Facebook reminded me today—as if I could forget, as if I were the kind of person who doesn't carry these things in my bones, a sort of person who doesn't viscerally remember each moment and hour of every terror, every poignancy, every moment where life changed, could have changed, every pacing manic moment—Facebook reminded me this morning, that a year ago, three and a half hours north of here, in a room I never saw, in a hospital by the water, a surgeon held my father's heart in his hands. A year ago I paced and babbled and waited. An old woman in a green vest—a vest that reminded me of Girl Scouts, thin and cotton, clearly intended to signify something—played Disney theme songs on the piano. It was a fancy hospital and the waiting room I sat in was just for cardiac surgery. There was a large fish tank and a tv screen with a color coded system and a scrolling list of patients represented by private identification numbers to keep us informed of their position in surgery: Who is being prepped, who is in active surgery, who is in recovery, etcetera. We were given laminated cards and a little buzzer that buzzed and flashed when we were to go to the phone at the information desk where the attending nurse called you to update you on the progress. She said things like, he's on bypass now... And they're just about to close. Her voice was cheerful and matter of fact. Or that's how I imagine it. The details are foggy.

The day is a blur, a blur punctuated by crystal clear flashes.

I remember waking up early in the dark in my father's house. I remember the palpable fear in the car on the drive to the hospital. I remember the quiet as we checked in. I remember the circuitous winding hallways. I remember the waiting. I remember the hand holding mine. I remember the puzzle in the waiting room. I remember drinking coffee. I remember not eating. I remember the dizzy spin and the buzzing in my head. I remember the delirious rush of joy of seeing my father awake after surgery. I remember the banks of machines, the countless tubes, the greyness of his skin, the washes of pain unlike any pain I'd ever witnessed, how he would blanch and shudder, how his eyes would widen and his pupils contract. I remember the clench of his jaw, the smallness of his voice, when he repeated over and over again, it really hurts. I remember my surprise at my intense gratitude for drugs, my gratitude when the nurses told me he likely wouldn't remember these hours. I remember the weight of my exhaustion, my feeling of helplessness in the face of his pain. I remember the way I literally shook with exhaustion and relief, trembling as the shock wore off, the cascading rushes of gratitude as it slowly sunk in that he'd survived, that it had gone well, the realization that I still had my papa.

I talked to him on the phone this afternoon, heard his voice bright and cheery. He has climbed mountains this last year; he has floated down rivers. He has has swam in lakes, and gone out for coffee, and made dinners, and done dishes, and napped in the sunshine, and all of the glorious and lovely mundanity of a life. He is here and he is strong, and I get to hear his voice. It does not escape me how lucky we are. It does not escape me how much I have to be grateful for.

Yes. I remember.

In My Grown-up Life

I wrote a poem once entitled my grown-up life. It was intended to be tongue in cheek—at 24, I was pretty sure I was already a grown-up. It spoke of returning to the halls of my alma mater ten years later, my hair speckled with grey. In my grown-up life I will have a fig tree, it began. I heard children's feet on hardwood, smelled coffee and last night's dinner in the kitchen. I'm guessing there was an artist's studio out back and dried paint in the creases of my knuckles, but I can't recall the details now.

It was the fall after the summer I wore polo shirts and gold hoop earrings ironically, the summer I laughed and wandered and wondered with an eclectic crew of fiercely tight-knit friends who worked at coffee shops and bars, the summer we sat on stoops and porches and drank brown-bag shrouded cans of cheap beer through straws, the summer I discovered the swifts.

It was the fall after the summer after the end of my first great love.

A classmate, an older man, came up to me after I read the poem for the class and said I hope you get to have that life. I was taken aback and then immediately dismissed him in my head. This was before I considered that I might not, before it seemed possible that that future life might not be mine. It was a matter of when, not if. I had suspended it, put it on hold, but it was still coming. It still belonged to me.

A few years later, driving to school, I burst into tears at the realization that this was, in fact, the life I had imagined for myself, it was just a different imagining from a different time. (There had been a brief phase in my early teens where I was sure I'd live in a modern house in the countryside. There would be snow in the winter, parching sun in the summer, and giant picture windows. I was to be a swimming coach. I'm pretty sure this version of my future life was set somewhere in Eastern Washington.) The one I was living as I drove over the Sellwood Bridge in tears, this was the life that unfurled from the seed of my lifelove of art. There was paint in the creases of my knuckles, and a palpable aching loneliness strung from the sky. I was fiercely independent, wildly in love with myth and metaphor, the poetry of turn of phrase or changing light. I wore high heels often and lived by the covenant of apocalyptic hilarity.

