Page 7 of I Hope This Finds You Well

I shake my head. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, it’s a weird ask I guess.” She sighs. “But you took longer than the others to say no!”

Clearly, I need to limit my interactions with her even harder.

At last, I haul open the heavy metal door that’s supposed to stay locked but is constantly propped open with a hunk of wood. Its hinge creaks as I pass through. The drab, musty air of the room that is theoretically the lobby greets me.

My building is one of those rental company specials, the target demographic being us folks who have no room to be picky about vibeswith the rent we pay, which means the design is void of personality in favor of cheap durability.

The envelope is taped to the outside of my suite door. Freaking Marty, the landlord, always has to leave his threatening letters the same way. I tear it down and stuff it in my bag. My rent is always three days late due to my pay schedule and tight budget, and these letters won’t change that. Just another piece of clutter to add to the vivid tapestry of life, I suppose.

I unlock my door and am greeted by a counter of take-out boxes, half-filled glasses of water piled on every surface, and clothes that hang from the corners of every piece of furniture, like a whole party of sad people disappeared a few minutes prior.

I can’t believe I briefly considered letting Miley in here. I mustneverlet anyone in here.

And something breaks deep inside me, like my whole day, or lifetime, is catching up with me at once. I blink through the prickle in my eyes. I know what life I’m supposed to live; I have Pinterest. Obviously, this isn’t it.

When I first moved to Calgary, seven years after high school and long after most of my classmates moved away from our town, it was all so easy. Sure, my job wasn’t going perfectly, but it paid. I was finally free from my parents’ home—free from the years of them trying to control me and force me back into being a person. This meant I could finally do more than hide from them in my room reading epic fantasy and crying.

But most crucially, I could be anonymous.

Friday nights were magic. I went to bars and hung out with strangers who didn’t know who I was. Drinking snuffed the usual tightness in my chest I felt around other people, and I could say anything because nobody knew me. I even made friends, or at least a group of drinking buddies. At one point I was tagged in a picture where the group of us regulars were celebrating some birthday. I had a real smile. There was sex and laughing, and sometimes the wrong song would play and I’d order a round of shots that would cost a month’s rent. Yes, during those first years here, everything seemed cured.

It worked, until it didn’t. Because their sob stories would always slip in. And I couldn’t unsee their void stares that never found a place to land.

Because every now and then, I’d say something like, “We’re all going to be dead and we’ll forget we ever existed, someday.” And they’d look at me like they recognized something inside me too. Then they’d ask me if I was okay, or they’d suddenly realize they didn’t even know where I was from. Rather than letting things get messy, I settled into my Netflix and nothing routine.

It meant I had lived through it. Plus, I survived everything before.

Except there’s nobody really living here.

The problem is people eventually want to know more and more about you. And with time, they’ll find out enough to see what’s always been there. I’ve had one real friend my entire life, and she’s not here anymore. It always hits like a brick wall: Ellie technically doesn’t exist anymore.

Yes, when people find out enough about me, they stop wanting to know anything at all.

Nothing bad happens when I’m alone. I have YouTube and my little projects. I like to replay the greatest arguments of my lifetime and win them, research child actors and what their families look like, and disassemble things like the remote control.

I drop my bags on the counter and pour myself a healthy glass of wine, then head to the couch with my phone and open my creeper Instagram account. This is one of my favorite pastimes while drinking: checking in on what people I used to know are up to.

My heart almost drops out my butt when I spot the newest post. They’re all together, sitting at a picnic table with a tent in the background.

Camping.

The hashtags may be ironic, but they’re alsonot:#highschoolreunion, #friends5eva.

They’re not wallowing or hiding in their apartments drinking alone. They’ve all moved on with their lives.

They can look back on everything with a smile.

It makes sense. I pinch at the photo, zooming into every pixel, studying it like an archaeological dig.

Something about it feels off, uneasy even, but I can’t pin exactly why. I stare at it like it’s a Magic Eye poster, and still nothing.

I let my phone drop onto the faded beige couch cushion. There’s a line of grit tucked into the corner of the case that could kill someone if they were to lick it.

I shouldn’t do this anymore. I should be able to focus on my own life by now, instead of cyberstalking people who don’t matter. They moved out of their parents’ houses, and so did I. They have jobs, and I do too.

But I should have arealInstagram.