Amber Sparks: May We Shed These Human Bodies

And especially the ones that did.

You will want desperately to talk about Danny, but no one will let you. Don’t dwell on it, your mother will say. You’ll make yourself ill. When you call your brother at college to ask about the afterlife, he’ll tell you not to be so morbid. You’ll ask him if it was morbidity or genius or both that led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

Neither, he’ll say. It was a parlor game.

You’ll think about killing yourself. Of course you will. For a moment you’ll picture yourself floating among water lilies and reeds, hair and skirts spread like Ophelia or the Lady of Shalott. You’ll murmur, the web flew out and floated wide, but since this really isn’t applicable to your situation, and since when you were ten you almost drowned in your neighbors’ pool and it really was quite horrible, and since you can’t think of any other poetic way to die that wouldn’t hurt just as much, you decide not to.

Your body will seem strange and fragile to you. Your skin will feel like paper and your bones will feel like porcelain and you’ll eat almost nothing but fruit, which you'll crave like you are pregnant. In fact, your parents will begin to worry aloud that you are pregnant, until you start pointedly leaving tampon applicators smeared with blood in their wicker wastebasket.

Your father will grow silent and sad. You are his favorite and one night he will make pancakes shaped like your initials, just like when you were little. You will refuse to eat them and he will tip them into the garbage disposal one by one, then flip the switch and stand there, listening to the loud whir and scrape of metal on metal, staring at the buttermilk bits disappearing down the drain.

III. Solve for X

Your mother — as always, as ever — will be the strong one. She will be stoic at first, then angry, and finally, exasperated. She will take you to a therapist, who will tell you to cut it out with the fruit already; don’t you know you can get sick from too much vitamin C? You’ll wonder how he knew; your mother must have told him. Bitch, you will think, and decide to be rebellious. You don’t need a therapist. You don’t need anybody.

That’s your decision, of course, the therapist will say. You will roll your eyes and sigh loudly. But, he will add, it might be good for you to have someone to talk to. Your mother tells me this is your first death; you’ve never dealt with anything like this before. You will hear the words, First Death, with Emily Dickinson capitals, and you will panic. You will think, Good lord, will there be more of these? You will think of all your future loves lined up like tin soldiers in an oven, colorful and shiny, melting down as you look on in horror. And you will think you may have a Nervous Breakdown right then and there.

The therapist, whose name is Dr. Mueller, will agree to see you twice a month. In the waiting room he will tell your mother that unless you’re feeling better by fall you should postpone college for a while, even though you’ve already been accepted. Fine by me, you’ll say, and shrug.

She’s lost a lot of weight, your mother will stage whisper to Dr. Mueller. You will feel like a punk. You will feel embarrassed and cool, like a rock star talking about politics.

At this point your mind will want to get away from you. It will start to take trips, to watch birds or catalogue flowers or read calm novels where no one dies in tights or duels. It will grow squeamish at the sight of your now awkward, angled body. It will avoid mirrors. You will wave whenever you spot your mind in passing, but it will duck its head and pretend not to notice. I’ve lost my mind, you will complain to your mother.

I know, she will say, the corners of her mouth white and sagging. She has no imagination and counts out an exact number of chocolate chips before making cookies. That’s why you’re seeing Dr. Mueller.

Dr. Mueller will ask you to call him Curtis and will act more like a teacher than a doctor. You won't really like him, but he will listen to you talk about Danny if you want to. And you really want to. You’ll tell Dr. Mueller lots of things about Danny. You’ll tell him how Danny wanted to write a book about a monster so big it could swallow the whole world but because it doesn’t, people worship it and call it God. It would have been a thinly veiled novelization of his religious beliefs, you will say.

Curtis will narrow his eyes a little. Are they your beliefs as well?

Oh, no, you will tell him proudly. I’m an agnostic. He will nod and ask you where you think Danny is now. I strongly suspect, you will say, that he is nowhere at all. Then you’ll worry that this sounds too clinical, as if you didn’t care, but Curtis will have already moved on and so you’ll cry by yourself later, wrapped in your down comforter even though it’s ninety degrees outside.

Another time Curtis will ask you if you could tell that Danny was depressed. Oh, sure, you will say. Yeah, for sure. This will be a lie. You will feel that it would look bad for you of all people not to have noticed, not to have known.

IV. Undiscovered Equations

The summer will drift along in lonely clusters like tumbleweed. You’ll spend it alone and bored, falling asleep at odd times. You’ll go driving through thunderstorms, so slowly and aimlessly that drivers behind you will honk, giving you the finger and mouthing like fish behind their rain-spattered windows. You'll learn to read Tarot cards, training yourself to find meaning in everything. You'll find Danny in nothing: not in the romance novels from the local library, not in the Victorian poets you're reading because you think you should, not in the movies you watch, sometimes several a day, where somebody has died or is dying.

You’ll start to miss your mind. While you are reading Danny’s emails for the four-hundredth time, you’ll want to cry but nothing will happen. You’ll push air out of your lungs, force a cry, even squeeze your stomach like a squeaky toy. This will not work; it will feel more like the dry heaves than sorrow.

You’ll sit for a moment and think hard. Then you’ll go downstairs. I think I want to go to college this fall, you will tell your parents while they are watching television.

Your father will nod, carefully watching dancing stars instead of you. He will act as though there was a spell and his moving or speaking could break it. Your mother will annoy you by hugging you so hard that your bra clasp cuts your skin. And your mother is not the hugging type, which is no doubt why she gets it wrong.

To your surprise, you will immensely enjoy yourself at college. Your roommate will sleep too much and listen to bad house music, but she’ll be funny and sarcastic. You’ll gain the freshman fifteen, which is good because then you’ll be rounded instead of angled. You’ll take Philosophy 101 and feel sorry for Danny, because he would have loved college and now he’ll never be any smarter; he’ll never know any more than he did at seventeen.

One day a flyer will go up in your dorm, announcing auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You will audition and land the part of Helena. An older girl named Tanya will play Titania because of her height and her long red hair, and the two of you will become friends. It will be good to have a friend again.

Your parents will call every day at first, then less often when they discover you’re always busy. When you apologize for not visiting, your father will practically yell into the phone, No, no, stay busy, honey! That’s fine, that’s good!

You will sometimes forget about Danny. Then you’ll feel guilty and try to cry, but it will feel like bad acting, an echo of someone else’s sadness. Besides, the noises you make will annoy your roommate. You sound like a goddamn cow, she’ll say.