Sarah Bridgins Ocean of Storms It's melodramatic to say you're an orphan when you're an adult. Yes, my parents are dead, but it's not like I became a ward of the state. I take pills to save my shedding hair, to fill the holes in my dissolving bones. to speed my heart, and make it ache from something other than grief. I tease my ex-boyfriend by threatening to leave him things in my will. He accepts my cat, refuses my books. I spend my father's money on things that will make me too beautiful to die, or at least too beautiful to care that everyone else already did, expensive red lipstick, a dress covered in birds flying toward nothing. My new mantra is: What doesn't kill you leaves you alive.