This is the cleanest bathroom I’ve ever died in. Not that I only die in bathrooms. I mainly die in the halfway places - hallways, airports, elevators. Bathrooms are, comparatively, more final. At least this one feels final. It’s a dead end, a windowless room on the top floor. There’s not one, but two separate fluffy magenta rugs against the coral tile. The walls are toy-ribbon pink, and so is the ceiling. I’ve had my life flash before my eyes so many times, it all blurs together. I remember dismissing monochrome rooms as a fad what feels like a century ago. An actual century ago, I stopped being able to appreciate irony.

Here’s how I’m dying: starvation. Awfully boring way to die, and I should know. Starving is nothing but a laundry list of little losses. Your organs shrink, like grapes in the sun. Your skin starts to freeze over, to rattle. A set of teeth in the snow. As the body realizes it’s running on empty, it starts feeding on itself. Muscle tissue, stores of fat, all disappear back into the body. They are fading embers, used to feed a half-ashes fire. People debate whether you die when you can’t breathe or when you can’t brain. For me, the two usually happen too close to tell. Breath is more poetic though, so I’ll say it. I’ve stopped breathing.

Here’s what’s not boring: the little painting above this bathroom’s toilet. It’s called The Studio and it’s by my favorite painter ever, Philip Guston. It’s not the kind of painting most people would put in their bathrooms. That’s why I’m here. Guston depicted himself as a Klansman in the painting. A white, cone headed being with sticks for arms. Here, he is a Klansman drawing his Klansman self. A painting of a painter painting a painting. Guston was Jewish, and he hated himself like a hero hates a villain. Along with many other semi-famous artists, he had trauma stacked on top of trauma, trauma all the way down. He painted himself like this because it was the most evil thing he could think of. Years later, not many people know what to do with the thirty-three artworks he made in this vein. Well, the people that aren’t rich.

Most artists live to sell. So now his paintings exist in private collections, or the rare lucky museum. They are spread throughout posh New York neighborhoods, little alcoves of snobbery. Places where people appreciate the art for its rarity but not its emotion. A ‘conversation starter’ they call it. A ‘curiosity.’ Still, it would certainly be presumptuous to just walk into a random rich person’s house, and search their bathroom for a Guston. Between the cake-like layers of security, and in-vogue endless hallways, you couldn’t possibly hope to succeed. Unless you knew you weren’t making it out alive.

The human body can go twenty-one days max without food or water. Today is day number twenty-two. I am proud of making it this far, proud of expiring. My fingers are all bone but they pull the Guston close to my chest. I have done many horrible things to my body to get here. I have been emaciated, I have been amputated. My hair has fallen out and my teeth have yellowed. This pint-size victory is a cool breeze on my forehead. A reminder that there’s still a way to win. 

I adore Guston's work not because I enjoy looking at Klan members, but because I know what it’s like to feel completely rotten. By most accounts, Guston was not an easy person to befriend. He was coarse, unkind and rough to the touch. That’s what happens when you cover yourself in dark thoughts. You become unbearable. It’s a life that translates wonderfully into artwork, and terribly into in-person interaction. Two days before my first death, I remember thinking, in another world I am bearable. For years I had sat in my head and watched everyone leave. Even the people I hired to help people stop leaving. These people get frustrated when they cannot help you. They begin to resent your unfixable nature. 

Yet I didn’t think dying would be better. Up to and during my first death, I was trying desperately to live. It was Sunday. Church day. I wore a white dress that stopped well below the knee. The night before, I had washed it in a river, then spent hours cursing the stars that made my dress so slightly imperfect. Creased and limp, unfamiliar with my frame. I was nineteen. After falling out with my dressmaker, I was as foreign to the fabric as a baby is to life. It is my understanding that a suicidal person would not agonize over the quality of a dress they planned on never wearing again. 

It’s bad taste to pack two boring deaths into a story, but I’m trying to be honest. On the way to church, I tripped over a branch and fell into an empty well. The angle of my fall caused me to die the second my head hit stone. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. People found me with my neck twisted, feet reaching towards the sky. Some believed it to be an accident, others an act of self harm. They stood around me for a few hours, just staring, then went back to their routines. No one wanted to climb down and risk their own life just moving me around. To be fair, I didn’t stand around myself that long either.

