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Honors Theses Student Work

6-2022

What I Knew Then, and What I Know Now What I Knew Then, and What I Know Now

Madeline Schaeffer

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What I Knew Then, and What I Know Now

By

Madeline Schaeffer

of the requirements for

Honors in the Department of English

UNION COLLEGE

narrator’s life from college during the initial stages of shutdown, as well as the significant events

that happened during the long, in-between period of quarantine that many of us remember so

well. As a plot device, the narrator’s romantic and familial relationships also grow and change

throughout the story. Through this, I hope to call into question what it means to love other people

from a distance, as well as adequately describe what it feels like to be alone, truly, for the first

time in one’s life. Most details of the narrator's life (such as places, names, etc.) are kept

relatively vague, in hopes that the reader will form a deeper understanding and connection to

“You” — the one who is ultimately telling the story. And although this story is largely based on

my own personal experiences, I hope that by exploring themes such as isolation, loneliness, and

self-identity — things that many of us have most likely contemplated in the past year — the

Part 2: Summer ………………………….47

IV. June 2020 .………………………….48

V. July 2020 .………………………….59

VI. August 2020 .………………………….67

Part 3: Fall ………………………….82

VII. September 2020 ………………………….83

Epilogue ………………………….92

Works Cited ………………………….95

and learned new ways of being, and were still.

And listened more deeply.

Some meditated, some prayed, some danced.

Some met their shadows.

And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people living in ignorant,

dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,

the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again,

Part One : Spring

random, cold Thursday in March while you’re already in the middle of your own personal crisis

that, very suddenly and uncomfortably, falls violently to the side.

on campus, walking down the sidewalk? That day when you were under the impression that the

world and its people cared about anything? When you believed that time would stop for your

problems?

in the blink of an eye, that things would stay the same. But that was a long time ago.

uncertain what if? moment, snapping like static in the cold between all of you. Remember how

all the nearby schools were closing? How you had already guessed what had happened before

everyone’s fingers flew into their jackets, the back pocket of their jeans, their bags, and

wondering later if everyone else had that same scary, slow-motion moment of realization that

you did. This thing — this virus — the one that had managed to creep its way into the superficial

drama and gossip that made your school resemble a mini petri dish, a breeding ground for

infection, for paranoia. And although you aren’t standing close to anyone, being outside

— one girl down the sidewalk bursts into tears as her friends distractedly attempt to console her,

their faces contorted with their own worries; less than twenty feet away from her stands a cultish

supposed to know what to do stare shockedly at each other, shifting back and forth on their feet

everything: RAVE Notice: A staff member has tested positive for COVID-19. See email for more

the bewildered what are we supposed to do now? so clearly written across the faces of everyone

— slowly at first, then gushing all at once — you’re reminded of the circulation of things on

campus, and how this virus surely couldn’t be any different than a rumor, or an STD, honestly.

You’ve been too exhausted to keep up with the weeks of updates, although your phone feels the

need to alert you about the current state of the world at random times throughout the day. You

only hear the worst of it, and it stresses you out, so you read next to nothing at all in

compensation, shutting it out with the snap of your laptop, letting the battery in your phone run

not. The last few months lay cloudy and muddled and sleep-deprived in your head.

hair trailing down his stomach as he glides past you. You remember finding it stupidly funny,

your parents’ house.

you were supposed to be frantic about finals but were now, instead, were worried about the

head. In the midst of the chaos, you were headed to see one of your professors, because for the

first time in your life, you had been messy and irresponsible, and were now in danger of failing a

class. Because of a boy — out of all the bullshit you’ve dealt with in the past couple of years —

slept in past all his classes, skipped lectures for smoking, gotten so hungover you could barely

you binge all of it, alone on the floor with your hands like an animal, tasting nothing. Watch as

you spend hours heaving all of it up in the bathroom afterwards, choking on the smell, your

hide your retching.

ringed with oil. It’s four a.m. and your head is spinning, and you fall asleep with the skin around

before. It’s a Sunday. You pack up your cat and all of his stuff — shove the loose amount of

troubled daughter — his dress shirt tucked tightly into the belt buckle of his pants, your ears

pierced in six different places. He still has the light blue rosary beads sitting in the console of his

car that have been there since forever, the obnoxious Keep the CHRIST in Christmas! bumper

sticker glued to the back of his car with grime, the constant scowl of disapproval on his face that

made you want to throw up on his shoes. You wish your mom could have picked you up, even if

it was in her big maroon minivan that looked like a big, ugly eggplant on wheels— there was no

one left to watch you go — walking away, head-down, with your hurricane of a family.

of your belongings in the apartment — all of which you shove into a closet on the second floor

and never get back. The vacuum that you picked up off the side of the road. Your mirror. Your

carrier on your lap, your cat crying loudly — shut that thing up — crammed between the garbage

from freshman year, listening to the radio station your father is playing funded by dozens of Pro-

your father, or listen to what he tries to talk to you about. Everything outside the window is

When she hugs you, her clavicle presses, hard, against your chin. You’re always aware of the

prominence of her shoulder blades when you come home, as you stand there with your arms half

holding her, half holding your bags.

lost — and how you’re measuring her back, as you loosely hold each other. It’s this toxic game

of hide and seek that the both of you have been playing for all your life, dancing around the

dinner table roundandround as if you were children, evading dinner and difficult conversations.

