Read "Same Time Tomorrow" and "I Still Hate You" then come back here. Lexi's waiting.
The summer was long.
Not in the romantic way. Not in the golden, endless possibility way. Just... long. The kind of long that stretches across your skin like sunburn and settles behind your eyes like screen fatigue. Lexi spent most of it indoors. She told people she was "taking time to regroup." Which sounded adult. Reasonable. Purposeful. But what it really meant was that she stopped answering texts. She watched old comfort shows on mute. She alphabetized her books, then de-alphabetized them just to feel in control of something.
She didn't go home.
Marisol invited her once, maybe twice. The second text had a skull emoji, a threat or a joke or both. Lexi let it rot unread for three days before she replied, "Next time." There wouldn't be a next time. They both knew that.
Her mom asked questions like, "Are you taking care of yourself?" and "Do you need anything?" and "Should I be worried?" Lexi answered all of them with the same vague deflection: "I'm okay." Which wasn't a lie, exactly. Just a placeholder for something more complicated. Something she didn't want to name.
Morgan left early--off to a film internship in L.A. or Portland or some other city that smells like dreams and self-importance. They hugged once before Morgan disappeared through the terminal, earbuds in, sunglasses on, looking like a girl who belonged anywhere but here.
Lexi didn't cry. She stood in the kiss-and-ride lane of the airport for ten minutes after Morgan left, watching other people reunite or leave or just exist. Then she went back to campus, moved into her summer housing assignment, and tried to become invisible.
She mostly succeeded.
She slept too much. Then not enough. Ate whatever required the least thought. Read longform articles about climate collapse and Gen Z burnout like it might explain the hole in her chest. It didn't.
She went to therapy. Once. The woman was kind-eyed and clipboarded. Asked her about loss, about identity, about "narrative ownership." Lexi nodded. Answered with honesty she immediately regretted. When asked what she wanted from the sessions, she said, "I want to stop remembering her like a bruise."
She didn't go back.
August came humid and slow. The edges of the world felt blurry. Campus woke up in pieces--resident advisors returning first, then athletes, then the rest. Lexi moved into her new dorm on the first assigned day, two hours earlier than the check-in window. She wanted to get it over with. Wanted to unpack without an audience. Wanted the illusion of control back, if only for a moment.
Her new room was smaller. Not worse, just smaller. It faced a tree-lined walkway that got just enough traffic to feel alive but not enough to feel invasive. The walls were off-white and scuffed. The carpet held the ghosts of at least four previous residents. Lexi unpacked like she was building a shrine--folded her sweaters with reverence, stacked notebooks like sacred texts, arranged pens and sticky notes in tidy rows.
No roommate this year. She'd requested a single. Told the housing office she needed the quiet for academic purposes. What she really meant was: I don't want anyone to hear me unravel.
The silence was immediate. And relentless.
The first week of classes passed without distinction. Professors with kind voices and syllabus jokes. Icebreakers that left her teeth grinding. "Tell us something unique about you." I used to be in love with a girl who died. I still sleep on the right side because she liked the left.
Lexi said, "I'm really into archival research."
No one cared. No one remembered. That was the nice thing about sophomore year--fewer performances. The freshmen buzzed with energy and panic, trying to find their people, trying to reinvent themselves without looking like they were trying. Lexi watched them like a ghost at a wedding. Distant. Removed. Already familiar with the magic trick and its eventual collapse.
She went to class. Took notes. Ate alone in the dining hall. The pasta bar hadn't changed. Neither had the fake plants near the soda machine or the unspoken rule that you don't sit at the window seats unless you want to be seen.
She sat by the windows anyway. Because what was left to lose?
The grief had changed. Softer at the edges. Less like drowning, more like a weight she'd gotten used to carrying. Some mornings she still woke up with Sylvia's name caught between her teeth like a splinter. Some nights she slept through without dreaming at all. Which was better. Maybe.
She hadn't written in weeks. Months, maybe. Not the real stuff. Not the cut-open, bleeding-for-someone-who's-not-there kind of writing. Just class essays. Academic decay, neat and structured. She got A's, of course. She always got A's.
