This is traditionally why I abscond to the Pacific Northwest during the month of August. It seems that working my remote job in my childhood home for a month is the closest American version of a Euro-Summer I’m going to get, and for that I am grateful!

I was thinking as I take long walks through these tree lined streets swept through with blessed Cascade northern winds, that the plant life really does feel different in the summer here. In Los Angeles it feels like the trees withstand the heat, in a long, sustained, war of attrition. In the Pacific Northwest it feels like the trees expand and breathe during the summer, like they have been eagerly waiting for it.

I read in the Atmos science magazine that trees, along with all other organisms, have evolved to attune their internal clocks to the sun. Trees are attuned to the summer solstice - it is the day in the Northern hemisphere when conifer trees reach “peak efficiency”, slowing down their growth afterword in preparation for the winter. In Europe, beech trees use conditions during the solstice to determine seed production for the following year.

I love the changing of seasons. The solstice, the equinox. I always hope that I can wrest some sort of internal guiding force from these special days, the kind of estimations that the natural world around me seems to make effortlessly.

For the summer solstice this year I hosted a party on the roof of my apartment. I could see all the trees in my neighborhood from above, and wondered what kind of calculations they were making on the year’s longest day.

This summer, Los Angeles (along with the rest of the American Southwest) is under a brutal heat dome. Even in my idyllic Pacific Northwest, smoke from horrific wildfires in eastern Washington tint the sun a deep orange. Horrible air quality is a daily reality we all have to withstand like uncomfortable humidity in Los Angeles. What sorts of calculations are the trees making, is my body making, adapting to these chaotic conditions of climate change- when our bodies also hold memories of a more peaceful, more predictable, past?

I turned 29 and and the first person to wish me a happy birthday was not my fiance, who passed away from cancer last January, as he traditionally was for the past 8 years, but a guy I have been in a BDSM roleplay sext-uationship with. (No, these words do not appear in the Bible.) Did I reflect on this strange turn my life has taken with a bit of a queasy feeling at 11:59 pm on August 17th? Yeah, you could say that.

I feel a need to tell you this so you know where to place my current state of mind. Your girl is dispatching you from the eye of a storm right now. Not to compare the state of my love life to the existential horror of climate change, but it would be fair to say I am also weathering “““chaotic conditions”””.

On my birthday, I was journaling about all this and wrote the following sentence- “I turned 29 and felt hope in my heart like sand in the oyster.”

Isn’t that so true? Hope really does live in the body. And, for me anyway, it’s irritating. It rises like sediment from some ancient place, the ceaseless factories at my base, getting stuck in between my teeth. Often these grains find no purchase, they are no grist for the mill. They make their way back down, down to the soles of my feet, dead weight. A dead thing to be picked clean, transmuted by some mysterious alchemy, floating to the surface again. I pick at it with my tongue. It’s annoying, I prefer my teeth smooth and clean. I swallow the particles before they can lodge somewhere and calcify into a pearl, before we have a real problem.

Months ago I was on the phone with my friend and they said “hope” was emerging as a guiding principle in their life. This made me cry, for I have never gotten in good with hope. Hope is like some kind, patient, ancestral guiding force smiling and knocking gently at the edge of my vision, and when I hear it, I turn and run. I am afraid of hope. I am afraid of feeling entitled to what I want. The other day I said to my family I want to drive my 2001 Honda Accord for the rest of my life. Then I knocked on wood, saying that “I shant covet lest God hears me”.

Save me from what I want.

Oh, it’s so smart, isn’t it? To assume the worst. How often we are proven right. How often a positive outcome is shrugged off as a pleasant aberration, the exception that proves the rule. And when devastation comes, at least you can smirk, laugh softly to yourself, and say “you knew so”, because you’re so smart. What warm consolation that is. A life that looks like an ever-dimming city, your pessimism dutifully turning off one streetlamp at a time.

I have reason to be skeptical about hope, the belief in a positive outcome, based on recent events in my life. You can probably surmise.

But something happens in that dark city, when you foreclose on hoping, I’ve found. It becomes impossible to locate what I want. I can no longer map the geography of my heart. But it does seem that no matter what I do, no matter what intellectualization I come up with, hope returns again and again. I am an animal, and this is the life-drive, eros. Mucking my clean city up with sand, tiny grains of desire. Does the birch tree resent the sun for convincing it to produce seeds, knowing they won’t all survive the winter?

I turned 29 and felt hope like grist for the mill. I felt it rising in me, from that mysterious eternal well, as if my cells are nothing but factories for this obnoxious life-drive. My body lays it at my feet, so much of it, doesn’t it know, after everything? I understood this surplus, when I was a teenager and nothing but lank and wanting. But haven’t the dark colors been filled out by now, the deeper notes written into the score? Hope appears at my door, regardless, a stray cat I fed once. There comes a point when facing it, investigating that kernel of grain, means facing yourself. Hope renews, and, such is its generosity, “never asks a crumb of me”. But grain dumped on my front porch, the mill rusted over and covered in cobwebs, rots.

And it really is in the body, God, no, it’s in the body. The grains of hope are in my teeth, the churning of desire is in the maw. Desire is no gentle sunrise, no birdsong, it is a body crawling over coals. It all really is some grotesque chorus. It’s writhing in the muck. To do without it is to be clean, so clean. Repressing the dirt can create its own sort of shadow factory. It’s so much work to be clean.

I was thinking recently that my late fiancé was such a disciplined gambler. He gambled with money, at the craps table in Las Vegas, and on sports games, but he was the rare gambler who never lost in his mind the value of every cent he was risking, who could always get back to even.

Since he died, all the bets have been hedged in the romantic entanglements I’ve gotten into. Vulnerability was piecemealed, with collateral, extended and then yanked away with a rope held behind the back. When Nick gambled, with me, he gambled with his entire heart. When he was sick, he dealt in hope like it was the house’s money.

I didn’t understand this, this propensity for gambling, and this eternal conviction that everything would invariably work out. Sometimes it actually drove me up the wall, because I felt that we were seeing two drastically different realities. It had less to do with my disrespect for his worldview, than the challenge it posed to mine. I thought I was so smart for wanting to see things clearly, for wanting to never be spared the “brutal truth”. This was nothing more than a desperate bid for control, as assuming the worst outcome usually is. When you are dealing in the unknown, really, two possibilities are always coexisting in that dark box. At the time, another friend asked me why I didn’t feel entitled to hope, when I wore anxiety like a birthright. It is maybe equally foolish to believe in either, which makes it perhaps, wiser to believe in the one that makes your days easier.

But, as we all know, the glittering lights and dark, smoke-filled rooms of Las Vegas are only possible, only perpetuate themselves, because everyone loses eventually. And lose we did. In spectacular fashion. That’s the important part – spectacular fashion. With the wedding planned, the dress bought, the hope cultivated. We fell from a great height, but in the fallout that I’m left to deal with, my self-respect remains gloriously intact. I knew the odds and I was all in.

From the eye of the storm I’m currently weathering, I’m realizing it’s time to solidify some sense of ethics, an internal compass to help me make decisions. But I don’t know if I can ever never know the right answer. It seems increasingly like I can only know the repercussions I am willing to accept.

