Eleven months. [335]

(Embodying our experiences. Our pasts. Our tragedies, [somehow] lived through. "You're gonna lose what you love the most." -B.E.)

("Two sisters." All I overhear on the plane from Newfoundland. And sisters being everywhere these days.  Except for mine.)

(What's the use in feeling inadequate, except to waste time? As if it makes sense to save it.)

Four days after arriving in Costa Rica, we were on our way home. Besides the glaring omens, unknown to be so at the time (as most are), there's very little I remember about that brief trip Now. All I know is that we made it way too far from the airport, and getting back was the longest, blankest, most joyless journey of my life. I don't doubt it will remain so. The boat ride, bus ride, plane ride - all gone Now, like curses etched into ancient stone, dictating or directing the inevitable. Already damned, this sudden role as one of your "survived by"s.

But I ask you, what else is there to talk about? To think about? Damned be damned - it's the only thing I don't Now have trouble giving a damn about.

I don't Now nor do I expect to ever believe in the prospect of "getting over" this. All is Now wrong with the world that we lived in before - though I don't notice so starkly nor think of it as steadily. And yet I'll never feel right about fully abandoning our former world only to fake faith in this new one. All the same I'd like to learn to sand down the sharp edges of this naturally-occurring Self-Pity, which flows freely from the fact of having lost the irreplaceable. If not individual self-pity merely, than universally-affirmed; a collective self-mourning.

Having just finished "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion, I Now have this word in my vocabulary, with its usual sense of derogation wiped clean from this context. That is, the context of grief. Of mourning. Indeed, if one cannot allow these feelings of self-pity in the face of monumental and foundational Loss, even as it strikes out at one's recognition of Life, then when can this be possible? I do believe it to be the most appropriate of long-term responses, insofar as the alternative is accepting this loss as 'okay'.

And of course it's not.

Nor will it ever be.

As for the magnitude of your presence Now lost to us, self-pity is all that remains to acknowledge its gravity. To bear witness and pay tribute to its not-'okay'-ness.

And yet. The days do pass. The experiences of the day still require energy, focus, attention. And my eyes have learned to blur; to stay drier, longer Now than ever since. (For the most part.)

(The thought of fiction - how it sounds - presents as pointless to my mind's internal ears. Even though I know it's not.)

("My thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth..." -M.M.)

(I'm sorry. I can't care about description any longer. The very idea of describing a room I've been in, or a person or house I've seen, seems tedious to the point of desperate and tearful, bewildered exhaustion. Though I know why, I can't say how it happened. Or how long it will persist in being true.)

But the ball is Now set to rolling resolutely, toward the end of Year One. It will be good to be with our family. Necessary. And to see the faces of your friends reflecting their most cherished memories of you, putting the sun to shame.

-L (9/10/11)

Ten months.

Yesterday was the ten-month anniversary... 'Anniversary' is such an inadequate word. Wrong. No celebration is represented, only most deliberately honoring her and sharply regretting the fact. That we have to. That taking her life and youth and well-being for granted no longer applies. Is no longer possible. A fact as wrong as the word 'anniversary' to describe the 10th.

My heart growls for a different reality, like the rumbling hunger of a skipped breakfast/lunch/dinner/lifetime worth of meals. My head subsists on numbness and neglecting memory. On skipping hours. I'm returning now from a trip to Newfoundland with M -- my/our first since Costa Rica and the sudden lack of Katie. Heavy, this hole-shaped her. A her-shaped hole. And getting darker with every passing "first since." Come two months from today, on Oct. 11th, 2011, we'll no longer be able to look back a full year and wonder, 'what had she been doing then?' Come a year past from that date, she'd have already been gone. Empty, the thought and its feelings of this soon expected new fact -- just like the already tired old facts of this last year.

["My sister's life was 21 years long."]

["My sister's life was 21 years long."]

["There is no 22."]

No 2011. And no acceptable explanation. No 'okay.'

She takes with her our remaining years as well, as adequate. As acceptable. 2011 has been barely a blur of a year. So will all the other years, however many more there might be. The her-shaped hole remains, and a hole won't be painted over, despite the vibrancy of hue offered. Even though she deserves to be decked out in only the brightest of colors. So we just keep painting around it -- outlining/contrasting/highlighting the black, as there's no covering a hole with paint. Or words, for that matter.

[last night i dreamt about you, my sweet sister. it was the fast forward from the before to the after, and all of it i'd photographed with my phone along the way. browsing through the wretched time past, spent in a house that was unfamiliar to me, i somehow notice a brief blur in one of the electronic images of the after. i zoomed in, and there you were, defying all that has most recently become true, despite ourselves. it was you, but it wasn't. 'you' were floating above the room, parallel to the floor and looking down on it serenely. i recognized the outfit you wore. so it must have been you, despite the impossibility of your position and timing. i ran around the house, trying to call everyone's attention to the concrete proof that you existed still, somewhere, in some alternative realm, and that you peeked in on this one occasionally and looked to be at peace with it! like you were still here, almost. but when i found people around, the different faces of my family, the picture was gone. not just you, but the picture itself, having taken you with it. i could no longer find it among the other dull, gray images. i spent hours hitting the snooze button this morning, trying to buy the time it would take to once again spot the image before i had to awake. to this. but of course i couldn't.]

-L (8/11/11)

"Packing...

...to put away the dreams, rather than to live them."

Nine months. And Sugar says...

"[19.] When my son was six he said, “We don’t know how many years we have for our lives. People die at all ages.” He said it without anguish or remorse, without fear or desire. It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was 45 years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at 89, my mother at 63, my mother at 46. Those things don’t exist. They never did.

[20.] Think: my [sister’s] life was [21] years long. Breathe in.

[21.] Think: my [sister’s] life was [21] years long. Breathe out.

[22.] There is no [22].

[23.] You go on by doing the best you can, you go on by being generous, you go on by being true, you go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on, you go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days, you go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage."

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/

(Thanks L.D.D.)

-L (7/10/11)

"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)