I have had so many lives while trying to get to the one I imagined for myself. My life has been made up of vignettes—suspended and disparate vignettes. I remember a dinner I had years and years ago with my first love, and a family member and her then-boyfriend; afterwards, my boyfriend told me how every time we did something, every experience always led him to think this is how it's going to be now. From here forward, we would be having these dinners with these two. But they broke up not long after, and after a time, so did we. It was the only dinner of its kind. Still, I think about that idea, the way a pattern develops, or even just an occurrence, and it feels like the way things will be.

I've made a sort of tenuous peace with my life unmoored.

I was once a girl waking before dawn to trudge through the snow to lifeguard at a swimming pool in a college town in new england. (Remember the night sledding down the Brown Green on cafeteria trays?) I was the child in rowboats, and the woman painting inky blue skylines, the preschool teacher, the nanny, the woman in a business suit presenting at museum conferences, and the apron covered in printing ink, and artist talks, and high heels and hiking shoes, and watching the sun rise from the roof, and the woman who's loved so hard and so deep and so many times over that counting doesn't suffice.

I was once the girl who built gallery walls, and tore them down, and wrote poems about what life would be like in ten years. It isn't anything like what she imagined.

In this life, phosphorescence is my season. But I haven't seen it since that week in August, at grad school. The one where possibility felt palpable, where ideas and artmaking felt wide endless and expansive, and I snuck away from the beachfire late at night to kiss a man I shouldn't have, and I watched the stars fade and the sky grow pink, and love and life and future felt like the sun rising in me.

I haven't swam in phosphorescence in years, but it feels like swimming among the stars. It was just this summer that I rediscovered swimming in lakes—the silence, the wide open blue sky, the way a toe breaching the surface makes a sound deep and echoing underwater and the sound of my breath and heartbeat amplified. The first night of that camping trip we all stumbled down to the lake's edge and dove in and under. Stars thick in the night sky. This was a life that felt so alive, every part of me was happy. Free.

And what about that brief vignette of red lipstick and Lana Del Rey, boozy fancy cocktails, and dancing all night?

And there is the night I spent out in the gorge last month, the spur of the moment trip we took after hearing bad news, the company and the drive into the golden hour lifting my heavy heart, reminding me of hope and pleasure and open air. He held my hand and touched my face, and things felt actually better. We drank hot chocolate from stainless steel travel mugs after watching the light drain from the sky, slept in the folded out backseat bed under the skylight in the car, made coffee at dawn and hiked up to where we could see the gorge and the river spread out in front of us. To the west, greens and blues, and to the east the trees gave way to rich yellows and golds. We were on the precipice, sitting at the very edge of where the landscape changed, the newest place that felt like this is how it's going to be now.

But the quiet white sky, the golden hue of the worn-down wooden floorboards in my empty apartment, the sound of cartires on wet streets, the poet in me finding meaning in sounds and colors and the words written on passing trucks, the familiar tinny voice calling out the line number on the bus, the mixture of sadness and hope settling in my chest, sleepless nights in the company of sitcoms or my thoughts under the yellow halo of my bedroom lamp, laughter with friends, walks around the lagoon, my studio... this is the life in-between, the thing that always returns between the hypersaturation of each vignette. The baseline is the sound of my own breath in the space between the notes.

Antilamentation
by Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

I don't know how to talk about the things that are really happening, the things that are bigger and deeper, the things rooted to deep lines of blood and family, and the ways we've loved each other all our lives.