The cold weather gave you an excuse to pile on the sweatshirts, double-layer yourself to the

slowly dissolving with the lack of your presence each time you’re gone. You haven’t been home

since Christmas and your mother still has her saccharine snowman collection arranged up on

often sit into April — well after the snow has melted. There’s black mold growing in the upstairs

bathroom that you’re convinced is the explanation for your father’s behavior, and the front porch

Christmas lights years ago. The silences in the high-ceilinged rooms somehow feel much too

technically as occupied as it’s ever been with all of your brothers and sisters home, it feels

entirely empty; you can hear it echoing in the stairwells, the family pictures hanging in the wall

deep, unsteady feeling whenever you thought about coming back, maybe stirred by that loss of

your school-provided therapist has suggested to you once, upon bringing it up. And although you

quite know how to deal with. How do you begin to explain things that have already happened,

understand. The can of worms they wanted to attack was bigger than they thought and much too

hard to open, despite your best efforts — explaining things that didn’t make sense in your head

— in-between panic attacks, although maybe you were just stubborn. Maybe you just didn’t want

it to get better.

mattress, buried in childhood stuffed animals, is too small, the springs digging into your back

out older sister is kicked off her college campus a day after you are, and she arrives to share the

already too small room with you in a flurry of crankiness and purple scrubs and overbearing

E.R. nurse in the overcrowded hospital down the street and her nights collapsed, next to you,

her, claiming that he doesn’t want to accidentally spread anything to his family, so they crankily

college. She goes through your stuff and takes your clothes and has random fits of rage over

next few weeks of uncertainty, you fight to share the obscenely small space, snarling at each

other like wild animals when you disrupt the other’s routine — but unlike your other siblings,

there is no avoiding her. She’s constantly asking you what you’ve eaten, if you slept, if you’re

still throwing up. You know she cares about you, but her questions make your mind pace in

circles when you lie to her, tell her everything is fine.

endlessly about — either shut in her room throughout the day or casting suicidal looks at you

tops of their heads bobbing back and forth across the kitchen. She looks thinner, and tired, and is

constantly irritated with something, however small or insignificant. She spends all her time

obnoxious videos on her phone. She reminds you of you, and you hate it — the familiarity of her

throughout the day, throbbing, alongside the guilt of it all. She was sent home from the local high

friends, her teachers.

You’d wonder for the one-thousandth time why your younger sister had to be so much more

scared you so much. This better, younger, less broken version of yourself, how much you loved

her, how fiercely you felt the need to protect her, to keep her safe. You never felt this exact

feeling with your brothers, who begrudgingly accepted the pandemic in silence — as if it were

just another piece of bullshit thrust into their lives that they have no choice but to deal with. One

quietly turned eighteen the day after the city schools shut down. The other spends his days

sleeping until three in the afternoon. They share bunk beds and crossly argue at each other in

hushed voices late at night. You never see them not in front of their computers, or some other

attention. They go to bed late and wake up late and you catch them checking their school emails,

occasionally, with video games running in the background.

had changed — broken a little after your past relationship. You couldn't ever tell what they were

such a point of fascination for you — their obliviousness, how much they could surprise you but

their explosive moods. But you understood. You try to remember what you felt like at their age,

You’ve been trying to change — the partying and smoking and drinking and laughing too loudly

cripplingly the same. You can feel yourself sliding backwards with this little end-of-the-world

scenario that you were experiencing, somehow faster than before, with everything — eating,

sleeping, functioning. At school, there was no one to watch, but at home, your mother’s eyes

follow you into the kitchen at mealtimes. Her gaze is pleading, desperate, and heavy as hell on

your shoulders when you always eventually leave, empty-handed.

