Rough excerpt from Population 5000, the novel I'm working on:

Gary had had a hard life. The fact that he was still standing was something of a miracle. Before her bipolar disorder killed her, his mother had killed herself. Gary was a freshman in college when it happened and a part of his soul had died along with her. He wasn’t solid anymore: his skin was so pale it was almost translucent; he was so skinny, clothes hung off him like they would a skeleton. He was in danger of blowing away in the wind.

The only thing that kept him firmly on the earth was the smell of peppermint. Peppermint chapsticks were the most portable and he had bought dozens over the years. He carried one with him everywhere and he always had spares. Peppermint meant Christmas. The only time of year when his parents tried, truly tried, to make everything seem fine. His dad, a silent man who had long ago learned that talking will not fix his wife’s problems, decorated the house and filled it with the peppermint candy that his grandfather always had in his pocket. To Gary’s dad, peppermint meant family. And so he tried to use the memory of family to fill the void of theirs on Christmas. It didn’t matter that peppermint didn’t mean family to anyone else but him; he needed it to get through the holidays for the sake of his poor son.

And every Christmas, Gary’s mom got out of bed. A small miracle when she was depressed. She couldn’t muster a smile but she could at least muster herself. They could never know how hard it was for her to be with other people. Other people radiated life but she was dead inside. She was not sad; she was nothing. Sadness has a cure. You can’t fix nothing because there is nothing to fix. She was a wisp of a woman, never bothering to eat until the pain of hunger got so bad it was able to cut through her nerves long ago numbed from disuse. She couldn’t be bothered to eat until she had to eat so she wouldn’t be bothered by hunger.

She resented her son. She wanted to kill herself but she couldn’t do that to her son and she resented him for it. She even told him periodically that she hated him hoping he would hate her back so she could then kill herself. But he never showed her anything but love. He thought he was being kind, loving her because she couldn’t love herself. But it was the most cruel thing of all; to be loved by someone who didn’t want it. His love kept her tethered to the earth; to him. What he didn’t understand was that all she wanted to do was to float over the clouds; to be free. He was afraid of the wind that threatened to carry his mother off; she was frightened that it never would.

She was not meant to be bound in a human body. Her spirit echoed the ebb and flow of the oceans; she felt the pull of the moon on her blood. The delicate hairs on her arms latched onto the wind as it rushed by, hoping it would carry them away. Her physical body was made from stars that had exploded eons ago. They had exploded for a reason.

She killed herself three days before Christmas. Her husband had left to pick up her son and so she decided to leave while she had the chance. They came home to her empty body. Gary kept the smell of peppermint with him to help him imagine the Christmas he never had. He had saved up stories to tell her and imagined her smiling at his foibles and misadventures. He was going to show her his grades and she was going to tell him she was proud of him. He was going to make her laugh; make her realize why she must go on living. Which is, of course, why she had to kill herself before she saw him. Her guards were off duty. Now was her chance to escape.

Gary knew sadness. He had spent his childhood with it as his constant companion. It had beaten him down until he could barely walk. But still he could walk. His mother’s suicide shattered his memories of sadness. He became something not quite human after his mother’s death. His heart had twisted on itself and left him with a constant ache in his chest. It was the only thing he could feel as the rest of his body gave up. He was a pale imitation of a person. His nerves were dulled and his eyes couldn’t be bothered to focus so everything was just a little bit fuzzy. The tiny hairs in his ears no longer had the strength to vibrate with sound and everything sounded far off and tinny to Gary. It didn’t matter: he wouldn’t have laughed at anyone’s jokes even if he could hear them.

Gary knew he was in danger of floating away like his mother. It scared him that that was the legacy she left him. He was in constant fear of himself and so started to try and tie himself to as many things on this earth as possible, using the smell of peppermint as the tether. He forced himself to go out with friends and see his now smaller family. He joined groups on campus and became an RA for his hall, knowing that if others depended on him, his sense of duty would override his despair.

Gary started seeking out his old friend, sadness. He knew humor was a good way to make friends and so he started joking around with sadness, pointing out sad things with a laugh, becoming morbid and sardonic and sarcastic. To his friends, Gary seemed unsinkable. To them, it seemed like he was happy despite the sadness in the world. They didn’t realize that he was happy because of it. Sadness was a cold comfort; but comfort nonetheless.

He started dating Hester, an ethereal girl who spent most of her time wishing she were in a different one. She wanted to live in Shakespeare’s writings and spent most of her time in the theater, indoor and park alike. Gary saw all her plays because that is what boyfriends do. He liked Shakespeare but he liked Hester’s enjoyment of his plays more. Hester was like his mother in that she floated above the ground; but she was in no danger of drifting off because she loved the reality she had created, which costumes and sets aided in making.

She liked Gary but he used her more like a life preserver than a person. He clung to her, pulling her down. He did everything he could to support her and lift her up but, as he couldn’t do that for himself, his efforts were largely pointless. Hester told Gary she didn’t want to ever get married because she didn’t want to be tied down. They broke up his junior year of college and she married someone else two years later.

Students gathered in the classroom of the last class of Gary’s senior year of film school. The room was just a large table with chairs around it. Wedding magazines were scattered on the table for a reason no one has ever found out. As the students settled in, Gary remarked with a laugh, “There are always wedding magazines. Why aren’t there any divorce magazines?”

Those around him laughed at the thought. A girl looked at him from across the table in surprise. “That’s so sad,” she said. No one had ever responded to Gary’s jokes in that way. It was so human. Gary’s heart untwisted. Just for a moment.