Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead

“I feel like my ribs are a birdcage and my heart is a bird on fire.”

Gilda uses her signature animal-based similes to signify that her heart is trapped in her chest but desperately wants to escape. The escape of her heart would mean death. Thus, the image of her body as a cage for her heart illustrates her complex fear of death.

“Sometimes I wonder if I have really been the same person my whole life. I stare at the picture, and think: Is that really me? I have this bizarre feeling like I was a different person at every other stage of my life. I feel so removed from myself then. Sometimes I feel like I was a different person a month ago. A day. Five minutes. Now.”

Gilda often exhibits disorientation, both from herself and her surroundings. Gilda’s dissociation from her past selves makes it difficult for her to form a meaningful narrative of her life and how she arrived at where she is now. This disorientation is reflected in her stream-of-consciousness narration, in which memories appear in disjointed ways that interrupt the flow of the narrative.

“I feel like I am wearing a costume. I keep forgetting I am wearing a dress, and I have not been crossing my legs. I feel like I have the words ‘atheist’ and ‘gay’ stamped on my forehead.”

Gilda forces herself to live inauthentically in order to pay her bills and rent. Her fear that “atheist” and “gay” are stamped on her forehead reveals how innate these two traits are to her. They are so core to her person that she believes any interaction is liable to expose her ruse as a heterosexual Catholic woman.

“What if beneath every lawyer’s suit and every stay-at-home-parent’s apron, everyone is just a baby who doesn’t know what they’re doing? I wonder if anyone really identifies as the adult they’ve morphed into.”

Gilda’s use of “morph” places a child at the core of every person: People don’t stop being children; they slowly turn into adults and are expected to perform as adults. Gilda’s outlook makes the world seem like a place full of children playing at being adults, with some being more successful at fooling themselves than others. She finds comfort in believing that everyone struggles with existence as much as she does.

“I never know how to answer [the question of when I came out] because I don’t feel like I am out. I feel like I am in a constant state of coming out, and like I always will be. I have to come out every time I meet someone.”

Gilda expresses frustration at the concept of “the closet” that LGBTQ+ people must “come out of” in order to be authentically known. Despite presenting as a lesbian in every facet of her life, people constantly assume Gilda is a heterosexual woman: Her mother slips and thinks she’ll marry a man someday, and the entire church assumes she’s available to Giuseppe and other bachelors. Gilda’s daily life forces her into situations where people continually place the burden of coming out on her shoulders.

“I stare at her pink face as she screams. I relate to her. She’s uncomfortable and confused, just like I am. Why am I here? Why are you doing this to me? Why are we wearing these ridiculous clothes?”

Gilda views humankind, and particularly herself, as never truly growing up past childhood. In this quote, the confusion and turmoil of the baby being baptized is a perfect metaphor for Gilda’s disorientation throughout the novel.

“I lie down on the floor of my bedroom, breathing heavily, now fixating on the pulsating pain radiating from my arm and my knuckles. I stare up at my ceiling and then down at myself. Wait. Am I looking down at myself? […] That is my face. Those are my eyes; that is my body, wearing my shirt, my pants, and my socks. […] I don’t feel anything. It is as if I’m a corpse.”

Gilda’s dissociation takes on a literal form as she starts to view her body from an outside perspective whenever she becomes anxious. Her literal dissociation from her body comes with detachment from her own senses. This experience mirrors Gilda’s detached view of the world.

“I am inside of an ecosystem that I don’t belong in. These people spend a significant amount of their lives together. They attend meetings, go for coffee, eat lunch. They are a community with relationships and shared objectives. It’s strange that I am in this room. I feel like a foreign object inside of a body, waiting to be rejected.”

Gilda doesn’t feel at ease in any community—whether this be her own home, the church, Eleanor’s workplace, or anywhere else. In every instance, Gilda views herself as a “foreign body” that’s invaded places it shouldn’t have. The use of “ecosystem” echoes Gilda’s tendency to speak about human activity as if observing other animals.

“Ingrid and I are not close friends anymore. She isn’t the same person. She’s a grown-up. I don’t know her; I know the teenaged version of her. I’m at this party because I feel indebted as a friend to the shadow of the kid that she used to be. It’s strange I’m here at all. I wonder how long it takes the cells of our bodies to replace themselves. I wonder if I’m literally no longer the same person I was when Ingrid and I were friends.”

Gilda’s pondering of the cycle of cellular rejuvenation is a version of the Ship of Theseus paradox: If all the parts of a ship are replaced, is this ship still the original ship? She suggests that she’s not the same as her younger self if all her cells have since been replaced. Moreover, Gilda is not a continuous being, but a series of people and personalities that happen to look the same and share memories.

“She thinks I’m laughing at the movie, but I’m not—I’m laughing because I am endeared by her. I’m looking at her exposed gummy smile and listening to her quack with laughter. I find it so endearing, it becomes difficult for me to inhale. My vision is blurred in tears, and I am incapable of speech.”

Gilda’s few moments of happiness are always related to her girlfriend Eleanor. Eleanor’s animal-like behavior of “quacking” is not a means of detachment for Gilda, but a trait of endearment and point of attachment.

“It’s strange to think of how small I am, and then to consider how much smaller cats are. In the grand scheme of things, I matter as much as this cat does. Worse than that, everyone around me matters as much as this cat does. Worse than that, I think this cat should matter. I think this cat should be considered incredibly important.”

This contradictory quote is the heart of Gilda’s struggle to understand the human condition. Gilda’s inability to reconcile the fleeting nature of living things with the human need for meaning causes her to detach from the world for fear of getting too attached to something that may die at any moment.

