Grief & Loss

Between 2009 and 2017, I lost my mom, my dad, my brother, and my dog. This is writing done in direct response to those losses, or related in some way.

The Rain Came

Well, the rain came. Misty floating pillows of it, directionless and soft. Unthreatening, it promised not to interfere with anyone's plans. Then I guess it changed its mind, or just got tired of holding its own weight, and the tin roof above me became a drum. In the pitch black bedroom I pulled up the covers and listened. Each drop was a glass marble surrendered by a sky too full to keep them. Hundreds of marbles fell, then thousands, until the wind stepped in and picked up a slingshot, and the marbles hit with such ferocity I expected to see moonlight piercing through at any moment.

The rain loosened the soil on the cliff above the house, shaking down small stones and clumps of earth. I had the sensation of being buried alive, and with each crumbling patter I pictured faceless mourners tossing handfuls of dirt onto a casket.

It woke me up periodically, from feverish dreams that either made no sense or too much of it, I'm not sure which. One saw Terence embracing me lightly from behind, turning my cheek to kiss me with an adroitness I hadn't remembered ever knowing. He evaporated, leaving me melting and unsure, and standing at the edge of a shallow pond. Someone dared me to wade to the center of it. And when I did, I found a circle of my friends scowling at me in disappointment. I didn't know what I'd done; I only knew I'd confirmed their worst suspicions.

We had a sort of Thanksgiving. The family, myself, and three neighbors whom I tried terribly hard to impress. They must wonder who the hell I am, I thought uncharitably of myself - of them. What gives with this stranger, this interloper from across the country? She is not blood. Where is her own family?

Woody, of course, knows the answers to those questions now, and probably wouldn't ever have asked them anyway. He and his wife (tennis buff, no nonsense but quick to laugh) brought spaghetti squash, sea-salt dark chocolate caramels, a pumpkin pie the size of a manhole cover, and a bottle of Sauternes. The Sauternes really deserves its own post, honey bright and smooth and lip-licking sweet. It was my first, which made it special to me. And it was the first Sauternes Bill has had in decades, which made it special to him. He and Hannah used to order it as a young couple in California - I believe he said on trips to Mendocino. His face when he spoke of it - laughing about how little he knew of wines back then - briefly lost all of those decades. Woody, too, had a Sauternes story to tell. A group of nine friends, gambling one day on a $900 bottle they had to split, well, nine ways. $100 per man, for about a sip. Worth every penny.

Today the rain abandoned all restraint, laughing at me, spitting in my face as I stubbornly rounded up the last day's worth of photos. The wind turned Hannah's umbrella into a sail, and I nearly toppled into the water trying to take a selfie at the end of the dock.

I didn't have a great day today. Sleep has evaded me all week for a combination of reasons, twisting my nerves into a bundle that threatened to snap at the slightest provocation. And provocation came tonight, in the form of a nasty burn running the length of my forearm. I was making vegetable chowder (Hannah liked it so much the last time I made it) and I stupidly used a short-handled cup to ladle some of it into the blender. My elbow grazed the lip of the pot and I jumped, splashing piping hot soup onto myself, my favorite navy cashmere sweater, and the floor.

Everyone swarmed to help me. To clean up my mess, to treat my burn, to fetch me painkillers. Their solicitousness sent me sailing over the edge, and I had to brush tears - humiliating, childish tears - from my cheeks so I could see to finish my cooking. At the table the meal was subdued, heavy with the tone I'd set with my overreaction, and it wasn't long before Bill's gentle prying unleashed the truth underneath the ostensible reason for my tears. I was exhausted, anxious about returning home, lonely for friends who wouldn't be there when I got back, and generally in a storm of self-doubt.

Not exactly the note I wanted to leave on. I mean, I didn't say all that, though the subject of my breakup did come up momentarily. But they could see I was fraught with worry and sleeplessness, and Bill ordered me to bed early.

That was seven hours ago; only one of which I slept for.

Oh god, here it comes again. I wish you could hear it. Great gusting sheets, surging suddenly just now as if desperate to drown out my bleating self-pity. Or maybe gently wash it away. Maybe the rain is a friend tonight.

Anyway, friend or foe, it turned the lake and its surroundings into a crayon box today. It wicked the leaves down from trees that weren't ready to release them; they were still too bright, too alive. They lay stunned on the ground - a wet, waxy palette of goldenrod and ochre, strawberry and chartreuse. I feel guilty filtering pictures of them, like I'm adding salt to food that's already plenty seasoned. So only the tiniest bit, to make sure their vibrancy comes through loud and clear.

The sound of the rain, though - that you'll have to imagine. And now, for me, sleep - though maybe I'll have to imagine that.

The Clouds Themselves

The 24-hour Korean spa that I visit a few days after my dog dies--my eyes puffy from lack of sleep, my shoulders sore from body-racking sobs--requires nudity.

I know this going in. I've read the reviews, I understand the etiquette. Still, it takes a few laps around the labyrinthian locker room to work up enough nerve to shed the uniform issued to me upon check-in: mustard yellow t-shirt, baggy khaki shorts, brown rubber flip flops so thin my ankle bones crackle on the hardwood floor. I'm pretty sure the ensemble is purposefully designed to be as ugly as possible, so patrons will want to leave sooner.

A wall of paneled glass, closed off with curtains except for double doors on which are etched the rules, leads into the main spa area. Jacuzzi. Cold-water dipping pool. Sauna and steam room. These facilities are bookended by a series of standard showers on one side, and on the other, three rows of some other kind of bathing stalls that I don't quite understand. Short, tiled booths with detachable shower hoses and plastic stools for sitting. Something ritualistic and exotic about them intimidates me, makes me feel like a prudish outsider. As I walk past these washing stations with averted eyes, I expect to catch glimpses of grey hair, loose skin. Instead they are occupied by lithe young bodies and heads full of sleek black hair.

It's 1:00 am on a Saturday morning, and there are easily three or four dozen other women here. We're all naked. We're not all Korean.

He isn't with me here. There's no reason he ever would be in a place like this, so it's easier to forget him for a few minutes. Heartbreak doesn't exactly leave, but it abates, lessens to a dull throb. I press my shoulders hard against the dry wooden beams of the sauna. Sink my fingers as deeply as I can into warmed-up muscles. Breathe in, then out. Life goes on. You've been here before. There's no holding onto anything, or anyone.

A heavily-accented woman's voice pierces my thoughts and I realize I'm being summoned. The numbers she's calling out match the ones on the plastic, waterproof bracelet around my wrist. The bracelet serves as identification, and also syncs with the locker I've been assigned.

"Seven forty-tooo? Seven forty-tooooo?"

I emerge from the sauna with my hand raised, feeling sheepish and extraordinarily exposed. "Here! I'm here." Glances shoot my way which feel disdainful, though I'm probably imagining that.

The woman who leads me to the separate area where services such as massages, facials, and other treatments are administered is not naked. She is in fact wearing lingerie, or some approximation of it. Tiny black tap pants. A lacy black triangle bra. She's sixty if she's a day.

With a few impatient gestures I am directed to lay facedown on a vinyl massage table sheathed in clear plastic. My skin, hot from the sauna, sticks awkwardly to the plastic as I try to shift into a more comfortable, more dignified position. But I'll understand soon enough the reason for this prophylactic measure: the entire treatment area is tiled, with drains underneath each low-walled cubicle. When things get messy (which they will; I've opted for an oil-based massage), guests can simply be hosed off like elephants at the zoo. After a massage the acrobatics and detached intimacy of which confirm all my presuppositions, bucketfuls of warm water are dumped over me, washing away the oil, and with it the last of my worries. Or such is the idea. Alas.

Alas.

I don't linger long after the massage. One more quick round of the sauna and steam room, then I walk to the wall where I've stashed my t-shirt and shorts in a plastic bin At this point I'm no longer fazed by my own nudity. I don't face the wall as I dress. The place seems to have cleared out anyway. It's time to go home. There is no more putting it off. I remind myself that it will hurt a tiny little bit less every day, until it becomes bearable. But already my throat is thickening and my fingertips tingling. I think of his face and the pain makes me gasp.

Outfitted once more in my own clothes, I trudge up the stairs to turn in my wristband and check out. The cold night air is bracing and black and joyless. I have a twenty minute walk ahead of me. My hair is wet and tangled, but I don't much care.

As I round the side of the building, I hear male voices and laughter issue from somewhere along the curbside, where every inch of precious Koreatown parking has been utilized. It's dark though, so I don't see the source until I'm directly next to it: two men sitting in the front seat of a beat-up mid-90s Nissan, the windows rolled down and passenger-side door swung wide open. The engine is off, as are the car's lights. I'm almost past the vehicle when one of them calls out.

"Hey, how's it going? How was the spa?"

Out of surprise more than friendliness, I stop, bending over to better see the strangers while still maintaining my distance. The faces that peer back at me are grinning and guileless. Both thirty-ish. One fair, one dark. Casually dressed. Well-groomed. Neither particularly bad-looking.

"Great," I reply. "First time. Place is a trip."

"Isn't it, though? Did you check out the rooftop?"

"No. I didn't even realize there was one."

"Oh yeah, and it's awesome. Co-ed floor is crazy, too."

"Co-ed floor? I didn't even know about the co-ed floor." Hearing this news, I feel I've failed somehow.

"Yeah, but you have to wear the uniform."

"Ah, okay," I say, as if consoled. I'm about to dismiss myself and press on when the two introduce themselves. Brian and Zack. We wave polite hellos in the moonlight.

"You seem nice. Do you want to smoke a joint with us, before we go in?"

There is no reason to say yes to this absurd invitation. Two strange men sitting in a beat-up car, in the middle of the night, on the fringes of Macarthur Park - a place I don't want to be even in daylight. But the thought of the alternative - that is, returning home and facing a fresh round of the shattering grief that awaits me there - eclipses my better judgment. And anyway, nothing about these guys reads predatory. My gut says go for it.

And so with a shrug at how fucking weird and wonderful the universe can be, I accept.

The three of us walk around to the front of the building, ambling and talking for another half block until we reach some stone benches underneath a tree. We're on Wilshire Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare. There's still a decent amount of traffic, even at this hour. I'm not concerned, though. I'm too busy trying to wrap my brain around the information I've just received: Brian and Zack are youth pastors.

