"There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road." -J.N.

What an astonishing and ridiculous month April truly is. Oh Saturday, my Saturday! With your Kellerweis Hefeweizen and hummus on toast, and more projects/papers/exam preparation than a girl really knows what to do with, besides begin. Always beginning, it seems, since the endings aren't something it makes sense to talk about.  (Anymore.)

Ten momentous birthdays, one heartbroken anniversary, eight silly school assignments, and more than the year's worth of radiation and ambivalence later--all we have to show for it is a solemn afternoon with enough time to consider. The face on the screen with the smile that was. Frozen in place, before a now finite number of backdrops.

And a suitable poem....

Grief

Trying to remember you

is like carrying water

in my hands a long distance

across sand. Somewhere people are waiting.

They have drunk nothing for days.

Your name was the food I lived on;

now my mouth is full of dirt and ash.

To say your name was to be surrounded

by feathers and silk; now, reaching out,

I touch glass and barbed wire.

Your name was the thread connecting my life;

now I am fragments on a tailor’s floor.

I was dancing when I

learned of your death; may

my feet be severed from my body.

by Stephen Dobyns

...if only for the afternoon.

-L (4/30/11)

[172]

[Why dreams are so much easier. And lists. And disbelief. How words were as good as their definitions, before the day got in the way of the sun. And the brightest light blinked out--but everyone else woke up, just the same.

When did this detachment take up residence in my mind? Never as cool as you, everything would startle and marvel me. Now none of that. Losing interest, or lost? Or realized its illusion? Which always you saw through...? No sé. But today, I met a friend who helped me to forget to forget. And the feeling graduated only to a still ambivalence. Not sure if I can handle such awful relief so soon.

Your picture makes me cry. (Not what you would have wanted.) Takes me back to that day of learning the un-learnable; those instant, ancient, wrenching sobs, unabashed in public. All that time just waiting to be heard. Continue to be felt. Like yesterday still, but less startling now, somehow.]

[-L (3/30/11)]

Five months. And Sugar says...

"That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really fucking hard to get there...

You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal."

http://therumpus.net/2010/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-44-how-you-get-unstuck/

(Thanks A.)

-L (3/10/11)

"No one knows where the ladder goes."

CarTroubled Musings

Baby-love,

I want to tell you about strange, momentary connections. And how they come from every-which-way.

Last night my truck wouldn't start. I'd left the house for school at 7:30am and walked out of my last class at 9:30pm. I crossed the street to the Starbucks parking lot where I'd stashed it, being pushed along by the drizzling winds of a welcome storm. I crawl in through the passenger door, soaking and feeling high after a night of talking International Women's Movement in my Human Rights Advocacy class, scoot over behind the wheel and turn the key. Chicka-chicka-cough-cough-whirrrrrrr.

For the next three hours I encountered all types: nice Asian men willing to try their hand at jumper cables; a sweet, all-out-fix-it guy that helped diagnose, pop-the-clutch, and push; and wonderful fathers able to scroll through the list of every mechanical possibility not-taking-place. Alas, all to no avail. Finally, my merciful roommates saved the day by driving a 60-mile round-trip out to me, just to sign the silly AAA papers that the tow-truck-driver brought to offer. And closing in on 2am, I finally found myself home--still reeling from the depth of conversation just had in the toasty cab of a flat-bed, as it carried me and mine through the wind & roaring rain falling reckless on Highway 17.

I can't believe I don't remember his name. Why does the mind block out such crucial details? Nonetheless, Mr. Norteño-Tow-Truck-Driver and I somehow got around to talking about drugs (something about the last time he towed to Santa Cruz--a 50-year-old woman in an M-Benz exclaiming from nowhere: "I don't even care--I love weed!"), which somehow lead him to tell me about his older sister who had overdosed on methamphetamines two years ago.

She was five years older than he was, and his only sister--like I'm five years older than you and your only sister. He told me that he and his wife were pregnant with their second child when he found out, and how they took in her five kids after she died. Five kids; three birthdays--two sets of twins flanking the middle child. 4s-10-14s when it happened; 6s-12-16s nowadays. How their father had up and split after their mother died, somewhere in Washington state perhaps, and hadn't written one Christmas/Birthday/Howdy card since. The profound anger at this. Knowing it should have been that useless fucker instead, were the world a decent place.

Of course I told him about you after he disclosed these god-awful things to me. It made me a teensy-weensy bit grateful, because at least we're not riddled with a tortured knowledge that you did it to yourself. Because you didn't; it was unjustly done to you--and this is a bitter yet righteous place to occupy. At the same time, at least he still gets to live in a world that makes sense--that people's actions may come with tragic consequences, but they still have a say in whichever brutal direction life takes them...

