27 Club

Hi, my name is Lillian, and I don’t want to be alive anymore.

I wake up the way I always wake up: drenched in sweat with the taste of blood in my mouth.

Sometimes I bite my cheek in my sleep and gnaw away at it while I dream. I currently have a sore on the right side, and it’s been hard not to catch it while I’m eating. Every accidental bite makes my whole body tense.

A tiny wound I keep reopening.

There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’m too tired to find it.

I peel the clothes off my body and turn the shower knob, waiting for the water to become unbearably hot, just the way I like it. I step in, notice the shower needs cleaning, and sigh.

The day-to-day never stops.

You can be contemplating your own mortality and still notice mildew in the grout.

I look up toward the showerhead and let the boiling water blast me in the face. I rub my eyes, cupping my hands around my mouth to breathe in the steam.

I know hot water isn’t good for my hair or skin, but I still usually shower twice a day. Once in the morning to remove the stain of my nightmares, and once at night to wash away the day.

My teeth feel dirty, but I don’t brush them.

I’ll do it later.

I did it before bed.

That’s good enough.

I look tired. There are always dark circles under my eyes from night shift. Between the lack of vitamin D and a shitty vending-machine diet, I don’t exactly have the youthful glow of someone who is just a little older than thirty. I put medicated concealer on my acne, comb my hair so it isn’t frizzy, and coat my underarms with twenty layers of deodorant.

I’ll still sweat through it in an hour.

I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember.

With the amount of antidepressant ads plastered across billboards and interrupting Hulu, apparently what I’m dealing with isn’t exactly an original experience. Nobody talks about it, though. Not really. Not until someone kills themselves, and then suddenly everyone wants you to reach out.

Seek help.

Check on your strong friends.

You are loved.

Have you tried yoga?

Have you tried going outside?

Have you tried praying more?

Get bent.

I’ve also been angry with God for as long as I can remember.

I’ve been equal parts aware and afraid of Hell since I was five. Being raised Catholic, the indoctrination starts young—as early as birth, actually. Parents hand their precious child to a strange man in a dress for a mock drowning and are told it cleanses original sin.

If I rolled my eyes any harder, they’d pop out of my skull.

With everything that’s happened, it’s hard to say what the final straw was.

Maybe it was the tomatoes on my sandwich last week that I specifically asked them not to put on there.

Maybe I should sign up for one of those class-action lawsuits about social media ruining young people’s minds. I never thought Adobe Flash icons on MySpace would be my undoing, but here we are.

I’m straight edge for the first time in years.

I don’t drink.

I don’t smoke.

Oddly enough, I don’t feel any kind of moral superiority raw-dogging the apocalypse. In fact, I’m jealous of everyone who still has an escape while I force myself to sit here and experience every single one of my feelings in 4K.

I’m sure my therapist would tell me there are preferable coping mechanisms to suicide, but let’s be real.

They need to keep their clientele.

After my daily scheduled dissociation, I’m ready to start my day.

1.

I’ve always been one of the odd ones.

Like a hare among rabbits.

Close, but not quite right.

Uncanny valley in the flesh, with deep rot in my chest.

It’s like everybody knew better than to invest in someone who thought they wouldn’t live past fourteen.

I guess we all get to be unpleasantly surprised.

Today, I don’t have to work.

The world is my oyster.

Unfortunately, I’m allergic to shellfish.

I sit on the couch next to my cat.

Winston deserves so much more in life than an owner who wakes up disappointed she didn’t die in her sleep.

He is so fucking cute while he sleeps, though.

There’s a meme online about “a girl and her don’t-kill-yourself cat.”

Sorry, buddy.

I know you tried.

I would make sure someone came to get him before I checked out.

That matters to me.

I don’t know what it says about a person that I can imagine disappearing from everyone else’s life but feel morally obligated to make sure my cat experiences as little disruption as possible.

Probably nothing flattering.

I wander into the kitchen and throw back my psych special with a fresh, crisp energy drink.

Breakfast of champions.

