One minute you were playfully complaining to friends about a man’s farts and the next minute you would kill to have the farts back.

Salsa dancing was the last stop on the suicide express.

I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.

How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe.

So I was going to try to be happy, even if it brought me more suffering.

I realized it wasn’t my impending departure for Phoenix that stopped me from offering the words. And it wasn’t my fear of intimacy. It was still my fear of rejection.

The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it.

I was not trying to kill myself so much as vanish. I just wanted to go to sleep and be transported into the ether, another world. I guess that vanishing would have meant death, so perhaps it was an attempt at suicide? But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either?

This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.