Chapter I

Creases

I still have the vision.

It didn’t stop when Adam died. If anything, it got louder. But it wasn’t a premonition. I’d been having it for years—before, during, after. Before there was anything to know, it wasn’t a warning. It wasn’t even grief. It was just there.

It comes the same way every time: I’m driving, and I hit something. Full force. No warning. Just the sound of glass unzipping, the hood folding like cheap aluminum, the front end collapsing in on itself and driving straight into my chest. The steering wheel doesn’t stop. It presses deeper—the seatbelt slices across my ribs like a piano wire. I feel my lungs deflate. My teeth crack together and splinter in my mouth. My jaw goes slack. The windshield doesn’t shatter—it fractures. Long lines like veins, branching outward in front of me. The silence afterward is thick and total.

I see my blood on the dash. I see the bend in the frame where my legs should be. I feel the preasure of the engine pressing into my sternum like it wants inside. Sometimes I see my face in the rearview right before it hits. Sometimes nothing. Just the impact. Over and over.

When Adam died, I thought maybe the vision had been about him. Some signal, delivered early. But his death didn’t resolve anything. It just made the vision heavier. Stickier.

It was a month before I started asking. A month of silence, I told myself, I could explain. We’d had worse fights. Longer stretches. Adam’s ghosting was a pattern I wore like an old sweater—abrasive, familiar, mine. So I didn’t panic. I just simmered. I told myself he was punishing me, that it would pass.

But even before I knew, I felt it. Something had gone sideways in the universe. I couldn’t name it, but I could feel it folding space differently. The absence didn’t feel like avoidance. It felt like a vacancy. A quiet that wasn’t holding anything.

I started clicking through the last few people he’d posted with on Instagram. We had no mutual friends. That was the design. Our entire relationship lived in its vacuum—sealed off, oxygen-light, untouchable. He had his world; I had mine. He was all fraternity parties, binge drinking with perky blonds. I was the art kid in a black turtleneck and combat boots, eyeliner like war paint, always ready to disappear into a bookstore or a bar bathroom.

We never should have met. A professor paired us up for a group project in our sophomore year. There was nothing natural about us. Our magnetism made no sense, but insisted on itself. Something in our wiring recognized the other. We built a mythology out of that. Maybe it was the same depression, bent in different directions. Perhaps it was something darker. Either way, we became a fixed point in each other’s chaos.

We were violent with each other. In language. In silence. In the way we showed up, too late or too hard. We exhausted every version of ourselves—friend, enemy, lover, stranger. Longing was built in. Absence was built in. Love came later, and it limped.

When I finally reached out to one of the guys he’d tagged, I wasn’t expecting anything more than a vague breadcrumb. But the response was immediate. Cold.

“You didn’t hear? Adam died.” No apology. No softening. Just a flat dispatch. Another person confirmed it, like they were telling me the score of a game.

“Car accident. You really didn’t know?”—a passive interrogation of our closeness. I need to know what I was to him. A challenge to prove I had the right to feel anything at all.

It was a random state—Ohio, maybe, or Missouri. A place he had no ties to. Someone sent me a scan of a local news article. No photo of him. Just a crushed shell of a car wrapped around a 16-wheeler. It happened at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.

I had spoken to him that morning. The conversation was unremarkable—something about books. He’d asked, like he always did, for a recommendation. I probably gave him the same names I always did: some woman author who had suffered well and written beautifully. He never read them and always asked again. But I sent them anyway. It was our ritual. One-sided. Indulgent. Useless.

Now he’d never read them. And it’s still here. The vision. The silence. The weight. It sits with me as I drive north on I-95, through the soft underbelly of Florida, past orange groves and empty gas stations. The “Drive Safely” signs start appearing somewhere around Volusia County. They litter the roadside like accidents waiting to happen.

Some are marked with fresh flowers, wilted in the humidity. Others with teddy bears—cheap, sun-bleached, their fur matted from storms. Saints taped to wooden crosses. Balloons long since deflated. Most are bare. Just the sign. White background. Black font. Simple. Clinical. Drive Safely. Underneath: the name of the dead.

I never thought much about them until someone I knew died in a car accident. In high school, it was a football player who crashed while drunk. The school made a banner. We mourned in the cafeteria. I remember thinking his girlfriend would be haunted by the “what if” of her perfect boyfriend that died too soon, and I immediately felt bad for all her future partners. There was a scholarship in his name. His parents sued someone, I think. But the signs stuck. Quiet tombstones without epitaphs. Reminders that vanish in the rearview.

They’re everywhere here—a state-sponsored mourning. Part PSA, part dare. You see enough of them, and they stop being warnings. They become scenery. You start counting them. Make games out of them. “Another one,” you say, like it’s normal. Like it’s not a body.