I quit eating breakfast in high school, but these pills make me throw up if I don’t eat something with them. Bananas are a no-go. Something about the taste mixing with the bitterness of the little pieces of white chalk makes my stomach revolt.

If I wait one minute too long, nothing is successfully going down.

First come the mouth sweats.

The kind you get right before fighting for your life in a Walmart parking lot.

I’ve thrown up in a lot of parking lots.

Depression.

Anxiety.

ADHD.

BPD.

Seven years of therapy.

No prior institutionalizations.

A fucking partridge in a pear tree.

988 glares up at me from my browser while I scroll through Reddit threads written by people who sound exactly like me.

That’s almost worse.

There are thousands of us.

Maybe millions.

People sitting on couches beside sleeping cats, staring at glowing screens, quietly wondering how much longer they are expected to keep participating.

I close one thread.

Open another.

Close it.

Open another.

My brain keeps looking for certainty where there isn’t any.

I don’t want pain.

I don’t want fear.

I don’t want some stranger to find me.

I don’t want my last contribution to the world to be traumatizing some poor bastard who was just trying to get through his shift.

Mostly, I don’t want to keep doing this.

That is the sentence underneath all the others.

I sink into my couch and curl my legs against myself, folding inward like I can somehow become small enough to return to the last place I was completely safe.

The womb.

Before memory.

Before grief.

Before anybody could die on me.

Winston yawns and stretches before readjusting himself and plopping into my lap.

I feel guilty for all of two seconds.

He’s an old cat. I’ve had him since he was a kitten. Realistically, I know I’m only a couple of years away from outliving him, and my best friend would take him.

She would do a good job.

She would love him.

I have everything arranged in my head.

That scares me less than it probably should.

Whatever I decide, I don’t want anyone to find me.

My goal isn’t to traumatize the fuck out of somebody else.

God.

How fucked up this world has become.

People are not upset enough about what’s happening.

What is what, you ask?

Turn on the fucking news.

2.

I decide to go for a drive to visit Zoey.

I know she won’t have a lot to say, but I want to see her one last time before I make my decision.

God knows we won’t meet again in the afterlife, considering, you know, me committing the ultimate sin and all.

Catholicism is funny that way.

God loves you infinitely.

Terms and conditions apply.

I’ve only gone to see Zoey twice since she died.

It rained both times.

Today makes three.

It’s raining again.

Of fucking course it is.

Her burial plot has finally grown over with grass and clover. It’s no longer the slurry of mud and snow it was when I helped carry her to her final resting place five years ago.

Five years.

There should be a different word for time after someone dies.

Calling it a year feels dishonest.

A year is birthdays and Christmas and summer vacations and complaining about daylight saving time.

A grief-year is measuring how long someone has been missing.

Five birthdays she didn’t have.

Five Christmases where nobody had to buy her anything.

Five summers without her complaining about the heat.

Five years of my life continuing without her permission.

A lot has changed since then.

I stare at her senior-year portrait, laser-engraved for eternity into granite.

She’s seventeen or eighteen in the picture, depending on when it was taken.

Even younger than the woman I lost.

There’s something uniquely cruel about that.

Zoey died at twenty-seven, but the girl staring back at me from her headstone hadn’t been diagnosed yet. She hadn’t learned the names of medications or the language of scans. Cancer hadn’t entered our vocabulary as something personal.

She was just Zoey.

A teenager.

Her whole stupid, beautiful life apparently waiting in front of her.

The photograph doesn’t know better.

Her family took their sweet time placing the headstone. A year and a half, if I remember correctly.

I was irrationally angry about it.

It’s not like Zoey cared whether people could easily locate her grave, right? She was presumably on to bigger and better things, like being an angel occupying the Rainbow Bridge where animals go when they die.

At least that’s what I like to believe.

Not Heaven.

The Rainbow Bridge.

If there is an afterlife and Zoey had the option between eternal worship and being mobbed by every dog she ever loved, I know exactly which one she chose.

“Zoe,” I choke out, crouching until I’m level with her portrait.

