You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

We eat dinner together in the dining hall the first night, and while there is a kosher meal option, it dawns on me that there’s no one here to say anything about my not keeping kosher. There’s no one to disappoint if I don’t spend Shabbat resting.

This is an intensely freeing thought.

It felt good to go to support group over the summer, learn how others like me are coping. It took a couple weeks for my body to adjust to the antidepressants, but now that I have been on them for several months, I sense a definite lift in my moods. My doctor recommended a therapist in Baltimore, and I’m going to see her next week. What I am trying to do is focus on what’s in front of me: how much I loved the dining-hall lasagna I had for dinner, classes starting tomorrow, the party I am going to with Corinne tonight.

Evil eyes jangle on my wrist. I put on a short-sleeved dress, leave my hair long and wild, outline my lips with Siren, then fill them in. Dab. Reapply. Perfect. In this moment, I feel genuinely content, though there is something in me that could alter the trajectory of my life at any second, something not even Tovah will ever understand.

All beautiful things in life lose

their sheen. Gardens wither. Skin wrinkles. I might be waiting for a while—hopefully for a very long while—but some parts of my future are inevitable.

As Corinne and I wander through campus at night, my heel catches on a crack in the sidewalk, and I stumble.

“Careful,” she says with a smile, reaching out to catch my elbow. “Clumsy, clumsy.”

I steady myself. “Thanks. I’m okay.”

The fear is never far away. My broken heel reminds me the disease could sneak up on me at any moment. One day I will twitch when I want to be still, rage when I want to be happy, forget when I want to remember. It has happened to my mother, and it will happen to me. We are a doomed family—but we are not done fighting yet.

I jam my shoe back onto my foot. “This party better have good music,” I tell Corinne.

One thing is certain: before I go, I am going to make a hell of a lot of noise.