the hall. After a second, I get a message back from her.