Joan Didion describes self-respect as the willingness to accept the fallout from your decisions. To become a disciplined gambler.

I wrote something else in my journal, a guiding force - “PURE SENSATION”.

For 29, I bet on losing dogs, because “I want to feeeeel it.” I want to writhe in the muck, open the mill, let the sun tell me to trust in the future. I want to face this hope, face myself. I want to want.

I turned 29 and felt hope in my heart like sand in the oyster. I’ll make it a pearl, this time.

“What’s more precious when one is young — that loose sensation of complete possibility, or the soundness of maturing under an affectionate wing?” (Lillian Fishman, “Would You Rather Have Gotten Married Young"?”)

“And [the Trickster] never was in Eden, because Coyotes live in the New World. Driven forth by the angel with the flaming sword, Eve and Adam lifted their sad heads and saw Coyote, grinning.” (Ursula K Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”)

The night Nick and I decided to get married, we were in my East Hollywood apartment trying to get some sleep. It was a warm, springtime night. My standing AC unit was hemorrhaging like an old tractor, punctuated by the barking laughter of teenage boys under my window.

I turned over and glanced at Nick lying beside me, annoyed to see the glow of his iPhone illuminating his face in the not-quite city-dark. I had begged him not to check his hospital portal for the CAT scan results before bed. These days, we knew it could only be bad news. This continuous parade of scan results wearing us down. A lethargic old dog circling its tail, a slow, pathetic tightening spiral.

He told me what I already knew but didn’t want to confront before sleeping – the previous round of chemo had not worked. His cancer had metastasized; the tumors had grown.

I remember this part like a nightmare, which is to say I misremember it. My consciousness split, I observed myself, from somewhere in the top corner of the room, throwing off the covers and pacing the laminate grey floor. I observed myself berate him for checking these results before bed. There she goes, I thought from afar, “she can’t direct fury at mindless, rapidly dividing cells, so the anger is bursting through the cracks of more shoddily built emotional structures.” I nodded knowingly at myself, while I became annoyed at my own condescension. I watched Nick take the fury silently, handing me tissues wordlessly every now and again.

I floated down eventually, recalibrated. I tired myself out, wrung myself dry until my mind became a pleasant grass field. I asked, simply, “what are we going to do?”

“Let’s get married.” He replied, his large brown eyes holding me, looking up at me. The idea entered that pleasant grass field like a sunrise. He was 25, I was 26. He died within the next year.

Recently, I have tried to make sense of this moment. Marriage was never a goal of mine, not something I dreamt of. The weight of trying myself to someone “forever” made me itch. But I dreamt always of a great romance in my life. On every star, every dead dandelion, every birthday candle, I closed my eyes and wished for true love. I was obsessed with Victorian romances where Juliet dies beautifully pale, plucked like a rose at the height of her youth by tuberculosis. True love, to my teenage self, was a haunting. Romantic because it ceased to exist, and therefore evolve, and therefore become messy. A clean, uncomplicated sort of eternal pain. I imagined a dead body picked clean of its sickened and inconvenient flesh, a skeleton white as Greek columns.

I wondered if my fiancé’s cancer diagnosis was my monkey’s paw, the punishment for my desire for true love, the fulfillment of the darkness of this fantasy, of romance as tragedy, as haunting. Was the universe cruel? Had I dreamed too mythic a dream, hadn’t bothered to put in stipulations in the fine print of my teenage longing? Was the universe indifferent? Did it have a warped sense of humor?

I recognized something then. God was a Trickster.

From the time the cancer returned, I understood that I had passed some sort of threshold. I called this new place “the realm of the absurd”. Not quite a new world yet, but a world in flux, being remade, convulsing. I pictured this to look like the surrealist episodes of Looney Tunes, where cartoon logic is suspended and heightened, even, the animators becoming omnipotent entities, erasing Daffy’s body and replacing it with a purple flower and a flag saying “screwball” pictographically. Power was being exerted on me, always dark, sometimes funny.

This realm exists within the old world, but one must be spirited into it by circumstance, by an unwitting tryst with the Trickster god. The train tracks are switched underfoot, and suddenly the old world rules no longer apply. A kind entity may come and explain the new rules to you, but there’s only so much you can glean. Everyone in the new realm moves within the flow of its logic, irritated with you for not yet knowing how to swim.

This realm comes with a new language to learn. CAT scan! Immunotherapy! Metastasize! Synovial! Lymph node! Dramamine! New words give shape to dimensions of your own body you never knew, becoming increasingly aware of how horrifyingly ignorant you are to your own machinery, its intricate Rube Goldberg systems. You must learn the spell-casting of insurance agents, the right words to say in the right order to unlock portals, and the wrong words which will clamp shut the castle doors. You must learn the rules of the hospital; the cheapest areas to park, the schedule of the coffee shops, the nurses which can become allies, the likely wait time at the emergency room.

I recognized the game. I saw the chess pieces being moved. I didn’t think that getting engaged would stop the seismic waves of a new world being formed. But within its logic, I could engage with the absurd. By getting engaged, I could see an imperfect utopia where I stood.

In “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”, Ursula K Le Guin asks if utopia could not be right here, right now. In a Euclidean mind (as in, Dostoevsky: “the rigid, rational, scientific way of thinking that is limited to three-dimensional logic” – one could also argue, the Western mind), utopia is definitionally non-existent. It exists on the horizon, “out-there”, a mirage. If it were to be brought into the present, it would be muddied by inconvenient realities and therefore cease to be “utopia”. What is the promise of marriage, of forever, if not that glittering, impossible utopia, which functionally cannot exist. Which crumbles in the mud of reality.

“[Utopia] is not accessible to Euclidean reason; but on the evidence of all myth and mysticism, and the assurance of every participatory religion, it is, to those with the gift or discipline to perceive it, right here, right now.” (Ursula K Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”)

Essentially, we were bringing the utopian vision of marriage, of everlasting love, of stability, as the guarantee of a future, into the mud, the chemotherapy, the scent of starch on hospital blankets, into right here, right now. Into the reality of biology, of absurdity, of existing as tiny specks on a sleeping god turning over, yawning, and destroying everything in its path. Promising forever really meant our shared ecosystem as long as we could sustain it, our shared star as long as we didn’t run out of nuclear fuel. My self as long as all my cells still constitute my self. Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? As long as. The true, surging, magmatic core of reality – churning, relentless change.

This was heartbreaking. It was inviting pain into my life with almost surgical precision. I was telling the Trickster god to hurt me here, right here, in the ventricles of my heart. I was hanging by a hook, pointing to my stomach, telling the butcher the exact location of my most tender meat. I was trying on wedding dresses and then spending nights in the emergency room as my fiance’s fevers spiked to numbers I didn’t know were possible. But the invitation of that level of pain meant that I didn’t experience the regret of Nick dying without promising him forever, promising him as long as.

On one January night, while the city was evacuating in the inferno of a wintertime wildfire, unbeknownst to me my fiancé was fighting for his life while I watched The Jerk with my mom and sister in my apartment. He died early that morning, passing away before I could see him. The train tracks switched again, I saw the Coyote loping away, and I returned to the realm of the living, unlike I had ever known it before. Born into the new world.