The ten fabled years of the poem have come and gone, and how many lives have come and gone with them? There is no fig tree, no backyard studio. Instead there is the podium from which I lecture, charcoal ground into my skin, curious and excited students, the drive through the hills to the campus out west of the city, my basement studio, this crazy wild chosen family of friends, my heart breaking and opening more and more deeply with each passing year.

There are bits and pieces of the different lives I imagined, there are slicing shards I never would have dreamed, and there are the threads that diligently and inelegantly weave them all together.

This is a patchwork life; this is my patchwork life.

It is here, and it is still coming, and it belongs to me.

Mabel

This morning I slipped my great grandmother's ring on my finger.

I can't say why, exactly. It is a symbol of something. She is a symbol of something. I can never place exactly what. Or maybe it is that it is so much that I cannot parse it out. She is a symbol of everything. A weight so heavy, I know she could not (or would not) bear it should I ever have met her, had she still been alive when I was born. I never did; she was not.  Instead, I pour over old photos, the notations on the back of them. I am thirsty for her stories. I make up my own narrative of her life. I understand her, in some ways, as both the glorious embodiment of all the things I have wanted for myself and the failure of those things, the ways they failed her, failed her children. The story of her as told by my mother's generation is always tinged with a selfishness. My mother's mother was loved less than her sisters. Mabel said so flatly, I am told. Mabel was not really a good mother, I am told. It is whispered as if it is a secret, but it is so central to everyone's story of her that I cannot imagine it ever being anything but plain as day. She was an artist. And when I look at photos of her young, I see that. That is what I see in her eyes: a fierceness, a wildness, a desire bigger than the life that was laid out before her. I wonder often how her story would have differed had she not been born at the turn of the twentieth century.

The ring is from the twenties, three sapphires surrounded by a cluster of tiny diamonds. The once faceted sapphires are worn down to smooth round stones like river rock, or the stones I used to collect on beachwalks as a child.

I wear it on my right hand as a signifier, but it is just as much a signal that I am taken. I am taken by art, by history, by the weight of expectation, by story, by all the things she was, all the things she could not be, all the things I can be and somehow must be because she could not. I am obligated to make something of the creative fire that burns in us both, the one that is more my inheritance than blood or jewelry, or cut of cheekbone. I am obligated to make her story more than that of a woman of some means, a wife and mother who painted in her spare time, who did not give her children enough attention, who had a room dedicated to hat-making, whose lore is imbued with dismissal and reverence in equal measure. I am taken by the responsibility of that. I am taken by narrative. I am whisked off my feet by story, by my story, by the body politic, by the politicized body, by the feeling of being a woman in this time, by its tethering to our collective history. I am taken by feminism and expectation, and the crushing weight of wanting everything, the weight of the expectation that I must be unfalteringly capable of that everything. The seamlessness of it still expected of women. She was not seamless; she was biting. She knew what she wanted. It wasn't always what she was supposed to want. It wasn't always kind. She wasn't always likable; she was a woman willing to be unlikable. I like that about her story, about my story of her.

Mabel.

I slipped on her ring on my way out the door this morning—on my way out the door to work, where I stand in tall boots and an oversized turtleneck sweater, wearing my professor uniform—on my way out the door while listening to Roxan Gay's essays Bad Feminist. I slip it on my finger, and think about choice, about freedom, about desire, about all the times I've been told that women need to choose between art and love, art and family, all the times I sat in classrooms while men and women(!) told me it was still not really possible, not truly. You can't have both. Men can have both, but not you. Women care too much about being a good mother. Being a good mother precludes the kind of singular devotion that true artistic genius demands.

I think of my great grandmother, the wildness in her eyes, her unparalleled beauty. I wonder how it could have been different had she not chosen the man who adored her most, the man who offered her the most security. She was acutely aware and conscious of that choice, I am told. How could she not be? She was happy and she loved him, I am told fervently, as a follow-up. It is important to note: She loved him. I wonder how it would have been different had she lived in a time when a pursuit of her own passions was an option. She tried to have both. She broke her daughter's heart. She met with no fame or traditional success as an artist—something I can only assume she never pursued. We have glowing oil paintings of autumn trees, and wild stories, and I have my life. I cannot arrange these facts into a tidy meaning. They are simply the facts.