I found words—What if we do nothing and then she's just gone?—tumbling from my mouth, into the phone receiver, falling through the ether and backhanding my mother's soft open face. The words as I type them bring instantly to mind that terrible time I slammed the door to my bedroom in a dramatic teenage fight with her, how she was in the doorway, how the door hit her head, how her glasses hit her nose, her wince and gasp of pain. Nothing is worse than injuring my mother; nothing is worse than my mother injured. But this is what is true. My mother is injured, and I cannot fix it. She is in pain, and I cannot fix it. Her little sister is sick. My aunt is sick. Saying it, even here, sours something deep in my gut. a little stone turns over, disrupts some peace. It feels like I am betraying a secret. Why is illness a darkness, a hidden secret thing? Cancer. The word is ugly. We don't like it. My mouth has said it too many times. And I am not yet old. My mouth is not done saying it while formed into shapes of shock and sadness. There will be more. Cancer. Words like metastasize fall easily from my tongue now. It is in her stomach, her spine. It has metastasized. This is what we know. Metastasize is a bad word; it is a worse word than recurrence; I know that now too. 5 years ago she had aggressive breast cancer. After a litany of surgery and poisons and radiation, she came through still on this side. And now it is back. She told us she thought of it as a bird, a bird she had to get out of the house. I liked that. I liked it because I always hated the war and battle metaphors. This is a body, a person. Soothe and tend always seeming more appealing to me than wage, attack and fight.

But now I understand the urgency to fight. I want to fight to make my mother ask the questions none of us want answers to. I want to fight to protect her from those answers. I want to fight to make everything ok for everybody.

I want to fight for my aunt, fight to always be able to hear that belly laugh coming from the woman brushing my hair with her hairbrush—the one that was SO much better than the one my mom had at home—on the couch at the beachhouse. I always took pride in the way family thought that I looked like her, was like her. You have your aunt's hair, and I puffed up just a little. 6-year-old me just wanted to be her. I remember visiting her once, in Seattle, before she was married. I think she married the summer I turned three, so I must have been very young. She was a single woman, living in an apartment (in a city!)—so exotic. There was a mystery and some secretiveness surrounding it, something I can't quite place now.

Cancer. It is such an ugly and plain word. It doesn't suit the woman I looked up at wide-eyed as a child, the woman of cities and world travels, the woman of opinions and convictions as brash and unabashed as my own.

She was tough. She was tough, and she was like me.

And I don't want to soothe and tend. I want to be—and I want her to be—the woman that 6-year-old me saw in both of us; I want us to be tough, and I want us to fight.

This morning I went out into the warm blustery day, rain and wind, and that deep grey of autumn. Fall's first real rain. I remember that rain years ago, arms slung over the railing on my patio. We had waited all day for it to come, Michelle and I, and then we watched the sky open up, felt that rush of release as the crackle in the air broke, the warm smell of summer dust rising up damp from the pavement. I don't remember what we did that day—some 8, 10 years ago—but that moment is burned into my memory. Elbows slung, sense of possibility, that feeling of coming alive. Yes, I think I remember now. Harvest, et al. There is different and richer kind of magic to fall. Yes. Everything is going to be just fine.

I have been struggling for days to write my artist statement/ project description, my bio, even to title this project that's trapped inside itself, a kernel in the center of its own stasis. I somehow don't want to name it, pin it down. I want to keep it perfect in my head. What if it falls flat in open air? What if that perfect shattering and falling against concrete sound that rings in my ears is dull and disappointing in living breathing space? Brokenness and repair.

I am still thinking about the closing of my gifting project, that Rumi poem.

how long will you make clay pitchers / that have to be broken to enter you?

There something I am afraid will be lost in translation. I talk about it in its mundane details, but it is not that for me. It is an opportunity to glimpse into the possibility of a new organization of meaning. It is the way things are always breaking down and building up at the same time. It is the making and remaking of meaning. It is systems that no longer work in their wholeness, things that have to be pieced together from what remains, from what has been worn and torn and shattered, loved into loose strands.

There was a way in which the gifting project started a conversation within me, of attachment to objects, of the relationship between object and meaning, the way the story and the thing weave in and out of relationship with one another. The object, relieved of its meaning, the meaning bereft of object, the meaning feeling its way toward new object, the object birthing new meaning. The way the stories live both within and without the vessels we use to carry them. Something. There is something there. It is only whole and complete when I close my eyes and don't put words to it... but it's there.

I had a dream I finally returned all of my library books and the library forgave me.

