For the record, I wasn’t trying to disappear.
I know how it looks. I grew up in the Midwest; I should have known the dangers of an October night and a cornfield shrouded in fog. I remember being young, maybe seven, overhearing my grandparents (wise, weathered, somber) discussing a farmer who had vanished in his own fields. They said it was a quiet way to go, and that was what made October treacherous: you felt, there at the end, like you were wrapped in a cocoon of mist, safe and invisible. You had to be vigilant to keep yourself from dissolving into the fog.
But that was long ago. The past decade, there’s been no dangerous fog in my hometown. The past three years, there were no cornfields at all. October isn’t a soft gray veil anymore; it’s brown and dusty, cracked earth and withered stalks, people huddled in their air-conditioned rooms built to withstand heat waves and wishing for rain. When I left for Oregon to start my job, I was just looking forward to seeing green again.
It happened like this. One Friday, in the middle of harvest season, I got the call from my dad.
“Ellie,” he said. His voice was rough, like gravel being crushed underfoot.
I held my breath.
“Ellie,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”
I sat at my desk, clutching my phone in trembling fingers, and suddenly I felt too heavy, like I was sinking into the earth. I didn’t speak for too long, and he started talking again, his words like a sandstorm, an incoherent whirlwind.
“It’s all right,” I said quietly. “Hey, it’s okay, don’t be sorry.”
I sounded like a stranger, an echo. His sighs were like gusts of wind, and they made my chest ache.
When the conversation ended, I wandered dazedly outside. It was dusk, and the sky was a hazy orange, the office park trees drooping with the day’s heat. The city was loud in October, busy, the streets choked with cars and people. I walked softly on the sidewalk as my thoughts raced tornado-fast.
I was thinking I needed to find the shape of my sorrow.
I pictured everyone I’d ever known who had been through a loss. My coworker with a dead father, my friend whose sister had lupus, my neighbor who was robbed, my roommate whose childhood was spent moving from shelter to shelter. Their sorrows showed themselves in various ways; going suddenly quiet at a memory, a breakdown on a birthday, becoming bitter and angry or else clingy and desperate for reassurance. I’d always felt disconnected from them in those moments. Sorrow was foreign to me.
You know, part of this, too, is that people my age tend to think we’re invincible. Nothing truly bad had ever happened to me, not really. I’d never had one of these sorrows that haunted other people, and by the time I started my career, I figured I never would. I didn’t think my world could crumble like this, any more than I thought I could vanish into thin air.
Now sorrow had come, and I would have to decide how to bear it. So I was thinking over all the models I had as I walked.
I finally went inside at closing time. In the office, I ran into Jake and Mira.
“Good, you’re still here,” said Jake. “Can you look over these reports for the client meeting? I made some charts.”
“Sure.” I took his tablet and fixed my gaze down on it. “Tell me about the quarterly projections?”
The reports were soothing, a chance to fill my head with dry, solid numbers. I let Jake go through them for a while, then we switched and I explained some figures to him. I sipped my coffee slowly, methodically.
“When we finish the presentation on Monday,” Mira said, “and I submit the final draft, want to go out for dinner to celebrate?”
“Yes,” I said, too quickly.
“Sure,” said Jake. “Ellie, tell me about the market trends.”
That first evening, I thought about telling them. The easiest time would have been right away. The second easiest thing would have been to take my cues from the sorrows I knew about, go silent, look away from them, fill my eyes with tears until they asked me what was wrong. But I didn’t end up doing either one, and by the time we were packing up our things, I’d decided not to tell anyone. I’d have to figure out how to say it, the correct emotions to express, how not to sound like a blubbering child or a cold-hearted robot. Too difficult.
So I went back to my apartment and did my work. I started analyzing data I’d been putting off for weeks. The hour ticked later; I finished the analysis. I double-checked my formulas. It was three in the morning. I didn’t want to sleep, sure my dreams would be chaotic, sure I’d wake from them gasping and vulnerable to tears. When I was too tired to work, I lay in bed and scrolled through news feeds until dawn.
I trudged to the office. It was our last day before the big client meeting. I sat next to Jake.
“You look exhausted,” he said.