Being a ghost doesn’t feel much different from being alive. You are repaired somewhat–if you died with a broken leg, your ghost can walk fine. It’s more comparable to a ‘reset’ than a second life. I remember at first being surprised that I was in the well one minute, then on ground the next. I thought maybe I’d passed out, and someone had rescued me. It says a lot about my disoriented state that I even considered that a possibility. Upon seeing my decomposing body, I realized. I looked at my hands, and saw they had a yellowish tint to them. Like I was now an artifact. Something once useful but now just preserved. I must’ve had quite the reaction. Maybe even cried. But it’s been years, and it’s not that good of a story anyway. 

What followed was days full of red tape and being escorted from one spot to another. A man calling himself Charon took me to a lake, where another man, also called Charon, took me underwater. A third man called, unsurprisingly, Charon, took me below ground. None of these changes were accompanied with soft words or instructions. Just a hand to hold and a metallic blue helmet covering their face. Eventually, I was taken to a poorly-lit reception office. There was a long line of perfectly ordinary looking people. A few bowls of peanuts had been set on some painted-black coffee tables, but I assume they were for decoration. No one here had any urge to eat.

When I finally got to see the receptionist, a short, frowning woman, she checked a file and sighed. “Well, in the time it took you to get here, your body disappeared.”

My what? She sighed again. Her voice was the acrid kind, where every word was laced with a deep sarcasm. “Your body returned to you. You’re flesh again. Happens sometimes. I’m not a scientist, just go up to the surface. With any luck, you’ll be back soon. Bring me a postcard.”

Thus, I was sent back to land with another round of Charons. I don’t know what stopped me from just returning to the life I’d had. I was freshly healed, after all - reborn from death’s wet mouth. I could’ve easily lied. Say that wasn’t really me in the well or I’d somehow recovered. Instead I wandered the hills. For so long I had wondered what would happen if I just kept walking. Now the earth itself seemed to open up and invite me. Bugs stung my arms and rocks cut at my feet. My hair morphed into several greasy mats. I didn’t care. I walked past towns and wondered if they had anything to offer me at all. I walked into a dark cave. A mother bear was sleeping there, trying to protect her two cubs. She wanted to tear me apart. I let her.

For the first time in my existence, I had a routine. Get sent to the afterlife, wait in line, heal, be told my body’s returned, live, repeat. I was never told why my body kept returning, and I’ve never asked. I ended up bringing the receptionist lady a postcard after death number ten. It was pretty cheesy, a picture of someone’s cat with the words ‘Wish Mew Were Here!’ She didn’t smile, but she took it from my hands gently, and put it in a frame. The trinkets I bring her aren’t much, but they are hers alone. The Guston isn’t one of them. 

After a hundred or so deaths, she stopped immediately telling me to leave. “If you want to,” she half-whispered, “you could hang out in the coat closet. There’s not too many coats in it. They made it so damn big, just for everyone to die wearing shirts.” 

Though I’d memorized the path down, I still struggled with basic instructions. It took an agonizing two hours for me to find my way there. I think I’d lost all goodwill from the receptionist by the end. I didn’t expect much of the closet.  After almost two decades of wondering, the afterlife had turned out to be another in-between space. Sparse living rooms leading to hallways leading to living rooms. Flickering light bulbs. None of it exciting, none of it well-lit. The rare cushion, usually leaking some fluff. But for whatever reason, my life decided to begin behind that creaky door. I opened it, and saw a baby boy.

“Oh,” went the receptionist. “Forgot about that. His name is Isaac. We don’t have anywhere else to put him.”

“Is the - being in the dark like this. Is it good for him?”

She shrugged. “Well it’s not like he’s going to grow up.” And she said so carelessly that my hands were still made into fists after she left. Leaving me in the mothball-laced dark. 

