“This is great stuff, Lottie. Someday you’ll look back on this and be happy you wrote it all down.”
She bought me another one, and I went through two or three a year until I was fifteen and it suddenly felt like all the things I wanted to write about were too heavy for the paper. My anxiety was worse than ever, my brain was a treacherous place to navigate, and I thought those feelings might be better left trapped inside me than free to fill up a page.
So I piled the journals in a box in my closet.
I hadn’t looked at them in years, but that night I took the last half-finished journal from the box and went into the attic, which was hot and stuffy but at least afforded the maximum amount of privacy, and I wrote.
Or—I tried to write.
My pen hung an inch or so above the paper, but I couldn’t think of anything to do with it. Where there used to be words, there was now only a quiet kind of emptiness. My ears were fuzzy and ringing slightly, like how I imagined it would sound to be buried alive.
I’d been thinking a lot about death lately. About the many different ways a person could die.
I’d been doing so well keeping my anxiety under control, but then Aunt Helen had died, and it was like a flood had washed into my brain.
Now all I could think about was being buried alive and getting cancer and even the most obscure, unlikely deaths, like elevation sickness on Mount Everest and spontaneous human combustion.
I tried to focus on the blank page in front of me but instead of being comforted by that finite expanse of white, I imagined it stretching out to fill up the room, choking me in its blankness, taking over everything.
I closed my eyes and squeezed the pen tighter in my hand, and then I opened my eyes and wrote:
I miss Aunt Helen a lot.
And then:
I feel like I didn’t do enough.
But what else could I have done? I wasn’t a doctor, and even if I were, they said Aunt Helen’s cancer was the type you couldn’t cure.
So why did it feel like I was somehow to blame? Why did I find it so hard to forgive myself for something I had no control over?
I’m so sorry.
I don’t know why I’m sorry.
But I am.
I jumped off a cliff the other day and I thought it would be terrifying, but for the first time in a long time, all the worries just melted away. It was like I was suspended even as I was hurtling through the air. Like I found some kind of peace even as everything was screaming.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe when things are fine, that’s when I can’t handle it. Maybe I mess up all the good things because my brain doesn’t know how to process them. Maybe I can only be truly happy when everything is hanging on by a thread.
I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I’m not sure I’m making any sense. If you were here now I guess I would just try and make it really, really clear that I loved you.
And I don’t know why I always feel so afraid.
I don’t know how to calm down.
I don’t know how to stop thinking about everybody dying, about Abe dying and Em dying and my parents dying and even people I don’t know dying, people all over the world. I read that over 150,000 people die every single day, and I don’t like that thought, all of those bodies just stopping throughout the day, going limp or dropping to the ground. We are going to run out of places to put them. We are going to need another Earth. We are going to have to figure out how to live on the moon.
I put the pen down again and closed my eyes so tightly that spots of light danced on the insides of my eyelids. Aunt Helen, I knew, wrote every single morning of her life, at her desk with a cup of coffee and her hair in a bun and sometimes still in pajamas. When I was younger I would sit underneath her desk with LEGO bricks or a coloring book, and the sound of her pens scratching across the paper would lull me into a calming trance.
“Are you writing more Alvin?” I’d say. Before I could even read for myself, Alvin was read to me. The final book, the sixth book, ends unresolved. Alvin and Margo stand in front of their grandfather’s burned-down house and absorb the knowledge that they have lost everyone; they are truly alone.
“I’m trying,” she would always answer and peek down under the desk, smiling at me. “It’s not coming very easily.”
“They have to end up happily ever after,” I’d say. “On an island.”
“An island? Why an island?”
“That’s a happy place to end up. Like, they had a really hard time and now they just get to relax.”
“That’s a nice idea,” she’d say and go back to writing.
If only it were that easy. If only we all ended up on islands, our own private islands with nothing but sunshine and sea.
I thought Aunt Helen would have approved of that ending. At least more so than the one she got.
“Are you ready?” Alvin asked his sister. “This will kind of change everything.”
They stood together in the foyer of the house in the woods, the house that had become their home, their safe place. Every so often, every few weeks, someone came to knock on its front door: more often than not a member of the Everlife Society. But Alvin and Margo gave no indication that they could even hear the knocking. And since no one could open the magic door except Alvin, eventually their unwanted guests left, discouraged, sometimes after walking around the house and trying various windows even though they must have known it wouldn’t do any good. Sometimes their guests shouted things at them, not-nice things. Sometimes Margo threw tomatoes down at them from the second-story windows and the not-nice things turned into VERY not-nice things.
It wasn’t much of a life, but it was a life. A safe, quiet life. They played board games and read books about magic, and Margo became very good at braiding her own hair.
And now they were faced with leaving it all.
Now they had decided to leave it all.
Because living safely wasn’t the most important thing in the world.
Not when their parents were still out there and still needed their help.
“I’m ready,” Margo said, impressive resolve settling on her face.
Alvin put his hand on the enchanted doorknob, the one that would only open for him, and pulled.
—from Margo Hatter Lives Forever
9
The things we had picked out from Aunt Helen’s were delivered while I was in the attic. I came downstairs to a small mountain of boxes in our foyer.
“My eldest returns!” Dad said, hugging me harder than he needed to. “Where were you anyway, out somewhere? I checked your room.”
“I was doing stuff.”
“Ah, stuff. The mysterious stuff of youths,” he said, winking.