You talk on the phone, but soon she stops picking up, stops responding to your texts. “If you don’t want me to worry,” you tell her when she finally answers, “if you want me to feel safe, you’re not doing a very good job.” Your body feels huge, swollen, as though it is pressed into the room’s corners and your limbs are growing out of the windows.
“I don’t care,” she says, so softly that you know it’s true.
“Are you still seeing her?” you ask.
You cry and cry.40 You cry into your phone, flood it with saltwater. It stops working.41 So she breaks up with you over Skype instead. Her face is pinched and regretful.
“I still want to be your friend,” she says.
When it is over, you stare at your dark, dead phone; a rectangle of black glass. It grows in your hand, larger and larger, and you discover that, instead, you are shrinking. By the time the realization hits you, you are three feet tall. One foot. Six inches. And then, up to your chin in saltwater. You wonder if you have somehow fallen into the sea. “And in that case,” you think, “no one will come and get me.” You soon make out, though, that you are in the pool of tears that you had wept when you were nine feet high.42
“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” you say as you swim about, trying to find your way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.”