She is a symbol of something, a symbol of everything. I wonder how things might have been different for her. I wonder how they could be different for me.

Last week I glimpsed through the narrow crack between two large metal doors on the third floor of the Museum—the Museum: capitalized, as was our custom—and saw emptiness. The place that once was the resource center is now an empty room, only the streams of light coming in the angled windows, the quiet.

This was the place that my love for art and my love for education met. I remember my first day there, the way it made my heart swell. It was fall. I was just 25, or maybe not even yet, and I was madly in love with life, with the season, with swirling leaves and color and the way everything seemed to be imbued with magic, even the sound of the high heel click on concrete on my walk from the bus, on the marble stairs inside. It seemed my whole wide magical life was laid out in front of me in glittering jeweltones, like the night pavement after rain.

---

It was strange to see the bareness, the white walls, the tacked up paper, presumably an exhibition on its way in some distant future. It reminded me (as as everything seems to) of the passage of time, of the way things slip in and out of a life, of the way sometimes the color just fades despite our best attempts to keep it alive, vibrant, stay in love with it, the way something we have worked for and poured ourselves into can slip away into memory, into emptiness. Time can sap as well as swell, and my persistent metaphor is unrelenting; it is the waxing and waning of the moon, the rise and fall of the tide.

This has been a year of the swell, a year of growing and rising, at times fast and sharp, a tidal wave, bursting at the seams. It has been a time of intense gratitude and learning, and the deep searing growing pains that accompany such times. So much good has come into my life since last year at this time. Still, it's hard sometimes, to catch up with all of life's dizzying spinning, to catch my breath after all of the fear and the work and the work and the work.

---

That year—the year I started at the museum as an intern— that was the year I found the mark that made me feel like what I was making was art, that my love and my sight could somehow translate to paper, to 2 dimensions, to something others could see and touch, a way I could put a true and real and unedited piece of myself out in the world. I fell in love with ink and skylines and feeling—for the first time—wholly and unabashedly myself.

As the splits and seams heal into stretch marks, rivulets of scars, and the exhaustion begins to abate, I know that this has to be what comes next; I have to find my mark again. I have to find the place in me that is in love with curiosity and truth and the bones beneath the skin, the part of me that is unafraid of all I have to lose, unafraid of all I have to give.

I am sitting in the school library, by the window on the second floor. Building 3 is across the small green, and the tiny campus is tucked into a pocket of fog in the farmlands west of the city. My eyelids are heavy because they sprung open at 7.30 this morning, and because this is the first long day of the first long week of the term. It is week 4 of the term already (somehow), but this week my classload doubles. It is a lot of talk of scramble and busyness, but really it is unadulterated glory. I love my leather briefcase, my commute along skyline through flickering afternoon sunlight, my office, all the trappings of this real life, this real career that seems to finally be something thick enough to knock on, breathe around. It is all tenuous, and I know that every term has potential for drastic change, but sitting here in this plush chair with the grey out the window, I am happy. I am deep down, full-bellied happy.

And despite the ever-nagging fear of falling, fear of failure, I am wise enough to revel in this moment while it's with me. Here I am. This is the life I get to live today, and I am grateful.

I packed for rain: sweaters and books, a bag of dry lentils for making soup, cinnamon-infused brandy for hot toddies, slippers, movies... and every day the sun has burned through, the sky bright and blue. October, and I found myself lying on a sheet on the beach, skin bared to the sun, napping, reading, eating potato chips, drinking beer.

I took a long walk each day, along the shoreline that I have known my whole life, the one that is always shifting imperceptibly beneath me, the one that has always been there, the one that is my foundation. A foundation of sand somehow makes the most perfectly solid and tenuous all at once metaphor for all that is my life.

My nose and the apples of my cheeks are kissed with pink, my shoulders brown. My legs feel stretched long from their loose swing and sway. I am happy to be here, and I am ready to go home.

I've been feeling lately like mining my heart for content, scanning the horizon for something to say, the right thing to say, the right way to say it. It is the artist's struggle, the painfully mundane and predictable artist's struggle. But I have been remembering things, feelings, remembering the shape of hope, the formlessness of how words tangle, and the certain kinds of images that rearrange the deepest places in that ever-shifting foundation of sand in that thing that I call my heart. I've been scrambling to capture ideas again, not with the same fierceness of those early days of my first thesis, but in the way I felt when I spent 2 weeks here.