After Nick died, I entered a phase of somewhat-manic-experience-accumulation. We all know of the seven stages of grief. As of now, mine have looked a little like this-

• Crashing parents’ trip to a budget resort in Puerto Vallarta for mother’s 60th birthday and feeling physical pain in my heart so profound I often Google “heart attack symptoms”.

• Constant partying, very little sleep, ill-advised flirtationship I convince to go to a furry convention with me

• Dislocating knee dancing to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Talking to Yourself” at my own house party.

• Dating an indie musician on and off again for nine months who can’t decide if we are friends are not

• Multiple cross country road trips followed by surprise extended period of homelessness

• Writing increasingly surrealist essays

• Becoming abrasive and purposefully off-putting on dating apps

• Profit (?) ((Still waiting on this one!))

I was experiencing complete weightlessness. In the confusion I became an amoeba, moving toward the chemical sensation of warmth and away from the chemical sensation of cold.

On some level, I felt a need to throw myself into the world, violently, to see if it would catch me, or how it would catch me, or where it would place me. I needed to fill my life with after, as quickly as possible. This phase came to a literal, crashing halt when I dislocated my knee. I was now forced to sit still, I cannot stress this enough, literally, and the grief I had been ignoring started seeping into the edges of my consciousness.

I experienced “staying still”, steeped in the emotion, the loneliness, like an itch under my skin, a physiological signal to move. Was this listlessness not really alchemy, I thought? Why not use my sadness and listlessness as propulsion into the netting of the world? Wasn’t that productive? Or … was it escape, running from processing, pure distraction? Is there a difference?

I went to an art exhibit at the MOCA in Los Angeles recently. Two pieces were contrasted next to each other- Jaques Villegle’s “Rue Piruoette” and Betye Saar’a “Gris-Gris Box”. The former collaged ripped posters on a piece of plywood. Layered on top of each other, original meaning was lost, confusion and overwhelm the effect. In the former, objects were neatly arranged, each given their own space and emphasis. Care, arrangement, and distinction gave the otherwise random objects meaning. It was as if the empty space between them was held together by an invisible, ancient energy. A sense of place and memory. A shrine.

I avoided feeling the fullness of grief because I feared the prospect of missing Nick for the rest of my life. It seemed impossible to me that the feeling of missing him would ever lessen. But now, I’m worried about forgetting. Since he died so young, I will likely face more years with him than without him, and I worry that I can’t possibly hold the memory. In the beginning, memories floated to the front of my mind with an accompanying sting, fresh as a new puncture wound no matter how many memories I’d already painfully waded through, an ocean of needles. Now it’s less frequent, and I miss the constant stings, that at least brought him to the front of my mind. But I was on an airplane recently, and for no reason at all I could vividly feel the weight of his head on my neck when we would fly together. Something about the stale air of the airplane cabin held the memory for me, I didn’t have to. Grieving wasn’t my task, it was the entire scaffolding of the new world. The whole world, a kind conspirator in holding the memory.

When I think about what I want now, in this dizzying freedom, I still want love, and partnership. I want a love that presses me down, forcing me to wrap my fingers into the grass, into the dirt. A weight that intermingles me.

But- there’s something similar that happens when I’m writing, when I face myself and come back to an essay like this again and again. When I think about my thesis as I drift off to sleep, when I retread painful memories, when I send an essay out into the world, which feels very much like “weight”. A weight which makes me feel close to the ground, to the intermingling feeling, to sublimation. Giving “weight” to writing was something that I was afraid of for quite some time. Because that meant risk, failure, just as letting a body press you down means the risk of loss, of being flung into weightlessness again. But when I allowed it, writing with seriousness feels like digging into the earth again.

This is the reality of the new world. If I allow it, grief becomes the scaffolding and writing the weight which ties me to the earth. Is life really so dichotomous - weight and stability through partnership, or freedom and meaninglessness through solitude? I hope not. If you think of yourself as experiencing only one, the other looks like a Euclidean utopia, on the horizon, definitionally impossible. Even worse, to think you should, or even can, crystalize one path when you are young. I would never advise you, reader, on matters of the heart if I couldn’t offer up my own to you. I hope I have in this essay. So let me just say to you what I say to myself: you are not here to crystalize one path in your youth. You cannot even if you wanted to - The Trickster god remakes your world all the time. You are here to alchemize your loneliness into freedom, and to tie yourself to the earth, to do both. To reject dichotomy in favor of duality. Yes, finding where you can let love weigh you down means exposing to the butcher exactly where to cut you. It also means the grief scaffolds the world, which invites the world to be a partner in remembering. Utopia is not on the horizon, it is right here, right now, and always will be, even as you and the world are remade thousands of times. You have all the time in the world and no time at all. You are an organic being living in geological time. Get married, get divorced, love, grieve, fuck it up. I love you!

I don’t mean metaphorically - although she was probably changing on the inside, too, like any normal person - I mean physically.

I didn’t believe her when she told me this, obviously, but there was a desperation mixed with resignation in her tone that meant to her, it was the truth. I could tell…

Read more

Hello. I know this is weird, we usually don’t talk to each other. Not directly, like this. I know you give me signals. Walking in the sunshine, you form a thin layer of sweat on my skin, you reveal the smell of jasmine slowly, almost like you revel in the magic trick. So many sensations, like invisible curtains I walk through all the time. The feeling of laying in bed at midnight, alone and imagining someone’s hands on my skin. Someone who might have existed or may never exist. Is it you who gives me that dull ache, the one that waxes and wanes every day like some orbiting star?

I’ve been thinking about you a lot. We’ve been thrust together, and neither of us asked to be here. I’ve been trying to draw you, in colorful diagrams like middle school biology textbooks. Animal cells. Permeable membranes. Nuclei. I feel so tumultuous, my moods varied and plunging, but here you are, every morning when I wake up, every night as I fall asleep. My emotions, the atmosphere, a drama played out in weather and shifting pressures, storm claps and rain. You, the patient soil and stoic mountains, hiding your own mysterious drama in your false consistency. I know the peace threatens a cataclysm, I know it’s a matter of time, and for now we have a wary truce. The truce looks like this: every night you offer me mercy and every morning you offer me another chance.

I wish we could talk to each other. Do you resent it, being here? Do you feel like nothing more than a passenger? Is there solace in that, in your destiny being so clearly defined? Do you feel satisfaction for a job well done? I know when a cell misfires, makes a mistake, or can’t function anymore, other cells are sent to kill it. Do you feel oppressed by that, or do you have a strong sense of collectivism? Do you understand your death as being for a greater cause? Do you wonder if I mourn you? If I even notice that you’re gone?

I try to listen for you, the blood rushing in my ears while I lay down in a dark room. People say things like, “the wisdom of the body” and “the body keeps the score”. But for me, being made up of me, I somehow can’t seem to speak my own language. I look down at my naval and it reveals nothing, a vast unfeeling expanse, like a dried out basin of an ancient lake. Signals float up from deep below, muddled from the sediment, ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’. A rudimentary streetlight swinging in a one horse town.