That’s where I’m heading now. The Charons have stopped holding my hand at this point. I’ve become too experienced with death for that courtesy. I'm going to set the Guston in a place of honor, then fall asleep on some faux fur. In the fuzzy dark, I feel alright. With all this memorabilia surrounding me, I’m almost like a fan of some sports team. But all I’m rooting for is humanity. I’m endlessly alive, and all I have to show for it is disappearances. My body is mine to batter and bruise. It couldn’t feel more robotic. I carry in my arms a thing only a human could love, and a love that is perpetually inhuman.

A hand taps on my shoulder before I can place my healed fingers on the doorknob. I don’t need to turn to see her face. Angled, framed by cowlicks, accentuated by a pair of dark undereye circles. It’s Andrea. I didn’t think she would be back yet. “Got your painting I see!”

I met Andrea the same day I met Isaac. The second I was engulfed in darkness, she was emerging from it. Begging me to not tell anyone she was there. “I’ve been taking care of Isaac in secret,” she’d explained. “I keep dying and coming back to life, like my body comes back to life but–it’s stupid to explain. I try and bring him milk. And stuff. Make the place comfy.”

She had been so terrified of me betraying her that all I’d spoken that day were apologies. Eventually we figured out an arrangement. Bit by bit, we turn this coat closet into a home. We carry with us baby formula, stolen binkies, and occasionally, modern art. “A home is about luxuries as much as necessities,” we whisper to each other. Like a vow. We are, essentially, thieves. But thieves endowed with an unnatural advantage. There is no law that can trace us, no prison that can bind us. All for Isaac. All for the makeshift home. 

I turn and face Andrea. Her injuries fade slower than mine–on her neck I see the remnants of a particularly painful decapitation. “And I see you haven’t got that clock.” I try to say it jokingly.

She rolls her eyes. “All the cards were lined up. I broke into the house. I silenced the alarms. But it turned out the husband was a self-defense freak, and I bled all over his wife’s bras. Pure humiliation, really. But at least I got…” She pulls out a pocket watch from her jeans. “...This.”

“I like it!” I say, and I actually do. It’s a very beautiful pocket watch, painted gold, sporting a long, only slightly chipped chain. “Old-timey.”

“Almost as vintage as being burnt at the stake,” Andrea drolls. Then winces at the memory. I’ve never asked Andrea when her first death was, but it seems to have been a lot earlier than mine. 

Sometimes all I have are questions. For all I never doubt, there are a thousand little worries about how to keep going. They come wrapped in stories about still wandering into caves sometimes, about breaking into zoos at night, searching for underfed tigers and bears. “I’m not who I used to be,” I whispered to Andrea once. Back in the closet. While Isaac slept in her lap, worn out from hours of crying. “I’m not scared of anything.”

“Do you want to be?” She asked, avoiding any sudden movements, and it was more comforting than it should’ve been. 

Sometimes all she has are half-answers. A story of a boy she died having only kissed once. (“I came back for him, and he fainted at the sight of me,” she said. “We couldn’t be together. His mother became convinced I was an evil spirit, pretending to be the girl her son had loved.”) Bloodlines she’s traced over the years, great-grandchildren she’s watched repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. (“He had her face. Her exact face, down to the goddamn eyes. And he hurt himself the way she did. I couldn’t do anything.”) Sometimes we sit together in silence, trying to get Isaac to eat applesauce that wasn’t put in his favorite cup.

Andrea’s giving him a bottle of milk now, one of the essentials we cannot stockpile. We may be indestructible, but we are not strong enough to steal a fridge. It’s humbling. Nonstop pocketing little bottles and storing them in ice buckets is the method for now. He eagerly swallows the milk, a good sign. I almost yell “good kid!” before stopping myself. He is a good kid though. 

Everyday we say to each other, he’s growing. It’s another vow, of a more desperate kind. We point at his surely-slightly-bigger feet, marvel at his surely-increasing appetite. Everyday we say to each other, we should take him to the real world, carry only him in our arms for once. Give him to a real family. Everyday we find lamps and Christmas lights, plug them in and make the afterlife a little brighter. He is growing up on our shoulders, learning to be weightless. Nothing heavier than a bottle in his fists. Everyday we wait. For what, for who, is unknown. But everyday it is desired, and everyday we find new ways to die.