Fans of the Impossible Life

Blue sky, sparkling sun, eighty-two degrees. A day for ice cream and Slip’N Slides, for falling asleep in the grass with a Popsicle melting in your hand.

She would destroy herself in order to destroy

“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”

It felt so nice to have her lean on me, to know how comfortable we were with each other, how well she knew me. Nothing else at this stupid party mattered because Mira was here, and Mira wouldn’t leave me. And then suddenly we were kissing,

“Later I’ll make you the Sebby special,” she said. “It’s used to remove paint from cars.”

Lying like breathing, because those were the only two things allowing you to survive.

Yes, I wanted the pills,” you told them. “Yes, I want to kill myself. Yes, I understand what I’m saying.”
It took them a while to believe that you weren’t kidding. You had always been so amusing.

There was no one sitting and keeping watch through the night in a chair while your roommate’s TV blared on.

We were three bodies that didn’t know the end of each other, breathing together. We knew that we would have to go back. Kick off the leaves and become three separate people who would go off into the world, forced to breathe on our own. But not yet. Not quite yet.

My tiny twin bed somehow now felt too big when he wasn’t there.