I’m carrying plastic bags full of groceries down Roosevelt Road to the Red Line station, and there’s too many of them, even though I kept telling the cashier, “I’ll be okay.” (She was friendly and had long blue acrylics and bangles that jangled and wrinkles that told me she laughed a lot. She kept ringing my items up twice on accident.) I’ve found myself lying more recently. And the strops of my backpack aren't helping the numbess in my fingers. And Ethel Cain's "Thoroughfare" plays in my ears as I stand on the platform, plastic bags all around my feet. Too many. Too close to the electrified third rail Ethel is telling me how Isaiah said,

"End of the line. We finally reached the edge after all this time." The Limestone Coast in Australia is riddled with cavities. Limestone dissolves, ponds take its place, green sprouts forth, tunnels wind their way. There’s this phenomena that happens when humans are in high places. The think about jumping. L'appel du vide. Call of the void. The void calls me. I've been thinking about jumping. In those ponds on the Limestone Coast, thirteen cave divers died before 1985. There's this picture I can't get out of my head. That's why I keep starting this poem but never finish it. Two divers. Their guidelines tangled around them. No bubbles: they're dead. Each movement would have brought them closer to the end. Hurricane Helene barely ended and Milton is on its way. Ethel Cain lives in Florida. So does my cousin and her husband. a friend I knew through Tumblr who ran the Discord server I joined and left as a teen died during Hurricane Laura. He was 15. He lived in the Bible belt. He never transitioned. He never grew up. I’m so tired of seeing kids never grow up. Seeing the counties I played in and went to school in and made my first friends in in North Carolina flooded, biblically, has left me— left me— honey, I'm left. The water is deep brown, and the homes are unrecognizable. We abandoned the South. Sometimes I wonder who I would be if my parents never foreclosed on that house in Apex. When my heart pounds in my chest to try and get out, get out, get out and my hands are slick in cold sweats and my arms are going numb, I Google theories of what happens after death. The first result is from r/Existentialism; the summary helpfully supplies that “Once you die you will return to the infinite void of nothingness.”

I'm thinking about jumping again. In times like this, I reach for the prayers I never thought I would return to.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace, The Lord is with thee. I am not any better than anyone else. The idea of being more makes me sick. The idea of being nothing makes me sick. At the end of Preacher's Daughter, Ethel is cannibalized by Isaiah and tells him, from beyond the grave, "Just tell me I'm yours if I'm turning your stomach and I'm making you feel sick."

I want to end this somewhere else. Go back. When I was seven (or maybe it was eight or nine), I learned to jump rope. I learned to double Dutch and double jump and life is made of doubles, I think. I found my double under the wave that tumbled me over at the Outer Banks

My big toe nail scraped my left wrist. I still have the scar.