Five First Chances by Sarah Jost

Author:Sarah Jost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2023-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday, August 23, 2018

It’s been me and her for an eternity. The balcony’s blinds are down, the French windows shut so we don’t hear the cars, the ever-worsening traffic, which distresses her. The sun is pressing its hot, sticky hands on the outside world; inside, the room is eerily cool. The tips of my toes are cold. The skin on my bare arms too. It’s three in the afternoon; we should be warm. We should be enjoying the sun. But I can’t move.

Mum takes the remote, stares at it for a bit, then pushes it toward me.

“Can you change the channel?” she asks. I don’t try and get her to do it herself anymore. This time, I have found her company almost indifferent, depression neutralizing depression.

Easter and the summer term passed in a daze, still carried by the hope that love would be enough and that, the next day, I would wake up to a text from Nick. I set a lot of project work at school so I’d have to lose myself in tedious marking, into nights getting shorter and shorter. The stretching of the world itself was teasing me with all those hours made for barbecues and flirting in pub gardens.

When school finished for the summer holidays, with the loss of my routine, I found myself one of those cartoon characters who keep running up in the air over the cliff—I was finally plummeting. I did the only thing I could and flew to my mother. I’ve spent most days sitting here on the sofa, trying to remember how to breathe to the rumbling of the trains below, the too-cheerful jazzy notes of blackbirds in the park, my only escape being painful trips to the Migros supermarket, wandering among familiar yet uncanny products: green packets of nutty biscuits, saffron brioche, dried beef, all screaming at me in a cacophony of French, Italian, and German.

“What would you like to watch?” I ask Mum as I flick through the channels. She shrugs. I struggle to find something she would describe as “nonthreatening” before settling on a “France from the sky” documentary, a sleepy voice-over describing endless rivers and châteaux. I can’t tell anymore whether I’m selecting this for her benefit or mine. The list of banned programs (documentaries about endangered species, suspense, the news) being much longer than what we can watch, every day we engage in a delicate negotiation with the remote.

My phone has been nothing but a reminder of emptiness this summer, so excruciating that some days, I leave it off, go back to check it, turn it off again, and so on. The last text I received was on July 30, when Yuki asked me how I was and sent me a GIF of an otter. I had to hide in my room to cry. There was no use in telling her how very much not okay I was. She has gone quiet now, and the hope that Nick would reach out has fizzled. I have come to the realization that to him, our breakup must have been a relief.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.