Or do you feel as though you and I are locked together in a conspiracy? To stay alive, because what else is there to do but make the best of it? Or does the joy buoy you too, after a long day? You seem to propel me toward other humans. Is that why you give me that dull ache when I’m alone, and why making someone laugh feels like clouds parting? Do you find beauty in their cells like I find beauty in their face, does it make you feel less alone in the conspiracy too?

I’ve been learning about you. I know that you are being born and living and dying all the time. I know the cells in my intestines are replaced within days, my skin cells within months, my cerebral neurons within years. I know that learning my own language is learning an evolving dialect, a history, or maybe folklore. Do you carry traditions, do you speak of time, or events? Are there times of before, and after? Are there great legends of cells that led movements, made great sacrifices? Do your generations get smarter, or do they forget their lessons too?

This may be an uncomfortable question for you, but where do I exist? It’s just that, you take up so much space, and there are so many of you. Is there space in there, somewhere, for a soul? I know, I know, I am you too, but I am also the me that feels you, and observes you. I am snuggled up within you and I am you but I am somehow apart from you.

And if you are wondering if I grieve you, I do. It’s a white hot power that underpins everything, like the root system underneath the trees.

Part Two: Dark Matter

I have one question for you. Do you grieve the dinosaurs?

Obviously, I don’t know who you are. And I don’t know if you can hear me, and even if you could, I don’t know if we speak the same language. When we pray to you, can you make out the specifics, or do you just feel signals, desire, distress? Two pulsing lights in different shades? Do you feel even that, or when you look at us do you just see ants on a hill, flicking our antennas and following chemical trails?

Listen. On one unseasonably hot winter day in Los Angeles, a mountain range of smoke from wildfires on the horizon, I laid my cheek in the crook of the neck of the man I loved most in all the world, and he looked like he was asleep but he wasn’t, and he was still warm and still smelled like himself, and that was the last time I saw him, I didn’t see him again, and we buried him in a shining wooden casket in the hills of Mount Sinai with layers of white flowers and rosewater.

Maybe the names of these places don’t mean anything to you. Maybe you remember this land for the mammoths that used to live here, that have all died out by now.

I imagine it must be hard to keep track. All these different epochs. The time when it was just algae, the time when it was just rain. Were you lonely, then, when it was just algae? Or does flora have its own form of drama?

Maybe you didn’t put us here. Maybe you didn’t ask to be here, either, yet here we are, locked in the same conspiracy. Maybe you are made up of us, and you don’t know where you begin or end, either. But you respond to the same signals, propelling you toward life like it’s a pathology, even when mass extinction wipes the planet clean again and again, when a supernova jumbles the carbon and flings it far out into space. Is that where you exist, in dark matter?

And now here I am, feeling kinda bad for you. I hope you are expansive enough, really expansive enough, to hold all of it. All of this grief, and this pathology toward living. As everything changes, again and again, how do you feel joy when you know the end. That to love something is to covertly agree to mourn it.

Part 3: Human

I got your message. I get all of your messages, all the time, and I always respond. Is it my fault that none of you can understand it? I gave up on that a long time ago. And anyway, when you think you understand it, you don’t, and it becomes a whole mess. I gave up on that but I can’t help myself, I still try now and again, ever heard of something you humans call the “wild iris” or the “steel guitar”?

This may be an uncomfortable question for you, but where do I exist? It’s just that, you take up so much space, and there are so many of you. Is there space in there, somewhere, for me?

You’ve given so many names to things, which I did ask you to do, and it has been helpful for me. For example, what you call ‘atoms’, which are held together by ‘electromagnetic force’. Maybe this is immodest, but I think I exist within that force. That empty space, which improbably holds all the microscopic physical bits together. I know, I know, I created you in my image, but I am also the me that feels you, and observes you. I am snuggled up within you and I am you but I am somehow apart from you.

You may call it “electromagnetic force”, but it has another name, a truer name. It’s called missing someone, which is also called grief. I know it because I do grieve you. All that has been born, has died. The languages I didn’t have the chance to learn before you all stopped speaking them. I know that this is what is immortal, because I change constantly, but I always miss you. Missing you intensifies. As I age, I worry about that, my ability to withstand it, grief, this pain that only grows. You call it “dark matter”, but it feels like a white hot power. It electrifies me, shoots through all the empty space that holds me together. That’s what animates, and it’s what remains.

But for me, being made up of you, I somehow can’t seem to speak my own language.

(Paintings by Helen Lundeberg)

This is one of those charming places with a juke box and pool tables and dart boards, you know, a bar where you can move around, where the social barriers are permeable. One of those places where the bathroom is full of graffiti, which always makes me wonder if people plan ahead for vandalization. It seems like they all buy the same type of pen.

I’m sipping on a beer, which I historically only order because I’ve been told throughout my life that I’m “intimidating”. Really, men would tell me this when I didn’t find them funny. Drinking beer disarms this assumption, and at times I feel generous enough to be disarming in masculine spaces. Especially now, when I am practically vibrating with the need to catch someone’s eye, have them look back at me, to assure myself that I’m really made of flesh and bones. Then once they’ve done that, I can move onto the honest aim of the evening, of every evening as long as I’ve harbored the human curse of desire: to have a person look into my eyes long enough to notice the dark patch in my right iris.

If a person noticed that dark patch, I would tell them that once when I was a child my friend’s mother noticed it, and said it made me a psychic. They would probably ask if I’m indeed a psychic. They wouldn’t believe me if I said yes, so it doesn’t matter, even if I have seen a ghost a couple of times, which I have. I wouldn’t tell them that though, because what they’re really asking is if I can see the future. I would say no, not always, but being a natural pessimist, you’re often proven right. And once you’ve been proven right too many times, you start to develop an adversarial relationship to fate. This is the best course of action for a pessimist. To look at the inherent cruel logic of the universe and say, ‘try your worst!’

I don’t know if this person would find that relatable, or profound, but it wouldn’t matter, because if they saw the dark patch in my right iris, their face would be close to mine. And if their face was close to mine, I would feel the warmth of their breath on my upper lip.

Of course, this doesn’t happen tonight. This is no great tragedy. Acquiring what you desire isn’t the point. The desire is the north star, the light from another dimension used for navigation. You can never get close to it, and if you look at the star and not the dark sea ahead of you, the rudder will run against the reef, you’ll be shipwrecked. You’ll burn up in the atmosphere, you’ll wander the desert in pursuit of a mirage, etcetera. (Really, you’d just transform, but this would feel like death because it is.)

I meet someone at the bar that night. He doesn’t get close enough to see the dark patch, I can’t feel his breath on my upper lip, but it’s enough for now to be made of flesh and bone and to see that oblivion out of the corner of my eye.

I had just gotten back from San Francisco, and I tell him the weather was uncharacteristically bright and sunny. We talk about the qualities of light at different times of day. I say I love the light when the sun has just disappeared and is just about to arrive – dawn and dusk. When I was on the plane heading home in the early morning, the mountains below me sublimated into similar shades of slate grey blue; the clouds and the sky and the sea brushed with the same palette. I loved how everything became the same, separated only by vague shapes, suggestions of themselves. In response, he advocates for the harsh light of the afternoon, when shadows are their most intense. Later, I wonder if he likes that time of day because it is when everything is the most itself, the most separate. It’s a nice thought; that every day everything begins as less itself, becomes more itself, then ends as less itself again.