strange foods from the refrigerator late at night when everyone’s asleep, foods that you know no

of crackers — throwing them up afterwards in the most absolute silence you can manage while

your night-owl brothers are distracted by the bluish glow of their computer screens. You think

your system — because your parents still look at you as if you’re wounding yourself and your

you in stale silence to the grocery store, where you let him buy whatever he picks out for you. He

that, you know that. Being near him triggers more binges, more panic attacks than ever, although

anything other than work. You don’t have a job to go to anymore, so you begin to go grocery

the cemetery with the dog while your father is at work, making up stupid rhymes out of the

strange last names you find carved into the granite of the gravestones, doodling shitty looking

sketches in your notebook. With no one allowed to leave, the fractures in your family somehow

became even more obvious as you thrash around each other’s schedules, breathing in everyone’s

foul moods as if they were air. Your brother works in food service, coming home stinking of

cheap hand sanitizer and wearing three layers of round cotton masks that vaguely make him look

like he has a beak. Your mother comes home from her shifts looking brittle and destroyed, telling

night in front of the dinner that you tried to make for everyone. On the television, the cameramen

follow big, refrigerated trucks pulling away from miscellaneous hospitals around the state; the

you wear tracks on the sidewalk. Catch the downcast gazes of your neighbors and wonder if they

pace in compulsive circles late at night for hours upon hours in the basement, attempt to work off

had time to read and clicking through your exams in a multitude of strange online formats. In the

almost as soon as you receive them. The professor you talked to just before you left gives you a

B, despite barely attending class during the term, and you passively decide to forgive him in the

split-second it takes you to open and close the tab. At least your parents don’t ask about your

grades, for once, and you don’t tell. You used to be good at school at one point, great at it, even,

but you don’t feel like that now. You don’t feel like an exceptional student, or a good student,

even — you feel like garbage, like everything you had worked so hard to achieve didn’t matter

your stomach roll.

against all odds like a teetering block tower built by a child. Sometimes you picture your family

stop, despite the suffering of everyone involved. Your father was always an unhappy, unlikeable,

maybe it’s just the jumble of all seven of you that caused chaos. They are a bad pair, the two of

you are unable to see over them — and they seem to grow taller and denser as you spend your

dry out and crack like clay. Your sister gets temporarily laid off for a period of time, but your

parents don’t ever stop working, overloaded by restrictions and pandemic patients. Your father’s

foul mood ricochets off your mother when he gets home and ping-pongs off the five of you like a

pinball game.

cupboards like a fugitive in-between the roar of your father’s snores upstairs. You’re lapsing into

your own private cycle of self-destruction that’s only gotten worse since you left. It’s not until

you, and you’re dismissed, just like that. You remember the stinging in your chest, the sharp,

involuntary inhale of air you take, as if she had just jabbed you in the ribs, as if something just

That's when you stop talking, you think, or trying at least. Your sister tries to force more

but you feel like you just got raped again — somehow — of something else, of your ability to

with the rest of it.

spring without making it sound like you had a psychotic break? Because you definitely had one,

everything relevant in your life was usually a direct result of those isolated moments where

happened to you so much as something happened, good or bad, big or small. You still don’t

small things such as crowded grocery shopping with your mom on holidays and lying in various

him, any sort of goodbye. Wondering where he was. Contemplating sending texts to his blocked

knew would never get resolved. At night, you can feel his hands move across your body, the way

tears and cold-sweat, alone past 11 a.m., long after your sister has gone to work — feeling

broken and hazy and useless.

from the school that your study abroad program in England for the next year has been called off,

would normally process colossal disappointments, feeling mildly upset by it but not completely

let alone the country, feeling so alienated among your often well-traveled classmates that you felt

should’ve done — you angrily ignore the bad ones and shove them to the side, where they sit,

at night like monsters in the form of numb, uncontrollable urges that you always succumb to,

stuffing your feelings down, down, down, with bowls of cereal, freezer-burned ice cream, and

near bad leftovers — your only “feel better” option laying out in front of you like a one-door

labyrinth. That void, to this day, haunts you, the feeling of falling into that pit over and over

again, the opening and closing of the door, with no idea how to get it to stop.

felt certain anymore, really, it was unnerving, but also somehow oddly nice — like someone had

Novocain and told you to get bedrest for an indefinite amount of time. The days passed by like

viscous liquid, slow and thick and sluggish; long nights and late mornings spent lost on social

doctors down the street, where you sit, eyes glazed, in front of children’s’ cartoons for hours

Barbies and dress-up with them as they tug at your hair and demand piggy-back rides and scream

sunken — you look like a sick frog. The figure peering back at you from inside the mirror is a bit

day. You’ve picked at your skin, let your hair grow to an awkward length, grown pale from days

spent, shivering and depressed, inside looking out on the sunshine. Your ex’s face comes to mind

in times like these, his lips pulled back into a sneer, his claggy blue eyes locked on yours.

to remember yourself, who you were, where you’ve been. Dodge your family’s sadness, leeching

away at you as the weeks progress, trying to find some sort of happiness in yourself. When you

with everything here, pushed together like mismatched puzzle pieces from different sets. Your

younger siblings with their big, hurt eyes and slouched shoulders. Your bomb shelter bedrooms,

versus how empty it was. The ghosts and cobwebs lingering in the corners of its high old ceilings

like wolves in a maze with no end.

least over the various muddled messages you've sent him in the past weeks, you don’t get the