At first I don't believe them. I accuse them of trolling me. But the pair is sincere. They've got stories. They've been doing it a long time. They've been friends a long time, too. They're aware of how odd a light their current behavior casts them in, and try to explain themselves more. I probe, genuinely fascinated. The more I learn, the more I suspect that neither is a true believer. It seems to be something they fell into by way of a charismatic church leader. The word "cult" floats through my brain, but I stay diplomatically silent. They've got weed, after all.

I'm not a pot smoker. It's just not my drug. It makes me dopey and slow and paranoid, and doesn't work well with my body chemistry. Leaves me feeling blah.

But blah is better than broken, so I take all three hits that are offered to me before thanking my benefactors profusely, and saying goodnight.

Okay. Well. 

The walk home is both interminable and fleeting. Once there I cast about for something to put my attention on. Can't read. Can't write. Want to talk to someone, but it's 2 am. There's always a chance my best friend awake; he keeps crazy hours. I re-read our last few exchanges. Zero in on the message I sent a few hours after night it happened. Thursday, February 9th, at 3:02 am, when I found out that the news had been shared. My boyfriend had thoughtfully told my best friend, so I wouldn't have to say the words myself.

I'm sorry. I didn't know he was going to tell you.

Anyway.

It was bloat. The surgery would have been $6-8k. And he was 10. And I hadn't told you but he slipped really bad about a week ago and had been limping way worse than ever. 

I'm sorry you found out this way. 

He loved you so much.

I don't know what else to say right now.

It's never been so quiet. 

---

The night my dog died, the streets of Los Angeles were thick with fog.

LA is never foggy. The coast, sure. But never the city. In fact I'd never seen anything like it. I noticed it when I got off work: hazy streetlights and a slickness in the air. By the time Timo came over to hang out, you couldn't see twenty yards in front of you. Everything was shrouded, romantic and dramatic and mysterious. Sounds disappeared in the night.

Maybe Chaucer felt the strangeness. Maybe it tickled his senses, delighting him into being especially playful. Trotting more quickly down the dark alley beside my building, his passageway out for a walk. I don't know. Timo doesn't know, either. Both of us took him out that night, in pretty quick succession, because he hadn't gone potty after we fed him. Perhaps he was more keyed up, thanks to the weird weather, or because Timo was there.

He adored Timo.

There is no knowing exactly how or when it happened. If he jumped, or if he drank water too quickly. But it became clear pretty quickly that something was wrong. Retching. Heaving. He wouldn't settle. Wouldn't lay down. My increasing nervousness turning to panic, turning to dread in the backseat of the Uber we called when the 24-hour emergency vet said to bring him immediately.

I knew, of course. Not that it was bloat specifically but that something was very, very wrong. I just knew. And I held my sweet pup in the back of that car and stroked his shaking body, and just let silent tears pour down my face. And Timo reached back and squeezed my knee and I felt nothing, because the most beautiful part of me was dying, and I knew it.

---

It was foggy the night my best friend left the world.

Fog that wrapped itself around our car as we sped down the freeway, hiding everything from me except his perfect, sweet face. Fog that hugged the animal hospital like soft cotton, muffling cries that tore through me like fire. Fog that gently closed us in, just the two of us, him breathing heavy with sedation, strapped in a tragicomic display of last-moment silliness to a gurney, looking like some kind of spa guest in his white towel, in the room they gave us for our goodbye.

Of course it would be that way. The fog. Because how else would he get into dog heaven?

The clouds themselves had to come down to carry him up.

One Less Bottle

It was surprisingly easy to go through my dad's things, after he died. Occasionally, I'd stumble into a moment of paralyzing nostalgia. Some ostensibly harmless personal effect of his - a handkerchief, a slide rule, a Zippo lighter - would reach my hands and burn as if on fire. Just some thing, with the power to trip up my pragmatism, to laugh at it. This is so him, I'd think. Emblematic. Representative. I'd recall its place in my father's life, delicately fingering every facet of the memory. And the breath would be knocked out of me for a few minutes while I let grief wash just over me, unchallenged.

But for the most part, I maintained an attitude of stoic resolve. All this shit has to go.

You can't keep everything, after all.

The liquor posed a problem. Not the stuff that was still sealed - Greg and I didn't have to think twice about what to do with that. We packaged it up and shipped it back home to LA (though sadly, it never made it here). But there were several bottles of entirely decent (even decent plus) alcohol that, as established and accomplished lushes, Greg and I were loathe to drain down the sink.

So we started giving it away.

One afternoon, the cable technician came to collect some equipment. He was somewhere solidly in his sixties, a man whose stooped demeanor and perceptible limp belied an otherwise rugged vitality, and an earnest face. He'd probably seemed sixty-something for the past twenty years, and would probably continue to for another twenty.

As he was putting together some paperwork for me to sign, Greg ambushed him in the friendly way he does. "Sir," he said, "I don't suppose you're a whisky drinker?" He assured Greg that he was, in fact, precisely such a man. And before the technician could say "nonrefundable deposit", his erstwhile customer's daughter's boyfriend was presenting him with a two-third's full bottle of Dewars.

The man accepted the gift with grace. He must have been putting two and two together already, what with the boxes, the general disarray of the house, and the cancellation order he was there to fill. Greg probably confirmed his suspicion when he told the man that the liquor's previous owner would appreciate passing on the bottle to a worthy and appreciative trustee. The man looked at me. He said some kind words. I wish I remember them exactly. Or maybe it's better I don't.

A look came across Greg’s face, and he stepped out of the room with some unknown purpose. He returned a moment later, a roll of blue painter's tape in hand along with a black Sharpie. He tore off a small piece of tape and carefully stretched it across the bottle of Scotch. He spoke as he wrote on it. "The only requirement is that when you pour yourself a glass tonight at home after work, you have to raise a toast and say this." He smiled and looked up from his handiwork to me. I read what he'd written. To Norm. I swallowed and smiled back.

More warm words from the technician. "Wonderful young woman", "good souls" - something like that. Small dabs of salve on a freshly blistered heart. We walked him down the driveway to his truck. He asked my name and shook my hand. Then he had an idea. "I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll do you one better than just a toast. If you give me your phone number, tonight when I'm ready for my drink, I'll call you guys up, and all three of us can drink to your father at the same time."

I looked at the man. I looked at my boyfriend. I felt, straining its way through the clotted, hard dirt of loss, a tiny shoot of joy. How had they done that, these two men from different worlds, with nothing in common but big hearts and a gift for awing me with their thoughtfulness? They made it look so easy.

He called us promptly at the appointed time. Greg took the call, and put him on speakerphone. He had the man hold while we scrambled to pour our own drinks. All we had on hand was vodka and apple juice. It was perfect. We lifted our glasses and told the stranger on the other end of the line that we were ready. And that's when my heart, already squeezed to near suffocation by this moment, was clenched just a bit more: the man said, "What sort of man was Norm? Tell me about your father."

I made a sound, something like "Ohhh," a mixed exclamation of surprise and laughter and I don't know what else. Oh, wow, I wasn't expecting that and Oh, wow, if you only knew just what a character he was. "He was an engineer," I began, carefully. "He loved to read. He...taught me to question everything." I was grasping, falling. Greg saw it, and chimed in cheerfully. "He was a ladies man, too." We all laughed, and something came loose inside of me. Some knot of sadness, born of the fact that there was next to no one around to mourn my father's death. Next to no family, next to no friends. It had broken my heart on his behalf. But here, now, an utter stranger was honoring my dad in the purest way possible: truly caring about who he was. Making him matter, if only for a moment.

After our clinks and drinks, the man again offered his sincere condolences. He praised me as a daughter, from the little daughtering he'd witnessed that day. He invited us, should we ever find ourselves back in his small town again, to dine with he and his wife. I thought wistfully of that dinner, which I knew would be lovely and probably somewhat life-affirming, but which I knew would never happen.

We said our goodbyes, rinsed out our glasses, and continued sorting late into the night. We had one bottle less to pack.

Black Outlines

There are two sides to my father's death. There are the plain, cold facts of what happened, and there are all the little details that fill in those black outlines with color. I need to get them both out of my head. Here are the plain, cold facts.

My first few weeks in Florida were overwhelming to a point of comedy.

My dad had no one but me to take care of him. His brothers and he had long since ceased speaking. There was a cousin, herself elderly, unstable, and unavailable. That was it, as far as his family of origin. As far as his own family? His ex-wife was dead, and his son was MIA. He had no close friends, and certainly none close by enough to help.

So I was it. And I was in way, way over my head.

I can't claim to have hit the ground running when I got there. More the opposite: I faltered and flailed about for the first few days, terrified and in denial of the situation. Feeling sorrier for myself than him, really. But once it became clear that my father was becoming more helpless by the minute, some survival mechanism in me clicked into gear. I made calls, set appointments, did research, and shuttled him to doctors. I wrote lists, asked questions, picked up supplies and medicines. I created three different schedules for pill-taking, in an effort to make it easier for my father to keep track of the seven prescriptions he was taking (none worked). I cooked and cleaned and counseled my father as best I could. When he started to lose mobility, I rearranged furniture, and even sold some things just to get them out of the way. I acted as liaison between him and the panoply of specialists he'd collected in a few short days since his diagnosis.

And speaking of his diagnosis. Here's that, in a nutshell. On April 7, my 73 year-old father was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. They didn't like what they saw, so they kept him overnight, and ran tests. A day and a half later, he was informed that he had small cell lung cancer. I was on a plane two days after that. Four days after that, his radiation oncologist gave him a prognosis of 6-12 months. But the doctors were optimistic about treatment, affirming that my dad would be healthy enough to undergo several weeks of chemotherapy and radiation. They even said he should be able to drive himself to his appointments.

Hearing that, I was utterly nonplussed. It seemed obvious to me that he wouldn't be able to care for himself on a basic level (eating, bathing, etc), much less have the strength to take himself to treatments. But maybe they were right? Maybe the bad state he was in was temporary, and he'd rally? Maybe I could manage his care from across the country at first, coming out every few weeks and stepping up my presence as necessary, as things devolved? I conferred with one of his doctors. And by "confer" I mean, I practically clutched the man's coat lapels, voice shaking, and asked, "What the hell do I do?" He told me my "plan" was a good one, and that'd I'd know when my dad would need more help. I'd know when things were getting worse.