This all reminds me that when I was in San Francisco, I stopped at the De Young Museum and become totally transfixed by the Papua New Guinea exhibit. I tell him how I spent the whole bright afternoon in that dark mahogany room. Plaques explain that when artifacts from colonized Papua New Guinea were brought to western Europe in the late 19th/early 20th century, their ‘simplistic’ designs transformed the western European art scene. Instead of capturing realism, giving the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface, they experimented with the impression of the object, or at least that was the European interpretation of the matter. Art from Papua New Guinea introduced to them the idea that the shape, the impression of something, could hold more truth than the faithfully rendered version. The idea that the brain fills in a richer truth in the gaps left by suggestion.

I stood for a long time looking at a “spirit figure”. To the uninformed eye, it appeared to be an unaltered piece of driftwood with a small face carved into it, giving the impression of a spindly creature with four legs. And that’s essentially what it was. These were pieces of wood found when someone was visited by a spirit in a dream, then would search in the marsh for a stick which resembled the spirit as closely as possible. They would carve nothing out of it, except to add a small face. The idea, I guess, was that if you dreamt it, it already existed in the world. What you dreamt doesn’t have to be forged into existence, it simply has to be found.

I’m not sure if he understood what I was getting at, as I breathlessly explained the spirit figure. At this point, the beer is drunk, fulfilling its mission to make me look less intimidating and worth entertaining oblivion for.

I catch what might be a patch of iris unlike the rest of the iris in this stranger-who-is-not-a-stranger’s eye. I lean forward until he must feel my breath. He doesn’t close the gap, but he does ask me about my past, which is the question I am dreading.

I used to try and make some sense of it, the revolving door hospital stays, tubes, needles and bags full of chemo, radiation machines that make a person smell like rotten spinach, weeks and months and years of peaceful waters with the wind at your back punctuated by storms that almost kill you until they kill you. It makes less and less sense as a fully rendered image, so now I look at it like mythology, hoping the suggestion of the shape is closer to the truth.

I lean back so our atmospheres are separate again. Instead of telling him about cancer, I tell him the story of the flying dutchman, or at least how I remember it from this movie I watched recently.

A beautiful woman lives alone in a seaside town. Men fall for her, and she plays with their affection cruelly, returning it only when they entertain her with daredevil stunts. Until she inevitably grows bored with them, casting them aside. Then one day, a handsome stranger appears, and she falls head over heels for him after seeing that he has painted a portrait of a woman who looks strikingly similar to her. What she doesn’t know, but learns eventually, is that this man is cursed to sail the sea forever. Once every seven years, he can come to land in search of a woman who will love him knowing he is cursed. Only her love will allow him to die and escape the torment of immortality.

You see, I tell him without telling him, you see, I had a love like that.

I don’t know if he understands, or is content to let the mystery lie, but he does ask me about the spirit figure. He says it seems like a shame to go through all that work to find the right stick, only for it to degrade over time, being made of wood in a wet place. And anyway, what if the perfect stick existed, but got swept away one day, or it took so long to find that the shape became warped?

I think about this, and it makes me angry, because he’s right. I had dreamt for what I hadn’t been prepared to lose.

And I hadn’t found it tonight, but since I have dreamt it, I know it exists, unless the wood gets warped, unless a flood washes it away. The warm breath on my upper lip, the eyes close enough to my eyes to see that dark patch, the story I can tell them, about how when I was child, my friend’s mother saw it, and said it made me psychic.

She felt a strange tugging on her skin, around her chest. She slumped back on the bed and fumbled at the sensation, decorative pillows falling onto the floor listlessly. She discovered a few wires, and looked to her left, discovering that she was attached to a heart monitor. Her mind felt foggy, thoughts struggled to emerge from the haze. A thought floated past her: “I should probably be alarmed”.

She tried to remember something … anything … from the days leading up to now. She closed her eyes and poked at the lumbering beasts of her subconscious. A memory groaned awake, and she recalled her apartment, the sickly glow of half-hearted winter light from behind closed curtains. She remembered her sister visiting, barging in really, cleaning … she remembered yelling, an argument. She didn’t want sister to see her like that, why couldn’t she understand that …

She felt a dull, familiar pain in her center, a wringing out, like a sore muscle. From what exactly, she wondered. The pain felt as familiar to her as an old friend, and its return comforted her somehow.

She heard a soft hiss and the door swung open. Two impossibly gorgeous women in white lab coats walked through. Shiny hair in an oscillation between brown and blonde swung down their backs. Their lips were round and firm, like ripe grapes. They smiled, but the edges of their eyes remained frozen. They looked remarkably similar, different only in the way two brands of tortilla chips are meaningfully different.

“Hello, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” The one on the right said, her voice flat and shot through with gravel. Both women extended their right hands. For a moment, Mina wondered if she should shake them both at the same time.

“Hello,” Mina croaked, clearing her throat. She shook one hand and then the other.

“I don’t mean to sound insane,” she continued, “but … where am I?”

Mina laughed, nervously. The women laughed with her, as if this was all some big cosmic joke and she would be in on it soon.

“I know, I know. Here you are, waking up in this weird room, no idea how you got here. You must be like, what the hell is going on?!”

Mina nodded gravely. That’s exactly what she was like.

“Don’t worry,” The woman continued, “all will be revealed. But first, I need to ask a few questions. They’re going to sound dumb, but please answer them honestly, okay?”

The other woman whipped out a tablet, and began to take notes.

“Firstly, what is your name?”

Mina blinked, vaguely wondering if she should be telling this woman personal information just because she was wearing a lab coat and had shiny hair. But, she figured, a name is not exactly a secret.

“Mina Bonaville.”

“Great. And what’s your date of birth?”

“May 17, 1995.”

“Great. What’s the last thing you remember?”

Mina once again prodded the slush of her mind. The air in the room felt dense. She blinked rapidly, as if that would lift this strange shroud.

“I was in my apartment. It was dark, and my sister came to visit. She turned on all the lights. We had a fight, I was embarrassed …”

Her heart constricted again, a sharp tendril of pain. Tears sprang to her eyes. She brought her fingers to the dampness, then examined them, as if they held the answer to some unasked question.

The woman with the tablet looked at the other woman, concerned. The other woman ignored her, and leaned forward. She folded her hands on her lap, and her eyebrows converged, forming one neat wrinkle above the bridge of her nose. Her eyes remained frozen, and Mina wondered if she’d seen them blink.

“Why were you embarrassed?”

“It was a mess. My apartment, I mean. Food everywhere, bags of garbage … I’m not a messy person, usually, I don’t think, but I wasn’t able to leave the apartment. I kept it dark, so I guess I didn’t notice how bad it had gotten.”

“Why couldn’t you leave the apartment?”

Mina inhaled to answer, but her breath caught in her throat. Her heart began to race, and a thin sheet of sweat formed under her clothes. The heart monitor started beeping at a faster quip.

“I don’t know. Why can’t I remember that? Hey, who are you? Where am I … in some sort of doctor’s office? Why am I hooked up?”

