Notifications from the Afterlife

The first thing Maya noticed when she woke up at 2 PM on Saturday was that she looked like a zombie. Three consecutive nights of binge-watching supernatural dramas until 4 AM will do that to a person. Her hair was a tangled disaster, her eyes were puffy, and her soul felt partially detached from her body.

She rolled over and grabbed her iPhone from the nightstand. The screen lit up with three notifications from Jordan: the cute barista from her neighborhood coffee shop who'd finally slid into her DMs last week. Her stomach did that nervous flutter thing that always caught her off guard.

"Hey, want to hang out later?"

"There's this food truck festival downtown"

"My friends say this papaya stand is actually fire lol"

Maya stared at the messages. Jordan wanted to hang out. Like, actual hang out. Outside. In public. Where she would have to wear clothes and function like a regular human being and not a sleep-deprived creature of the night.

She hadn't left her house all weekend. Her cat, Pickles, gave her a judgmental look from the foot of the bed, as if to say, "You're really going to let anxiety win again?"

"Shut up, Pickles," Maya whispered. But the cat was right. Jordan was nice. Jordan was cute. Jordan had messaged her first. And here she was, overthinking everything as usual.

Her phone buzzed again. "No pressure btw! Just thought it'd be fun 🤷"

That was it. The kindness of the no-pressure message broke her paralysis. Maya dragged herself out of bed, spent twenty minutes fixing her zombie face, and put on actual pants — the ones with buttons, not elastic. She was going to meet Jordan. She was going to try that papaya. She was going to be brave.

The papaya turned out to be weirdly sweet, Jordan laughed at all her jokes, and for the first time in forever, Maya didn't feel like she was performing a version of herself. The zombie girl from this morning felt like a different person entirely. Some days, she thought, you just have to show up and see what happens.