“I find it so bizarre that I occupy space, and that I am seen by other people. […] Whenever someone does something nice for me, I feel intensely aware of how strange and sad it is to know someone.”

Gilda’s experience of being acknowledged is disorienting. She views herself as a detached observer of animal behavior, like a biologist—so suddenly being reminded that she’s part of the world is a “strange” feeling. This profound sadness is why she refuses to let herself connect with others.

“I don’t think she really cares if I’m fine. She just wants to tell me about her husband, and her house, and her plans. She wants to be validated, to feel good about herself. She wants to prove to me that her existence matters. I wonder how I can signal to her that she’s succeeded.”

Gilda views herself as a soundboard for other people’s validation. In her mind, she isn’t a person who can reciprocate, but a kind of machine that exists to create happiness for others. This is why she pretends to date Giuseppe and pretends to be Grace.

“I came to the realization that every moment exists in perpetuity regardless of whether it’s remembered. What has happened has happened; it occupies that moment in time forever.”

Gilda’s view of time and past events makes it difficult to see the past from different perspectives: To her, there is only one way things could have happened, which doesn’t allow for reinterpretation. This mindset prevents Gilda from moving past painful memories.

“It’s ironic that a belief system theoretically created to help me feel safe and meaningful takes away one of the few things that makes me feel like my life is worth living at all.”

The belief system of Catholicism is one that Gilda believes she is fundamentally alienated from. There are many things Gilda doesn’t know about herself, but she is absolutely certain about her identity as a lesbian. Her identity, and relationship with Eleanor, are the only things that bring her joy in the novel—defying the trope of an LGBTQ+ character struggling to cope with their identity out of self-hatred.

“I remember looking at the rhinos, listening to their teeth crunch twigs and wood, and thinking: those things are just like dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are just like dragons. I decided rhinos were like magical creatures. The only reason they aren’t considered magical is because they’re real.”

Gilda believes in the magic of the mundane. To her, the noise of everyday life makes the magical look routine, which results in a loss of wonder at the world. Gilda’s outlook (and the novel’s ending) suggests that one way of coping with the world is to rediscover the magic inherent in existence.

“I wonder, why do we do this? We give each other rocks and wear expensive clothing to sign papers saying we will be someone’s partner until one of us dies. […] Something in my mind clicks. This makes them happy. They buy expensive clothing and involve the government because it makes them happy.”

Until this quote, Gilda never viewed happiness as an end in and of itself. Instead, she thought happiness had to be in service of a greater, more substantial goal. Now, Gilda understands happiness as the ultimate goal.

“I can see the top of my head. This sensation is unsettling; however, maybe I should be grateful for it. It’s sort of like a superpower, to float outside of your body. […] Maybe it’s pessimistic of me to categorize this feeling as unsettling. Maybe my physical perspective has warped itself to encourage me to change my inner perspective.”

Gilda’s metaphorical detachment from the world becomes literal when she views her body from an outside perspective during a panic attack (similar to her experience in Important Quote #8). This change in view makes it impossible to dismiss that she, like other people, is a person existing in time and space. It encourages her to understand that she can’t escape being a person, despite her desire to do so.

“I didn’t file a report because I didn’t have the motivation to. I suspect that this rationale might be difficult for people with the drive to complete basic tasks to understand, so I am choosing not to share it. […] The task of filing a report is more daunting to me than accepting the loss of my car.”

Many of Gilda’s mental health-related struggles are interpreted as evidence of guilt by the police, as the latter are rarely trained to deal with people struggling with their mental health. This reflects a larger societal tendency to attribute the actions of people with mental health conditions to malicious causes. This dismissal of mental health is what causes the police to link Gilda’s inability to file an insurance claim to Grace’s murder, rather than seeing it as a symptom of Gilda’s depression.

“When I discovered the corpse of my pet rabbit, I wondered if she’d died because of me. I wondered if I’d fed her weeds that were poison, or if I’d scared her. I knew rabbits could be frightened to death. I thought maybe I’d done something. Maybe I’d killed her.”

Flop’s death is what ignites Gilda’s anxious brooding on the fragility of life. There are many ways a rabbit could die, yet Gilda never gets closure for Flop’s death. This lack of closure opens a space for anxiety and guilt, when the absurdity of death doesn’t always have answers.

“It is disgusting that I eat. I consume sustenance while other living things starve. I fill landfills with wrappers and trash. It’s unforgivable.”

Gilda’s self-loathing explains her desire to remain detached from the world. This detachment also protects her from the darker aspects of human society. Gilda’s inability to alleviate the death and suffering she sees is too much to bear, prompting her to hold herself at a distance from the world.

“I feel so profoundly inside of myself, I can’t stand it. I can feel my life force rattling inside my bones like a rabid dog in a pen trying to escape where it’s been trapped.”

Gilda repeatedly uses similes of trapped animals to describe her feelings, often her anxiety and panic (like she does in Important Quote #2). These similes are often prompted by her ruminating on the darker aspects of humanity, such as starvation and war.

“If I didn’t say goodbye to you, goodbye. I have had a wonderful life. I don’t know that I could have been happier. I am so grateful to have been alive.”

Grace’s suicide letter is found in the romance novel she left behind, which Gilda briefly considered opening early on. The romance novel is a Chekhov’s Gun, a form of narrative pay-off. Grace has a fundamentally different relationship with death than Gilda: She accepts it willingly after a long life. Grace’s last words express gratitude for the life she lived, a juxtaposition to Gilda’s nihilism surrounding death. This letter closes Part 4, and in Part 5, readers see that Gilda is actively cultivating a healthier relationship with life and death. This juxtaposition implies that Grace’s letter is partly responsible for the change in Gilda’s behavior.