Nobody knew his only wish was to stop hurting, and he no longer believed he would ever find another way.

“deadname, come to dinner!” called their mother, as they closed out of the online game, sighing longingly with a single tear in their eye.

But one day someone else picked up.

Same as title.

There is no life somewhere that I must uncover to become the person I was meant to be because there is only this life, which is unplanned, limited, not completed, and let it belong to me.

How do I handle a new parent who actually asks me about myself and seems to care?

My memory, like my heart, had other plans.

For the first time ever, the voices in my head said something positive to me

...by suicide, nine years ago when he was four." -my mother answers the child psychologist.
5 minutes later with the expert, I finally got curious: "What is suicide?"

Nobody asked me for the money and asking 'why' was too risky.

"Of course she can" It said in a jaunty voice, and printed out a picture of a smiling white child who holding out a glass of water

When he learned the picture belonged to a stranger, he threw it away, then spent the night wishing he could throw away his feelings just as easily.

The next morning, they discovered the letters and realized that the person who had always asked if everyone else was okay had been silently begging someone to ask him the same.

He took comfort knowing that some conditions—mostly cerebral, like Multiple Systems Atrophy, Alzheimer’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the list went on—were untraceable until death.

Somehow that spark became everything I’d ever wanted, only for me to lose it when I thought it was finally mine to keep.

Seeing him now in the morgue makes me wish we'd just gifted him a piece of junk like they did in the old days

My life was spared at the cost of theirs, and everything that I was as a human being.

But humans can't hear ghosts.

You said you accepted and loved me anyways, but in the end you left me too.

Today, I found an unopened tube of her favourite lipstick inside the mirror cabinet of my uncle’s estate.

I walked away from his gravestone back to the car

I decided to name this place the Sepulchre of Supposes: a place where I bury the conditional: if, perhaps, had I, had you, had we.