He was right about that. Things got worse, fast, and I knew it. I saw it with my own eyes. Those first few nights, when we were making early rounds to specialists to get a plan of care in place, were hell itself. He had completely lost his appetite, and dropped 20+ pounds in a matter of a couple weeks. He was consequently too weak to move much, but so mentally agitated that moving around was all he wanted to do. The cancer had spread from his lungs to his ribs and spine, and he was incredibly uncomfortable, even with the morphine. He was depressed and afraid. He'd sit in his office chair for five minutes before insisting on moving to the living room sofa, which after another five minutes, he'd want to get up from, and go lay on the bed. He didn't want to wear pants, and I couldn't get him to stand in the shower long enough to wash off. Incontinence kicked in. We (meaning me) were still tweaking his morphine dosage, trying to find a happy(?) medium between lucidity/pain and bombing him into a speechless semi-coma.

It broke my heart to watch my father, always the vainest man I'd known, forced to abandon his dignity in such a manner. As for me, I had no clue what I was going to do. I had no idea what I was facing, or how long my father was going to be like this. It was clear as day I couldn't leave him and go back to California. Did that mean I had to move out here for the next half year, year, to be his sole caregiver? Would I even be able to do that?? What the hell did I know about caring for a sick person, much less one who was dying? Visions of me trying to bathe him, taking care of his bathroom and hygiene, spoon feeding him and checking his IV, managing all those medications several times a day, etc. wracked me. What. The. Fuck.

I was bewildered and lost. When the occasional nurse or insurance person or hospice worker that I spoke to found out I was handling everything completely on my own, the compassion and solicitousness with which they responded broke me every time. I'd chin up and thank them politely for their concern, but inside, the little girl in me was throwing pity party confetti in the air: Yes! I know! It IS incredibly unfair, right? How am I supposed to do this?? After a while, I stopped pretending to be strong and just let them throw their arms around me for a virtual hug.

The kindness of strangers saved me in those days - the acknowledgment and validation that no one should have do what I was doing, alone.

And so the second week went, with him leaning on me more and more every day, literally and otherwise. He didn't want to eat, so every few hours, I'd spend several minutes trying to coax him into a few bites of ice cream, or chocolate milk - anything dense in calories, in an effort to keep some meat on his bones. He was completely at a loss re: tracking his medications, which needed to be taken every two hours. I couldn't trust him to remember, so I gave up on my fancy charts and checklists and just set my own alarm. He became disoriented and confused about place and time. I awoke on Saturday at three am to him calling me frantically from across the house. I found him fully dressed, sitting near the front door, convinced that he was about to be late for an appointment. When I explained that no, he had no commitments that day, he became inexplicably angry and threatened to hit me.

I'd take advantage of his moments of lucidity to talk to him. We even managed, in the first few days, to have a couple of restaurant meals. I sat across from my father and we looked at one another, the dead weight of his prognosis making each forkful feel like a thousand pounds of sand to swallow. We did our best, though, with small jokes and the occasional sincerely loving exchange. I told him in no uncertain terms what he meant to me, and how I credit all my favorite parts of my personality to him. He told me that despite what I'd convinced myself of, he was incredibly proud of me, of who I'd turned out to be.

Back at home, the restlessness was a killer. He just refused to stay still for more than a few minutes at a time. But with every hour, he lost more and more strength and balance. Each time he wanted to move, I had to be there, lest he go crashing to the ground. At first, the support of my shoulder was enough. Then, he'd need me to walk backwards in front of him, so he could hold my outstretched arms. By the time I went to buy him a walker, he was so frail from lack of food that falling was a near-constant concern.

And then he did fall.

At 2am.

And I couldn't get him back up. And he couldn't get himself back up.

Just that morning, he'd been enrolled in in-home hospice. We'd been at the oncologist's, and I had pulled him aside, wild-eyed with lack of sleep, and said, basically, "Look. If you think he's strong enough to undergo several hours a week of chemo, you're out of your mind. And aside from the issue of chemo, I need help. Badly." The doctor agreed that it was time for hospice, even though he still felt confident that my dad could do chemo. We went home and I spent the afternoon learning just how much support I was about to get - I knew nothing whatsoever about hospice. As it became clear that I would have a team of professionals acting as reinforcements, I slowly let more oxygen into my lungs. I can do this, if I have help. Help is coming.

Help came that very afternoon. He was enrolled, the paperwork was signed, and all the ugly but necessary documents placed on file (his living will, his DNR order, his funerary wishes, etc). A hospital bed was set up in the living room, because my father refused to give up the ghost on the waterbed in his bedroom. He was still adamantly insisting, even in his degenerative state, on climbing in and out of it all day and night.

That's what he was doing, when he fell. Trying to get out of the goddamned waterbed. And I was helping, but not well enough, obviously. Because suddenly he was on the ground, moaning in pain, and I couldn't do a fucking thing about it other than try to dial down my hysteria.

That was one of the hardest, most awful moments of the whole ordeal. But it was by no means the worst. No, cancer is an endless swag bag of heartbreaking surprises!

Anyway, I called hospice, who sent help as quickly as possible. It took almost an hour. During that time, I ostensibly sat with my father, covered him in a blanket, held his hand, propped his head, and talked to him (he didn't talk back). But what I was really doing was facing the fact of my father's impending death, and taking the first wretched step towards accepting it.

The EMTs arrived, and lifted him into bed. I got more What, wait? It's only you here, taking care of him? type pity. I ate it up, greedily. His hospice team's head nurse, upon learning of this incident, upgraded him to continuous care - I was told as much over the phone. By 8am, a certified nurse would be there to help, and, I was told, there'd be someone staying with us, at the house, 24-7 from that point on.

America's Favorite

My mother snuck up on me tonight. She likes to do that, when I make a cup of tea.

Tea was her clock and her comfort. She fixed a cup first thing in the morning, rawboned and pensive in faded flannel pajamas. Thinness kept her girlishly limber into her fifties, and she would sit with her knees drawn tight to her chest like a child at story hour, a faraway look masking her thoughts as she sipped. In those moments it was as if her whole body were wrapped around the mug, pulling heat and strength and reassurance from its steam.

All day. She drank it all day. With meals and afterward. Between chores and before bed. My mother drank tea the way some people smoke tobacco: agreeably and pleasurably chained to it.

She drank cheap American tea, which she prepared the tragically American way: by nuking a single-serve baggie in cold tap water on high for two and a half minutes. As I child I thought microwave ovens worked by conventionally heating their contents, only with greater power. When I learned they actually operate through radiation, I was terrified to think what my mother was ingesting from those little bloated brown bags of leaves. Now I know whatever poisons irradiated Lipton left in her blood were nothing compared to what the alcohol did. But kids aren't always good at recognizing the enemy.

Tonight I wanted to wrench more from the dwindling evening than my brain seemed prepared to give, and past a certain hour coffee just feels obscene - so I made a cup of tea. The cabinet is stocked with Earl Grey, peppermint, and chamomile, not to mention a half-dozen tins of Terence's oolongs and greens and other more exotic blends. But I chose from the bright yellow box with the red and white logo - the one containing several dozen miniature envelopes packed in cheerful uniformity. The cheap stuff. America's Favorite Tea. Well, perhaps. One American's that I can attest to anyway.

I can't drown it without smelling it first. And that smell is everything. Things I've known and things I'll never understand. Things familiar and things forgotten. Things that make sense and things that have no business speaking to me at all, much less from the depths of a delicate paper packet the size of a pocket watch. Orange blossom, pepper, and miscommunication. Timothy hay, chocolate, and blame. That smell is my mother.

A funny thing about tea, though: its scent seems to fade under the kettle's boiling spout. So she comes sometimes, when I reach into the bright yellow box. But she rarely stays longer than two and a half minutes.

My Father's Yard

Wild things grow in my father's yard.

Things lush in texture, riotous in color. Things unnamed and unknown to him. He couldn't tell you the species or genus of the plants, the trees, or the flowers that bloom outside his windows, or how best to care for them. But bloom they do, because in spite of his inattention they've managed to get what they need to survive. Sunlight. Soil. Water.

Which is not to say they couldn't do with a little help. Some pruning, some pollarding to clear the way for new growth.

If he brushed away the fallen, dried leaves that crunch in clusters along the walkway, it would be easier to reach his front door. If he tended to the weeds that threaten to choke the more delicate flowers, he could better see their blossoms. But he doesn't think to do it, and they live on in pretty, if precarious, complacence.

If he watered the roots of the tree that dominates the very center of his yard, it might bear fruit. But though its bark is brittle, its limbs are sturdy enough for anyone wishing to climb them.

Unsupervised, unmanaged and unchallenged, these growing things have become defiant, unruly. They thicken and thrive with a tenacity that their well-watched cousins in other yards needn't have.

Wild things live in my father's yard. He protects them, from a distance.

A duck has taken refuge against the west wall, under the spare bedroom window. She must feel safe, nearly shrouded from view behind fronds the size of dinner plates. Her white face, red rimmed eyes, and green-black body are exotic, and they captivate me. But when I try to creep closer to examine her nest, to look for eggs and take pictures, I am scolded and shooed away. Just leave her be, my father says. She aint bothering anybody. The duck has a frantic look about her. She meets my intruding gaze head on, and I have the feeling that even one step closer would move her to aggression.

My father doesn't seem to mind the downy white feathers that litter the landscaping and stick to his doormat. In fact, I suspect he takes a certain pride in the fact that she chose his yard to make her home, of the dozens that line his quiet street. At night I can hear her plaintive cry, and I wonder what need she's communicating. My father, on the other side of the house, sleeps through her call.

When, months ago, a kingsnake took up temporary residence in the lanai, my father chose retreat over confrontation. Rather than try and run the snake off or have it professionally removed, he recused himself and declared the patio off limits until the snake was done with it. He'll go when he's ready. He got in there; he can get back out.