Morgan sent a postcard in early September.
It had a vintage photo of a flamingo wearing sunglasses. The back said:
"Everyone here is insufferable. I've started smoking cloves again. Tell me you're alive, Barbie."
Lexi didn't reply. But she stuck the card to her wall with a piece of washi tape. Next to a picture of her sister. Below a quote that read: We don't heal by forgetting. We heal by remembering and surviving anyway.
It had been a year and a half
Eighteen months since her life split into Before and After.
She never marked the anniversary. Never visited the spot. Never lit a candle or post a vague caption or call Marisol. She just woke up that morning, ate a granola bar, went to class, and stared at her hands during lecture like they might betray her. Like they remembered holding Sylvia's blood. Like they remembered trying to hold the world together with nothing but muscle and prayer.
There was a poetry reading the second Friday of the semester. Some student group's welcome event. She almost skipped it. Would've, if not for the email Morgan forwarded with the subject line:
"Sounds like your kind of sad."
Lexi went.
Sat in the back. Arms crossed. Ready to be unimpressed.
Then a redhead got up.
Freckles. Too many layers for the weather. Voice shaky but stubborn.
And Lexi didn't know it yet--not fully, not even a little--but something in her body went still.
Not healed.
Not mended.
Just still.
Like the moment before a wave crests.
Like breath, held.
Waiting.
Redhead is already shaking when she walks up to the mic.
Not the kind of shaking that says fear. The kind that says there's something in me trying to claw its way out. Her notes are handwritten, folded twice, the edges curled like they've been clutched too hard, too often. She doesn't make eye contact with the crowd. Just stares at the scuffed stage floor like it might give her permission to exist.
The room is humid with too many bodies and the illusion of cool, intellectual detachment. A dozen conversations don't stop when she clears her throat. A boy in a denim vest leans into his friend and says, not quietly enough, "Oh god, another Sad Girl Poem."
A few people chuckle.
Lexi, from her spot near the back, tenses. She almost stands. Almost says something. But Callie lifts her hand.
Just a little.
A twitch. A breath. A refusal to leave.
"I'm--um--Callie," she says. Her voice is tissue-thin, full of the kind of nerves that make you apologize for breathing. "She/her. This is called 'How to Grieve When the Body is Still Warm.'"
Someone near the door coughs. The mic feedback whines like it's flinching for her. She starts to read.
Too soft.
The room leans back instead of forward. Attention scattering. Even Lexi feels her stomach twist--not with embarrassment for Callie, but with something sharper. Recognition. That helpless ache of seeing someone almost fail because the world doesn't have the patience to wait for her to bloom.
And then--
"Can't hear you, sweetheart," someone calls. Mocking. Male. Probably bored and full of himself. He's not heckling because he's cruel. He's heckling because it costs him nothing.
Callie flinches. Her fingers tighten around the paper. She doesn't look up. She just closes her eyes, breathes in once--ragged and high in her chest--and then:
She begins again.
Louder.
Not steady, not yet. But full of intent.
"My grief is not poetic.
It does not arrive in stanzas,
Or bleed in clean metaphors.
It arrives in rotting fruit and overdue library fines,
In voicemail inboxes too full to delete,
In the name I still whisper
when I burn my tongue on coffee
because she used to do the same."
Her voice cracks on coffee, and someone in the crowd makes that low, involuntary sound people make when something hits too close.
She keeps going.
"I do not cry gracefully.
I ugly sob to sitcom reruns
and apologize to the pizza delivery guy
when I answer the door
in her sweatshirt."
That gets a laugh. The good kind. The painful kind. A collective exhale.
Lexi feels it before she realizes it--her fingers curled into fists in her lap. Not out of tension. Out of need. Something in her wants to bolt. Or scream. Or kneel. Because this girl on stage, trembling and brave and entirely too open, just opened a door Lexi thought she'd bricked over.
Callie looks up. Holds Lexi's gaze a bit too long. Just holds the page like it's a holy text and reads like it's a confession.
"Some days I kiss mirrors
because her reflection still lingers there.
Some days I avoid them.
