David Levithan - Someday

When sleep comes, I’m sure to let go fully—I bring his memories to the front of his mind, and give up on my presence entirely.

The next morning, I wake up inside someone else, and within a few minutes I know I’ve done well. A divorced divorce lawyer. Rich and miserable. His kids no longer speak to him. His hypochondria is acute. His hair is greasy; his shirts all have small splattered-soup stains that only a person who doesn’t care could ignore. There’s no one around to tell him to take his shirts to the cleaners, no one around to take out the trash when he’s worried he’ll throw out his back. It’s almost like he welcomes me when I arrive. The less time he has to spend in his own life, the better.

I can use that.

NATHAN

It’s not that we hit dead ends. There aren’t even roads to turn onto.

I can tell Rhiannon’s boyfriend, Alexander, is a little confused by my sudden presence in her life. He can’t put his finger on what connects us . . . and who can blame him for that? She told him we met at a party—technically true. But there’s no way to tell him the reason I’m so attentive isn’t because I want to sleep with her or date her. I’m attentive because she’s the only one besides me who knows the most unknowable thing about my life.

A lot of the couples in my school are glued together emotionally, but Alexander is all about them having their own lives—which is great for me, because it means he doesn’t get all weird when he comes over and finds me and Rhiannon on her computer, searching the Internet for news of body snatchings.

“Watching more Lorraine Hines videos?” he asks. This is a pretty good guess, since it feels like everyone’s been watching them lately.

“Just searching for the elusive truth,” Rhiannon replies. Which could be taken to mean we were trying to get the elusive truth from a Lorraine Hines video. But I know A’s location is the real truth that eludes her.

I don’t know how Rhiannon does it. It’s clear that she likes Alexander. It’s clear that he treats her well, and that Rhiannon is still getting used to the thought of being treated well. I also notice that she never lies to him, if only because he doesn’t know the right questions to ask. And even if he did, even if she told him everything . . . the strange part is that he might actually believe her. Us. But I can see how it’s easier not to risk that.

We search and search the Internet for some trace of A. We read about other people’s experiences of being taken over, and wonder whether they’re like us, or whether they’re just crackpots, making it up in a way we’re not making it up.

Finally I ask her the question that’s been nagging at me the most. We’re in her room, looking at the same “strange phenomena” websites for the twelfth time.

“We’re looking for a sign of him, right?” I say.

Rhiannon nods.

I press on. “What about leaving him a sign? Why not let him know you’re looking?”

“How?” she says. She sounds defensive.

“There’s this thing called social media? And you have a pretty distinctive name?”

“What am I supposed to say? Status update: Missing you, A. Alexander will see that and say, Hey, babe, I’m right here. ”

“He wouldn’t actually say babe, would he? Ew.”

“No. But anything I post, everyone sees. Not just A.”

“You don’t need to write him a message. Just give him a sign.”

“Like what?”

I think about it for a second. “Do you guys have, like, a song?”

She looks at me strangely.

“What?” I ask.

She shakes her head slightly. “Nothing. I mean, it’s just that—you were there for it. When A and I talked about it, A was you. In your body. It’s stupid, really. Just a song.”

“What’s the song?”

She tells me the name of the song, and I feel the echo of a memory—that’s the only way I can describe it. I don’t actually remember talking to her about the song. But the fact that she and I talked about it once makes sense to me.

“Watch,” I say.

I go on YouTube and find the video for the song. Then I copy and paste the link into her status box. In front of it, I type: Listening to this on repeat.

“Okay,” Rhiannon says. I hit return. Then I go back to YouTube and type I miss into the search box. Among other things, I get an old Johnny Cash song, “I Still Miss Someone.” I copy the link for that, then go to the comments section under the original song, type This one, too, and add the link.

“Not very subtle,” Rhiannon tells me.

“Maybe to you. And to me. And to A. To everyone else— totally subtle.”

I hit return.

RHIANNON

It feels wrong.

It feels like I’m pleading.

It feels like I’m saying I’m unhappy with my life.

It feels like I’m saying I’m unhappy with Alexander.

It feels exposed.

It feels like I’m shouting into the wilderness.

It feels like I’m setting myself up for disappointment.

It feels like I’m setting myself up for silence.

It feels like I’m breaking a promise I never really made.

It feels desperate.

It feels like I haven’t thought it through.

It feels like I’m giving something that was ours away to the world.

It feels like I don’t have enough things that were ours to afford to give one away to the world.

It feels treacherous.

It feels like I don’t really have a choice.

Posted by M at 10:34 p.m.

I don’t think I can do this any longer. And by “this” I mean “life.” The pain is out of control—and I am not talking about the kind of pain where you can get medication to make it go away. I am talking about a pain I carry with me everywhere, a pain that has nothing to do with biology or chemistry. The pain started because of who I am. Now it is all I am. There is no way to treat it. No way to calm it down. No way to get it to stop clawing. A thousand times a day I try to think of a way to destroy myself without hurting someone else. A thousand times a day I fail. My pain is the feeling of that failure. My pain is louder to me because it is inaudible to others. I don’t expect anyone to be able to help me. The world around me does not exist. I am alone in this, and if I could find a way to die alone, I would.

A

Day 6082

I used to think nobody could see me. The body I was in was impenetrable from the outside—no one else would ever expect I was there, and therefore even when I slipped up, it would be written off as the action of the person whose life I was borrowing. No one is entirely predictable—we all have surprising bursts. I hid behind that.

I got better at hiding over time, once I figured out what was going on. As a kid, I was a poor mimic, but because kids produce surprising burst after surprising burst, nothing I did ever seemed so out of character that any parent, teacher, or friend suspected the truth. Around ten or eleven, I better understood the ways to disappear, even if I still didn’t understand why I was so different from everyone else. The past couple of years, I treated it like a test I was passing. I stopped wondering what I sounded like, because the sound of my thoughts was enough. I stopped wondering what I looked like, because whatever I looked like that day was enough. I stopped wanting people to see me, because to have them see me would be the ultimate failure of the test.

I took the roles I played to heart because I didn’t have a heart of my own. I only showed anger when I thought I was meant to show anger. I only showed affection when I felt it was my obligation to show affection. I didn’t know what most of these emotions actually felt like, because I never got to express them purely. Only sorrow appeared unfiltered, because what made me cry was often the same as what would have made anyone else cry. Joy, though, was the opposite, because my joy was always edged by the fact that it wasn’t really mine.