The Stars Look Down Kim Schneider When it comes to death, everyone thinks about how difficult the big things are and forgets how difficult the small things can be. For example, everyone hugs you the day that one of your best friends dies, but no one embraces you when you’re shopping for a black dress to wear to her funeral. You’d be surprised how easy it is to hate everything you put on when you’re shopping for the occasion. “That dress fits you perfectly,” your father will say, a tinge of annoyance in his voice as it’s the seventeenth dress you’ve thrown over your body. Like the way a bride finds the perfect dress, you think that as you zip yourself into polyester or cotton that you will look at yourself in the mirror and think, Yes, this is what I want to wear to the funeral. But you don’t, and you know the dress looks good because your father is always painfully honest. You tug at the fabric anyways, itching at the tags and squirming like an inchworm hoping it will fall over your hips in a different fashion or that your boobs won’t look so big. You look at the dressing room floor covered in black fabrics, small masterpieces some fashionista created in a far away land, and the only thing you can think of is how you should be focused on housing applications for college or which dress you’ll wear to your graduation in four months, not which shoes you’ll wear to a wake. Death is tricky. When you finally settle for a dress, knowing it’s not good enough, that no dress will ever be good enough for this, you place it in your closet. It hangs there like a sad slab of meat. The days blur. They pass. Soon it is Friday, and you’re trying to find something appropriate to wear to the wake. What would she have wanted you to wear? The question bounces around in your muddled thoughts, but you’re too tired to even think. She is eighteen. She was eighteen. You spent all last week staring at the ceiling until four in the morning, wondering when that call would come, when she would take her last breath. It comes when you never expected it, as you’re getting dressed for school—black tights, grey skirt, top not yet on but waiting patiently for you on the bed. Your best friend Alia will call, and you just know. You don’t even need to pick up, but you do anyways because you need to hear it. She says, “Hi,” and the
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