Today I woke up early; the alarm went off after less than 5 hours of sleep, and I crafted excuses in my head as I continued to fight my way in and out of dreaming, drafted conversations through the hour of pressing the snooze button, finally hurling myself from bed with the phrase fuck it on my tongue. I threw an assortment of random things into my suitcase: arugula, a bikini, 3 beers, 2 dresses, what else do I need? And boarded the bus for the coast. Today I learned the lineage of my family in a more deep and direct way, found this photo of my paternal grandmother’s maternal uncles. Yes, This is from whence I came.

I met my grandmother’s cousin today, on her 92nd birthday. She was a real spitfire in her youth, they tell me, and I see it in the twinkle in her eye. They remember her for her love of adventure when she came to live with them in St Croix, her wigs, her lovers. Yes, this woman is of my flesh and blood. Later, my father and I sort out family stories, immediate and extended. I am so grateful for this time here with him. I find myself closing my eyes, trying to draw out the family tree, connect the stories to the branches, sew in all of the connections.

This afternoon in my father’s old bread truck, the one that was once his brother’s, gutted and refitted like a boat—a place for everything, neat and tidy systems, a love and careful attention paid to each inch in a way that most homes never get—we drove in the screaming van, past flashing lights, a car plowed straight into the fence. That just happened, I say out loud to no-one in particular, meaning nothing in particular. I watch as people converge around the car. We are headed toward a lake we used to swim at when I was a child, a lake I have no recollection of. I expected that I might remember it when we arrive, but I don’t. We circle the parking lot, then turn back. When we pass by the accident site again, there is a swarm of ambulances and firetrucks, men in uniform. I look closer and the entire roof of the car has been peeled back. There are people working diligently and there are stretchers. In the time we are abstractly exploring memory, men had peeled the roof from the car, like a sardine can. In a moment, I am overcome with emotion. My hand flies to my chest; tears burn at my eyes; my breath catches in my throat. Death. I repeat something akin to prayer. Please let them be ok. Please let them be ok. Strangers. It wasn’t long ago I was having a conversation with a friend about the moments that everything changes, the moments where life will never be the same. What was playing on the radio moments before that car needed to be peeled open like a sardine can? What microdrama was being played out inside that car? Was someone in the backseat causing a disturbance? Was everyone lost in thought? Where were they headed? Was it someone travelling alone? Were they thinking about where they had just come from, where they were headed? Now, instead, a sea of flashing lights, stretchers, curled back white metal.

I hold my hand to my chest for a long time as we continue to drive, and then we arrive at dinner. I sit across the booth from my father and we don’t talk about it. We talk about family, about relationships, about the nature of knowing self, knowing other. In some way we are exactly talking about what we saw. We are talking about what it means, the fierceness and immediacy of life, the urgency. How do we navigate the ways we love each other, the ways we hurt each other, while holding firm to that there may not be a tomorrow? There may not be a tomorrow. I remember all of the times I thought I might lose the people who I love. I have received too many of those phone calls for how many years I have been here. I remember, too, that moment of spinning, on the road not too far from here, the car careening across the highway, my hot chocolate making an arc across the car, the fear and amazement in both of our eyes as we acknowledged our nearness to the edge of something, our powerlessness against it. In the end it was nothing. It was an encapsulated moment where we got to walk away with nothing to show for it but our stories, some scrapes on a car that wasn’t even mine. Still, the closeness to the edge stays with me.

Fragility has never been a hard concept for me to grasp.

So, when I look at my father, I remember what he looked like in a hospital bed as well as what he looked like with his hand on the tiller, the sea and the horizon behind him. Yes, we are all of these things, all of us. Today it is easy to remember how much I love humanity, how much we are all a part of one another, how lovely and poetic are our struggles. Today I love them—our struggles—yours and mine, the particular ones. Today I love this beachhouse, even the fights we had in that yard, along with the memories of my feet reaching just to the edge of that chair as my mother’s hands tied my shoes. I love every bit of it, the ways we loved each other, the ways we failed to, the ways we are all working and making it better now. Yes, today I love every last inch of it, and as for the people in that sardine can car, please let them be ok, let them have another day, let them find a day where they can love every last bit of it, every inch, and then sleep, in peace, and wake to another good day; let them have gratitude and peace. Let us all have that. Let us find a way to love unfettered, to see clearly, and to know how lucky we really are.

