If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and it's the only way I know how to go on living. If relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back. I'd go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can't you see that? HARUKI MURAKAMI, Norwegian Wood.
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͏͏͏͏͏͏⠀⠀⠀ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏⠀⠀⠀IT IS ALWAYS OCTOBER.
⠀⠀⠀ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏⠀⠀⠀Even as the leaves fade, fall, and reappear. The few objects in her apartment have been rearranged (see: the couch it facing the window, rather than the tv―the victorian works have slid to the floor, made a home between the shards of glass―shoes in the hallway.) A death toll is ticking a mile away, up, up, up until Gotham realizes they're facing a pandemic with bias. People are dying (bad people, but still, people), and there is nothing to do but wait, maybe it'll subside next Monday or the one after that.
⠀⠀⠀ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏⠀⠀⠀(Saleha Abadi does not check because she is stuck in October. Surrounded by orange leaves, large scarves, and horrible pumpkin-flavored coffee―she is in the library, or at the park, maybe even attending class for the first time in months―but none of that matters because it is October.)
⠀⠀⠀ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏ ͏͏͏͏͏͏⠀⠀⠀This virus, The Rapture, had been claimed by various parts of Gotham. It is a religion, sickness, excuse, reckoning, (anything but a girl,) it has hands and picks the city apart. On Smithers Street, it knocked door to door, top to bottom, politician after politician, by morning half of them dead―their bloody rags in the papers, front page. The following week, a table of corrupt officers swallowing their own blood, clawing at their throats, fingers in eye sockets, desperate for relief and saved within the hour. (They lie beneath a park, names scrawled deeply into stone.) For the first two weeks, people kept existing―work, then home, and all over again―but the virus had settled in Gotham, and they could not work next to dead bodies.