You almost want to drive faster, daring death to catch up. The signs start to feel like invitations. Try it. See what happens. There’s no telling where they begin or end. Maybe they bleed out of Florida. Maybe they’re just ours. Perhaps this state is a graveyard masquerading as a coastline.

It’s been four years since Adam died, and I still think about him on drives like this.

Florida’s roads are made for reflection—long, flat stretches lined with things that have outlived their intention. You don’t even need a destination. The land pulls you forward. There’s a rhythm to it: pine, pasture, swamp, citrus grove, broken strip mall. Repeat.

Every time I’m out here alone, I end up back in that thought—what it would take to run head-on into a semi. What would have to snap inside? What silence would need to settle in? It’s the space between towns where it gets loud—the land hums. You drive for miles under an open sky, then suddenly you’re swallowed by green. Pine trees stand in formation, sharp and indifferent, until the terrain changes—low and wet, dense with sawgrass and cabbage palm, pressing up against the shoulder like it wants in.

Everything smells like humidity. The air is thick, even with the A/C blasting. You can’t stop it. Florida seeps in through the seams. I roll the windows down just to let the noise in—bugs, birds, that high electrical whine that fills the silence between billboards. It reminds me I’m somewhere real. I chain-smoke without meaning to. I try not to count the cigarettes, but I do. I wonder which one will do it. Gives me lung cancer or something worse. The thought doesn’t stop me from lighting the next one. I blast music until I can’t hear myself think. And still, I think about Adam. About the stretch of road where it happened. About the fucking nothing of it. A Tuesday night. A flyover state. The kind of place he shouldn’t have been. But then again, neither should I.

You keep driving, and eventually the asphalt starts playing tricks on you. Sun hits it just right, and it turns to water. That strange shimmer—those black puddles that don’t exist. You want them to be real. A spring, maybe. A tunnel. A way out. But then the tires roll through, and it’s just road again. Just heat playing pretend.

Rain comes fast here. A sudden curtain. You see it before it hits—an actual wall in the distance. All the cars slow down at once, like it’s not something we’ve lived through a thousand times. It comes in hard, then disappears. The road steams. The sky stays the same.

The trucks out here aren’t for work. They’re costumes. Lifted. Flagged. Half-empty beds hauling around whatever fantasy they’ve stapled to masculinity. I pass them like wildlife—recognizable by silhouette alone. That’s the thing no one tells you about Florida: it’s not dying. It’s patient. It’ll crack the concrete with mangroves. Drown the driveways in mildew and moss. It’ll flood us out, swallow us in sinkholes, take our billboards, parking lots, and dollar stores, and wear them like jewelry.

Everything here is reaching. Everything here is wanting. The roadkill is constant, but I no longer flinch—mostly armadillos—bloated and ruptured. Grey armor cracked open like an eggshell, brown and red innards smeared like yolk across the asphalt. I clock the bodies automatically. I scan for collars. But it’s rarely a beloved pet. Just the usual casualties of something wild trying to cross into whatever the fuck we’ve built.

You start to feel it—this invisible border between the living and the planned. The trees don’t grow that way on purpose. They’re bending away from the power lines. Crooked. Adaptive. Still alive. There’s sand on the floor of my car. Always. Even when I haven’t seen a beach in months. Sunscreen in the door pocket, oily and leaking. A warm water bottle. Debris from the latest fast food stop. A towel I should’ve washed two weeks ago. Dirty underwear filling the cracks between seats, the middle console is my reliquary: peppermints, jerky, napkins, receipts, a broken charger, a pack of sleeping pills I tell myself I’ve earned. I recall reading about an older woman who got trapped in her car and survived four days on the peppermints in her purse. My stomach rumbles at the thought.

I finger through the clutter on the passenger seat—broken cigarettes, melted jelly beans, a stick of concealer. My hand returns sticky and sweet, clutching what I was looking for: a syringe. I’ve gotten good at multitasking while driving. Better at injecting myself. I hold the syringe in my teeth while my knees steer. I fish the prescription bottle from my purse—bright orange, my mother’s name printed neatly: Eleanor Doyle. Tirzepatide. 2.4mg.

I’ve lost 34 pounds in the last three months. Another transformation I didn’t plan for. Another distortion I’ll have to carry. My body doesn’t know what to do with the change. It hangs wrong. Pockets of loose skin bunch above my knees, around my belly button—creases that fold in on themselves as tissue left too long in water.

Mom doesn’t mind. “Now that you’re single, you should lose a few pounds,” she said before I left, like she was doing me a favor.

I look down at my stomach. The skin sits low now. My belly button looks confused. My thighs slap together when I walk, but only at the top, where the fat is stubborn. I tuck my shirt in, as if it might help, but it always creeps up.

Sometimes I think about my students—how I used to teach them about ecosystems. How everything adapts or dies. What I didn’t tell them is that sometimes adaptation looks like damage, and sometimes age appears to be neglect.