“I just have one more question for you Mina, then I’ll answer yours. Does the date ‘September 5th’ mean anything to you?”

The tendril in Mina’s heart progressed to a boa constrictor. Tears flowed freely.

“I … no, it doesn’t. I don’t know why I’m crying.”

The woman nodded, and the other scribbled furiously into her tablet. The fluorescent lights hummed, like a distant ocean, or a nearby highway.

“We haven’t quite been able to remove the physiological queues. The brain is able to forget, but the body remembers. Hopefully soon we’ll have a solution for that, too.”

“What are you talking about?”

The woman cocked her head and laughed apologetically. The neat wrinkle above her nose deepened.

“Sorry, that probably makes absolutely no sense to you! Thank you for your answers. Let me introduce myself. My name is Irene. This is my colleague, Jessica. We’re here with Psychiatric Productions. Are you familiar with us?”

“Sure, I know your shows.”

“Oh stop, you didn’t forget that, did you?”

“Forget what?”

“You were selected, specifically, for being a mega fan! Jessica, pull up Mina’s profile. You’ve gotta see this.”

Jessica pressed a few buttons on the tablet, and Mina turned to see a blown up video of her own face, projected onto the wall next to her. She watched herself talking animatedly. She winced at the dark bags beneath her eyes, and the garbage in her apartment sneaking into the edges of the frame.

“My feeling is, basically, that Justine isn’t in the wrong. We have to remember the tendency for misogyny in the fan base, especially, and concerningly, among women. Dustin is the one who was DM-ing women while they were exclusive, lest we forget!”

Mina looked in horror at this person, speaking rapidly and with such conviction, who was supposedly herself.

“You granted our show a lot of legitimacy,” Irene said, “and kept the discourse train going with your feminist analysis! We already knew quite a bit about you, and were thrilled when you decided to sign up for the show.”

Mina turned to face the women, stiffly.

“Are you saying that I’m on a TV show right now?”

Irene sighed and whined to Jessica-

“It’s going to get old explaining this to everyone.”

“It’s hard to localize the memory,” Jessica said, patiently, “and remove it without removing the logic behind joining the show.”

“I guess so,” Irene murmured, and glanced back at Mina.

“Yes, you’re on a TV show right now. You signed a waiver - Jessica, pull up the waiver, would you?”

“Am I being filmed right now?!”

Irene nodded sheepishly, and gestured to a small camera near the door.

Mina leapt up from the bed, instinctively covering her face.

“Jesus Christ…”

“Jessica, show her the waiver.”

Jessica turned her tablet toward Mina.

“I don’t need to see the waiver, Jessica.” Mina hissed, lurching toward Jessica. Jessica turned the tablet back around, dejected.

“Let me out.” Mina said to Irene, simply.

“Mina,” Irene said softly, patting the bed.

“Let. Me. Out.”

“Mina.” Irene said, more forcefully, “You’re free to leave at any time. But let me remind you, you wanted this. Don’t you trust yourself?”

Mina turned to stare at Irene’s unreadable expression. Irene patted the bed again. Begrudgingly, Mina sat, letting out a deep breath.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

Irene cleared her throat. She said nothing for a moment, silence settling the room like a fine dust. The heart monitor beeped like an obliging bird.

“As you may know, Mina,” Irene finally started, “we at Psychiatric Productions are not only interested in boundary pushing reality television, but in psychological research and pharmaceutical development. You agreed to be a part of a clinical trial for a memory suppressing drug. The aim is to help treat PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder. We are especially interested in those who have experienced trauma … within romantic relationships, and how the suppression of those memories might help, or hurt, the chances for a new, healthy relationship. To that end, you also agreed to be a part of a dating reality show, with people in the same clinical trial. You’re doing a wonderful thing, taking your own pain and harnessing it for the betterment of medicine. And, with your eloquence and fiery personality, it goes without saying that you’ll make for great TV.” Irene smiled, broadly.

Mina blinked for a few moments, rubbing her temples.

“So what you’re saying is, I willingly agreed to be a part of a clinical trial, which is also a dating show?”

Irene looked at Jessica pointedly, and Jessica weakly turned the tablet around once again. Mina snatched it, skimming the waiver furiously.

“You know how it is,” Irene mused, “the government stopped granting research funds for mental health, and stopped funding universities entirely, but people are still having a hard time, you know, mentally. Anyway, it’s a good thing, this partnership with the production company, don’t you think? Mental health resources should be accessible!”

“What’s this here about harvesting my biometric data?” Mina said, pointing to the tablet.

“Irene’s face became pinched, and she waved a hand in the air, as if smoke had gotten in her eyes. “Legalese. We needed as much information about you as possible, to find you a perfect match!”

Mina murmured to herself, reading the contract.

“Maybe this will help,” Irene said, pulling out a remote, and pressing a button.

The screen beside the bed turned into Mina once again, this time sitting at a table in a sterile room and facing the camera, much like a police interrogation.

“Hello, me. Or uh- hello, Mina, I guess. I know, this must be strange, I imagine you have a lot of questions, but please, you have to continue with this. I’ve given you- me- such a gift, here. I- we- you- I’ve been hurt so deeply. My trust has been betrayed so profoundly, with this memory, I don’t know if I can ever love again. At least, never in the same way. After what happened with-”

Irene pressed a button on the remote, fast forwarding. Mina rose as if possessed, floating mindlessly forward to face her own face in the projection. She felt woozy. Irene pressed play.

“I need the chance to experience love again as a trusting person. I know how this is going to sound to you, but you know it’s true- all I’ve ever wanted is to be loved, and loved fully by someone else. We are kidding ourselves if we say we want anything different. Please. We are better off this way. You have to trust me.”

Irene stopped the video. Mina looked silently at her own paused face, noticing her eyes, red-rimmed and puffy.

She felt her heart tighten again, that strange and familiar feeling.

Suddenly, the bright room was plunged into darkness.

“Hello? Irene?”

No answer.

She felt a zap in her brain, and in the next instant found herself sprawled on the bed. A dark face hovered over her. She couldn’t make out any features, but felt the danger as intrinsic, as something that existed in her cytoplasm. She tried to wriggle away but was paralyzed, as if her mind was disconnected entirely from her body, which remained horrifyingly placid and amenable.

She tried to scream for help, but was drowned out by the sound of a car tire screech, rising from within her or flooding the room, she couldn’t be sure.

She felt the zap again, and was back in the fluorescent room, watching Irene and Jessica frantically assemble a hypodermic needle.

“Mina, listen to me,” Irene said. “You’ve lapsed in your memory suppressant. Do you consent to receiving more glycoflaxecytum?”

Zap.

Mina was once again paralyzed in bed, in a dark room. She felt someone begin to take off her clothes, every square millimeter of skin vibrating. She screamed, or thought she did, her consciousness now existed in a pin prick space in the back of her mind…

She heard a woman’s voice, distant-

“Mina, do you consent?”

“Yes … yes … please …”

Zap.

Mina gasped as she felt a needle slide into her forearm. She blinked and was back in the white room, the sudden silence deafening. Jessica handed her a glass, the words “Live well, Laugh often, Love much” etched into it.