“I was up late last night. Working.”
“Oh, good for you.”
And working was how I got through the days until Monday. I did manage to get a few hours of sleep on Saturday and Sunday nights; when I woke, early in the morning, I distracted myself by immediately reaching for a report I was supposed to review for another project. The only trouble came when I heard people talking outside my window. Loud laughter, calls across the street. It made knife-sharp moments in my dreams come back to me; the crack-snap of a branch in a storm, the roar of water through a broken levee. The longer it went on the more tempted I was to open the window and scream at them to shut up.
The conference room was beautiful, a spacious silent space, the soft click of keyboards and rustle of papers all I could hear. I wanted to live in it forever.
When I left the meeting room, I had a voicemail from my mom. Her voice was thin, stretched out with worry.
I went into the bathroom to call her back. “Hi, mom.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier.”
“It’s all right.”
“Tell me how you’re feeling.”
“I’m okay. I just got out of a big meeting.”
A terrible silence emanated from the phone.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, because it seemed like the right thing to ask, though I desperately didn’t want to know the answer.
She spoke in brief spurts, as if struggling to push words out of her lungs. We didn’t talk for long, and afterward in the hall I felt light-headed again, unsure if anything around me was real, unsure if I had enough substance to touch it.
Jake barreled into me from behind and flung an arm around me. “We did it!”
“Hell yeah,” I said.
“Let’s go find Mira. Then dinner.”
The sun was setting when Jake, Mira, and I set out with a few others to the nearest restaurant. We got a table and ordered nachos and margaritas and toasted to our professional success.
“I don’t think it went that well,” said Liam, who’d just finished his part of the presentation. “But I don’t think we lost the client, either. That’s all that matters.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Jake. “I want a promotion.”
I sucked down my drink too fast and ordered a second one. I finished the second one, too, but my heart sank unexpectedly when the third appeared in front of me. This wasn’t how I was going to grieve, was it? That was one of the worst ways I’d ever seen it done, the way it seemed my hometown had been trending these past few years.
The conversation turned to careers. Jake was holding forth about how terrible the job market was for anyone without connections.
“That’s why I’m thinking of selling out,” he said. “Going into finance.”
“You don’t have to call it selling out,” said Liam.
“I mean, it is if you’re only doing it for the money, I guess,” I said.
“Right,” said Jake. “But is that so bad?”
“I don’t know.” I took a deep breath and sat back in my chair. No, I was all right; I was eating, and I didn’t feel dizzy or sick.
I looked out the window. My heart jumped; it had started to rain.
Jake caught my stare.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s supposed to rain a lot tonight and tomorrow. Actually, we should probably head out before it gets worse.”
So we paid our bills and finished our drinks and fifteen minutes later we were splashing through puddles already an inch deep. I shivered, a tiny thrill, when my shoes sank into them. Everyone peeled off one by one; at the end, I had five minutes to myself, heading back to my apartment with the rain falling gently around me.
There’s something about rain at night. All dark and cool and strange and still. Watching the droplets fall, I imagined distant corners of the Earth, lush rainforests, desolate coastlines in the far unpeopled south. Unthinking, unfeeling beauty. That night, I found myself yearning for autumn; for the deep mists that used to descend on my hometown and lie over it until winter, for centuries before I was born. I think that was when the desire awakened in me, to escape all this human turmoil for a night, to find some bone-deep peace in the damp, to numb the blazing pain in my chest.
I woke to streets glistening with rain. Jake and Mira invited me out for a walk in the nearby park. I clomped out in my thick rain jacket, but soon I found myself throwing it off in the warmth of jogging, laughing, splashing through puddles.
That night we went out drinking again. I had three more drinks and then slowly nursed a fourth. I remained coherent, cracking jokes, nodding along to my coworkers’ stories, dry-eyed and enthusiastic.
Taking grief is a little like taking booze. The pleasure of alcohol, for me, was always partly the challenge – how much I could drink while still acting sober. This was like that. It was almost a pleasant mental exercise, by Wednesday, to down six drinks and plaster a smile on my face. But it didn’t stop my longing for real rest. Head foggy, I kept leaning back from the bar and watching more rain fall through the window.