Around the yard is a tall wooden fence, long since sun-bleached of whatever rich brown color it once must have boasted. It's dry and splintered, and while the grooves in the grain draw my eye in, I know better than to run my fingers down them. Rusty nails and jagged knots poke from it in irregular intervals. The fence was there when he moved into this house years ago, and he never so much as weatherproofed it.

But it keeps his yard safe enough.

My father doesn't spend a lot of time in his yard, or, I imagine, thinking about it. Inside, his house is a testament to his own interests, carefully curated with the furniture, the curios, and the decorating touches it took him decades to collect and perfect. But the things that grow and bloom and drop and die beyond his immediate sight don't trouble him much. When I show him close-up pictures I've taken, showcasing the glorious pinks and reds and purples of the wild things that flourish, right under his nose, he nods dismissively. He's unimpressed.

The wild things will keep growing, anyway. They'll keep coming to his yard for shelter, shade, and safety. And he'll help them find it, in his way.

Reunion

When my mother died, I found among her things an inch-thick stack of neatly typed letters on high quality stationery, chronologically ordered and carefully bound. They were in excellent condition: freed from their envelopes, unbent, unsmudged, and seemingly untouched by time. They were from my father. They were dated from the years during which he'd worked as an engineer at a remote Alaskan radar station while she had worked for Pan American in New York.

I knew the bulk of my parent's courtship had been conducted via long distance, broken up only by occasional, exotic vacations afforded to them by his excellent salary and her travel benefits. For two, three weeks at a time, they'd meet up somewhere far across the globe: Hong Kong, Israel, the Canary Islands. I knew all the stories. I'd seen all the Super 8 footage.

What I didn't know was that these letters existed. When I found them, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Not only because it was impossible for me to reconcile the idea of my curmudgeonly, cynical, and darkly jaded father with the impassioned, earnest, and lovestruck thirty-something his words revealed. And not only because trying to imagine my parents - two people who spent twelve years fighting tooth and nail through the most bitterly acrimonious and drawn out divorce imaginable - as the young, smitten lovers emerging from these pages was mind-boggling. What caused me to leaf through these love letters in absolute shock was the fact that my mother had even kept them.

Every word my mother had uttered about her ex-husband for the last twenty years of her life had been laced with contempt. Likewise for him. It didn't make sense to me that she'd be sentimental about anything from their long defunct love affair.

I realized immediately that it wouldn't be right of me to read the letters in their entirety. Skimming the first two had been enough to give me an idea of their contents: the soulful outpourings of a man who'd found his life's mate. Partly out of curiosity to see how he'd react, and partly because I wanted to abdicate the responsibility of keeping them, I cautiously broached the subject of the letters to my dad. He was nearly as floored as I was. He asked me not to read them, and to send them to him. I did so, gladly. Something about them bothered me. They were fucking with my world view.

I'd barely recovered from the surprise of the letters when my dad sprung a shock of his own on me. He knew I was having my mother cremated a few days later, and he knew from comments I'd made that the idea of keeping an urn with her ashes made me exceptionally uncomfortable. It was macabre in the worst way to me: macabre and funny. The truth was, I didn't trust myself to treat my mother's remains, should I retain them, with the respect they deserved. I couldn't imagine placing some godawful metal vase, hermetically sealed to prevent spills for Christ's sake, on my mantle and not finding it simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.

My dad knew this, so he asked if he could have them, instead. "And not to do anything nefarious with," he quickly assured me. "I'd just like to keep them, if it's all the same to you."

Go fucking figure.

Rather than try and summon deductive powers I didn't nearly have at the ready (I was, after all, a mite consumed with handling my mother's death) in order to suss out his true motives, I shrugged, thought fuck it, and made arrangements to have my dead mother Fed-Exed to my living father.

And so it was, nearly three years later, when I was faced with the task of going through my second dead parent's things, that I came across my mother once again.

She was in my dad's office, on the top shelf of a mahogany bookcase filled with outdated computer manuals and the sort of tacky bric-a-brac I'd been chiding my father about collecting for years (perhaps in subconscious anticipation of this day?). She was in a predictably ugly brass urn, the fattest part of which was laser cut with thick black grooves.

I couldn't help but laugh. My father himself had been delivered just that day to the mortuary where he'd pre-paid (ever the planner!) for his own cremation. In a matter of a couple days, I was going to be in possession of the ashes of both my dead parents. Just me. All mine. No other family to divide them up with (because, disturbingly, that is apparently a thing people do). No one else to stake a cremains claim.

What a lucky girl I am, I thought wryly.

Well, try as I do to avoid being an utter cliche, there aren't a whole lot of options, when it comes to dealing with the ashes of your dead parents. As far as I can tell, there are three: keep, dispose, or disperse. The first was never an option; the second, a little too callous even for me. So I had no choice but to be a cliche. Christ, I thought. Well, it's Florida. At least there's an ocean a block away. Burial at sea it is!

By the way? Don't judge. You have no idea the sort of dry humor and emotionless pragmatism you're capable of until you're syringe feeding morphine into the mouth of your cancer-crippled dad. You discover versions of yourself you never knew existed. You have to.

I drove to the funeral home to pick up my dad's ashes a few days later. I didn't bother upgrading him to an urn. As far as I was concerned, he was on a short layover. So he came to me bound up in a clear plastic bag that was placed inside a thick, red cardboard box. The mortician supplied me with a certified letter declaring the box's contents, that I would need to show TSA if I wanted to travel with it. And if you think I wasn't tempted to bring the remains home just for the sick fun of messing with people at airport security, well, you don't know me at all. Likewise, if you think I didn't text one or two of my close friends a picture of the box strapped into the seatbelt of the passenger side of my rental car - again, pay closer attention.

I waited until the dead of night before I did one of the strangest and hardest things I've ever had to do.

I placed my mother's urn, my father's box, a small flashlight, and a pair of scissors on the front seat of the car and drove to the water. I stuck the flashlight and scissors in my jeans, carefully cradled both sets of ashes in my arms, and walked down a short pier to the Apollo Beach shoreline.

There were four or five widely-spaced, rickety wooden steps that led down to the water, and it was extremely dark. I don't think I've ever taken steps with as much care as I did those.

It was a clear night, and the moonlight reflected off the water in a way that felt suspiciously scripted. The warm breeze was in on the conspiracy, too. Everything aligned to make this heartbreaking moment as sensually powerful as possible. You will not forget this.

I took almost an hour to say goodbye to my mom and dad. I thought about them not just as parents to me, but as individuals with complex, rich inner lives the depths of which I could only guess at. I thought about what made them special to me, and what made life special to them. I thought about their accomplishments and failures, their quirks and charms. I mourned that as a family, we'd drifted apart, but I treasured the fact that at that moment, they were both there in my arms, together again. I thanked them for what they'd taught me, what they'd given me. I meditated on the ways I would continue to parent myself, in their absence - on what I would take away from each of them.

And finally, I let them go, one at a time, into the warm, shallow water that lapped the lowest stair. And it wasn't a cliche at all.

Flour Girl

If you want to see an extremely disconcerted dog, take a bag of his human-quality dog treats into the bathtub and eat handfuls of them while you cry. Chaucer wasn't sure whether to be more anxious about my tears or that fact that I was eating his fucking cookies. His head nearly exploded. And don't judge. Do not judge. Those things are delicious.

—-

Lately I've been taking some very large checks to the bank. I keep getting the same teller, a very polished and pretty young woman. She gets a look on her face that belies her curiosity is to why this sloppily-dressed woman in dire need of a manicure and root touch-up is plunking down such heavy coin. So far she's processed the transactions without comment, but yesterday afternoon she gave in.

"I don't mean to be nosy," she started, through the window. And then she trailed off, letting me volunteer helpfully, "My father died." It was at this point that the bullet proof glass suddenly thickened up another inch or so, preventing her from hearing me. She cocked her head and frowned. What's that?

"MY FATHER DIED," I announced, at about ten decibels louder than I'd intended. I could tell by the hush that fell over the crowd of paycheck-cashing weekend revelers that they really enjoyed that uplifting start to their weekend.

—-

My neighborhood is filled with familiar characters. Homeless persons, some mental, some just destitute. Shopkeepers and small restauranteurs that step out onto the sidewalk when business is slow. Street vendors selling melted popsicles and bags of fruit.

There's this one old man who sells water. He stands on corners and under awnings and hawks bottles for half a buck. I think he might be a little bit crazy. He'll call out, "Water, fifty cents!" and then mutter something vaguely ominous under his breath like, "You gotta drink water. In this heat? You'll get dehydrated, you'll see." or "The pipes. It's bad water, in those pipes. People don't know. They'll find out."

For some reason, I love this. His fear mongering sales angle delights me, I don't know why. Probably for the same reason I love doomsday and dystopic movies: I not-so-secretly want to watch the world crumble. Anyway, I kind of want to buy his water, stand nearby drinking it, and nod in agreement at his prognostications. But I'm afraid he'll tell me what's actually in those pipes, and I'll have to find Erin Brockovich.

---

Everything I own keeps breaking, and it's making me feel like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel. There is nothing more depressing than having a house full of expensive broken shit. In the past six months, the following things have crapped out on me, or gotten effed up in some way: My dSLR (in the shop now) My vacuum cleaner (which now emits sparks when I vacuum, adding an exciting element of danger to my housekeeping duties) My french press (which, haha, I knocked over with the vacuum cord and shattered) My electric tea kettle (since replaced) My lamp shades (Chaucer flung brown drool on them) My upright clothes steamer (just straight up stopped working) My floor lamp (the floor step-on switch came apart).

Today, the “unbreakable” container my five-pound bag of flour was in broke. Can you guess how long I let the mess sit on the floor before I finally cleaned it up?

a) 3 seconds
b) 3 minutes
c) 3 hours
d) I'm just going to wait for Chaucer to develop a taste for flour. I

If you guessed d), you get a human-grade-ingredient dog cookie.

Low Resistivity: A Weird Love Letter

In the cold, concrete-floored basement, there's a shop table covered with the guts of dissected medical devices. Clipped wires and dials. Metal rods and needle-sized levers. These are the trappings of an electrical engineer. This is my father's office. 

