People that don’t wake up every morning feeling like what’s the point will never understand. It’s impossible. They say: exercise, meditate, think happy thoughts, snap out of it, wear this crystal, drink this tea, find your goddamn bliss. But I literally—and I am not exaggerating—do not remember a time when I was truly happy. Except for when I was on Percocet. Those fuckers in their fancy labs actually figured out how to bottle happiness. Thing is, when you don’t have those diamonds in you, it’s all worse. So much worse. The Sad is so big it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like that movie Mae loves where the astronaut can’t get back to the ship and he just floats off into the complete, utter, terrifying darkness of space listening to cowboy music. My sister studies the void—but I look into it Every. Single. Day.

The universe is so big and terrifying, and we are so small and weak. What is the point of getting out of bed in the morning when you are so utterly insignificant?

I turn away from her, push my face into the pillow, and the tears come fast and hard because—

“It smells like her,” I say into the cotton, into the pretty forget-me-nots Mom picked out.

Mae scoots closer and presses her nose to the pillow. “Roses.”

She rubs her palm between my shoulder blades, which always makes me feel better, I don’t know why. After a while, after she smooths away my crying, I hear her sit up, and when I look over, Mae is holding Dad’s pillow to her face. I know exactly what it smells like: my great-grandpa’s cologne, Brut, which Dad started wearing after he died. Sweet and cedary. Dad says it keeps his feet on the ground, since his head is mostly in space.

“It smells like morning hugs,” Mae says.

He’s a scientist, but I’m pretty sure Dad thinks it’s bad luck not to hug people when they leave the house in the morning.

And I realize: “I didn’t get to hug him. When he left.”

Mae got up early to see them off, but I slept in. Why do I always do the wrong thing?

“I hugged him for both of us,” she says.

I wish the bed didn’t smell like them, because I know that if they don’t come back, there will be a moment when it stops smelling like them, and I don’t want to know that moment, not ever.

I curl back into the pillow.

Sometime around eleven, Micah comes back from his shift at the restaurant and squishes onto the bed next to me without a word, him on one side, Mae on my other.