It was this time of year, 8 years ago. I was on medical leave from work, and I was scrambling to rearrange my life into a something I could fit inside, something that could fit inside of me. Those days here felt long and good, languid and bright. I gathered tiny pieces of driftwood that reminded me of wintered trees and  even smaller red and golden leaves, leaves smaller than my pinky nail, and arranged and rearranged them into tiny tableaus on the beach. I made postcards, and took photographs, and rerooted myself to this place of my familial and familiar history. I watched sunsets and stayed up too late in the empty house alone, I walked the shore at midnight, and spread myself out in the sand to stare at the stars. I drank wine and remembered that fluttering beating heart inside my chest, the leaping and settling of my gut as I felt my way slowly, steadily, unsurely back into myself.

Yesterday the rain settled in and all night I listened to its song outside my bedroom window as I drifted in and out of dreaming. Though it's still warm, fall is definitely here.  It's been a slow shift and still somehow hit with a bang. It feels like everything embodies that narrative lately. I watch a slow turn and then suddenly I'm looking at the other side of the thing.

The sky is white and I've had strange little hints of reminders the past few days of places I've been, places that feel so far and distant it's hard to imagine they once felt close to the marrow of me, places I feel fondness for and places I feel grateful to have left behind, bullets I managed to narrowly dodge, trainwrecks I watched unfold in the rearview mirror... in the same breath there have been breezes blowing through with the intoxicating scent of future possibility, directions that—like this impending season—feel fresh and grounding, full of earthy wonder.

This year, like every other, I went to visit the swifts for my birthday. I watched them gather in the sky, flutter and swirl, dart and soar, and was reminded once again of the way they work together, the way they so perfectly embody the singularity and togetherness that I feel in the world. They coalesce and converge, then break form—a mass of seeming chaos—then just as quickly, drop a wing and are one again. There was a time I would have called this the closest thing to religion I know how to understand, the way we are all—imperfectly—a part of something bigger.

Once, I wanted to trace the flight patterns of birds on paper, macro and micro—30 seconds, a lifetime. I made them up in short bursts of thread, of ink, tracing their way across paper. Do their movements across the sky, the continents follow those same patterns of tributaries, bark, the veins of a leaf, the veins beneath my own skin?

Somehow now though, the abstraction feels a little deeper, a little more distant. This year, my body is my body. That little bird body is his own. 2 beating hearts, a million. Meaning is less born of the sameness, the layering of pattern. Tangible proof isn't what I'm after, not exactly. The weight is no longer in making visual the gaps and convergences. The call I feel is something like wanting to learn to be them. This year my fantasy is to trace their goings more specifically, fly alongside them—if only in short jaunts in the metal body of a jet. This year my fantasy is to spend a year with them, see what they show me in the moments without the grandstanding of their yearly show, break free of the metaphors that have grown up around them in my own yearly rituals. I want to see their quiet moments. It is in those moments, I think, that I might find the simple beauty of the easing between community and singularity, the way a life is built in the accumulation of those moments.

I have always wanted to be that last bird in the sky, the one diving and darting alone as night falls, with the safety of the rest just below, waiting. This year I want to learn the ease of transition, slipping easily back and forth between that solitary delight and the pleasure of the whole, making something beautiful together.

I am both very happy and very sad. This is either a character trait or an extended state of being. This is both a character trait and an extended state of being.

Last week I camped at a lake, floated weightless in bracing cool clear water. Blue above me, blue below me, that special submerged silence, the small muffled splash of a toe breaching the surface.

......

For a time I prided myself on the shortening, the simplifying of my long languid sentences. See how I am breaking form? See how I am laying bare what I used to shroud in epiphanic gesture? See how I am revealing what simply is? See how I don't need to pretend there is beauty?

I need to pretend there is beauty.

I need for there to be beauty. I need to believe in it. It is the believing that makes it.

......

On the second night by the lake—the blue hour, the gloaming—the swifts dove and darted low and sweeping around me. It felt like something. It was that familiar something feeling, the precipice of something. 'I know I should be too old to believe in that feeling anymore,' I heard myself say, 'but I think I'm a better person when I believe in magic.'

I love that swelling feeling inside of me, that buoyed feeling of hope, that intangible slippery something. It is what I feel on warm summer nights on my bike, at sunset on the beach, with my face buried in the crook of the neck of someone I love, the feeling when artmaking and living are imbued with the same breath, when they are indivisible, that feeling that makes me want to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, unfurl my fists and fingers, breathe deep. It is something like delight, something akin to peace.