I don't mess with any of it, not that I'd get in trouble if I did. My dad encourages curiosity. The only things I'm forbidden to touch are the bench vise and scalpel blades. "You'll lose a finger," he warns, though about which I'm not sure. He encourages curiosity and questions, which occasionally I produce. I rarely understand his answers, however. I am my father's daughter in many ways, but not in this way. He will explain concepts to me a hundred times and I will never get them. That's okay. I'll get a lot of things one day that he never will. 

Still, I like to be in it - this space. There is a sense of relaxed gravity, and intelligence. I'm only eight years old, I don't yet appreciate the sort of mind required for engineering. But there's something magical in my dad's tinkering, that I know. He brings things to life, often with visible sparks of energy. It's dangerous and delicate work, and requires all his concentration. I have to play quietly, if I'm going to be down here.

Right now I'm playing with a stack of ferrite magnets. Cool and smooth to touch, they are the color of coal and the width of dimes. I pry two from the stack and set them down on the table a few inches apart. Slowly, very slowly, I move one toward the other. The second magnet scoots away, powerless to resist the opposing polarity. Then I flip one magnet and reverse the game, seeing how close I can get the disks before they snap together in attraction. The click they make when they combine is eternally satisfying, and a sound that will stay with me forever.

---

I heard it tonight, in my memory, as the heat ran from your body to mine, and things I never understood made sense for the length of a lightning bolt.

Magnetism is a fact of the world we can neither force nor resist. And conductivity is how easily things pass between you and I, because of how we choose to minimize the space and the obstacles. That's all I need to know, anyway.

On A Windy Day

On a windy day, on a late afternoon in February, here's what you can do: You can walk the three blocks from your apartment to the store, because you need things. You need a new mop head, because you've been ever so slightly fastidious about your floor lately. You need index cards, because you've started collecting vocabulary words again - because you've started reading again. Words like marmoreal, canebrake, gracile, loblolly. You need toothpaste.

You can walk that three block stretch briskly, without a coat or a purse to weigh you down. You can navigate the rush hour sidewalk with ease, twisting to squeeze past a crush of disembarking bus riders, weaving lightly through exhausted businessmen in suits, briefcases linked with invisible chains to their wrists. You can feel the late winter chill on your face, and thrust your fists deep into the pockets of your sweatshirt, which is zipped tight against your neck. The wind will lift your hair and your spirits, as it always does, and without looking down, you'll reach into your back pocket, feel for a tiny button on the side your phone, and press it once, twice. Yes. Louder. 

You can reach the far side of the main street, where the sidewalk opens widely, and finally get clear of the crowd. You can then be seized by a feeling of such unexpected, unadulterated, and embarrassingly unjustified happiness that it feels as though someone has shoved you from one spot to the next, across several degrees of uncharted latitude, through some unseen continuum of emotion and consciousness, indifferent to where you'll land. You'll marvel at how different this instant feels from the one just before it. You'll swear you could turn around, there on the city street, and see a fast-fading ghost of yourself stepping forward, ready to assume the moment you're in possession of right now.

You'll want to laugh, but instead you'll just take a deep breath, drinking it in with concentration, and with greed.

You can become acutely aware of your senses, your comportment, your gait. Objects will suddenly shed the cloudy scrim behind which you viewed them just a minute ago and come to life, extra-dimensional. Colors will be obscenely vibrant. You'll stare at the people you pass, fascinated, mystified, vaguely aware that what you're feeling is unreal, a trick, a dream, but wishing everyone else would wake up, too. How can they be so calm in the face of it?

It. What is it? What is it?

It's the undeniable certainty that life is devastating - in its beauty, and in its misery. It's the belief that not only will everything be ok - it already is. It's the knowledge that we are so interconnected in our experience of that beauty and that pain, despite the billion-odd individual paths we're on, that we may as well just stop dead in our tracks, look at one another, and laugh. Or sigh. Or cry.

Everything in your sight will charm and delight you. Every last everyday detail: the way a pretty blonde has carefully tied the belt of her trenchcoat into an off-side bow; the self-conscious jerk with which a teenaged skateboarder shakes his hair from his face, poised and ready for the stoplight to release him; the oddly comforting familiarity of the taxi drivers' faces, queued as they are in their regular spot: Eastern European, and African, and African American. I don't know a single one of them. I feel as though I've known each of them for years.

You can have the thought come dancing into your brain, boastful and irrational as it always is, that you feel things more intensely than other people. You can feel your mind schism at the thought, half of it prickling with shame - What makes you think you're so special?, half of it quietly agreeing - Yes. Yes, you do. 

You'll wonder for the hundredth time if something inside of you is broken, causing you to feel such exquisite, heart-stopping joy at the most mundane of triggers - or if instead something in you is enhanced. Amplified. And, as always when this happens, the wind will stir the leaves in your mind, exposing their opposite, darker sides: yes, but.

Yes, but, even if it's true, even if the wellspring of joy runs deeper in you, so too does the sorrow.

And you can think, for the hundredth time, about diluting both the joy and the sorrow. About saying, Yes, well, the thing is, doctor, the depression really is unbearable at times. Yes, I know this pill will dull the brighter side of things too. On balance, though, I think it would be best.

And you can say, Fuck balance. You can say, Fuck balance, I'll take them both. Because you can, because you've been doing it your whole adult life.

That's what you can do, on a windy day, on a late afternoon in February.

Anything, Just Anything

Ten years ago today a hospice nurse whose name I don't remember came to the spare bedroom in my father's house to tell me he had died. Or maybe not. Maybe she told my boyfriend first. Maybe she told him in the kitchen, keeping her voice low, so he could come break the news to me himself. Maybe he woke me up to tell me, gently stroking my leg until I opened my eyes and waited for him to find the words. Or maybe I was already awake, and bracing for it. Maybe I looked at him pleadingly, secretly hoping it was over.

I don't remember.

Ten years ago today I sat in that spare bedroom, hugging my knees to my chest, humming to myself to block out the sound of the body bag zipping shut, because my father had died ten feet from where I was still alive. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe I lingered in the doorway, morbidly fascinated by the whole scene, numb enough to watch the collapsible gurney get wheeled out into the Florida sunshine.

Maybe it was both. I don't remember. 

Ten years ago today I texted Mason, whose own father had died a few years before, one single word: fin. His own one word reply came quickly: triste.

That I do remember. That definitely happened, just like that. 

I don't remember much of what happened the day my dad died. I remember other things instead, like the incredible love my boyfriend and friends showed me, from the minute I found out he was sick until he was gone thirteen days later, rolling onward for months after I went back home to LA and dealt with the fallout. I am endlessly grateful to myself for writing it all down. If you go back to my posts from April 2012 to fall of that year, you'll see. You'll see how deeply I was loved, and how many magical moments I experienced in all of that love.

But back to my dad. 

I remember things about my dad that I've never written down or talked to anyone about, because the only people who would nod and laugh, well, they're gone too. So it's just me left to remember the random, weird shit about my dad that pops up out of nowhere, like when I do laundry.

My dad was a laundry guy. Me, I'm not a laundry person. I will wear the same thing five times before I wash it, and even then I do so unwillingly, sure I am degrading the precious, expensive fibers of my favorite pieces. But my dad fucking loved doing laundry. He kept his washing machine and dryer in the garage, and kept them immaculate--just like the garage. And he did laundry all the goddamn time. Washed his clothes seemingly daily. Didn't care about shrinking them. And they were already pretty tight to begin with, because despite his best efforts towards staying fit, my father put on a few pounds every year. That can happen when you slam nom M&Ms during Soprano binge sessions. 

And my dad's wardrobe stop evolving sometime around 1989, so we're talking corduroy short-shorts and polos in colors that haven't been fashionable since the Reagan administration. Lots of banana yellow. Oh, and no fabric softener. My dad was anti-fabric softener. Not an allergy issue. Possibly a cheapskate issue? I'm not sure. But there he was, with his stupid, shrunken polos keeping no secrets for his sixty-something belly, and the ridiculous shorts that crept alarmingly high when he sat down. He was an absolute clown in this regard and I would give anything, just anything to run the stupid fucking rough fabric of one of those stupid fucking canary yellow polo shirts between my fingers, because maybe it would help me remember whether I was even in the room when they took my father's body, because I should have been.

I should have been.

Ten years is a long time. You get a lot of scar tissue built up in ten years. But life is ever armed with a scalpel, and it can cut you back open in an instant, and nothing you can do about it. 

If the only day I could have with him again was the day he died, I would take it. I wouldn't have left the room, selfishly, childishly, to go nurse my own heartbreak. I would have stayed by his side and not averted my gaze once, even though his own eyes were glazed over and elsewhere already. I would have kept telling him things that he wouldn't have heard, about what his love had meant to me, and all the ways his personality had shaped mine. And if I could go back to April 30, 2012 but take April 30, 2022 with me, I would lean close and whisper all my news. Dad, guess what? My company is sending me to a gala. They're sending me to big fancy black tie party because they believe in me, and think I can make good things happen.

And I would tell him that after the gala, I'm going to go spend the weekend with someone special in this new city I've made home. And Dad, get this, I would whisper. He's an engineer, just like you. But much better looking. And here I would pause, for laughter that wouldn't come. Then I'd continue:

And yes, Dad, sometimes I am sad like mom and sometimes I am lost like Matt. But I am doing the best I can out here for all of you, and I'm sorry you're not here to see it.

That's some of what I would say. And then I would be quiet and still and let him fall asleep, and I wouldn't leave for anything. 

Dear Mike Deni

Ten years ago this past August, on the second Saturday of the month, I stood on a hill in Golden Gate Park with a plastic cup of wine in my hand. It was cheap red concession stand wine, and it was my second glass in an hour. I was trying to get drunk. I was trying to get drunk so I didn't feel so self-conscious about being at a music festival by myself. I wanted to join the crowd down below, where dozens of people were about to watch a set I had carefully chosen from a lineup of several possible choices. It was a group I'd never heard of until just a few months prior, but something about their music made me put them on my schedule. I wanted to join the growing group of fans, but I wasn't ready yet.