My dad called me at ten on Wednesday night. I didn’t pick up. An hour later, my mom called; I ignored that one too. My stomach roiled when I saw the voicemail notifications. I clutched my drink for balance.
“Ellie, what do you want to do in five years?” Jake asked. “Would you consider some finance job if they offered you enough money?”
I stared at the bar, pretending to think about it. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Not me,” said Mira. “I’d lose my mind if I had to work fourteen hours a day for a hedge fund and pretend I loved it. Don’t you think you would, Ellie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on,” said Liam. “What if I offered you two hundred thousand a year?”
“Not a chance,” said Mira.
“Ellie?”
The bar felt suddenly too hot; sweat beaded on my forehead. “I, uh, yeah – for two hundred thousand, sure.”
“Seriously?” said Mira. “I mean, I couldn’t even imagine writing a cover letter for a job like that. Having to gush over how much I loved the company. And you know the culture would be toxic. You’d really endure that just for money?”
If there was ever a time for me to have exploded, shouted at my coworkers and then started weeping, it would have been then. But I just stared at them all blankly for a moment, feeling the acid churn inside me, and then, slowly, carefully, concluded I would be all right if I just got some fresh air when we left the bar.
“I guess,” I said, “it’s hard to really know what I’d do.”
We trudged back to our apartments in a downpour. I gulped the cool nighttime air; my forehead cooled. On a whim, I tilted my head back and let the rain fall on my face. It tasted like oceans.
When it was just me again, I wandered to a stop.
It was like this. I wasn’t thinking straight; I was drunk, I hadn’t slept, I’d just come from a bar so loud I thought I’d never be rid of the echoes in my skull. And I wanted autumn. I wanted it so deep in my chest it felt like a wound, wanted it like you want air underwater. And here it was, falling around me, after so many parched, dusty years.
So I veered off and went toward the fields.
The fields aren’t too far from the apartments. They’re just across a few streets, a strip of land that’s all that remains of an old family farm once dizzyingly vast. I emerged onto the edge of the cornfield within a quarter of an hour, saw the mud squelching under my feet, the stalks bowing under the weight of the rain.
It was so quiet. No voices, no music, no sighing. I breathed in, deep as I could, and imagined the cool dampness settling in my lungs. The corn looked silver; I looked up to see a full moon, freshly visible behind fleeing clouds. The sky was bottomless. I stumbled forward, still staring upward, until my boots caught the edge of the field, and then I sat with a thump in the mud.
When I started to shiver, I forced myself to relax instead. That’s probably the most dangerous thing I did. If I’d kept moving, paced or cried or called my parents back, I probably would have generated enough body heat to be fine. But I didn’t want to. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been. I wanted to be still, still in a way only fog could be, my molecules dispersed, my atoms no longer cohering but settled, infinitely, indefinitely.
I know it sounds like I’m describing oblivion. Maybe I am. But this beautiful silence used to come to where I lived every October; we used to live alongside it for weeks at a time, when I was a child without any sorrow.
The last thing I remember seeing is the stars.
I woke to shouting, to sharp light; I woke shuddering violently from head to toe. I was in a stark white hospital room. A nurse shone a flashlight into my eyes. My coworkers clustered by the door, demanding to know if I was awake.
I think I was making some animal groaning sound. The nurse pressed something warm against my chest. That was the only thing I could feel; my arms and legs were numb, I couldn’t move them.
“Ellie, what happened?” Jake cried. “Did you black out? I didn’t think you were that drunk, I would have walked you home –”
“You idiot,” said Liam. “She had like six drinks. I said someone should walk her home.”
“What happened?” urged Mira. “Ellie? Can you talk?”
Sickness crashed back over me and I couldn’t maneuver myself; I vomited all over my chest, the nurse’s hand, the warm compress. The nurse withdrew and removed her gloves.
“One second,” she said. “I’ll go get a towel to clean you up.”
When she left, my coworkers crowded around.
“Tell us you’re all right,” said Jake.
I opened my mouth, maybe intending to reassure them, and nothing emerged but another drawn-out groan that ended in a sob.
