Page 1 of Kiss Slay Replay

For anyone going through it.

Help, I’m alive

My heart keeps beating like a hammer.

—Metric, “Help I’m Alive”

1

Who knew that time could move so slowly?

It’s been three minutes, and I swear I thought an hour had gone by. Just me, standing in the middle of this studio apartment. My studio apartment. I live here now.

It’s home but it isn’t, because I’m alone. Alone with the echoes of this empty space. Alone with stacked boxes waiting impatiently to be unpacked, mocking me from dusty corners. Alone with an obnoxious question many have asked before me and will continue to ask well after I’m gone, until the earth gets sucked back into the big, dark, hungry maw of the universe. The question, of course, being: Is home a place or other people? Is it a feeling? Is it happiness? Is it love?

This is the kind of thing we used to talk about over dinner, back at the beginning. Ravi loves a philosophical question. Loves deliberating over some cosmic problem, confronting it head-on. Loves a puzzle. Loves pressing on a bruise to study the feeling. Loves interrogating life’s complexities, sliding everything under a microscope to see the wriggly bits.

Not me.

It’s a waste not to wonder, he’d say.

I hear him now. His voice in my head like he’s there. I mean, I guess he is. He’s part of me. We met young, my bones fortifying in his presence, for so many years my heart beating to the rhythm of us. And now, a void. I think about the life I almost had. I think about people who survive shark attacks. Phantom limbs. I think about loneliness, the dorsal fin circling me as I tread water. Maybe I’m hopelessly self-involved. Maybe I’m jaded. Maybe I’m depressed. Maybe I’m dramatic. It’s a breakup. It’s not the same thing, losing a leg and losing a fiancé. I’m just grasping. I’m just bored. I’m so bored. There’s so much time. It’s here. It’s there, like the boxes, waiting. Existing. Inescapable.

Four minutes? It’s been only four minutes? Fuck me.

I grab my phone off the kitchen counter and call Cassie. It rings and rings and I worry she won’t answer, and then what will I do? But she picks up.

“Hey, Willa.” I can hear it in her voice. She’s sick of me. “What’s up, doc?”

“Hi, hello. I’m at the new place. All moved in.”

“How is it?”

“Um,” I say, looking around. It’s a decent size for a studio. There’s an alcove for a bed. The appliances are new, the kitchen and bathroom recently redone. There’s a dishwasher. Washer/dryer in unit. Closet space. It’s thirty-five hundred dollars a month, including off-street parking. Not bad for Jersey City. It’s fine. And I should say so, but my stubborn throat constricts in protest, won’t let the word out.

Fine? Is this how I want to describe my life? Where I live? My future? Fine?

Cassie sighs. “Do you need me to remind you that this was your decision?”

“That’s a gross oversimplification, but okay.”

“It is and it isn’t,” she says. “You’re making your own choices. I get that there are factors outside of your control, but you—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You win. Please tell me again how I’m in a hell of my own making.”

“Willa, honey, you are in a hell of your own making. Is it hot?”

“It’s so fucking hot, Cass.”

“How hot?”

“Scalding.”

“Mm,” she says. “That sucks.”

Cassie is all about tough love. It’s her specialty. If I wanted kid gloves, I would have called Steph.

Honestly, I did want kid gloves, but Steph is busy with wedding preparations. And Evan wouldn’t have answered. And no one else gets me like they do.