......

In 3 days I turn 35. Three fat decades, plus half of another, a baker's dozen—almost twice: My mother's age at me 5, a few years shy of when my grandmother first got cancer, the age they start calling a pregnancy high risk... Because I don't have children, a friend of mine says, of herself. She speaks of it as a foregone conclusion.  Another woman, 10 years my junior, talks confidently of her future children. It is such a part of how we know ourselves as women, locate ourselves in society, in time, in culture, in lineage. I once spoke of my future children—a younger, sharper, more fierce and naive me—now I hear the story shift in the telling: If I have children... If I had children... The maybe crept in. And it isn't really sad in the way the younger version of me would have thought it—the 28 year old me who saw babies everywhere she went, who felt that ache in the pit of her at the sight of them, the smell. Now it is an abstraction more than a feeling. And now I know that lakeside champagne breakfasts and dance-parties, and collapsing on the couch at the end of a long work day, and spur of the moment beach trips or spur of the moment pretty-much-anythings are a product of this childless life I am living. My twenty year old cousin told me last week that being an adult seems alright the way I do it, that my adult life is blackberry picking and drinking beer. And from a certain angle she is right; it feels good to see this vision of myself, this particular freedom, the way the sound—the feeling—of the wind stops me in my tracks, spreads a grin wide and slow across my face. This is a good life, a full life, a thrillingly happy life.

It is a life in which I am learning to embrace being both very happy and very sad.

I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago and was so blown away by the scene of Lucia's hand dragging across a fogged-up window while her brother and lover fought below her, so blown away that I didn't know how to talk about it, the visual viscerality. I could dissect it for its symbology, its metaphor, how it became a fulcrum, the pivot point for the rest of the opera. I could write a whole dissertation on the movement, the tracks, each moment memorialized as the next unfolded on top of it... But no. It was glowing red, and I felt in my spine. I felt it. That is enough. That is everything.

And in that moment I remembered what I meant when I first laid claim to being an artist, what it felt like—the unnamed thing coursing through me. Before I cared about theory or the postmodern secret nods of artists to each other behind the closed curtains of their public faces, before I knew the pasted on smiles of openings, the things we were supposed to be talking about. The language and slight of hand that proved the point of the dissection that made what I had to say worth hearing, the worlds of prestige and tangled meaning.

I have been dog-paddling, forgotten entirely that I am a swimmer, grasping and scrambling to stay afloat, getting nowhere. It takes a willingness to stretch out long, point forward while looking down, have a little faith in muscle and breath and buoyancy. If—instead of all of this furious trying—I can let my muscle memory take over, I think I just might remember the cool meditative rhythm of my stroke: reach, pull, kick, breathe. Maybe after a little while inertia will take hold again, and movement will come more easily than the swirl of my own thoughts.

The snow is melting and has become a sea of slush. I tiptoe and slosh and try to maintain balance. What had frozen rigid has melted in a flash and flooded everything. We weren't prepared, aren't prepared.

It is like that. When the ice melts I don't know what to do with everything that is suddenly liquid and flowing. It is moving and bigger than anything I can corral, anything I can even pretend to try to control. It makes its own rivers, forges its own paths, carves ravines into anything between it and where its headed.

My feet slop through the muck on the streets. Everything is slick and soft and yielding.

Last week in yoga, my instructor had us spend the whole class on backbends, spoke of the metaphorical implications of the pose: baring your belly, committing with effort and intention to vulnerability. She told us how, in her personal life, vulnerability was the most anxiety-producing place—bare yourself and then freeze and hold your breath. It is like that. I step forward into open air; I do it every time. I am not unafraid; I am terrified, but I do it every time. I take risks; it is the only thing that feels worth it, but I bare myself and then I freeze and hold my breath. I cling and I gasp and I hope, and I lose my suppleness, my ability to move and breathe with ease. So we spent the hour bending back, baring our bellies, pushing evermore skyward, opening, opening... and breathing, moving in the place of vulnerability.

It is a muscle that needs work, a practice we could all tend to with more diligence, more grace, with more give and forgive. Even writing the words here is me stepping forward into the wind, and I feel my breath catch in my throat, the beginnings of steeling myself, the rigidity creeping in and up. So, deep breath, return to the slick soft slush of the fiercely wildly melting snow and ice. It knows not where it's going, but it's going, and no fear or self-consciousness can slow its pace or block its path.

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.