Rain collects on her granite face.

“I don’t know how to keep doing this.”

The shiny wet stone stands in silence.

Obviously.

“It should’ve been me. You know that?”

Nothing.

“You would’ve done so much more than I ever could. People loved you. My God, did they love you.”

My throat closes.

“You were so fucking easy to love.”

There it is.

The thought I’ve spent five years avoiding.

Not that she was loved.

That she was easy to love.

And somewhere deep inside me, in whatever rotten little room grief shares with every insecurity I’ve ever had, I decided that meant her life had been worth more than mine.

My eyes fill.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t keep doing this. I miss you too much.”

The words come faster now.

“I’m sorry I spent so much time being mad at you over stupid bullshit. If I had known at thirteen—”

My voice breaks.

I wipe my nose against my sleeve.

“If I had known when we were thirteen that you were already halfway through your life…”

Twenty-seven.

This dumb bitch joined the 27 Club.

Hendrix.

Winehouse.

Cobain.

Zoey.

Except hers wasn’t glamorous enough for a documentary.

Cancer.

Her zodiac sign and her killer.

She was diagnosed when we were around twenty-one or twenty-two.

She had the BRCA gene, so cancer had already tucked a loaded card into her deck before any of us knew we were playing.

In her case, it was breast cancer.

It spread to her lymph nodes.

She went into “remission” for a couple of years before it came back.

I still hate that word.

Remission.

It sounds like forgiveness.

Like cancer reconsidered.

Like we won.

We didn’t.

The pain started in her hip, and her doctors made her wait months before properly investigating it.

By then, the cancer had spread to her bones.

I don’t know if you knew this, but your bones make your blood.

Inside the marrow.

I learned a lot of things about the human body that I never wanted to know.

I learned the names of medications.

I learned how tumors travel.

I learned what metastatic means.

I learned how much pain a human being can experience while everyone around her keeps using words like brave.

I learned that hope can become cruel if you stretch it long enough.

For two years, I waited for my best friend to die.

There is no polite way to say that.

There is no inspirational quote that makes it prettier.

I waited.

Every unanswered text.

Every hospital admission.

Every new scan.

Every phone call at a weird hour.

Every time somebody said, “We need to talk.”

My body would prepare itself.

This is it.

And then it wasn’t.

Until it was.

When she finally died, I felt relief.

God, I hated myself for that.

For months, maybe years, I carried it around like evidence that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

My best friend died and somewhere beneath the screaming, there was a tiny exhausted part of me that whispered:

Thank God.

Not because she was gone.

Because it was over.

Because nobody could hurt her anymore.

Because I could stop waiting for the phone call.

Because cancer could finally stop taking things from her.

There was nothing left for it to take.

Except us.

The anticipatory grief had been eating me alive for two years. I was throwing up long before my pills ever made me.

I had already buried her a thousand times.

Then we buried her once.

And somehow that was supposed to be the end of it.

3.

“I’m mad at you,” I tell her.

The rain taps softly against the granite.

“I know that’s fucked up.”

I sit directly on the wet grass.

My jeans soak through immediately.

Whatever.

“I’m mad that you died.”

My voice sounds childish.

Good.

Maybe grief is childish.

Children are at least honest when something hurts.

“I’m mad that you left me here with all these people who aren’t you.”

A laugh escapes me, ugly and wet.

“That sounds horrible.”

I touch two fingers to her photograph.

Cold.

Of course.

“I keep meeting people, Zoe.”

My fingertips trace the edge of her engraved hair.

“And they’re nice. Some of them are really nice. And I keep waiting for them to become you.”

There it is.

Another ugly truth.

“I keep waiting for somebody to understand the joke before I finish saying it. I keep waiting for somebody to remember some stupid thing we did when we were fourteen. I keep wanting to say, ‘Remember when?’ and then remembering nobody else fucking remembers.”

My chest caves inward.

“You took half my childhood with you.”

The sentence surprises me.

I stare at her.

That’s what it is.

Memory requires witnesses.

