To Feel Stuff Read Online Free

mush.” There was an illustrated bowl of mush on the page that made me feel even sicker. Whenever I heard that line, I felt like I’d swallowed that shit and it all grew warm inside me like baker’s yeast.
    This is how I was that night.
    â€œCome on, Elodie. The TB? The anemia? The fibromyalgia? The encephalitis again? The—” Sarah questioned, and I didn’t want to make her put in any more time.
    â€œIt’s the TB,” I told her. “And those voices!”
    Right then I heard a painful, crunching thwack outside and your voices stopped. After that, wild yelling. In the moment, though, all that registered was the absence of song.
    Sarah curled me up into a sitting position and asked, “The voices?” She offered me the macaroni and cheese.
    And I wanted to articulate how pissed and sad I felt that you guys had encroached on my territory. How I’d been wishing that someone would really send all of you into a jungle, so I could have my space back. You guys could have sung anywhere—under a fucking canopy—I wanted to explain, but I was the one who couldn’t go anywhere else.
    The usual thing happened, though, and I found that when I went to open my mouth, all feeling subsided and I was left with nothing to say.
    I’ve never told you that my mom had wanted to name me Melody, and my dad had wanted to name me Ellen (after his grandma), so they’d compromised. You wanted to know this soon after we met, and I was pretending to sleep.

Chapter 3
    From The Desk of Chester Hunter III
    Â 
    Dear Elodie,
    This is a love note, although for a while, it may seem more like a deposition. I’m trying, El, and what more can a person ever do? Maybe I don’t know what kind of words should go in this type of letter, so maybe I should just be as obvious as I can. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.
    There.
    Okay?
    Of course it’s not.
    You have no idea who I was before I met you. Because when I did finally meet you, it was almost instantaneous, that change in me, so you never understood where I pushed off from. But it only just dawned on me that you have to know what happened. It’s the reason for all of this paper, El.
    You were up in the infirmary and I was singing with the group. I remember sweat, how sweaty I was because of my thick sweater and because of the fleece scarf that George’s mom had embroidered with bears for each of us. I smelled fire and it seemed like it was coming from us guys because it was like we were burning in our sweaters. I thought that there wasn’t anything in the world that didn’t come back around to me, is what I guess I should be explaining here.
    We’d made a half circle underneath Wayland Arch, choosing it because we liked the acoustics, and, even more than that, we liked that there was a certain gravity to those surroundings. We faced the statue of Augustus in Wriston Quadrangle, who, rising above a nice blanket of white snow, seemed very, very proud. He approved, is what it seemed like to us. We sang toward the Ratty and welcomed the symbolic connection between food for the stomach and food for the soul; we’d considered titling our latest CD
Food For the Soul,
by the way. How unbelievably lame that seems now! Behind us, through the arch, freshmen in Keeney opened their windows to listen. It never occurred to me that you were somewhere in back of us, too, and that you were listening to me singing, and that, even more to the point, you weren’t enjoying it.
    I remember I was in the middle of exhaling between verses, my breath going white into the night, and I saw that this girl in the front row looked like she was gasping it in. She was staring at me while she was doing this. For the sake of honesty I’ll admit that I rotated my body, so she’d have to take in my better side. I never told you this because I thought you’d think I was a fucking idiot, but seeing as I have nothing