You could name at least six of them at school who had absolutely ruined you by sophomore year,

did, violently. But as you are, you are incapable of being alone, of dealing with the disquiet of

the house, of the inside your own head.

enthusiasm — feel something shrivel in your chest. You know you’re hurting yourself, that you

shouldn't be doing this. You wonder if he has alcohol that you’ll drink in the backseat of his car

as he tries to have sex with you, if he’ll sell you drugs. The day before meeting him, you almost

cancel, wondering why it’s so hard to interpret his intentions, why he even wants to talk to you.

pandemic — maybe they were just supposed to drop from your life like flies, forcing you to start

over afterwards, if you survived. Your trouble is that no one ever wrote an instruction manual for

always feel like you’re doing something wrong; not isolating enough, not cleaning enough, not

psychologists on the television advise people to take care of themselves, to remember mental

you’ve been in contact with your family, who have been in contact with sick people. Does that

insane in the first place? You bounce back and forth with guilt for hours, and eventually decide

to meet him on a weekend while you’re left in the house after your parents go to work and

you’ve logged off virtual school. Your younger siblings stay shut away in their rooms, and you

leave as silently and perfectly and easily as a stone sliding through water.

the house — the distant throb in the back of your head as you squinted up at it — the brilliant

blue sky. The boy is tall with brown hair much longer than yours pulled back into a ponytail.

stomach and wants to go on an adventure with you in his dirty Toyota Tacoma. You’ve dealt

with a variety of chaotic people, but you don’t know how to approach this guy, feigning

a mess of crumpled papers and scattered tools sit at your feet. He does most of the talking and

your legs. He tells you about his family in Maine, his job, where he lives. He’s graduated from

filling up the empty space with commonalities he seems to weave out of nothing, telling you

names don’t mean anything to you. You drive with the windows down, catch a glimpse of

yourself in the side-view mirror of his truck; look away at the yellowish glow of your skin, the

grown-out box dye in your hair. He says he lives about an hour east from you, in the neighboring

state, and asks you what you know about the area.

the news that domestic abuse statistics during the shutdown had shot through the roof, and you

could tell; recently a five-year-old had been killed downtown and the violence rates in your city

area of poverty back when you were a kid — but you still felt like you continuously suffered

from it. You saw it in everyone’s faces, your families’, the kids you worked with while you were

means, still, leaving it physically pained you in its little reminders that the real world still existed

hurt you the most.

It’s smooth and deep and rich and rolling — like the narrator of a children’s book. “No, I mean is

away. “Some of them you can enter from the back or climb in through the windows. It depends

aren’t really over there that much though.”

again, with his big booming laugh, scratching at the scruff on his chin. “Let’s go urban

exploring. It’s perfect. Everything else is closed. And I love the architecture around here. I love

it. It’s so interesting.”

school?”

urban exploring. But let’s just not get arrested. My parents would kill me.”

off the side of the road, take his oversized phone from his outstretched arm with both of your

the road and his phone sitting in your hand, wondering how a person could possibly talk so

much, fill up all the empty spaces that you had created with your silences, be so fluid and assured

in the way they spoke. Your heart lurches as he goes to grab his water bottle at your feet and you

shift away from him, knock his hand away and pick it up yourself, shove it in his lap.

grows quieter, listening to you, at least — easing his foot off the gas and putting both hands on

the wheel.

to be able to calm down and pull up the internet on his phone, to bury yourself in something else.

The location you eventually decide to bring him to — the address pulled up on Reddit, of course

website says it was once a four-story warehouse used for storage but is now just a mostly

other discarded supplies belonging to an old school that got shut down years ago.

view mirror.

to the back of the building, where you find a broken window that is low enough for you to

your waist as he hauls you up, and you feel like a child scrambling through the crushed glass and

splinters as he lifts you and you try to find footing in the split wooden beams at your sides. He

awkwardly crashes through it after you do, on all fours, like an animal, and you wince as he stirs

up dirt and dust and cobwebs that make you cough and your eyes water.

smoking cigarettes in the dim, dusty lighting of places you weren’t supposed to go into and

living in the thrill of it all, the cold air in your lungs, smashing anything breakable you could find

that I myself have no “survival instinct,” nor any strong desire to survive, especially if what lies

— Zadie Smith, Intimations

May darted away from you like a rabbit that year, having something to look forward to in

the lazy, breezy days spent with the boy — your unexpected, happy-go-lucky new friend, that

you both weren’t exposed to anyone sick. You couldn’t not like him, the way he was willing to

able to eventually make easy conversation with him, something you weren’t able to do with a lot

building between everything and everyone for months. You finish your virtual classes as a man

find meaning.

sure that it does now — this changing of tides. You learn to wear this little face of bravery that

you haven’t seen in yourself for a few months, spend your twentieth birthday beating your drum

alongside this cause that has brought everyone together after months spent alone. It feels so nice

to see other people that you almost forget the sad circumstances just beneath it; the people

destroyed in the process, the trust that had finally been broken between everyone — yet, still

somehow brought people back together.