I spent the morning with my hands in the dirt—what little of it there is out back behind my apartment, the cracks of earth breaking through the concrete, enough for dandelions and morning glory to push their way skyward, enough for me to come upstairs with dirt under my nails. I miss having a garden, a yard, a place to feel like I really inhabit this world, a place to cultivate roots that dig their way deeper and deeper toward the center of something.

I am grieving today, feeling the loss for my hometown, for the world. Still, I know I am grieving in that privileged way where I can afford to abstract, where I can draw connections and think about things like love and nostalgia, where I can wonder why the ways we take care of ourselves and each other are all so tenuous, so grasping.  I never knew him well, not well enough, not as well as I wanted to. He worked at the record store when I was a teenager, and his smile was enough to make me stumble for words and blush. Later, we knew each other casually, a conversation here and there, a nod on the street, but the details of it don't really matter.

They found him floating in the harbor.

That detail shouldn't matter either, but it's all I can think of, his eyes, his smile, and the reduction to a body floating in the water, an article in the local paper. Short dry sentences, body of liveaboard man found floating. So I pull weeds this morning, under the beginning of the warmth of spring, and I think about how we are all so entangled with one another, but yet so far off, how life and living and moving through this world together are so messy. I think about how I'm pretty sure I'm doing it all wrong, but somehow I am alive and strong enough to be pulling weeds in the sunshine, how my own dark nights have always given way to morning, how I feel undeserving and grateful, and how cruel it seems that so much of this is just luck. And then I just feel sad, so deeply sad for this man, sad for those who loved him, sad for people I love who are feeling his absence deep in the marrow of their bones.

Hurricane

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to 
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

--Mary Oliver

five minutes to five

His name was Bill. He was the second old man to approach me today. The first told me my pants remind him of a hot rod, so, when Bill approached, my defenses were up. He wore a baggy sweatshirt and a ballcap; he carried a cane. There was a tentativeness in his gait that made me understand the depth of his sincerity. I overheard the young woman at the counter tell him, no, we don't carry domestic beer, a subtle lilt of judgement or dismissiveness in her undertone. Alright, then I'll have a pale ale he says, and shudders a little when she tells him it'll be four dollars. He digs through his pocket, hands her a bill, and carefully refolds the change with trembling hands and tucks it back in his pocket.

His nose is purple; his hair is a subtly greasy white, his wrists are papery and bruised, his eyes far away and sad. He's come for the VA, he tells me—after asking me to move my purse and taking the seat next to me—but he got here too late, and now it's closed until Monday. He'll have to stay in a hotel all weekend. He had a heart attack on Wednesday, he says, and then they found a spot on his lung. His wife died recently, he tells me, and now he's sick too, a far-off sort of floundering in his eyes. He coughs; it is the quietest, deepest cough I have ever heard. It is like ice breaking a hundred miles beneath the surface of the earth.

I ask when his wife died. January twenty-second, he tells me, five minutes to five. For a moment his eye contact is piercing, but then he looks away; I get the sense that I couldn't reach him if I tried. He looks as if he is drowning. Slowly. He is drowning and he is not fighting it. He says something incomplete about not knowing what to do with his days, about spending too much money. All I can do is listen, offer my attention. I offer to look up directions to his hotel; I lecture him good-naturedly about allowing his worried son to take care of him. Allow him this, I say, It is his turn. He tells me he is 72. He talks of driving trucks all across the country. He does not get too deep—not beyond his five minutes to five. Of course, I can't really imagine anything deeper. He was between busses, he tells me, when he collapsed, on Wednesday, and woke up in the hospital. A heart attack. And then they found a spot on my lung, he tells me quietly, repeating his story. He is making it true, or untrue, scrambling to find the truth in it, grappling to take ownership of this, his story. I see it in his face, the struggle to make it his own, the distance from this new truth, from everything that's happened since five minutes to five on January twenty-second.