Grief doesn't always arrive with death. Sometimes it shows up when the world forgets how to hold you.
That's what I think about as I kill the livestream.
My finger hovers over the button for one second too long. The music keeps pulsing through the speakers, all bass and breath, the same track I've opened with every Friday for the last year. Onscreen, the hearts keep rising. Tiny little proofs of life.
Then I tap End.
The screen goes black.
No more comments. No more names. No more strangers typing omg needed this tonight or crying in my kitchen rn. No more being useful. No more being witnessed from a safe distance.
Just me.
Just Rowan Blake in a too-quiet Chicago apartment, sweat cooling on my spine, lungs sharp, thighs shaking, right knee already beginning its nightly complaint.
The silence after performance is always rude. It doesn't ease in. It drops.
I peel my crop top away from my skin and toss it at the chair by the window. It misses, lands on the floor, and I leave it there because sometimes failure deserves privacy. The ring light still burns white against the glass, making a ghost of me over the skyline. Behind that ghost, the city is reopening itself one lit window at a time.
NIRA calls it Return to Normalcy.
I call it a lot of people pretending they weren't broken by the same thing in different rooms.
My NeuroLink chimes at my temple, soft against the bone.
"Performance metrics recorded. Heart rate elevated fourteen percent above baseline. Cortisol descending. Would you like to begin assisted cooldown?"
No.
The answer moves through the interface before I mean to send it. The apartment lights stay brutal and bright. Good. I need the real light tonight. I need to see the portable marley floor with its scuffed corners, the laptop stand, the half-dead eucalyptus on the shelf, Miko's dog hair webbed into the Pride blanket on the couch.
I need evidence that a body was here.
My body.
The one I've built an entire career around teaching other people how to return to, while quietly outsourcing half its truths to a machine tucked against my temple.
A laugh comes up, small and humorless. My knee throbs in answer.
"Noted," the Link says. "Manual cooldown selected. Therapeutic compression recommended. Pain inflammation probability: seventy-three percent."
"Nobody asked you," I whisper.
Miko lifts her head from the blanket, offended on my behalf or because she thinks I said snack. Her ears tilt forward. Her tail thumps once.
"Not you, my girl. You're perfect."
She accepts this as fact and goes back to sleep.
For the past year, Friday nights belonged to strangers. Neon leggings, mismatched socks, a camera balanced on three stacked books before I could afford the real stand. I danced through grief with anyone who needed to remember they had a body. People logged in from bedrooms, kitchens, hospital break rooms, basements, cars parked in driveways because home was too loud. I became a lighthouse in spandex, which is both ridiculous and, unfortunately, true.
At first it was survival. My in-person workshops vanished overnight. My old dance injury had already taken the stage from me once. The pandemic took the room. So I made a room out of pixels.
Then people kept showing up.
Private clients. Small groups. Chronic pain sessions. Dancers who had lost studios. A waiting list. Rent paid on time. A life, somehow, built from the thing I thought had ended me.
And now the world is opening up, which is what people say when they want a clean verb for a messy wound.
The government says the numbers are manageable. NIRA sends soft blue announcements about resilience and safe reintegration. Everyone is supposed to want restaurants, offices, crowded trains, sweat that isn't mediated by a screen.
I want those things.
I think.
I also remember the ambulances. The birthdays sung into laptops. The funerals attended in pajama pants. The terrible intimacy of watching someone try not to cry because their camera was on.
My Link pings again.
I almost dismiss it, assuming another metric, another prompt, another small machine opinion about my blood.
But the notification blooms across my vision.
Avery Sage loved "Save me a page in your journal"
Oh.
My body does the embarrassing thing before I can stop it. Chest tight. Stomach lift. Heat at the back of my neck.
The Link registers all of it, of course. It always does.
"Emotional spike detected," it offers.
"Shut up."
Avery has a talent for arriving like a hand pressed gently to a bruise. Never loud. Never obvious. Just there, exactly where I'm tender.
We've been friends for a year. Friends is the word I use because it's stable and socially acceptable and doesn't make me want to throw my phone into Lake Michigan. We met in a grief support Zoom group with four other people trying to survive being alive after the world got weird and lonely and mean. Jules named us the Constellation after two glasses of wine and a lecture about stars that look separate until someone draws the lines.
Maya. Theo. Jules. Imani. Avery. Me.
Six dots. One imaginary shape. Somehow real enough to live inside.
Avery is the only person I know who still treats analog like a religion. Paper journals. Soft pencils. Real mail. Text messages instead of neural pings whenever possible. At first I thought it was pretentious. Then I thought it was brave. Now I'm deeply, privately annoyed by how much I understand it.
There's a relief in words that have to travel outside the body.
There's mercy in not being instantly known.
I stare at the notification until the edges begin to blur. Save me a page in your journal. I had said it at the end of the livestream, laughing, breathless, one of those throwaway lines people mistake for charm because they can't hear the want under it.