still remember that little black piece of coal you felt, slowly burning away, just at the bottom of

your heart?

health and the unbelievable question of why this was all happening in the first place. You don’t

Your late nights hadn’t gotten any later, spending them suffocating in the kitchen and making up

bathroom, he’s downstairs and has already begun raging at both of your poor brothers, who don’t

tears in her bedroom, and your older sister, unsurprisingly, is gone.

kids went through in their teenage years, when their parents found this one thing in their room

that wasn’t supposed to be there. But your family always had to do things a bit differently, a bit

more dramatic — with all seven of you, you were almost enough to function as the plotline of a

badly written television show, with all your emotional shit lined up like a comedic skit; faces

painted like clowns. Your sister tells you, in between angry tears, your grave mistake, and you

pants, to confront your father. You’ve already been skating on thin ice with him, as your mother

would say it, coming back home from college with your tattoos and piercings and red hair-dye,

siblings had torn at you ceaselessly for over the past few weeks. You knew you probably weren’t

isolation that you barely managed to handle for the past few months. Living with your whole

right? This early, gray area of the pandemic where okay and not okay were still undefined still

on the thin skin just above your shoulder blade. He screams that you’re being reckless, accuses

you of being on drugs, waving your stupid little e-cig in front of your face like an explanation,

his angry spit hitting you in the eyes as he yells inches away from your face. Last week, when he

had found out that you had been hanging out with a boy while he was at work, he had left

twenty-six angry voicemails and text messages on your phone yelling at you for being stupid, for

being selfish, for endangering the whole family while there was a pandemic, despite your pleas

that you had been safe, that you both had been isolating except to get takeout and to go on walks

was ten — that he completely ignored, and this implicit understanding, deep down, in your hurt

and isolated childhood-self, that this wasn’t about the pandemic. This was about control, and this

older sister — with your father, so you slid home like a dog with your tail tucked in between

in your family, but you never could. You couldn’t, in that huge, haunted house of yours, full of

sisters, in the profile of your mother’s thin frame sweeping the floor, in the black, sticky tar of

to the side with the rest of you like ornaments, stacked precariously atop one-another. It was

every right to stand by his side, apologizing afterwards for things that weren’t her fault, stepping

in the gap that your older sister should’ve filled in your life — except that your older sister

seemed to hate you — so it was your mom who was there. It was always your mom. Your closest

confidante, the one who held you when you cried when you scraped your knee as a child, from

when your first boyfriend broke up with you in second grade. She wasn’t perfect, but she was

there. Wasn’t that enough? She loved you because you were mostly a good kid, got good grades,

got into a good school with a good scholarship. Your mom covered for you when you snuck out

and bad breath, while your father hauled you out of bed, hungover, the next morning to go to

Sunday mass with him. You remember flirting with the kids who graduated the Confirmation

months without stepping foot inside a church, a defensive I’m just being a good father tossed in

that you still kind of liked, for piercing your nose. Shitty little things that your ex would’ve gone

and sold the rest of it to the pandemic, replacing its absence with boozed-out memories and the

Was it this hard for you to be loved?

your previous, fucked-up relationships, licking ice cream off a shared spoon like little kids in the

front seat of his messy truck with the air conditioning cranked on full blast. You had laughed but

remember feeling bitter. It was an easy joke for him to make, but you lingered too much on it.

You were the one who had to live with whatever fucked up childhood psychology your father

distorting shifting shapes and images — real or not real, good or bad, who the fuck cares if I get

a tattoo, if I get a piercing? — the fingers of your parents’ marriage gripping you around the

the line as if they weren’t poison, as if they weren’t going to kill you.

smile that nobody believed, withering away at college when everyone expected you to bloom?

emerge from your mouth like a demon.

make him listen, but know deep down that he never will. It goes on for minutes, hours, days,

eternities— the back and forth — playing ping-pong with a wooden board that you’re always

going to lose to. Back up in defeat into the sturdy shoulder of your little brother, who is now

much taller than you are — who pushes your father away from you like a grown man — shouts

at him to stop with his cracked, lispy, little-boy voice, and you throw your white flag in the air

and dissolve into tears.

animals and sob in the silence, your head in a pillow, your ears pounding. You remember this

feeling all too well — somehow hating both yourself and everyone else, simultaneously — but

the house so miserable. Reach in your pocket for your nicotine and know it isn’t there; feel a loss

minutes later to try to comfort you and you sob into the hard surface of her collarbone, not

you just hurl it all at her, all the words that you had been trying to say for your whole life but

life, you understand your mother’s struggle, her pain, the life she could’ve lived but didn’t —

how she got trapped. I wouldn’t change anything for the world, she tells you — but you would.

