Too Skinny

#ThighGap

I woke up around 4:30. I ran to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. This happened regularly because of how nothing was in my stomach. Usually I just retched and nothing came up because there was nothing in my stomach. But this time, my dinner came up. I could see bits of toast and peanut butter floating in the toilet as I flushed it. I wiped my mouth and staggered in to my bed. I wrapped myself up in the blankets and closed my eyes. I needed to get back to sleep because I had a test tomorrow. I shut my eyes and tried to get back to sleep, but I just couldn't. I reached up and turned on my light and opened up my book.

"Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should've gotten more.'

'Seventeen,' Gus corrected.

'I'm assuming you've got some time, you interrupting bastard.

'I'm telling you,' Isaac continued, 'Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness.

'But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.'

I was kind of crying by then."

My eyes started to tear up as I began to read. I always cried when I reached that part of the book. The part where you knew that there was only one way for it to end, and it was a bad ending, not a good one. An ending that you knew would make you cry. An ending that wouldn't be satisfactory. A kind of ending that was meant for me.

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My eyes blinked open and were immediately killed by the massive sunlight attack. I rolled out of bed and looked at my clock: 9:30. I was an hour late for class. I got up quickly and got dressed in record time. I rushed for my keys and dashed out the door. I slammed my door shut and quickly drove to my college. When I reached my building, I ran out of my car and quickly staggered up the stairs. I opened the door to my classroom and everyone turned their heads. I blushed and ducked my head, embarrassed. I rushed to my seat and took out my notebook and pencil.

"Why are you so late Ms. Flower?" My teacher asked. My head whipped up, startled. I had never been called out in a classroom before.

"I.....um......woke up late.........yeah." I said, my voice sounding hoarse. My teacher shook her head and continued writing on the board. I let out a big sigh of relief and bent down to start writing my notes.

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The bell rang and I walked out of the classroom, heading for my car. I hopped in my car and drove to my apartment. When I reached my apartment, I hurriedly went to my room and opened up my book. After about 10 minutes, I finished it. I slid it back in to my bookshelf and grabbed another book out. It was by the same author: John Green. The book that I picked out was called Looking For Alaska. It's about a sixteen year old boy named Miles Halter. Miles doesn't have much friends in school, so he's pretty happy when he finds out that he's going to a private school. And let me tell you this, it's much more exciting than his public school. He meets his roommate that likes to be called "Colonel" and a pretty girl names Alaska Young. But Alaska's taken, and she's a little confusing. And Miles's life changes as soon as he meets her. For the best...and the worst.

I opened it up and started to read.

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I couldn't take my eyes off of the book. I was on the end page when I finally glanced at my clock: 5:37. I groaned and hopped in to bed. As I stared at the ceiling, something occurred to me. Today was Friday, and that meant that tomorrow was Saturday, and that meant that I didn't have to wake up early to go to school, and that meant that I could read all night if I wanted to. I smiled and flicked on my light. I reached over and stole my book off of the snug place it was resting. I ripped it open and buried my nose in my book.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied by only the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and he screwed up and we screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there's no sugar-coating it: She deserved better friends.

When she ****** up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.

Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and him and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here's how I know:

I thought at first that she was dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her - green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs - would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke blowing out of some smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe 'the afterlife' is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.

But ultimately I do not believe tat she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take her genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science class is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if she took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself - those are awful things, but she did need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us great than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were: "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.

I sighed, satisfied with the ending of the book. I closed it and tucked myself back into bed. Smiling, I closed my eyes and drifted off in to a hopeful sleep.