It was a cloudy-cool summer day, in a painful but also wonderfully memorable year. My dad had died a few months prior, and I'd been in a state of semi-mania ever since. Parties and bars, dancing and drugs, nonstop nights out with friends. All the while a three-inch thick binder of paperwork shoved to the back of my kitchen cabinet, haunting every minute of my fun: my dad's will, estate papers, and everything I needed to do to get his affairs settled and my inheritance safely administered. I was simultaneously terrified of it and thrilled by it. I knew it meant financial security and a fresh start for me. All I had to do was pull myself together and get a job, any job, and I would be okay. The depression and anxiety of being shiftless, of having no direction--none of that mattered now. I would be okay, if I could just face down the panic-inducing task of sorting all the legalities out and taking my first, belated steps towards real independence.  

The binder sat and waited. It waited for me to catch my breath after his death. To fly home to LA from Florida and accept reality: Mom and Dad both gone now. On my own for real this time. The binder sat and waited while my friends swooped in with love and laughter to be a short term surrogate family. The binder waited while my boyfriend took me to Bonnaroo. And the binder was there listening when we broke up soon afterward, the terrible weight of my grief flattening us beyond repair. The binder knew it was a bad idea to go to Outside Lands, but we'd already bought the tickets. We figured we could travel separately, maybe meet up for a few hours as friends, catch a little music together.

Cut to day two of the festival. There I was with my wine, my mixed feelings of loss and gain, and all the insecurities that were keeping me from walking down the hill to be less alone than I needed to be. I felt, somehow, both broken and invincible. A difficult past, a family full of trauma and conflict, all the arguments and unresolved anger between my father and I--it was finally gone, gone, gone. No one to frown with silent disappointment at my mistakes anymore. No one to offer criticism but never help. My every choice going forward would be weightless, free from judgment. I could do and be whatever I wanted...if I could only figure out what that was. And in the meantime, music.

The band started up. My heart began pounding, hearing that unmistakable synth-pop sound. Taking the microphone from its stand, you addressed the crowd. And something about what you said or maybe just how you said it--it was like a key turning in a lock. There was a gentleness to it. A humbleness. A recognition of the gravity of the moment. Yours wasn't the biggest band on the lineup, and didn't command the biggest crowd. It was just exactly what I needed, to feel safe enough to lose myself in sound and celebration, to remember what could be beautiful so I could start to forget what had been ugly. 

"Alright, you guys ready?" A tremor of excitement as bodies started to move. "Let's do this."

That's all you said. But it was the invitation I couldn't resist. I tossed back the rest of my wine and took deep, quick steps down the hill to come listen to you, alone but not. 

---

No one ever warns us to keep some music to ourselves. So we share it, to amplify its meaning. To get even higher on it with another than we can get when we are alone. We draw a triangle between ourselves, the one we love, and the song that we've come to believe belongs to us both. With great consideration and ceremony, we place a piece of our heart inside that triangle. We need to. And it's every bit as intoxicating as we knew it would be. 

What they don't tell us is that we'll never get that piece of our heart back. Forever after, the association is galvanized. Good luck separating those songs from the ghosts that cling to them. It's impossible.

But I never shared your music with anyone. It's mine alone. After the festival, I revisited your songs again and again over the years. But I never played Geographer for anyone. It became a signifier of a kind of solo inner life that began that shimmering summer ten years ago. Every time I hear Verona, I can reconstruct the moment exactly. The slight chill on my underdressed arms. Hellman Hollow filling up with day two attendees. Laughter and chatter and music everywhere. My indecision about whether to plant myself on the hill and watch from a distance, or get lost in the mix of welcoming strangers. Then you spoke, and my decision was made. And ever since, the sound of your voice reminds me of my independence and strength. Of my ability to crawl through difficult days, to face down binders and breakups, to break down and bounce back without anyone else's help. Your songs are my selfish, secret strength. 

People worry about me on Thanksgiving, but they do so for the wrong reasons. They worry because I am alone, but really they should worry because I am not. The table is set for one but there are uninvited guests everywhere. My parents are here. My brother, too. They all want me to remember the simple happiness of sitting down to a meal surrounded by the ones that mean you must be home, safe. I don't want to remember that. It's too wonderful and it's too far gone.

On a day when there is always so much to be thankful for, today I am thankful for you. To my left and to my right, memories surge that threaten to pull me down into a deadly well of sadness. But your voice is a through line, a bright, beautiful wire on a cloudy day--again. Ten years I've been listening, without realizing until now just how much it means to me.

So thank you.  

Music and Death

Last night I met up with a friend who I haven't seen in months. We had a great talk. Or rather, I talked, at great length, and he obligingly listened while I was variously self-indulgent, mopey, maudlin, macabre, and morose. What was I talking about, that would merit such descriptors? Music and death. I've come to be quite the expert on those.

I told him that this year, I've become more emotionally invested in music than I ever was before. I always had been, honestly, but now it feels almost alarming—the ease with which certain songs can bring me to my knees. Take the Of Monsters and Men album, My Head Is An Animal. No really, pack it up and take it away from me, because it demolishes me to listen to it. I can barely stand it. But it's a beautiful sort of demolition. I'm broken down and rebuilt every three or so minutes.

Catharsis doesn't even begin to cover what I feel, listening to those songs. They wrote my life. Those warble-voiced Icelanders just sat down and wrote my life. There's love, loss, grief, pain, hope, comfort, and family to be found in the lyrics. I dare anyone who's struggled to love or be loved by a parent to listen to Sloom. I defy anyone who's fought with depression to not connect with Little Talks.

I discovered My Head Is An Animal around the time my dad died, and it carried me from those black days through the grey ones of losing A. It will forever be a lifeline to a time of pain and growth, and I'm grateful for it. But I'm also unnerved by how easily those harmonies can upend me.

Anyway, that's what I said to my friend about music. Having primed him with this cheerfulness, I proceeded to further lighten the mood with an anecdote about my mother's death.

When my mother died, my husband helped me clean out her apartment. There was next to nothing of value in her belongings, but her pantry was full to overflowing with perfectly serviceable dry goods and non-perishable food. My husband discouraged me from taking any of it, but I did anyway. I don't know what made him uncomfortable about it. I guess just the fact that she was dead? Maybe he found it macabre, to touch the things of a dead person? As if her cold, clammy ghost hands had left cold, clammy ghost fingerprints on the plastic wrap of the paper towels.

Anyway, I took two grocery bags' worth of stuff. Mostly canned food. The sort of crap that probably killed her: Chef Boyardee, deviled ham, salt-laden vegetables. I brought it home and put it into our cabinets along with our own food. My husband wouldn't touch any of it, and neither would I, at first. For months, it lurked in the back of our cabinets, passed over but not forgotten, while newer, fresher, and healthier foodstuffs came and went around it.

Then one day, I opened a can of her chicken and rice soup, and heated it up on the stove.

I ate it slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately. I tortured myself with it. I wondered how each spoonful would taste to her. Salty? Too hot, perhaps? I remembered how she looked when she blew on food to cool it, and I pursed my lips in the same way. When the bowl was empty, I felt sick. Remorseful. Like I'd taken something of hers - something extremely personal - and used it, without permission. Like I was using her. Using her up.

It was a game of self-flagellation that I drew out for the next several months. Something would trigger a memory, and I'd suddenly feel overcome with longing for my mother's arms. But there was nothing I could do. The closest I could get to her was this shitty canned food I'd pillaged from her kitchen. So I'd eat some of it. And again: guilt. I was trying to fill myself up with her, but with each bite gone, there was a little less of her left.

Eventually, all that remained was some plain chicken broth. I took an hour to finish it. Swallow after swallow of cold, oily water. I wanted to cry, eating it, but I couldn't. I didn't feel anything. I wasn't even hungry. I wanted to be close to her, but maybe I wanted to hurry up and get the awful exercise over with, too. I needed to feel her inside me. I needed to get her out of my system.

More than once this summer I've had the full, conscious thought, Thank god I only had two parents. I couldn't do this again. You fight with them. You fight to love them, to understand them, to be understood and loved by them. You struggle to relate to them, to identify with them. You reach an age and a maturity where you finally start to do that, but now you're also old enough to fully appreciate the damages they did to do. You forgive them, or you don't. You secretly wish them dead, or you hope they'll live forever.

Then one day they're gone and no matter how complicated your relationship with them was, you miss them so much you could throw up, even though there's nothing, nothing, nothing in your stomach.

Miles Yet Left

I didn’t find out until fall of 2016 that my brother had died that summer.

I only had one brother. He was four years older than me. He was an addict, a violent criminal, and mentally ill. When he died I hadn't seen him in nearly a decade. The last I spoke with him was when our mother died; when our dad died we had no contact whatsoever. His final parole officer was legally obligated to send me warnings that he still made threats on my life. He didn't recommend reconnecting.

Anyway, regardless of all this, learning he'd died (of liver poisoning) knocked the wind out of me. In fact that's very much what it felt like--like a deflation. Like a sigh. Like a third tire going flat on the saddest, most beat-up station wagon ever to limp along the road. In this tragicomic metaphor, my family is of course the station wagon. A car full of alcoholics, anger junkies, depressives, and well-intentioned failures. I'm allowed to say this, being one of them.

When that third tire went kaput, it was like Well fuck. Now what. You motherfuckers all skipped town, and now I'm the only one left, to what? Elevate the family name back up to some baseline of respectability? Prove that our existence was worth something? Well, you guys upvoted the wrong one. Prepare for an afterlife of disappointment.  

I've had a lot of cheese-stands-alone moments in my life, and this was the loneliest cheese I'd ever felt myself to be.

And when I got over myself, I mourned for him, and all the happinesses he might have had. Did have, a very long time ago. I cried for the little boy who pulled his littler sister in a red wagon down a sidewalk in a town so small it didn't matter if they got lost. A smart if difficult boy who loved paper planes, then model planes. A boy who hid from the things that troubled him in boxes of baseball cards, then British Invasion box sets. A teenager whose fucked-up internal wiring was all too easily ignited by some fucked-up parenting. My brother didn't stand much of a chance, to be fair. Our parents were a mess. Our household was a mess. I survived, relatively unscathed, by the skin of my teeth.

So yes, there it is I guess. This post ostensibly about him is really about me, and how I moved on from the death of my last remaining immediate family member: easily enough. Like a patched-up tire with some miles yet left on it. Like you do.

