Someone from my school died this morning. He drowned at 4:30 a.m. but then died in the hospital. I don’t get how that works. How can you drown but not die?

I found out from my mother, who texted me and asked if I knew anything while I sat here, at camp, 49 states away. She told me the kid’s name wasn’t released and asked me to check Facebook. I found it.

“We’ll miss you,” the status read, with an angel x and a link to his Facebook, where we could scroll through photos of him holding up his phone before a mirror. And it makes me wonder What does it mean to be a real person now? because this doesn’t seem like a real person on my computer screen. And it doesn’t seem like a real person to put up your likes dislikes kisses bangs slaps up in little text boxes if you get enough blue fists pressing thumbs to the sky.

It doesn’t seem real to press my skin against this screen and hold up a camera in the angle where my nose stops being stocky and my breasts stop being nonexistent and my mouth stops being flat. I look at these photos of me malformed and disfigured into beauty, and it doesn’t seem like a human – it isn’t me, it isn’t you, it’s just something else. I look at these little bits of my life, the time line full of Halloweens and photos of my chubby baby cousin and me holding a medal, and it doesn’t seem real because it’s not. It’s a thousand pixels in a thousand colors on something that looks like something else, and how can you be online but not alive?

Someone from my school died this morning. He drowned in a pool and died in a hospital but he’s still alive as ever on the Internet.

Sometimes, at night, when my head is full of this pressure that I can’t explain without sounding like a theoretical sad little s**t, this pressure that’s just there because I like clicking the spout and letting it in, sometimes, I pretend to erase myself. I get a big pink eraser and press it against my toes, my ribs, my nose still stocky, my breasts still nonexistent, my mouth still flat, and I forget everything. The only thing left is the something else people text and take photos with and screw up my mouth until it’s not flat anymore and giggle at my chubby baby cousin it’s not me.

When I am gone like this, I wonder why it is so easy. Why it’s so easy to be gone, and then I wonder what else is inside me, past this flat mouth and stocky nose and reach into my gone little head and wonder if there’s anything there. Sometimes on a Tuesday or a Thursday I’ll find a little jaded thing that glances and shifts, and sometimes on a Wednesday I’ll find a few scraps of trash, but sometimes on weekdays and weekends and nighttimes and daytimes I don’t find anything, and it’s just the other thing there, malformed and disfigured and singing and screaming and there is nothing left in me and there is nothing left here because I’ve been erased because I did that because how can you be gone but still exist? How can you be gone but still exist? How can you be gone but still exist? How can you drown but not die?