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THE WIND PHONE
How I’m Handling My Existential Crisis
Agnostic prayer, eating while crying, and other coping practices
One year ago my niece and her friend died. Nineteen years old. Bright, beautiful, loving, gentle girls. On the job at lunchtime — hurrying hot plates to diners, rolling bright eyes over inadequate gratuities — snuffed out at dusk by a pill spiked with powerful synthetic opioids.
Ever since, I’ve been haunted by a faint sensation of disconnectedness from matter, a threadbare memory of falling in slow motion through a night sky, as if untethered in space. It is accompanied by a sense that nothing is real. It’s typically fleeting and benign, but there are days it enfolds me, and something like emptiness, sadness, or guilt settles in my gut.
All the times I ate strange pills and put powders up my nose, slipped away, hated myself for waking up. It was a way of life. I was a drug addict. Wondering why I am alive and she is dead, where she went, or if I will see her again is futile. That line of thinking leads to madness and asylums.
Maybe you’ve felt it too. Perhaps it whispered in your callow ear when you learned Santa Claus was not an altruistic, bearded superman but “a metaphor” (nice try, Mom). Or at your first funeral, seeing your grandfather —…