You would. What happens when you’re the product of that marriage; of two fractured people

who tried to build a home? Are you meant, by default, to be broken?

around your head, and then, guiltily, make your rounds to your younger siblings’ rooms,

cold contempt. They tell you it's okay, with pity in their voices, but don’t seem to want to talk

about it further. Doors shut, your older sister goes to bed in your shared room, and you’re left in

memorized to avoid. Hear your parents’ fighting downstairs, about you — it’s all your fault. Text

read, ignoring his multiple phone calls and spending the night retching away your feelings after

elbows. This one small gesture of sweetness makes you want to cry forever, and also helps you

fine.

seeing him during the pandemic. He tells you that you weren’t putting anyone at risk, that he had

been pretty isolated alone in his apartment in the mountains since April — aside from hanging

out with you, of course.

guilty. I’ve been quarantining this whole time, if anything I’m only putting myself at risk by

seeing you — right? Literally everybody in your family works in healthcare, and you see them

that?”

“Controlling. He’s very religious.”

clatters on tile in the background. “He also sounds kind of like an asshole, no offense.”

boy. Could you imagine? It would be perfect. We’d just cancel each other out. I have an extra

bedroom — just in case you’re interested. Rent is dirt cheap out here, especially split between

two people.”

your head, mutter, “I can’t.”

him, your hair hiding your face, cupping your cheek with your hand in shock. It’s a damn shame.

all your siblings, the humiliation of getting smacked around in front of an audience enough to

creak and groan of the stairs outside of your door as your father approached your room, the halt

your clock in the dark told you that you were home before midnight, and you didn’t cry but felt

phlunk, phlunk of them hitting the pillow. You fell asleep just as a text from the boy lit up your

phone, but you couldn’t stay awake long enough to read it.

kind of difference between your family and others; the rigidness that held your spines so stiffly;

the sad, broken disarray of your house; your mother’s floundering attempts to make it look

happy, to make it look whole. You always noticed that people always looked at your parents

college tuitions to pay for. Maybe all big families were meant to be broken.

So, how long do you let yourself get stuck in one place? How important was your

temper, your mother’s anxiety and her bloody tissues crumpled in the garbage can in the

you a feature on his big, fancy phone where you could simply say Hey Google within any

phone to look up the answer to a pointless question — in which you would usually slap his hand

respond with. You wondered what would happen if you were able to ask it questions in secret

that would probably make the stupid little robot inside the system short-circuit.

breathe? Hey Google, what do you do if your parents won’t get divorced? Hey Google, what do

you do when you’re in the middle of a global pandemic? Hey Google, is any of this going to get

any better?

didn’t do anything. Your school was sending you emails about possibly coming back to the

campus in the fall, but in the malaise of the summer, you realized that all your classes you had

maybe because your sister graduated from college, meaning that the cheaper option would be to

according to the news — the rates of the virus would increase with the cold weather — and strict

relationship that you were still learning to be comfortable with, after being isolated for so long

when receiving the claims, even after you never saw him again, never spoke to him again. Even

of destruction and you knew this — knew how the cycle of abusiveness got stuck on wash, rinse,

repeat, from constant observation of your parents — how you couldn’t stop it — and how you

needed a break from school, anyways. You were never meant for its hookup culture, its drama,

the heartache piled atop of school atop of family issues atop of work upon work upon work. You

suddenly and painfully remember your stressed-out senior roommates that you’re not sure you’ll

ever see again, your housemates, the boy that lived upstairs from you. Where were they? What

were they worrying about, right at this moment? Was it anything like what you were going

getting progressively sicker and sicker but having the mental strength to tell absolutely no one.

and feel protected by the glassy surface of the computer screen. The introverted side of you is

whole family behind, for a man she barely knew and for a world she’d never been in. She was

discussion comparing your extensive list of female siblings and distant relatives to each Disney

her overbearing father, in a world she didn’t feel at home in. The prince was only her tipping

handsome prince to whisk you away from all the hurt and heartache that you experienced in your

own home, your overbearing father, your demanding siblings who loved you, but exhausted you.

Breathe in what you knew then, breathe out what you know now. Were you the same little girl

that you were then?

peels away as soon as you close the door of the passenger seat. You take the backroads out of the

state and feel the adrenaline surge through your lungs as you breathe in the warm June air, forget

the sun is shining, and the air is clean, and you were able to just get out, to get away. The boy’s

Victorian-era mansion that looks like it can house three small families — maybe four — just on

high-ceilinged rooms with impossibly big windows, two bedrooms, an office space. It’s badly

disorganized chairs— a bar stool, a folding metal chair, a brown rolling one with a crack splitting

your toes and stick to your bare feet, and you immediately go back to the front door to retrieve

your flip flops. The tiny sink in the dusty, badly organized kitchen is, sure enough, filled with

dishes, and the spare room is filled with literal garbage, empty milk jugs and salad containers and

egg cartons and boxes atop boxes atop boxes.

