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How We Are All RightDaryll Jane Delgado

When it happened to me the first time, I carried on, but barely, and, pardon me, Ifelt like an empty shell, hollow and brittle, filled only with the sound of the distance and

of the open sea. I just rolled along, went through motions without willful action. Now,amazingly, I even find myself missing that emptiness, and I developed instead thisembarrassing mannerism of heaving something weighty, but nameless, off my chest,and although I constantly have to consciously remind myself to straighten up, to keepmyself up, thankfully, I am able to, keep up, I mean.

In my case, after the first tragedy, the clean, clinical smell, the undisturbed coldair, of airports, meeting rooms, hotel lobbies, trains stations you get the idea, thepattern always constricted my throat, snuffed my breath. Cannot count the number oftimes I was carried off by the medic during this period, the number of times I wasadministered oxygen and submitted to ungainly respiratory maneuvers. After the second

one, I still keep finding myself in these places, and I still barely make it through. What Icant stand this time isnt so much the air or the smell, but the spaces between, the quietdemarcations amid the seeming jostling. That always does me in, leaves me similarlybreathless. So I bring with me the one that comes in a blue canned spray, which looks

just like anti asthma device, and doesnt invite too many queries.

Before, as soon as I settled in my seat on a plane, and snapped on my belt, justbefore the plane took off, I would have these micro seizures, without fail. They becameprotocol eventually managed without attracting any attention, performed withoutemotion, without feeling anything but the obvious sensation of wet streaks on dry skin.Now I sit calmly, I close my eyes and swallow, no, embrace, this fear recentlydeveloped. It comes in a blue pill, and I get to enjoy its yet undocumented side effectsin secret: the vividly imagined deaths by crash, wherein the end is always the same, butthey all start, each time, a different way.

The first time it happened, I ran away. This time, I came home.

Me too, after that first one, I moved out, made new friends with people who hadnothing to do with the past, who knew nothing of the tragedy. Were allowed to call itthat now, right? But when it, the tragedy, happened again, those friendships suddenlybecame old and too all knowing. I find myself forming new ties now and deliberatelykeeping them isolated from old ones. I also recently got married so that I can sinfullyfantasize about lurid affairs with the most impossible men. And on weekends I bookmyself into the most obscure hotels to spy on strangers before turning myself, with justa pop of the pill, into one of them.

I was so broken the first time, I would look at people and wonder embarrassedlyif they could see me. Im sure they could, Im sure they did. I could barely keep myclothes on me, or, in my brittleness, walk with any semblance of regularity. I realize now

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though that it is quite possible to be even more broken, more incongruous than that, butalso, thanks to this new intervention, to be sufficiently and so satisfyingly invisible.

Before, and for a long time, I held a deep grudge for every single person whowasnt there, who didnt make a move, make the necessary sounds or even token

gestures. Granted that it took a while for the tragedy to be so named, but still, all themanifestations were clearly there. Now, my memory has gotten ahead of me, I canbarely keep up with it. It has created a very organized filing system of those who wereand those who werent, and those who could have but didnt. Sometimes its moredifficult this way, remembering every detail. However, with this, ah, thing, I find that I nolonger bear grudges, only clean, antiseptic non feelings.

When it happened to me the first time, I managed, somehow. This time, I dontwant to manage anymore.

After the first one, I wrote a story about the loss as a loss of Self, a complete

disappearance and erasure, and I did this by way of inverting a character into a non entity that leaves no trace, and is untraceable but somehow transparent, see through.You know what I mean? After the second one, I ingested just a bit of the stuff, and I wasable to write of a man in a very tall glass building, standing always by the window of hiscorner suite, his view affording him, on the one hand, an expanse, and, on the otherhand, a constriction. I try not to be facetious here, and youll see the effort, trust me, butI ask, in this story, how many more of our Selves are we really capable of losing andthe answer is, of course, inherent in the question, for this is where the horror truly lies and whether that process, the eventual disappearances and the losses of Selves, willalways be as violent as the forced creation of new ones.