I've yet to decide which is preferable. Frankly, neither hold much of a candle to the world we thought we inhabited 130 days ago. And when it comes right down to it, I think Ani says it best: "I envy you your ignorance. I hear that it's bliss." Though I know you'd just roll your eyes and smirk to hear it.

-L (2/16/11)

Four months. And Sugar says...

"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room."

http://therumpus.net/2011/02/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-64/

(Thanks J.)

-L (2/10/11)

"Because death is just so full, and man so small." -M&S

January 9th, 2011. Three months to the day that your co-worker's car spun out of control--tossing you out rather than trapping you inside--and I dream of you for the first time. Finally.

But the dream doesn't alleviate my fearful sorrow with these images of you I'm given--because where are you now, if not in some goddamn lucky afterlife? No sé... Instead, they delineate and depict the monumental sadness I feel constantly with this living loss of you--the only thing we have left to hold onto. And even bloom fresher streaks of sorrow with the inadequacy of their pictures: You. Older than you should be. And yet at 7, wearing that gray dress you used to have and your cut short blonde hair, speaking animatedly and happily to someone outside of the frame of my mind's eye. Probably Jacob, I think. And then me, as I was--thick bangs past my brows, with long straight hair and an ugly flowery dress with a mismatched, open scruffy shirt over. Younger than I should be. Walking into the room looking always unkempt and insecure. Uncomfortable in my skin; unblessed with your grace. How you held out your hand to me without even looking my way, once I'd settled into the corner alone. How grateful I felt! Crawling toward you, toward your outreached hand, and then laying my head on your knee. My present self in the doorway, watching you place that hand on my younger self's shoulder. Watching my own young face smile; her eyes close, seeming finally at ease. All the time sobbing underneath that door frame, knowing what I know.

I texted you tonight: "Home safely. :) Love you all! Thanks for a lovely weekend." Automatically, in a bulk message to our family, letting them know I made it back alive because this is necessary now. I clicked your name in my phone with everyone else's: "Beautiful!" Up at the very top on purpose, as it's always been.

And I got a response back immediately that stilled my heart--making my stomach flip with excitement that even then knew itself to be doomed; to surely melt into disappointment: "Whoz thiz"?

Breath stopped; tears immediate; slight nausea soon to follow. I steeled my shaking hands and responded, knowing nothing had changed--impossible to forget or pretend: "Sorry, this used to be my sister's number. I didn't realize it was re-activated."

Because I lie. It wasn't an accidental text at all. I very deliberately include you in these stupid little family updates. Every time. Even before the phone company disconnected your number, cutting off what wasn't your voice anyway, since you never recorded your own messages. And then after, too, just because. On the principle of the matter. Because I love you and want you to know that I'm safe. Because you're not. If I'd had a camera on my phone I'd have still sent pictures of flowers to your disappeared phone--every morning, if I remembered--just cuz you always used to like getting them. I include you in these texts because it feels wrong not to. Until now. Now that all of a sudden, there's someone else on the other end:

"Oh its ok". That being it. It. Like nothing. 'Course it isn't.

-L (1/31/11)

[113]

[No longer able to sleep through the night. / Summer internship, back in L.A., to stay in your house if I dare. / Your phone no longer disconnected, answering me with someone else's text. / Auna-long-talks. Lovely. Jake's birthday, and the dinner/dessert/concert. / Unforgivable, the drop-off rate of friends, done with it. / And 1,000 Memories. The fear that comes with it not working. / Sisters--and what it's like to be one. And the lonely women who have no idea. / Angry cell phone--lost in the stupid freakin' desert. No one to blame. Like Mecca; the Holy Grail. / No message...disconnected. / "Do you ever not think about her?" No. How much easier if I believed in the afterlife... At all? / "Interesting" facts at school--not you. Because how to answer what's up in your life, when you know they don't want to know? / Honoring you with regret? How else? The love not being able to hold you. / Grief book. For siblings. No one else interested in having it. / 1-9&10-2011, and dreams... 1st: Me, you, young. Crawling over to be comforted. You reaching your hand out without even looking; head in lap, finally able to relax. 2nd: Losing something, a pocket watch, gold and antiqued and feminine--for to double as a locket? Needing to give it to you; not finding it anywhere. Everything falling apart, everywhere I touch. And you in a hurry to go. But not wanting to.]

[-L (1/31/11)]