Without Zoey, entire versions of me exist only inside my own head.

The thirteen-year-old me.

The sixteen-year-old me.

The twenty-one-year-old me.

There are things I could say now and nobody alive would know whether I remembered them correctly.

There are jokes whose context died with her.

There are people we hated together whom I could probably forgive now because nobody is left to remind me why we hated them.

There are songs I still cannot listen to.

Places I avoid.

Photographs I scroll past too quickly.

And every year I get older while she stays twenty-seven.

Except here.

Here she’s even younger.

Here, carved into stone, Zoey hasn’t even reached twenty yet.

Her senior-year face.

Seventeen, maybe eighteen, depending on when the picture was taken.

Even younger than the woman I lost.

Forever.

I hate that most of all.

Soon I will have lived longer without Zoey than I ever lived with her.

Someday, if I’m unlucky enough to make it that far, I’ll be seventy and she will still be twenty-seven in my memories.

And seventeen on her grave.

I’ll have wrinkles.

Maybe grandchildren.

Maybe arthritis.

Maybe one of those stupid little pill organizers with the days printed across the top.

And when I come here, the girl waiting for me will still have her whole life ahead of her.

At least in the photograph.

“That’s not fair.”

I’m sobbing now.

Not pretty crying.

Not cinematic grief.

Snot.

Hiccups.

My mascara bleeding down my face while rain runs into my collar.

“You were supposed to get old with me.”

That’s the sentence that destroys me.

Not you were supposed to live.

Not you weren’t supposed to die.

You were supposed to get old with me.

“You were supposed to turn thirty.”

My hand presses against the stone.

“You were supposed to complain about your knees. You were supposed to get gray hair and pretend you didn’t care about it. You were supposed to call me when your husband pissed you off. You were supposed to send me stupid fucking TikToks at two in the morning.”

I hit the granite once with the heel of my palm.

“You were supposed to be here.”

Again.

“You were supposed to be here.”

Again.

“You were supposed to be here.”

The fourth time, I don’t hit it.

I collapse against it.

My forehead rests against her name.

And suddenly I’m thirteen.

We are halfway through her life and neither of us knows it.

That’s the cruelty I can’t forgive.

Not cancer.

Not God.

Not doctors.

Time.

We were given twenty-seven years and nobody told us.

If someone had told me when we were thirteen that I had fourteen years left with her, would I have done anything differently?

Of course I would.

I would never have ignored a text.

Never held a grudge.

Never chosen a boyfriend over a sleepover.

Never let months pass because adulthood made us busy.

I would have memorized everything.

Her laugh.

Her hands.

The exact shade of her eyes.

The way she pronounced certain words.

The face she made when somebody said something stupid.

But thirteen-year-old girls aren’t supposed to know they’re halfway to goodbye.

Maybe that is mercy.

Maybe knowing would have ruined everything.

Every birthday would have been subtraction.

Fourteen left.

Thirteen.

Twelve.

Maybe we only got to be happy because we didn’t know.

“I don’t want to do this without you,” I whisper.

And there, finally, is the real sentence.

Not:

I don’t want to be alive.

I don’t want to do this without you.

They sound almost identical when you’ve been grieving long enough.

They aren’t.

I sit there for a long time.

Long enough that my legs go numb.

Long enough for the rain to soften.

Long enough for my phone to buzz three separate times in my pocket before I finally look.

A stupid notification.

An email.

And a photograph my best friend sent me of Winston sleeping with his face shoved into the couch cushion.

your son is an idiot

I stare at it.

Then I laugh.

It comes out wrong.

Half sob.

Half bark.

Probably alarming to anybody visiting the cemetery nearby.

I type:

He gets it from his mother.

Three dots appear.

Disappear.

Appear again.

Then:

you okay?

My fingers hover over the screen.

There are a thousand socially acceptable answers.

Yeah.

Just tired.

Long night.

Depression kicking my ass lol.

I could send any of them.

I have sent all of them.

Instead I look at Zoey.

Her teenage face.

A photograph taken before either of us understood how little time actually means.

