I bought a secret Bahamas estate after years of exclusion. My sister saw the pictures and demanded:
“We are moving in!”
I just sipped my tea and replied:
“Sorry. It’s out of your league.”
The silence in my apartment was usually my sanctuary, the quiet space where I created worlds and voices for other people.
But that Tuesday, the silence felt incredibly heavy, suffocating and thick with a fever that had been burning through my system for three long days. I was 42 years old, completely alone and curled up on my sofa, wrapped in two thick blankets, shivering violently despite the thermostat being pushed all the way up to 75°. My throat felt like it had been scrubbed raw with steel wool and my head pounded with a relentless rhythm that made just opening my eyes a deliberate, painful effort.
I reached for my phone on the coffee table. I didn’t want to work. I simply needed to distract myself from the deep throbbing aches in my joints.
I just wanted to see something mindless. A recipe video, a cat meme, literally anything to pass the time until the next dose of ibuprofen finally kicked in and offered me some relief. My thumb hovered over the social media icon.
I hesitated. I knew I shouldn’t look. I knew, historically speaking, that opening that particular app during a holiday week was an act of emotional self-sabotage.
But the fever made me weak, and human curiosity is an incredibly cruel instinct. I tapped the screen. The first image that loaded onto my feed was a hideous, sun-drenched nightmare.
It was a group selfie. The water behind them was that impossible crystalline blue that you only ever see in heavily edited travel brochures for the Maldives or Bora Bora. There was a massive white yacht gleaming brightly under the tropical sun.
And there, crowded into the frame, grinning with brilliant white teeth and clinking flutes of expensive champagne, was my entire family. My older sister, Bianca, was front and center, wearing a wide-brimmed designer hat and oversized sunglasses, her arm draped possessively over her husband, Derek. My niece, Sienna, and my nephew, Julian, were posing casually in the background, looking impossibly tan and happy.
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