because you don’t want to be mean, and you’ve seen this type of apartment before — one that

doesn’t belong as much to an artist as it does to a depressed person.

even be recycled!” he exclaims, kicking at it lamely for effect.

could just move it over there, if I really wanted to, I guess.

laughs sheepishly.

the dirty floor. You wince at imagining what must be stuck to his palms, the backside of his

pants. “Wow. Yeah, it’s been a year.”

everything. That’s the only thing that makes me believe you’ve been here for a year.”

in an I surrender position, but for the first time you notice his cheeks are flushed. You’re not

or embarrassment, or what — but he looks like an innocent little kid in that moment, lost in his

big-boy shoes in a place that was too large for him, too grown up.

bit too much space. You’d treat it so well, do it so differently — thrive, just out of cold spite.

your pinky finger and link it with his, tell him you’ll help him out. You’ve got nothing else to do

the back of his pickup truck like sardines. So spend a long, hazy afternoon trying to help him

the walls for some reason instead of hanging up curtains — holding your breath when the

you, while you’re scrambling around, cleaning, trying to make sense of this space that is not

yours. Then, of yourself, your body reflecting back at you in the old-fashioned glass cabinet built

into the wall, all knees and elbows, climbing the walls like a spider — god, you look like shit —

and you feel something that switches between the two of you, in that one glance. You feel your

heartbeat in your throat as you jump off the windowsill and on to the floor, glare in his direction.

twenty-four. My sister is your age, and she hasn’t even moved out yet.”

right?”

don’t really understand, probably — although you didn’t know it then.

about you, you’re too smart not to have money saved up. You said you were working two jobs at

school?”

heavy on you, your gaze dropped to the floor to avoid looking at him — just the two of you

sitting on the floor of his dirty apartment in a stillness that made you feel restless, the blue

mountains swirling in the summer haze like a watercolor just outside your window.

weaken at the seams. Stare at the ceiling to try to stop from crying, stop when you see a spider —

fuck, it doesn’t work, it never works for you — manage to meet his eyes just as yours are

sense. Do you get me? Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Is each day supposed to feel

any news at all as to when this will change. Is this normal? Everyone is acting like everything’s

anymore. Because the entire world is falling apart, and I'm falling apart with it. And I can't do

anything. And I'm okay, I’m safe now — but I’m still trying to recover from the aftermath of a

wrecking-ball of a relationship, and I can’t do that anymore when my parents are the mirror

image of the memory of us, dancing around the kitchen table like opposites, fork and spoon,

constantly jabbing at each other, at odds. Can you picture it? My little sister is dissolving into

the same negative habits that I’ve picked up, and I don't want my decaying body to influence her,

to make her worse, but I can't stop — and my little brothers are living in a video-game reality so

dewy-eyed younger one, to watch your little brothers wander around the house like lost boys in

outer space, to live in your crumbling gingerbread house as the walls fall down around you.

back as he’s driving you home in the dark through the winding mountain roads. “You know this

and instead focus on keeping an eye out for deer — a game you’d much rather play as the boy

“Promise?”

Gaze blankly out the window, count the number of times the boy has to flick his high

beams on and off for each car passing by on the dark stretch of road. He calls it hicktown, the

paltry area you drive through from your house to his, because it’s full of pro-life signs and navy

flags with thin blue lines running through the middle of them; religious statements jaggedly

spray-painted in red on rotting pieces of wood nailed to telephone poles lining the road that make

your breath away, but the valleys in-between that bring you back home manage to make you feel

a certain kind of depression that you can’t quite shake off. The summer is ending soon, and the

you’ll feel when he drops you back off, kisses you on the forehead, tells you to be safe.

and the house is dark and empty and silent. From inside the house, you watch the headlights of

wave goodbye at him from the window, but you’re not sure he sees you.

Maybe not.

honey — slather a tiny amount onto each piece, put it on toast, keepitdown, keepitdown,

keepitdown, scrub down the sticky countertops when you’re finished, the sink. Downstairs, in the

basement, you take the empty cereal boxes that litter the recycling bins, and you pile them all

atop one another, stomp on them to smash them flat. Your brother is asleep on the couch in front

of the T.V., his long legs spread out in front of him like a grasshopper, and you toss a blanket

over him. He doesn’t even move.

your meds and check your phone once more before eventually falling asleep. The text that lights

up your face in the dark leaves a small, involuntary smile on your lips that lingers there well after

won’t wake your sister up.

it out, extinguish it in a single breath. Sneak away at strange hours, get in trouble with your

him that you’re scared?

