"It's a Barnum & Bailey world, just as phony as it can be..."

Night Sixteen ("A Year Ago, You Painted")

Sinking into the faux-leather of your couch has become almost normal by now, these nights. Me and the downstairs -- we understand each other. The kitchen must stay only slightly used; the windows i may have my way with; and that space under the steps is all Sierra. Day and night, a practice in normalization. Playing music helps; playing some music doesn't. But then the definition of 'helps' is in flux, too -- as in, when is it okay to feel you so distinctly not here? & when is it much better to ignore it? Still in the process of figuring this out, and will one day report on whether I'm able.

So strange, how while here it seems i must seek desperately for an anchor to keep tangibly abreast of myself -- while what is having a place to stay if not an anchor in itself? And your place, at that, where i've felt so welcomed & comfortable, so many times before. Though not as many as i would have liked, living so far away. Seeing the unfinished paint reminds me of that; the blue tape still lining many corners, and upon the glass of your wall mirrors. And not the only things unfinished, either -- your almost touch on everything, and everything still in waiting. Maybe me, too.

It's funny how one can know something so clearly that it changes the very structure of her being, and yet so conclusively cut off the conscious knowledge of it. I feel like I set the fathomless loss of you aside with the knowledge that I would be coming here to deal with it this summer, and now it's like I can't break the habit of intentionally forgetting. Yet when i'm caught off guard and do, the re-shock of forrealremembering is as harsh & unexpected as a slap in the face by a familiar hand. While talking/writing/thinking about it somehow keeps one at a safe distance from its truth...

In some ways, being here without you only makes the unreality of it all that much more real, if that makes any sense. So that it can't be. As does this process of normalization, which I thought ought to be a good idea. It's as though my mantra of 'it is what it is', now reads 'it is what it was', and going back has proved senseless.

-L (6/8/11)

Second night; your place.

Sister,

I wanted to say something about the peace, too. That being surrounded with the things you lived with - breathed in - began & ended up keeping, brings its own sigh of relief or release. It's the closest I can come to you now.

And while in this space, by experiencing it as it is, rather than as I feared/thought/expected it would be (especially what with expectation's treachery), I come to realize/understand/see that all of the pain we're in really only reflects an internal struggle with this shakeless sense of despair & injustice. But rather than against these things we struggle for them, as a way of fighting for our own failed faith/hope/expectation. I don't see how it can be any other way. We show our disappointment & resentment like a young faceless couple wear their hearts on their sleeves. Flaunting it; defiant in the face of what is - simply, and yet so impossibly.

This peace here, with & without you, is the absence of that struggle. For better or for worse, and really just the same.

-L (5/23/11)

First night; your place.

Sweetie-pie,

I'm staying at your place tonight. I intend to stay for the summer, if I can hang. It's so quiet here. Everything holding its breathe, clearly waiting. Awaiting your return to animate the purpose behind the existence of all your belongings, for you to show them why they were chosen to be placed just so. I could describe it as a void; a kind of limbo exists here, accompanied only by the whish-whish-whish of the fountain beneath your finally re-opened window. It's like walking the brink of reality or sanity - and for the life of me (or you) I can't tell which way is down. Rather like it destroyed the deepest secrets of at-core expectation, your crash manifested this limbo in a blink or two of eyes, still looking-on dumbstruck. Suddenly everything here has been locked in, and all of it hangs. Frozen without a trace of cold; water without the thought of wet, yet formed. It's only me, the touch of you on everything, and my missing you, that moves...

And Sierra, of course. I scared her something awful when she tried to lay on your bed. ('Never again!', you'd said.) I'll get her a dog bed tomorrow, if I don't go to my internship first thing. I'm not even sleeping on your bed - it's not that you wouldn't let me or want me to, it's that you oughta be sound asleep beside me. And I can't forget that the last time I slept here, you were. So the couch it is for now.

Tonight I wandered around, utterly distracted without a hope of rational thought to even tempt my mind into believing. I stared at your littlest things on the bookshelf. Read and re-read that post card I sent to you years ago, still on the fridge, addressed "para mi hermana hermosa...amor de mi vida!" Felt like an invader, being here. (Still do so far.) So private you are, and yet everywhere surrounding me are symbols and tokens of everyone you love. You kept us all with you, always. How odd that pieces of ourselves should become our only remnants of you...

-L (5/22/11)

"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."