“Cranberry juice. We don’t know why, but it seems to help.”

Mina sucked down the juice. After a moment, her breathing settled, her backfiring heartbeat returned to a steady pace.

Irene placed a hand on Mina’s thigh.

“Allow me to apologize, Mina. We allowed too much time to lapse in between glycoflaxecytum doses. You shouldn’t have to experience those breakthrough memories.”

“Breakthrough memories? What do you mean?” Mina asked blandly.

Irene smiled, the wrinkle above her nose disappearing.

“Never mind about that. Are you ready to meet the eligible bachelors?”

(Image: “Trouble in Mind” by Yves Ruillere)

“One who regards one’s intellectual knowledge as ignorance has deep insight.
One who overrates one’s intellectual achievement as definite truth is deeply sick.
Only when one is sick of this sickness can one cease to be sick.
One who returns one’s mind to the simplicity of the subtle truth is not sick.
One knows to break through conceptual knowledge in order to directly reach the subtle
truth of the universe.”

Tao Te Ching, Verse 71, Translated by Hua-Ching Ni

The day after my fiancé’s funeral, my neighbor was having a yard sale. Our street was surprisingly quiet for being tucked between Fountain and Sunset, two major thoroughfares. We lived in one 1920’s Spanish colonial style fourplex among many, the sidewalks lined with sweetgum trees. It was the type of apartment I had dreamed of living in one day. I would have to move out of it seven months later.

My neighbor Pheobe was one of those home grown, hardened hippie Angelinos. She gave the neighborhood a sort of old school Los Angeles legitimacy, even more so than the trees that split the sidewalk and the terracotta tile roofs. She was middle aged and wore her graying blonde hair in two long braids. I would see her every evening watering her small lawn, fighting the daily effects of the sun.

I was introduced to her one night months earlier, when a man dressed in all black was peering into our windows, and we heard a woman flinging obscenities at him behind the apartment. Everyone in the fourplex wandered outside, dazed, as the unresponsive man shuffled away from our building and began immediately peering into the windows in the next building over. Pheobe called a mental health community support hotline that eventually arrived and picked up the window peering stranger. My neighbors affectionately referred to her as the neighborhood watch.

Pheobe’s wares spilled onto the sidewalk from the small front yard of her fourplex; racks of clothes, books and artwork, kitchenware. She asked me what was wrong, grief plainly written across my face. I told her that my fiancé had passed just a couple of days earlier. She pulled me into a hug, then told me that she was a medium, and that she could contact the souls of the deceased. She said the soul only stuck around for forty days, so if I wanted to have a séance with her help, it would have to be within that timeframe. I wondered if this strict and random-seeming timeline was common knowledge in the ghost community.

“I’m getting a message now,” she said, looking vaguely into the sky. “He’s telling you, ‘don’t wait to have fun’. I’m taking that to mean you should have sex.” I was floored because, her editorializing aside, this was absolutely something Nick would say.

“Before he passed, did you both decide on signs, messages?” She asked. I must have looked confused, because she clarified; “I mean, did you decide that him sending you a bird would mean this, a butterfly would mean that, etcetera?”

“No,” I said, concerned. Should I have?!

I bought a glass vase with orange fishes on it for five dollars. “Wait,” she said, looking slightly tortured. “Let me ask the vase if it wants to leave…” She closed her eyes pensively for a few moments. “What if I give you seven dollars for it,” I offered. She opened her eyes. “Deal.” She said. “Just … if I decide I want it back, will you let me come get it?”

“Sure,” I responded.

After that talk with Pheobe, I couldn’t escape this paranoid thought that Nick could send me any number of signs, but in lieu of deciding beforehand what they meant, I wouldn’t be able to interpret a single one of them correctly. What if Nick was trying to pull the levers of my life in a positive direction, and I was missing every butterfly, every open door, causing him endless afterlife frustration? This opened an unpleasant hornet’s nest in my mind, thinking about the statutes of the afterlife, like it was some sort of metaphysical sitcom. Was he smashing his head against the wall when my friend set me up on a date with an indie musician, because he had painstakingly set up a delicate string of events that would have otherwise led me into the arms of an optometrist, or something?

I had practice in leaving hornet’s nests untouched. There’s something about sickness and death that demands meaning. Nothing so random and disruptive could have happened for no reason. In the human mind, cruelty can’t exist without purpose. It’s God’s plan, it exists to teach you a lesson, when God closes a door, He opens a window, etc. This is why senseless tragedies are often followed by conspiracy theories, as if balancing out the scale of pain with an evil, and therefore weighty, plot. Or at the very least, it was fated. Some twig snapped at the wrong time, leading to a cascading avalanche.

What meaning or sense is there to be made, then, from illness? A hornet’s nest appeared – the desire to tease out the avalanche of fate, back to the twig. If we didn’t know what caused it, and we didn’t know what cured it, or what made it worse, then anything could have caused it, anything could cure it, and anything could make it worse. Knowing myself, my overactive pedantic anxious brain, I consciously kept the nest un-kicked. I had to trust the doctors. I had to accept the limits of their knowledge, and the limits of my knowledge.

Toward the end, when all the chemotherapy available had stopped working and his body was failing, we began to try anything. Supplements, dietary changes, off-label medicine…

When he died, I swept all the pills into the garbage.

I had to accept the body as an ultimately unknowable machine, potentially coaxed one way or the other through human intervention but ultimately answering to gods or meaning beyond comprehension. Beyond my love for that body. Beyond fairness. In grief, I didn’t allow myself any mysticism, or to see any meaning in “signs”. In my mind, accepting positive meaning from “signs” meant accepting meaning in illness as well, and how could I possibly accept that this had happened “for a reason”? I rejected mysticism. But then I started to dream.

Around this time, I was deep into a stoner phase. (Unrelated, surely!). I rarely smoked during the day, unless it was the weekend and I was in a sunny park, or I was hungover, or I was at the beach, or seeing a stupid movie … Anyway, I mainly smoked in the evening. It slowed my whirring mind and softened the edges of the night. I thought very little while lying in bed, and sleep would creep up around me. Elemental, like a rising tide, and dreamless, always dreamless.

After Nick passed, my weed consumption remained the same, but dreams began to break through, like they couldn’t be contained. Nick would come to me in these dreams, but not in the mystical, comforting ways dead relatives come to people in movies. These were mostly nightmares. He would be back, alive, but the cancer was back alongside him. I was thrust every night into the nightmare of my recent waking life.

Awake, my life had become so surreal, so beyond my comprehension, that I was barely able to differentiate my conscious days from the lifelike nightmares of my dreams. Once you’ve seen your 26 year old fiancé lowered into the ground in a coffin, seeing him reappear like Jesus on the third day in your dreams doesn’t seem inconceivable. Everything in my life had a sheen of unreality to it. I think, looking back, this was my brain’s way of keeping me from total despair. Conceiving of everything as “real” at the same time would have been too overwhelming, so I rationalized it all as being “surreal”. Like when you see yourself in a dream, somehow the main character and the observer.