And type:

No.

The response comes almost immediately.

Do you want me to call?

I stare at that too.

Something inside me wants to say no.

That reflex is older than most of my relationships.

Don’t inconvenience anyone.

Don’t be dramatic.

Don’t make people worry.

Handle it yourself.

Be easy to love.

I think about what I said to Zoey.

You were so fucking easy to love.

Maybe she wasn’t.

Maybe nobody is.

Maybe I’ve edited her into something impossible because dead people can no longer disappoint us.

Zoey could be stubborn.

She could be selfish.

She could piss me off so badly I wouldn’t talk to her.

Sometimes she didn’t text back.

Sometimes I didn’t.

Sometimes we hurt each other.

Sometimes we chose other people.

Sometimes we wasted time.

And I loved her anyway.

Maybe being difficult to love was never the same thing as being unworthy of it.

I type:

Can you come get me?

My phone rings before I can put it down.

I answer.

“Hey.”

My voice gives me away immediately.

“Oh,” she says.

Just that.

Oh.

Then, “Where are you?”

I look at the headstone.

“With Zoey.”

A pause.

Not the frightened kind.

The understanding kind.

“Okay.”

Rainwater drips from my hair.

“I think I need you to come get me.”

“I’m coming.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“I don’t think I should be alone.”

Another pause.

“Then you won’t be.”

Something in my chest breaks.

Not dramatically.

Quietly.

Like ice beginning to thaw.

I put the phone on speaker and set it beside me in the grass.

She stays on the line.

Neither of us talks much.

She tells me when she gets into her car.

When she hits traffic.

When she’s ten minutes away.

Ordinary things.

Turn left.

Red light.

Some asshole isn’t using his turn signal.

The mundane machinery of staying alive.

While I wait, I clean grass from the bottom of Zoey’s headstone.

There are weeds growing around one corner, so I pull them.

One has roots deeper than I expect.

I have to wrap both hands around it.

“Fucking thing,” I mutter.

“What?” my friend asks through the phone.

“Weed.”

“Oh.”

I yank harder.

It finally comes loose, spraying wet dirt across my jeans.

For some reason, this makes me laugh.

A real laugh this time.

Zoey would have laughed too.

Not because it was funny.

Because I looked stupid.

I sit back on my heels.

“There.”

Her grave looks exactly the same.

Of course it does.

I don’t know what I expected.

The rain stops before my friend arrives.

For once.

4.

I don’t have an epiphany.

I think that’s important.

Nobody should read this part and imagine the clouds open and God sticks His giant celestial face through them and explains why twenty-seven-year-old women get metastatic breast cancer.

There is no explanation I would accept anyway.

If God exists, He and I can discuss it when I get there.

Preferably somewhere private.

I have notes.

My friend takes me home.

She makes me give her my medications for the night.

I hate that.

I let her.

She orders food.

I say I’m not hungry.

She orders enough for both of us anyway.

Winston climbs onto my chest the second I lie down and begins kneading my sternum with his stupid little paws.

“Ow.”

He purrs.

“Asshole.”

He purrs louder.

My friend sits on the opposite end of the couch.

She doesn’t tell me everything happens for a reason.

She doesn’t tell me Zoey would want me to be happy.

I fucking hate when people say that.

Zoey wanted lots of things.

She wanted to live.

That didn’t happen either.

Instead, my friend eats French fries and watches television with the volume low.

At some point, she asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Ten minutes later, I say, “I miss her.”

“I know.”

“I miss her so fucking much.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think anybody understands.”

“I probably don’t.”

That answer makes me look at her.

She shrugs.

“I didn’t lose her like you did.”

There is something merciful about not being understood.

About somebody admitting they cannot climb inside the wound with you.

“I thought it would hurt less by now.”

She looks down at the fry in her hand.

“Does it?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

That’s it.

No wisdom.

No five stages.

No grief-is-love-with-nowhere-to-go bullshit printed over a sunset.

Just okay.

The pain exists.

She believes me.

For tonight, apparently, that is enough.