The road ahead glimmers again—fake water, real steam. I blink and keep driving.

Sometimes I stop at bars. Not because I want to drink, but because it feels familiar. Comfort, in a warped way. Dive bars have always been my natural environment. Sticky floors, dusty TVs, salt-rimmed glasses that never fully dry. I used to belong there. Now I move through them like a visitor to a zoo. Watching something I used to be. I sit at the far end of the bar. Club soda, splash of juice. Cherry, if they have it. Usually, they don’t. Orange or cranberry from a warm soda gun with decades of sugar crusted around its nozzle. The lime wedge is already browning. Half the time, they charge me.

The men are always the same. Swollen. Loud. Talking too close. They smell like wet cotton, chewing tobacco, and motor oil. They don’t notice me until they do. Then they ask what I’m drinking, as if it’s a trick question. I answer without looking. I don’t stay long after that.

The brown glass vial rolls against the orange casing. There’s just enough liquid left for one more dose. I know that without having to check. Still, I flip it to the light and squint to make sure. The clear liquid hugs the dark glass like it’s in no rush to let go. I feel the temperature rise in my chest. Not panic—pleasure. Sick, precise pleasure.

I unsheath the syringe from its packaging like a secret. My thumb traces the smooth barrel, the cool sting of chrome. I press the needle into the soft, rubbery top of the vial. There’s resistance. A subtle give. The kind that pushes back just enough to make you want it more. Then a quiet pop—the seal breaking—the barrier breached. I exhale.

I draw slowly. Deliberately. My breath syncing with the pull. I watch the liquid rise, thick and clear, clinging to the glass like it doesn’t want to leave. I’m careful, but eager. I tilt the vial, angle the needle to catch the last of it, and suck it dry. The medication crawls in, bubble trailing, then collapsing under pressure with a soft internal snap.

This part—this calibration, this tiny act of precision—does something to me. It’s almost sacred. The moment the line flattens, and the syringe goes full, swollen with possibility. Tight. Ready. My mouth waters.

But then comes the truth: it’s the last one. No backup. No buffer. The next refill is weeks away, and I still have too many counties to cover. Too many stops. The hunger will come back. It always does. And I know what that means.

The first few injections made me sick. Not figuratively—sick in a way that coiled itself around my intestines and tightened. It was constant. A slow, grinding nausea that lived just below the sternum. I could feel it when I turned too fast, when I swallowed too hard, when I even thought about food. It sat there like a second pulse, waiting.

Food stopped being a comfort. It became a threat. Even thinking about it made my mouth salivate. A single bite felt like sabotage. I could see the damage forming before I ever took it—the sweat prickling at my scalp, the ache blooming low in my gut, the sudden urgency in my throat. Swallow, and regret it. That was the rule.

I’d have to pull over. Sometimes on a shoulder. Sometimes behind a gas station or a row of abandoned outlets. One time, it hit behind a closed-down Circle K. Heat lightning in the distance, the parking lot soft from earlier rain. I dropped to the gravel, hands on my knees, the sickness already rising. Dry heaves first—loud, hollow convulsions that bent me in half. My abs locked. My vision blurred. Then it came.

Not all at once. First: a thin stream of yellow foam. Then: chunks of nothing, wet with spit. Then the real purge—violent, liquid, searing. Acid mixed with the powdered film of whatever pills hadn’t broken down yet. It coated my throat like soap scum. My tongue went numb. I tasted iron—burnt battery. The smell hit before I could fully breathe again. Not just sour—hot. Sour with age and body temperature. A scent that settles into fabric.

My nose ran. My eyes streamed. I coughed until it turned into a gag, then gagged again out of reflex. The vomit puddled in the gravel, slow-moving and tan at the edges, almost orange in the middle. There were still capsule shells—bent, collapsing, half-clear. The kind that dissolves in water but not in time. I spit once, then again, thick strings dangling from my lips. I wiped my mouth with a receipt from Burger King.

And then came the flies. They showed up like they’d been waiting. Black. Fast. Clicking wings. They didn’t hesitate. Just descended. Dozens of them. Maybe more. They landed on the edges of the puddle, then waded in, their little legs skating across the bile like it was nectar. I watched them work—tiny, ravenous surgeons. I thought: at least someone’s getting something out of it.

I blink. The memory clears. The road’s still there, flat and gray and humming under me. One hand on the wheel. The other rests on my stomach where the needle went in. I don’t remember doing it, but I know I did. My body knows. The ritual is now built in: the draw, the flick, the plunge. I could do it with my eyes closed. I probably have.

The syringe is capped and back in the console, still warm. The tightness in my gut has already started to bloom—that slow, clean clamp that tells me it worked. No hunger. Not for a while.