House Grief

When your dog dies, you will find yourself hating your home. There is nothing emptier than a house that has lost a dog. Nothing in the world as quiet, as lacking in joy. You won't want to be anywhere near it. You certainly won't want to be alone with it.

But if you can, spare a thought for that house. You think you miss your dog? How do you think the house feels? At least you get to leave each morning, be out and about in the world. Your poor house just has to sit there by itself, having lost the best friend it has ever known, wondering if it will ever have another.

Spare a thought for the walls, which kept him safe while every day he waited for you.
Spare a thought for the floor, warmed by his body and tickled by his fur.
Spare a thought for the fridge, and all the mischief the two of them caused.
Spare a thought for the bed, cold now, and entirely too clean.
Spare a thought for the bath, and all it endured for the sake of the house.
Spare a thought for the table, who taught your dog to sit as much as you did.
Spare a thought for the yard, the grass and trees and flowers who've lost a playmate.

Spare a thought for the vacuum, who probably feels really fucking shitty right about now.

 What I’d Say

My dad was an engineer. As a kid, I didn't really understand what that entailed. I only knew it meant lots of tools, lots of curious-looking devices, and lots of hours logged at a basement workstation tinkering with them. I learned very early on that my dad could dissect, reassemble, and explain anything with an electronic pulse, though such explanations were lost on me - less because of my young age and more due to the fact that I am not mechanically inclined, at all. That bit didn't land a spot on the DNA he passed along to me. Probably got bumped off by his dry humor and temper. Those I got in spades.

Nevertheless, I liked being down there, in our musty Michigan basement, near him while he worked away on various mysterious apparatuses. I'd color or do crafts (little known fact: clay and pipe cleaners predate Pinterest), blissfully immersed in my childhood creativity while he soldered wires, or calibrated dials.

One day I showed him a drawing I'd done. I feel like I was about seven, but of course I can't be sure. I remember having used the new "neon" set from Crayola, and for some reason, I'm pretty sure I'd drawn a family of aliens. In my mind's eye I see oversized, brightly glowing heads and gangly, striped bodies.

Anyway, he made a huge fuss over my picture. It was the greatest thing he'd ever seen, etc. etc. In fact, it was so good, he wanted to share it with others. Would I make copies for his friends and employees? 

He didn't mean on the Xerox machine. 

My dad was asking me to replicate, by hand, some random, throwaway drawing I'd done just to pass the time. And though to an outsider it might sound weird, or like he was making some inordinate demand of his child, it was actually the highest compliment he could have paid me. And, brilliantly, it would keep me busy and quiet for at least another couple of hours.

I got to work immediately, invigorated by the challenge. I don't recall if it was then that he sweetened the deal or later, but at some point he added that rather than just give my art away, he'd sell it. Ten cents apiece (or some similarly trivial price). 

To this day I remember what the stack felt like in my hand, when I turned it in: triumphantly thick, the paper waxy from crayons I'd worn down to nubs. And I remember him doling out a dime or a quarter here and there over the next week - my earnings from the sale of limited edition reprints.

For all I know he shelved the lot of them. For all I know he kept one and threw the rest away. For all I know he didn't even keep one. But it doesn't matter. What matters is how he made me feel that day, about myself and my creative efforts. What matters is what he taught me about valuing both.

I can't call my dad today. I can't wish him a happy Father's Day and catch up on our respective domestic vagaries. I can't confess to him all the secret things I don't tell you guys, or even my best friends. But I know what the conversation would sound like, anyway. I know what I'd say if I could.

Deadbolt

The ocean tried to follow me home tonight. Did you notice? I didn't want to say anything, didn't want to distract you while you drove. But I wondered if you saw it in the rear view mirror, black and surging and foamy with hate. I guess I know what it wanted. I guess sometimes I want the same thing.

It kept up with us a good while. I could hear it, even though I didn't turn around. Flooding the highway, waves crashing and tumbling over one another in desperation to catch me once and for all. It must be tired of getting so close each time. It must wish I'd be more realistic.

But then you said something, I don't know what it was, but it was like that moment when a sail unfurls, snap! and the wind slams into it, and we picked up speed like a boat on the water, except this water we left behind, because all of a sudden we were flying. And that's how we got home.

I don't think it knows exactly where I live. I think I'm safe. But I'll deadbolt the door and check over my shoulder for the next few days, just to be sure. The dog will keep an eye out, too. He already knows to.

Anyway, that's why I was quiet tonight, in the car. The ocean tried to follow me home.

Tidy

The space where she'd been filled in quickly. Empty is not the natural state of things, so life closed around the specter of her memory with ease. That nothing much changed revealed how little of significance she had displaced. Forty-six of the most meaningless chromosomes ever to be paired. Didn't she know it.

The last in a long line of would-be saviors stood stunned, still clutching his fistful of curling, writhing lies. She wouldn't do that. She's not that selfish. But a heart torn by shock can knit itself back together faster than one torn by pain, and the lies didn't have much bite left, anyway. By spring a vigorous program of forgiveness (the self and the other) muscled out her ghost completely. Everyones knows: spring is no time for looking back.

Safehouse

I'm building a safehouse for my demons, because they need a new place to live. 

I tried keeping them in a prison, but the riots and breakouts were extremely disruptive.

I tried giving them a playpen, but they had entirely too much fun at my expense.

So now, a safehouse. Somewhere out of the way, off the grid, that only I know about. An agreement between us. I'll never evict them (would that I could), but they'll stay quietly undercover. 

Visitors to be allowed at my discretion (but they shouldn't get their hopes up).

The Safest Place of All

The safest place of all is a cave that lets in no light.  

Outside, the sandstorm of the world rages wild. Howling winds slam sheets of dust against the side of the mountain where the cave is hidden. This dust is made of millions and millions of broken, useless words. But you can't hear a thing, when you're in the safest place of all.

In the safest place of all, you are safe from every snarling, biting beast that prowls outside. There are many, but the two most dangerous are Miscommunication and Misunderstanding. They will tear through your heart in seconds flat if they can get at you. 

It doesn't matter what day of the week or month or year it is, when you're in the safest place of all. It could be the most beautiful Saturday of Spring and you wouldn't know or care. All you need to worry about, when you're in the safest place of all, is keeping the fire lit.

The fire you tend could mean anything to you. It could be your resilience, or your self love, or even your will to survive. The fire is everything. And that's why all else fades completely away, when you are in the safest place of all. Keeping the fire going is all that matters.

You can't live in the safest place of all. You can go there for a little while, when you need to. But every practical thing you need to stay alive is outside. It will always be this way. So you must never, ever, ever let the fire go out in the safest place of all. You need to carry a little bit with you, always, to get through the sandstorm of life.

I Sink

It feels like a sunset. It comes on the same way, too. Slow leaking colors, spilling and pooling, shifting and expanding. They are my emotions: joy, fear, anxiety, shame, hope. All my collected feelings that blend and bleed into one another at any given moment, on any given day.

The night pushes them down, flattens them out, steals their space and their oxygen. It crowds them out of the picture as I watch, feeling my oxygen disappear, too. Intensity builds, flaring and fingering out in a last fiery gasp.

Then nothing.

Then dark.

Then emptiness. Or rather, hollowness. What's the difference? Emptiness is the property of a thing that's been void forever, or for a very long time. Or a thing that belongs that way. Or is natural that way. An empty room. An empty glass. Once full, but not needing to be.

Hollowness is a quality of unnatural lack. Things that are hollow shouldn't be that way. Hollow eyes. Hollow soul. Hollow grave. A space asking to be filled.

So, hollowness. Hollow but for wisps of the emotions that blazed bright just moments before. They swirl like smoke inside of me, barely there, and certainly unable to be grasped. And after another few minutes, when dark becomes darker, they're gone, too.

And then it's just black. With very little air to breathe. Everything has been flattened out, the good and the bad. Not even sadness or despair remain. Not enough emotion to generate even a tear.

So I slink home in the twilight, my feet leaden with dread of nothing worth dreading. And I slump against the wall of the elevator, artificial light ugly on my ugliest moment. And I drop onto my bed, dead inside, mechanically lifting my hand to stroke the thing that is so alive, and so needing me to stay that way, too.

And I know it's temporary, and I want to forgive myself, but I can't. Because I don't deserve the indulgence of it, and I haven't earned the right to swim in these waters right now. Have I ever? Probably not.

Probably not.

I'm a joy junkie.

 The Silver Lining of Apathy

What I've come to realize is that apathy is strangely empowering, if I look at it the right way.

Apathy is what exists at the very bottom of the hill. It's the thing I bump into when I go rolling down, down, and down some more. Hitting it doesn't provide any bounce to send me back up - but it doesn't give way, either. There's nothing past it. I can sit there with my back against it and know, if nothing else, that I'm not going down any further.

Apathy is the big, fat cipher I find in the bucket, when I make a last, feeble attempt to pull something up from the well. Even something useless, like anger or fear. But the well is dry and the bucket is glaringly empty. There isn't even any surprise in that moment. The well, the bucket, and I all knew this was coming.

But that's the point at which apathy becomes potentially empowering. Because from that point on, any tiny drop I find in the bucket, should optimism or curiosity or just plain boredom send me back to the well - just to see, just for the hell of it - is a bonus. Oh, ok. Well then. Wasn't expecting this. Guess I'll go ahead and drink it. Yeah. Just a drop, but I wasn't expecting that. Sort of really nice, that was. Kind of incredibly grateful for it. Oops, I'm smiling. And now I'm laughing. 

I'm so very glad no one is witnessing this. I look like a maniac.

Maybe there'll be another drop tomorrow.

Like Neon

I am developing an imaginary suit of armor, so that in the stillness of night, when all pretense of strength has dropped away and I am left exposed, the arrows that come for me can't pierce as deeply.

At first I pictured actual armor. Brass, glinting, annealed - strong as flint. But I am no superhero. 

Now I see light. Warm and white, humming like neon. I bring one knee down, curling into myself, and it cocoons me naturally. It wraps around my body, protective and fierce. And though there is no escaping the onslaught of memories, judgments, fears - if I meditate on this visual - the sting is mitigated. 

I'm trying to convince myself I was born with it.

