Let’s start with the memory of the first day in January of this year. She said “I have a feeling this year will be a hard one.” How dare that psychic pisces say that…. Her predictions are never wrong.  Let’s start with the fact that she was right. This year has been hard - knock the wind outta you kind of hard - that space where you don’t know if your breath will kick back in kind of hard.  Your breath - that natural rhythm of lungs doing their job of keeping the tempo akin to the breaths of waves. What is an ocean with out it’s lullaby of in and out, in and out?  How can seconds feel like years? How can years feel like seconds?  In that forever moment of a short circuit of body detaching from brain detaching from being- will life return?  Not just life, but living?  Or has that last breath been robbed from me as I take my final bow to this world, tunnel vision drapes it’s final curtains - no on-chore or standing ovation.  How can not one but two lives in this household kiss the lips of death? How can that grim reaper flirt with this home like a lover worth running towards?  How can we know the scent of the river of styx? Like a stench you can’t get out of your nose - like how smell brings you right back to a memory, or a nightmare, or both.  Let’s not forget the moments that were miracles.  Let’s not forget the seasons that sunshine kissed our skin.  Let’s not forget that this year is already passing.  Let’s not forget that time heals,  That phantoms can fade to ghosts,  Ghosts can fade to feelings,  Feelings can flow freely.

It doesn’t have to be beautiful  It doesn’t have to be significant  It doesn’t have to make sense now, then, or even in the future.  It doesn’t have to be profound,  It doesn’t have to be inspirational,  It especially doesn’t have to be buried,  Or stuffed,  Or jammed,  Or ignored.  It doesn’t have to be forgotten  And it doesn’t have to be winced at.  It doesn’t have to be a catalyst,  It doesn’t have to be packaged and wrapped  With a fancy ribbon.  It can be ugly sometimes,  And aimless sometimes,  It can make no sense and perfect sense,  It can feel like it was a lifetime ago and five minutes ago  It can bring you to your knees or spring you forward with hope and desire  It can be a heavy velvet read curtain.  One that can only be pried open by you lifting your hand and peeling away the mask of fabric.  Of stepping just one foot forward.  It can be the shadow that you now know how dark its corners can get.  To know how deep that bottomless hole can actually go.  Knowing what the gravity despair not only looks like, but feels like.  Because to feel it is to know it exists.  To know it exists means you know the limit of it.  Of you.  To know what the blackest of night feels like in your body also means the surrender of morning’s first ray of sunlight has never been so sweet.

I sat in my own bubble as I waited for my delayed flight to hopefully start boarding soon.  I hear to my right a muffled exchange of a tween boy being dropped off and the flight attendant assuring she would help him fly home alone safely.  After awhile, having all my stuff around me, I didn’t want to haul all my shit to the bathroom, so I ask the tween two seats away from me “hey love, do you mind?….” before finishing my sentence I see him turn to me, well over twenty minutes after he was dropped off, with fat tears brimming at his eyelids.  “Hey love - oh what’s wrong?” I ask  He says “I miss my uncle” and starts sobbing.  I ask him if he wants to sit next to me. He says yes. He slides over. I ask him if I can put my arm around him, he says yes. I drape my arm around him as if he were my own.  I ask him what his uncle means to him. He tells me he’s like his dad to him. He tells me he is going home to San Jose to his mom and grandma, but his dad is in prison for being a pedophile. He shares all of this without being able to pronounce his “r’s” and holding a stuffed animal in his arms.  I ask him what him and his uncle did together. He told me about the ghost town they visited and how he saw a donkey ghost and a man ghost and they were green looking and he didn’t get a picture because he was so scared.  I tell him what a beautiful memory they got to make together. I tell him how when we miss someone, when it aches like that, it shows just how important those people are to us.  He tells me he’s excited for school but gets bullied by some kids. I ask him if he knows what it means when kids bully, he says it’s because something is happening at home. I tell him he is wise for 13.  He offers me some of his pizza. I give him my mints. He tells me thank you. I tell him thank you. He hugs me around my neck and I realize I’m about to miss my flight now.  I leave him with tears dried from his eyes, mine pouring like a faucet, letting my heart shatter in my chest in the most beautiful, terrible way.

So let me live forever by sharing the little joys - and by joys I don’t mean these beaming moments of bliss - but the in between. The small. The familiar. The pauses. The sighs. The slowly closing of eyes.  Let me share with you the walk I take each day. The one where I wear the slip off shoes on purpose so when I see that patch of soft lush grass, I plant both bare feet there and let the cushion of Mother Earth consume me.  Better yet, I let myself go limp and crumble onto the ground, splayed out like a starfish on some stranger’s front lawn. She laughs nervously “honeyyyy you can’t just lay on people’s front yards”  “But I needed it and they don’t have a sense so it’s free game” I whine as our dog stands above me with her wrinkly towels hovering over my head.  Let me share with you how I gasp when I see the tissue paper poppies bloom. How I take a selfie with the orange and yellow flower bush.  How I have to stop at every iris and note how she is the sluttiest flower, just strutting her labias off like the freak Mother Nature is.  Let me share with you how I rushed my walk yesterday, head down and eager to get home. Eager to do instead of see what’s around me.  Let me tell you how I was stopped by our elderly neighbors, our adopted aunties, who made me sit in the yard with them, fed me homemade potato salad, asked questions slowly and shared nonchalantly how the garden boxes they just put together will outlast their time on earth. And hey giggled at that. And said “isn’t that a beautiful realization?”

The reality is that we don’t talk often, and if we do, it takes a long time before we can get to the marrow of any bone.  Instead I text you about taxes and I have yet to do them. You respond with that I’m in good company because you haven’t done them either.  I am on the road for weeks at a time and you have no idea where I am. Not because you don’t care, but because you don’t know how to communicate that you do.  Instead I text you that I woke up to my bus tire being flat, and you show up within nearly minutes with an air compressor and instructions on how to handle it moving forward. We make plans to do projects together, not to just spend time with one another.  I see that our last is done, but you don’t leave. You linger on the couch, ask questions about work that might carve a bit more time for us to be together.  I know you don’t want to leave.  I know you don’t want to go to your home that always feels like a house.  I know you don’t want to leave your kid that you love like the ease of the blood flowing through your veins, but reality is a knife, yours, however, a butter knife trying to carve into a tender steak.

It’s fascinating to me that children can be raised in the same household but experience things so differently…. Call it nature or nurture, it doesn’t matter, the outcomes show it’s somewhere in between, at least in my family.  In my experience of childhood, anger was the only emotion that was allowed. It was the only emotion that was modeled to me. So like the good little oldest girl I was, I took that emotion and made it my identity. I built those walls so high that then when I was coined “bossy” “abrasive” or a “bitch”, you saw me tilt my chin up high in the air, but didn’t see me sobbing in the bathroom stall later.  My sister, only four years my younger - every ligament, every joint, every bone that makes up herself is sweeter than a summer peach. Anger was a poison to her, IS to her.   And here we are in adulthood, trying to unweave the steel braids of our experiences from our younger years, reared under the same roof but worlds apart of scripts to present each other.  My anger is its own disease, but served as a motivator of what was okay and what wasn’t. Anger allowed me to learn the full sentence of “no.”  Anger to her was a cancer, surging through her body, multiplying to kill all of her before her body could express it. Anger is not a disease when we are able to express it. Anger is a cancer when we stifle it. How can her body withstand that?

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