When you try to recall leaving your parents’ house, the events stick together in your mind

as bright and tacky as bubblegum, hard to get rid of, to scrape from your memory. You don't

somewhere in your head. But you do remember packing up in bits and pieces, trying to go

confronting you with angry tears in her eyes, eyeliner streaming down her cheeks, her terrible

burst blood vessels in your eyes, shaking, your mother shuttered away in the bathroom.

shadow creature that seeps into your dreams. You lose your mind in violent memories of him as

neck when you’re trying to sleep, memories spin through your mind like a bizarre carnival full of

freakish clowns and bearded ladies and warped mirrors — a circus that never makes sense in

your head and you didn’t know how to find the ringleader, how to stop it from spinning.

your head, and in the middle of the chaos, there stands the boy. With his steady hands, his soft

brown eyes, his spare bedroom, drenched in dust motes and sunshine.

him hold your hand but never managing to unfurl it from the fist you always kept curled tightly

to navigate, lying about stupid things in your life that you were sure he wouldn’t relate to. You

your family — but the real issue was that you weren’t sure you knew how to live without that,

prepared you for what other people weren’t used to, the long days and the sleepless nights that

after a while, the sadness that almost became a constant companion, nestled deep in your chest

like a kitten.

even have to try that hard. You got used to it — it became a habit, over the years, addicting even

— but your father made sure that you were friends with your loneliness, years before the

shutdown had even happened. He beat it into your head until your brain felt like hamburger

patty, shutting off your emotions with a slam of a car door, invalidating your voice with the

went out and found someone new to do it for you in his absence. It was like you needed it— but

you weren’t sure why — and you couldn’t help but feel like this new boy was leading you down

boy’s hand as you melted into one another through the lazy summer afternoons like custard,

that would miss you, your family who needed help, a degree to finish that felt like it would last

once, sprawled in the boxed-in air conditioning of his bedroom, goosebumps pricking your skin,

Reluctantly, over the past few months, you had told him about your issues at school, with your

ex, your friends that had disappeared all over the country, all over the world, your family — your

father. He wasn’t ever invasive, but he did ask questions that occasionally made your head spin

for days, keeping you awake at night with your own troubled thoughts.

remark, a stupid quip. But yeah, sometimes you were glad that the world had frozen in its tracks.

You knew that you were crashing and burning at college, long before the pandemic began.

type of kid — one that fucked up when you were supposed to excel at school — getting into

every type of situation that you were supposed to avoid as if it would lead you someplace

way you seemed to be for all of your life — caught in this backwards limbo between your

up in his noisy truck and you dissolved into wandering conversation, the morning stretching

stuck to your feet, hang your clothes in his closet and stare at them, side by side, in a place they

different way. You can’t throw up everything you eat anymore in secret, in an apartment —

where he’ll hear your every move — so you stop it almost completely, cold turkey. You don’t

know how to drive, how to shop for groceries, how to take care of yourself without your coping

mechanism that has become so familiar over the past few years. Some days are so hard you feel

like you’re going through drug withdrawal, zombie-eyed and hitting your replacement vape

every six seconds, charging it, running out of juice, blowing your money on stupidly expensive

and weekdays spent trying to escape your family — keep you just half alive, drunk off some

stupid little fantasy of getting better as the sun finally seems to rise and set at a pace that doesn’t

yours, as all your belongings slowly dissipated and you spent longer and longer stretches of time

snuck out with the boy for the sixth, seventh, eighth time in a row — breaking curfews and

take comfort in the fact that no one seems to care where you are, or what you’re doing, or

office — it doesn’t matter. And it makes you feel better, despite being so scared.

you still feel sixteen, angry and imprisoned and stuck — repeating this through angry half-

conversations with your mother in your head, who picks at her cuticles, nods, says she

understands, but doesn’t meet your eyes. The first night you spend away from your family, you

have a panic attack, shaking so hard beneath the covers that you wake up in the morning slicked

with sweat like a fish, kicking the boy beside you to the opposite side of the bed, as far away as

day, over coffee. You forgot your antidepressants at your parents’ house and their absence leaves

a dry, metallic taste in your mouth, a day with more clouds than blue sky when you absently look

at him with chapped lips. Say it's nothing while bringing a coffee mug, shaking, to your mouth.

patiently, without moving, without dropping it, and you learn to trust him with it. You learn how

it’s so damn hard. He catches on to it faster than you realize — the third week we lived together,

back to the apartment as a “surprise” to get you to try. They sit, boring a hole into your brain

from the other room.

unopened box of cookies in the cupboard and knowing that someone would notice if you ate and

threw up the whole package — resist, resist, resist — the crushing depression at the end of the

day sleeping on your chest like the cat you had to leave behind, the absence of your little

siblings, your stomach constantly in knots as your digestive system tries to re-train itself to get

Wallace, David Foster. “David Foster Wallace Short Story - Incarnations of Burned Children.”

Yanagihara, Hanya. A Little Life. Anchor, 2015.