We Are Okay

“I know where I am and what it means to be here. I know Mabel is coming tomorrow, whether I want her to or not. I know that I am always alone, even when surrounded by people, so I let the emptiness in.”

This quote highlights the depths of Marin’s grief and hints at her mental health struggle. Something she should be excited about—a visit from her best friend—is something she’d rather avoid. Her loneliness and dissociation come through in the last line, where Marin states that she feels alone even when she is not. This constant aloneness is a feeling many can relate to. The familiarity of the experience helps the reader inhabit Marin’s emotional state and colors the way she interacts with the world around her. This is further supported by Marin’s refusal or inability to connect with old friends or form new emotional connections. 

“It takes me a while, usually, to be able to listen. But when I do, I discover the secrets of pollination, that honeybees’ wings beat two hundred times per second. That trees shed their leaves not according to season, but according to rainfall. That before all of us there was something else. Eventually, something will take our place. I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.”

Marin’s interest in the wonders of the natural world are significant in two ways: first, considering the enormity of the world helps her to feel as though her grief and pain are temporary and small in the grander scale of things; second, her interest in the Natural Sciences as a major is due to the comfort she finds in structure and facts. Later, Marin will tell Mabel that she is thinking of changing her major to the Natural Sciences; Mabel will be disapproving, but this passage suggests the reasoning behind Marin’s thoughts and the relief she feels at the thought of escaping the ambiguity of Literature.