chapter one

her life was full of those short, burning moments of awkwardness that fill you when you're 16. the kind that end up only being bee stings and bug bites in the end, but that at the time, set everything on fire. like when you were 13 and Max Anderson asked you to meet him in the basketball court after school, only to leave you waiting there until dusk, you feeling small but all your ugliness feeling infinitely bigger, like your vampire teeth and protruding chin and sinking eyes. like the first time watching someone you love more than yourself drive away on an early spring morning after telling you that too much had disappeared for him to stay any longer. those moments, that you won't forget and that might leave scars, but that eventually you can move past without being fated to broken hearts or broken bones that are too dilapidated for you to hold on to anything good.

except that sometimes even those things that aren't lethal, the little things, pile up so much that you can't breathe from under them. she often thought about how it was that happiness somehow left her. she was alive - i mean, her heart was still beating despite it all. she was young - only 24, although often she fell asleep and woke up feeling like an old woman. and at some moments, if she caught her reflection in a mirror or window with the right angle and light, she even felt beautiful.

it was a Friday evening in late November as she walked home from work, and she thought about where she was going and where she was coming from. it was just past 4:30 and the sun had already set (winter takes days and rips them in half). telephone wires stretched across university avenue like veins along an ugly gray sky. her lips were chapped, her mittens were too small and her hat kept slipping above her ears.

it was as she was tugging her hat down, trying to make it stay (although we all learn some day that things leave especially quickly the second you try to force them to stay), that the streetlights suddenly began to flicker on and off, almost violently - all of them, i mean, as far behind her and as fall in front of her that she could see. two things that were blatantly not right both became clear at once: that all of the shops and apartments had dark windows and closed doors, and that she was completely alone. not alone like how she always was, but alone in that there was no one else to be seen: no couples holding hands, no college girls laughing and drinking coffee, no high school runaways smoking cigarettes and braiding each others hair, no homeless men with big beards holding out big gulp cups ("keep your money, i want change"), no slightly balding men and nervous looking women walking fast in suits and ties to their cars. no one else but her.

she froze - it seemed to be the most natural way to respond. the street lights went out. it was not yet completely dark, but she could still see the edge of the moon, one or two stars, and the blinking red and blue lights of an airplane. she prayed every night, but only half-heartedly, and never went to church. still, she felt the next step was to ask the most logical question when faced with what is illogical - "god, is that you?"

naturally, there was no response. if god exists, he forgot to teach himself how to speak.

she heard quiet footsteps behind her and turned around fast, tripping on her shoelaces and stumbling back towards the brick wall of a convenience store. she found herself looking at her reflection, except she wasn't. her eyes were open, she was awake, she was looking forward and staring straight at herself. there was a woman standing there who looked exactly like her - an angel, a long-lost-twin, a figment of her imagination - and she extended her arm forward. in the palm of her hand was a pocket-sized notebook. the streetlights began to flicker again, this time more violently than before, until everything either became so bright or so dark that she couldn't see, with a quiet so loud and deafening it could burst your eardrums.

she awoke sitting cross-legged with her back against the wall. her purse was on the floor to her right, and to her left, the small notebook sat ominously on the concrete. it was still just past dusk, and the street was busy, with people bustling by and giving her the quick look of looking through you that the secure reserve for the insecure and insane. there was really nothing else to do besides put the notebook in her bag and stand up. the clock above the bank on the corner read 4:34 PM; a minute had passed, if at all. an old man approached, leaned with his back against the brick wall to her left, asked for cigarettes and a light. she gave him both, and then lit one for herself. they stood side by side and smoked without speaking, her looking up at the lights and in to the darkening sky, terrified that she was finally going crazy.

she finished her cigarette, tossed it on the ground, stamped it out with her heel. the old man reached over, put his hand on her shoulder. "do you ever feel like you go through each minute, each breath, each action, without anyone seeing you? without anyone seeing what you see?" if only you knew, she thought, but didn't respond - there was too much to say and think about that she couldn't do either. he continued, "i suppose it doesn't matter whether everything is real or imagined, whether life really happens or not. reality or a dream, it all feels the same. and in the end, there's not one else but you." he thanked her for the cigarette, walked away.

she fell asleep on the bus ride home, slept past her stop and had to walk back a couple blocks. she got home and climbed straight in to bed - without dinner or feeding the cats or sitcom re-runs or tea and a book - and slept soundly through the night, dreaming she was 8 years old and selling lemonade on a summer day on the street corner outside of the house in california that she grew up in.