I wake up one morning and start to dissolve. At first it’s only a shimmer at the ends of my hair, my split ends glistening as they transform into nothing, but the nothing spreads quickly, up each strand and down into my shoulders. By the time I’m out of bed, my hands are a million disparate particles. My forearms tingle and I know that soon they’ll be gone too.
Initially, of course, this fills me with fear; I am afraid to die. But this isn’t death. I’m still here, except I don’t have upper arms anymore, which is actually a perfect scenario.
My thoughts are there—my feelings too, my likes and dislikes, affinity for the color orange—but as I take what’s left of me for a walk down the street, I realize that I am unobserved. As my lower half begins to pixelate and fade, I find myself thinking it might be alright, even ideal, to live the rest of my life as a shapeless fog. Nobody gives fog a hard time for being what it is. Fog can’t have a hard time with midrise denim. Fog never said the wrong thing at a party and ruined the vibe.
I let my legs drift up and away, vein-mottled calves first. I will never think about them again. My friends and family will have to adjust to this new way of knowing me. Over time they will come to like that I am everywhere and nowhere, instead of disappointing them emotionally, or forgetting to bring my own wine to the event and then drinking most of theirs, or getting weird about the group photo. Rather than being smothered or put off or bored by my big, stupid feelings, they will find the atmospheric experience of me calming. My presence will be a warm breeze, like Mandy Moore’s after she dies in that religious movie about singing.
A glowing light fills my torso until it explodes, shooting outward like the universe at the very beginning (probably). I feel only relief: I do not have to know what to do about anything. It doesn’t matter that I do not stretch in the morning and have never successfully meditated, or that my face is round and my body decaying, or that I am a bad friend, an ungrateful daughter, and functionally useless in the face of society’s many problems.
I am a delicate mist. No one can look at me or touch me or see me. I do not want to be held, which is fine—no one wants to hold me, and even if they did, it wouldn’t help. I am a murmuration, a lightly undulating spray of particles, moving easily around the earth without impacting it. I don’t miss anyone and have never fucked anything up.