Unburdened

I heard you wanted to tell me something, but you were too afraid to even think it. To think it would be to know it, and to know it would mean unknowing everything you thought you knew about yourself.

That’s okay, you don’t have to say it. It’s written in neon above both our heads. To me it’s a bright ribbon of truth. To you it’s a buzzing banner of shame that burns particularly hot at bedtime.

I heard your conscience went digging through conversations we didn’t have and found far too many things you should have said. I heard you ran like hell away from them, but once unearthed they stuck to you like burs. They must make it hard to run, and dance, and play.

I heard you enlisted an army of justifications to campaign for you—to go to war against the knowledge that you could have done better. It’s a ragtag army, full of weak excuses and paltry pretext. It won’t protect you.

I heard all of this in the places you don’t even speak—in the rooms you never enter. In the quiet moments of admitting to failure, to fear. In the intimate space between two dropped masks. Your absence there screamed at me again and again, telling me who you really are, until I had no choice but to believe it.

I doubt—even if you tried—that I could hear you now, over the noise of what you didn’t say, when you should have said it.

Real Plastic Snow

In a single story Scottsdale Spanish Colonial, on a sunny, seventy-five degree day in December 1987, a woman and her daughter are making it snow.

They are in the family room, not the living room--a distinction still not entirely clear to the girl, even after two years. As best she can tell, it has something to do with the furniture. The living room sofa is new and expensive, off white and off limits. Patterned across its smooth linen are watercolor swipes of pastel teal, peach, and mauve. Colors the girl will come to know as a familiar Southwestern palette, echoed in near daily sunsets of staggering polychromy. The family room couch, on the other hand, is old and worn, one of the few pieces moved down from Michigan. A solid cream chenille, scattered with pea-sized cigarette burns and clumps of accumulated pet hair, it is the locus of household leisure. One look and it's obvious which is the real living room.

Regardless, they are the only family in the family room today. They'll be the only family in the family room come Christmas, too. In fact, they have been the only family in the entire house all year. The girl's older brother has been in Durango Juvenile Detention Facility since January, and her father moved out not long after. It's just her, her mother, and their growing collection of dogs (two) and cats (three).

The cats love the snow. They sit watching, tails flicking with anticipatory mischief, as the girl and her mother sprinkle it by the handful over the ceramic holiday-themed village assembled across three end tables covered by a sheet. The snow must be purchased new each year. It's too difficult to repackage. By January, the cats will have batted most of it to the floor, spreading it to every corner of the house where it will mix with their fur and the detritus of seldom vacuumed carpet. Easier to just buy more of the stuff. Fine by the girl, since that means a trip to the craft store, where she can gaze at rainbow row after rainbow row of art supplies. Soft bricks of modeling clay, begging to be molded into a zoo full of animals. Furry pipe cleaners, silky-soft and full of silly promise. She knows if she asks, her mother will buy her anything she wants. It's how her mother shows love, though it will be decades before the girl will make that connection. Before she sees that it was easier--simpler and cleaner--for her mother to open her purse than her heart.

But right now, they must ration the Department 56 Non-flammable Real Plastic Snow in order to adequately cover the village grounds. This year the girl, who arranged the pieces while her mother looked on with a glass of wine, has spread things out. The village center is a cozy cluster of commerce as usual--bakery, diner, gas station, post office, city hall--but the homes have been spaced out in an exurb at the outskirts of the tables. Plenty of room between each piece. Room enough for a yard, to be precise. That houses should have wide, grassy yards is a religious certainty the girl didn't know she held until she moved to the desert. But now she understands how lucky she'd been all her life, just to have a thing as basic as a yard. Baseball games with her brother and his friends. Getting dragged around in a sled by her dad. Raking piles of leaves into mounds just for the joy of stomping them. Laying on her stomach in the summer, combing through patches of clover in search of good luck.

None of that is possible at her new home, where there is only jagged landscaping rock and prickly cactus outside her front door, no matter the season. And so she has invested into the little ceramic village this year all her memories of Michigan winters past. Her mother helps her set the weather, but once the snow has been dropped it will be up to her to outfit the town with accessories. Stop signs and street lights with tiny, blinking bulbs. Mailboxes and cars, comically out of proportion to one another. A paperboy on his bicycle, riding down imaginary streets she has lined with real bottle brush trees. It is a magical scene she can escape into for one month a year, while outside there is nothing to indicate winter except a slightly sharper chill at night.

It will have to do for now.

---

On a downtown Chicago sidewalk in January 2022, a woman in a wool coat adjusts her earmuffs and peers up at the blue hour skyline. She has come to recognize the exact shade of luminous, ominous grey the sky turns when snow is coming. Sure enough, the first dry flurries begin to dust her face. She feels it breaking across her again--the sense of wonder and enchantment that hasn't loosened its grip since she got to the city. Snow. I'm in snow.

She has to squint for much of the walk home; the wind is against her and the swirling white flakes fly straight in her eyes. But she has the sights memorized, anyway. The street lamps, already amber in the five o'clock hour. The brass plaques fitted to the stone walls of buildings. The cheerful blue mailboxes and elegant sidewalk benches. The awning-covered stairwells leading up to the train stops. All of it blanketed with snow. Real snow. Crystallized water dropped in gentle clouds or spitting swarms. Snow that builds quiet into the city, dampening sound in a way she didn't expect, because she forgot. She knew once, that she's sure of. But now is a time of remembering some things and forgetting others, and she likes to think that deep inside her is a reawakening of knowledge, of familiarity with deep, real winter.

It is like Narnia to her. Just as magical, just as secret. Because who could understand? Who could ever understand the history of this moment? The snow is a signifier of things she barely realizes herself. It is purifying and redemptive in ways she's almost afraid to consider. Winter has stolen her heart; at some point she will have to break the news to autumn.

But for now, it's time to get home. She walks through the city center--the coffee shops, banks, and restaurants--to her cozy high rise apartment on the edge of the downtown loop. Not for the first time, not for the last, she cries with happiness. She can't help it. It's just too beautiful. It means so much. Gelid droplets run frozen streaks down her face, and she can't tell which are tears and which are melting snowflakes.

The Lake Way Home

I took the lake way home on Thursday, after it snowed. My brain had been telling me lies all day, and I knew the cold and white would shut it up. I have been assured that come summer, the lakefront will be abuzz with music and crowds. But it's a haven to me right now. In the spareness of bare trees, in the quiet expanse of a park waiting for warmer days, my mind goes similarly still. Spellbound by the steel and pearl of winter, I feel nothing but the beauty of its soft, frozen palette. The right colors, I am learning, will mute the wrong sounds. 

The lies are nothing new. Now and again throughout my life, they worm their way up from the depths of my depression where they only lay dormant--never dead. They find a toehold in my heart, lately made vulnerable by months of increasing social isolation. From there they launch an assault, climbing up my spine and dropping dread, heavy as lead, into my shoulders. A nameless, sourceless sadness I haven't asked for and don't deserve comes over me. Shimmering whispers become voices with form and cruel purpose, and then there is no refusing the message. 

---

The grounds south of Millennium Park were devoid of everyone except a trio of teenagers sheltering on the back side of an empty stage. They huddled close, and though I was curious, I limited myself to a single glance their way. They wore blankets and recent enough haircuts that I decided I didn't need to worry. I told myself they probably had more than just blankets to keep them warm, anyway. 

More troubling were the geese, which blocked every path to the water. They had fanned out across the field and sidewalks, preening their feathers with a proprietary air. A few stretched their wings and honked. They're south for the winter, I realized. This twenty-degree Midwestern February is their tropical vacation. All the more reason to steer clear. These were not the same lazy, overgrown ducks tormenting dogs from the ponds of Whittier Narrows. These creatures could commit crimes.

The pathway that runs alongside the lake was vacant. No one else wanted the view, the fresh air, or the exercise badly enough to fight the wind--which was formidable. Wind that bit my fingertips every time I shed my gloves to take a photo. Wind that dared me to walk close to the water's edge and see if my luck held. Wind that blew every awful thought out of my head. 

---

Some of my boyfriends have teased me, in varying degrees of kindness, about the lack of color in my life. About my white furniture, my strictly neutral bedding, the washed-out hues of my wardrobe. I take the ribbing passively; they wouldn't understand. Too much color is too much. It overloads my senses, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Brights can feel unpredictable, uncontained, aggressive. It is the legacy of my LSD usage, and one I accept gratefully, since along with that heightened sensitivity has come an enhanced awareness of the games color plays. I can be mesmerized by the simplest tableaus anytime and anywhere, natural or manmade. Differing shades of the same color--or differing colors in the same shade and intensity--will call out to me and I will stare, dumbstruck, at the way they have conspired to come together in that moment. Acid kicked open a new door in my brain, and behind it was a rainbow bigger than life itself. Time has closed the door to all but a narrow crack. What pours through that crack is beautiful--but loud. 

Pale colors are a respite from all this noise. I can slip into their subtlety and feel safe. Muted, faded tones are where the volume is turned down low. And when the volume is turned down low, it's hard to hear the lies my brain tells me. Like:

You're too broken to be loved. 

There are others, but that is the poison into which they all distill. COVID was the primary alembic. A confusing, messy breakup the secondary. And after a year and a half of little messaging to the contrary, I am all but defenseless to my lying brain's attack.

---

I stayed at the lake as long as I could, as close to the edge as I felt comfortable. Lakes don't get angry. Lakes are indifferent. But in the turbulent, viridian water I thought I heard an accusation. You wanted this. You knew you wouldn't know a soul. You knew it would be hard, and take time. Far in the offing, baby blue sky teased, reminding me of sunnier times. I wasn't interested. Blue sky is an ex-boyfriend I would never take back.

The wind eventually battered me back from the water, westward into the park. Further inland, the spindly trees had as much to say as the slapping waves. They held up their snowy limbs in example. Be patient, they urged. Look at us. Look how long we must wait, every year. For the company of leaves. For the joy of birdsong. For the sweetness of spring. 

This is a season of waiting, they said. This is a season of patience. Listen to the colors all around you, and let the quiet be enough for now.

I left before dusk could chill me beyond repair for the night. But the colors and the quiet stayed with me long past dark, and I decided I would take the lake way home again soon.