It was like that at first, after Derek died. Her emotions took over and decided everything for her. Whole days in bed, the hysterical crying, the long, drawn-out periods of melancholy without tears where she could stare blankly at her laptop for four hours, and then it would all hit again, and she would be in the whirlwind cycle of emotions. It took a few days until she had moments where she felt like things might be okay again, but, she would then immediately feel guilty about those moments. Guilty that he was dead, and she wasn’t, and that others and Harper herself expected her to mourn darker, more bleakly, and more sincerely. At this point, Harper would feel better after willingly losing control, drowning herself in the depths of her melancholy, blaming herself, and hating herself for him dying. This made her feel less guilty, to lay herself onto the bed of spikes. Maybe, if she mourned hard enough, hated herself hard enough, everyone would forgive her.

After a while, that didn’t work either. She would crucify herself against her mattress and only leave bed to piss. Her face held a grayness to it, and she either slept or stared blankly at the world. It was a nice, dark room, with everything in it consumed in a dark gray outline. The guilt and the sadness about it all was still there, it was just the mourning that started to feel fake. It didn’t feel right. In fact, worst of all, nothing at all felt right. Enjoyment felt perverted, sadness felt performative, and disassociation felt unnatural. The only thing was to just be blank and stare at her laptop, letting time pass continuously, hoping that maybe, just maybe, time was the cure. People always said about things like this that life goes on. But for Harper, the life that she had had literally couldn’t. The town, the people, the baggage, it was too heavy. And if life can’t go on, a new one had to be built, or she had to die, and she wasn’t ready to pick between those two options yet.

Harper lifted her face from the mattress and grabbed her laptop. She sat in front of it for the next hour, watching a documentary series about various cults. A woman was telling another woman that when she was younger, around twelve years old, she had been sexually abused by a powerful elder in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the laptop died right when Harper thought to herself, I’d kill to be a victim instead of what I am now, almost as if it was punishing her interior monologue. The charger for the laptop was downstairs, and Harper reacted to it turning off by staring at it for fifteen seconds and then leaning back to lie down.

She drank the warm soda that was in her hoodie pocket and looked at the wall.