And that was how it all came out. That was the shape of sorrow I was landed with, the worst, darkest one; that I’d tried to vanish because my hometown had been destroyed by climate change. My parents found out about it, and they both flew out to see me, even forcing themselves to leave the disaster relief efforts to wrap me in blankets and apologize over and over. My coworkers wept and fawned over me, sending me cards and flowers like I really had disappeared.
I was embarrassed about the whole thing. I tried to explain that I’d just gone to the fields for some air, that I was fine, really, that there was no need for any trouble. I tried to tell my parents they were doing important work and I respected whatever decisions they wanted to make. It didn’t make any difference. For weeks afterward, my sorrow and I were the center of everyone’s attention.
I wish it had all happened differently. Wish I had been able to hold myself together more, maybe drink a little less, maybe withstand the rain better. I wish I didn’t live in a world where sorrow comes like this for everyone. I wish the chaos of humanity hadn’t driven natural autumn away from my hometown. I wish my parents had stayed safe and happy and close. Sometimes I still want to cry, I wish my parents had stayed safe and happy and close. Sometimes I still want to cry, wishing so badly for things to be different.
But I’ll say this, now, for the last time. I wasn’t trying to disappear. I do want to exist. Terrifying as it is, I want to keep breathing and running and shouting and crying. I want to see spring again, too. I’m forever grateful to Mira, who happened upon my mud-covered, shivering form on Thursday morning, who saved my life. If nothing else, I’m glad for her.
In the weeks that followed, as I recovered both physically and emotionally, I began to see things differently. The rain that had once seemed oppressive now felt cleansing. The green of Oregon that had initially reminded me of what my hometown had lost became a symbol of hope, of nature’s resilience.
My parents stayed for a while, and in that time, we talked more openly than we had in years. They told me about the struggles back home, about the community coming together to rebuild, to adapt. I listened, really listened, and for the first time, I felt a connection to their pain, to the collective sorrow of a place changed forever.
Jake and Mira, along with my other coworkers, showed me a kind of support I hadn’t known I needed. They didn’t push me to talk, but they were there, steady presences offering silent companionship or distracting chatter, whatever I seemed to need that day.
Slowly, I started to engage with my grief instead of trying to outrun it. I joined a support group for climate refugees, people who, like me, had left homes that no longer existed as they once did. In sharing our stories, I found a strange comfort. We were all carrying pieces of places that now lived only in memory, and together, we were learning how to honor those memories while still moving forward.
I took up gardening, planting native species in a community plot. There was something healing about getting my hands in the soil, nurturing new life. It connected me to the earth in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a child playing in cornfields.
As the seasons changed, I found myself looking forward to October again. Not for the fog that would never return to my hometown, but for the crisp air and changing leaves of my new home. I learned to appreciate the beauty of what was, rather than yearning for what had been lost.
One evening, almost a year after that rainy night, I sat with Jake and Mira on a hill overlooking the city. The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that reminded me of the dusty sunsets back home, but with a vibrancy all their own.
“You know,” I said, breaking a comfortable silence, “I think I’m ready to visit home.”
They both looked at me, surprise and concern mingling on their faces.
“Are you sure?” Mira asked gently.
I nodded, feeling a certainty I hadn’t experienced in a long time. “It won’t be the same place I left. But that’s okay. I’m not the same person who left it either.”
Jake squeezed my shoulder. “We’ll go with you, if you want.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling. “I’d like that.”
As we watched the last rays of sunlight fade, I felt a peace settle over me. The sorrow was still there, a part of me now, but it no longer threatened to pull me under. Instead, it had become a quiet strength, a reminder of where I’d come from and what I’d survived.
I thought about that night in the cornfield, how I’d wanted to dissolve into the mist. Now, I understood that disappearing wasn’t the answer. The answer was to stand firm, to bear witness, to help build something new from the ruins of the old.
The stars began to appear, one by one, the same stars I’d seen that night. But this time, instead of an ending, they felt like a beginning. I took a deep breath of the cool evening air, feeling more solid, more present than I had in months.
“I’m still here,” I whispered to myself, a quiet affirmation.
And I knew, with a certainty that ran bone-deep, that I always would be.