Avery heard it.
Or maybe they just tapped a reaction and I'm building a religion out of a button.
That feels possible too.
I sink onto the couch, not gracefully. My legs fold wrong. My knee protests. Miko huffs at the disruption but lets me tuck my cold feet under the Pride blanket anyway.
The Constellation group chat is already alive.
Maya: I'm bringing cake!
Jules: please define cake before Theo starts a spreadsheet
Theo: already started one actually
Rowan: what kind?
Maya: surprise cake
Avery: if it's carrot we riot
Imani: nobody is rioting at my very peaceful cabin weekend
Avery: speak for yourself
Maya: carrot cake has raisins. raisins are a hate crime.
Theo: legally complicated but emotionally correct
I laugh. Actually laugh.
It comes out crooked and startled, like my body forgot it could make a sound that wasn't instruction. These humxns. These strange, impossible humxns. We weren't supposed to become anything. The grief group was eight weeks. Cameras on if we felt safe. Share what you can. Breathe when you need. Then goodbye.
But we stayed.
We learned each other's tells. Maya jokes too fast when she's scared. Theo disappears into logistics when the feeling gets too big. Jules sends voice notes like they're throwing bottles into the ocean. Imani asks one question and somehow rearranges your entire nervous system. Avery goes quiet in a way that makes silence feel full instead of empty.
And tomorrow, we meet in person for the first time.
All of us.
Including Avery.
I drag the blanket up to my chin even though I'm still sweaty. The blue sweater is already in my duffel bag by the door. Folded on top. Casual in the way that took me twenty minutes and three outfit changes to achieve.
I hate that I packed it first.
I hate that I know it makes my collarbones look good.
I hate that I want Avery to notice, and I hate even more that I want to seem like someone who wouldn't care if they did.
My phone buzzes against the cushion.
Private text. Imani.
Imani: checking in. how are you processing the end of the livestreams?
Me: still figuring that out
Imani: rowan blake I've known you for a YEAR. that means you're overthinking it.
Me: rude but not inaccurate
Imani: nervous about tomorrow?
Me: i didn't say anything about being nervous
Imani: babe your body language in our last call was basically a hostage note
I roll my eyes, but my chest softens.
This is what Imani does. She makes care feel like a hand on your back and also like someone has broken into your house and reorganized your medicine cabinet.
Me: stop reading my vitals!! it's creepy
Imani: I don't need tech to read you. you were doing the shoulder thing
Me: what shoulder thing
Imani: the "i have feelings and would rather perish" shoulder thing
Me: fake diagnosis
Imani: correct diagnosis. did you pack the blue sweater?
Me: irrelevant
Imani: so yes
Me: yes
Imani: good. also did you finish the pricing tiers or are we pretending accessibility means self-abandonment again?
Me: wow we pivoted fast
Imani: some of us contain multitudes. answer the question.
I let the phone rest on my stomach and stare at the ceiling.
The worst part is she's right. About the sweater. About the pricing. About the way I keep trying to make my work affordable enough that no one can accuse me of wanting to survive.
I built a business telling people their bodies were worth returning to.
Then I discount mine every chance I get.
The Link hums, offering to open the pricing document I've avoided for three weeks. I decline. It offers the compression sleeve protocol again. I accept this time because pain is one of the few truths I don't know how to negotiate with.
The sleeve tightens around my knee, warm and precise. Smart fabric pulsing in tiny waves. It's expensive and ugly and miraculous. Three months of private sessions wrapped around a joint that still believes one bad landing can change a life.
In the bathroom mirror, I look older than I did before the stream. Not worse. Just less edited.
Mascara smudged under one eye. Hair damp at the temples. A thin red mark where the mic pack pressed into my waistband. The NeuroLink's small silver crescent catches the light like jewelry I never chose to love.
Three post-its cling to the mirror.
You're allowed to take up space.
Grief is not weakness.
Joy is a form of resistance.
The Link could project affirmations into my vision every morning. Most therapists recommend it now. Personalized language, biometrically timed, adjusted for cortisol and sleep debt. Efficient. Impossible to lose.
I still prefer the paper.
Maybe Avery has ruined me.
Maybe I was already ruined in this direction.
I press two fingers to the post-it that says You're allowed to take up space, like it might press back.
Tomorrow I'll walk into a cabin full of people who know my grief patterns, my coffee order, my panic tells, my worst anniversaries, and exactly which memes make me laugh when I'm trying not to cry.
Tomorrow I'll hug Avery Sage for the first time and act like my body isn't a live wire.
Tomorrow the world gets larger than my apartment again.
But tonight, the ring light is still cooling by the window. Miko is snoring into the Pride blanket. My knee is pulsing under borrowed warmth. The city keeps pretending normal is a place we can return to if we follow the signs and don't look too closely at what's missing.
I stand there in the bathroom, one hand on the mirror, and let myself say the thing out loud.
"This is the end of the world. Again."