Say you’re 29. About to turn 30. Oldest you’ve ever been and your life is a mess. Everywhere you look there are headlines: 26-year-old debut author wins prestigious award; 24-year-old tech wunderkind blah blah blah. And here you are, divorced and living with your parents. On the one hand you understand: you’re merely shuffling through the rubble your ex tore down around you. On the other hand: it fucking sucks.

Say a year ago, when everything was crumbling, you did something pretty shitty. Not intentionally, mind you, given the no-thoughts-just-vibes kinda fumes your trauma brain was huffing at that point. But nonetheless, it all shook out pretty badly. Say you lost a friend. Say it was someone you loved. Someone who’d been a steady witness to your past decade of hardscrabble adulthood. Someone you admire and respect and who, in a Sliding Doors type scenario, you might have ended up with instead.

Say you are a woolen sweater consumed by moths. (Say that’s a metaphor for anxiety and regret.)

Solve the following:

1. Do you email your ex-friend a sincere apology, hoping for but not expecting a response?
   1. Yes
   2. Obviously
2. A year later, when your messed up brain’s favorite pastime is still composing and then obsessively refining letters in your head, and you send a 600-word missive over Facebook Messenger, is it because:
   1. You’re still an idiot
   2. Unlike email, this app allows read receipts and seeing the tiny avatar of your friend’s face beneath your message makes you feel like maybe you’re not just screaming into the void
   3. You dream about this ex-friend at least once a week
3. One month after that, still no response, you send another message begging them to tell you to fuck off forever. Is it because:
   1. You’re lonely
   2. Your impulse control is not operating at peak capacity
   3. It’s like an addiction, writing these pathetic messages just to see their picture with a timestamp appear below your words
4. Two weeks later (no response), when you write again, is it:
   1. A description of your clinical anxiety and panic attacks
   2. A casual anecdote about your compulsions to hiss invective at your reflection in the mirror
   3. An invitation to attend a concert together in two months
   4. You imploring them again to please, for the love of god, tell you once and for all to stop
5. Nine days after that, you write again. Still no response. By this point are you starting to feel:
   1. Deranged
   2. Pitiful
   3. Like a swarm of bees lives inside your chest and the only time they stop buzzing is right after you press send
   4. Lowkey worried re: the point at which might this be considered harassment?
   5. Shame

Say you reign yourself in for a couple months. Say you’ve been seeing a therapist and facing up to your unchecked anxiety and spiraling, unhealthy behavior. Say you have a couple of beers one night and decide to record a video telling your friend goodbye for the last time. Say you tell yourself it’s for closure but also you’re feeling hot for once and, not gonna lie, this bralette is flattering. Say you send the video, done, you’re finally free, but when you get out of the shower ten minutes later, you’ve missed a call from them! Of course you call them back. Of course you ask them: “Why now?” And when they say: “It felt cruel not to,” you understand at last: this is not a sliding door but a turnstile gate that spat you out long ago.

Say it’s a knife to the gut, but it doesn’t kill you.