Because my waking life felt like a dream, and my dreams were breaking through the drugs I was trying to numb myself with, I decided to open the door. I thought maybe, because my reality felt so un-real, there would be more unhindered truth in the dreams. I thought maybe there would be more honesty in this roundabout way, like how art is sometimes more “honest” than fact; the representation more truthful than the reference.

Was I successful? Hard no. Something you may not know about grief if you haven’t experienced it (yet!) is that it can make sleep extremely elusive. Quitting weed after a years long dependency adds to the difficulty.

I was never a person who struggled with insomnia, but now I would experience week-long stretches without sleeping more than three hours a night. I tried everything – I would leave the bedroom and read on a couch for hours, meditate, pray, cry … I would try odd techniques friends suggested, like going into the kitchen to wash a single cup. Nothing worked. Nothing, except anti-anxiety medication which I had not squirreled away from Nick’s stash (and which I burned through quickly), and giving up. I discovered the strategy of giving up one night when I was staying at my parents’ house. Once I heard the birds chirping after a sleepless night, the most anxiety inducing sound in the world for an insomniac, I opened up my laptop and turned on an episode of Sex and the City. I was asleep after one episode. I discovered that sleep, like an avoidant-attachment man with a tote bag and a record collection, will run further away from you the more it knows you desire it. It’s such an odd dance of pretending you don’t know how essential sleeping is for your health, or care how horrible your next day will be without it, so much so that you pretend to sleep until it sneaks up on you and grants you the wish you had to pretend not to want.

I finally reached a place where I was able to sleep throughout the night, and recall my dreams most nights. I can’t say I had many dreams that granted me specific revelations, or even comforted me all that much. Mostly I had variations of the same unpleasant dream with Nick, where he’d be back in my life, alongside the cancer, but now I’m in love with someone else. And yet, I’ve had a handful of simple dreams, where we are at a drug store together, we have a conversation with the same rhythm we always had. I can rest my head on his shoulder, and I’m always shocked that my subconscious can remember exactly how my head fit into his collarbone, when consciously I struggle now to remember how his skin felt and his smell fades from all his clothes. It’s like the memory of him is perfectly stored, in my subconscious, but I have no way of consciously accessing it. Now that I’m approaching the one year anniversary of his death, this is the question I’m facing – what to do with the memory.

When someone you love will very likely die, the idea of them becoming nothing more than a memory is torturous. The weight of every moment becomes unbearable. Is this going to play in my mind, in an endless montage, or this? Am I appreciating every moment enough? It doesn’t seem to matter, you don’t have much control over what your memory holds onto, the images that float into your subconscious whether you want them to or not. When someone dies, their memory is like a dream you struggle to remember upon waking. Did that really just happen? Or, when exactly does a dream end?

Maybe that’s why I allow myself to find “meaning” in dreams when it’s hard for me to find it elsewhere. Death and dreams reveal the curtain that separates us from another world. They blur the distinctions between reality and memory. It’s not that I think every dream has a clear, one-to-one metaphorical meaning, because dreaming feels like an organic process. The body and the mind, the subconscious and the conscious, pushing against each other and responding to each other in real time. Responding to stimuli, processing the day, storing the memory, coaxing or provoking the fear, asking questions and answering questions. Maybe “meaning” isn’t fate, or a grand plan, maybe it’s this process, a continual conversation between the knowable and the unknowable.

This summer I read The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin. A decidedly odd book in her canon, this one takes place not in some meticulously mapped and realized fantasy world or sci-fi planet, but in Portland, Oregon. A man named George Orr discovers that his dreams have the power to change reality, but only he is aware of the change. For example, if he dreams one night that a pink dog walks across his line of vision, he wakes up the next morning and dogs are now pink, have always been pink since time immemorial, and no one remembers a time that was different. Except for Orr, and eventually, Orr’s therapist, who decides to bend the world to his will by manipulating Orr’s dreams. As you can guess, even though the therapist is well-meaning, his ego and belief in his own correctness causes the world to become an unlivable and nonsensical place. At one point, Orr tells the therapist:

“’Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass’”.

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K Le Guin

Imagine my delight when upon visiting New York and meeting up with my friend Sam who had also read this book, we went to a Man Ray exhibit at the Met titled “When Objects Dream.” The exhibit featured Man Ray’s eponymous “Rayographs”- a photography technique which, Sam was thankfully able to explain, involved placing objects directly onto light sensitive paper and exposing it to light. The result is a camera-less “photograph”, and the technique results in ghostly, unexpected double images. Are these images surreal, or are they somehow more real, illuminating the hidden textures and movement of a static object?

Man Ray wrote the following explaining “his theory about new art for modern life”, or “flattening” life’s intangible realities onto two dimensions, as in a photograph:

“just as the lens sacrifices actual space to focus all that space upon the plate, so the artist must condense the time and space element to create life’s equivalent.”

“A Primer of the New Art of Two Dimensions”, Man Ray

The book and this art exhibit sailed on the tides of my subconscious for a few months now, as I thought about dreams, memory, meaning, and the year anniversary of Nick’s passing this upcoming month. The real in the surreal, the surreal in the real. I’ve never been able to find comfort in anything that has felt untruthful or incomplete, as inconvenient for me as that usually is. But dreams present themselves to me whether they make sense to me or not, whether or not I ask for them. They ask nothing from me, except to experience them.

This Christmas I attended Christmas Eve service for the first time in almost ten years. I was able to appreciate the beauty of the sanctuary in a way I never had before, as I had taken for granted the high ceilings with stained glass windows, the simply carved wooden cross and the enormous organ. This sanctuary used to be a battleground, where I would bristle and second guess the call and response, at the insinuation that God was in control and I had to subjugate my will to him. Now, returning to church a decade later, after experiencing profound grief, I found something different in the same passages that upset me so deeply before. The sermon was about leaving your fears at God’s feet, and trusting in His love. I came away with the thought that maybe ‘God’s plan’ doesn’t imply that everything has meaning, or a “reason”. Maybe “trusting in God’s plan” is as simple as the act of surrender, the humility of not-knowing. Maybe “God’s plan” is unknowable, like the subconscious is unknowable, even as it works in tandem with your conscious mind and brings you dreams every night.

When you fall in love you don’t know it, you feel it, elemental as the tides. I don’t know why this happened, I don’t know the meaning behind suffering, but I know that Nick existed, like a pot that carried water for a time. He had been apart, and now he is a part.

I surrender his memory to my subconscious, it’s a conversation that needs nothing from me but asks gently for a response. Here it is. A dream, an essay, a prayer.

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss (…)

But here rise the stubborn continents (…) And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking…

What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?”

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K Le Guin

Start a dialogue with God?

Experience the static that forms

when you see the expression

behind a person’s expression?

Do you want to glimpse the ineffable?

I see it there,

hidden within the bramble and bureaucracy you’ve grown to protect yourself.

If I see you as God sees you then I’ve seen God.

Forgive me, I’m a race horse at the starting gate

the anxiety feeding itself in this transitory state

somewhere between liquid and solid.

Forgive me, I have seen my love without breath in his body.

I have been a psychopomp,

a perverse sort of midwife.

What this has carved out in me is now a cavern

the sides of my heart have been scraped out,

a baptism by fire.

A river will form a canyon and so will dynamite.

It’s more crude and the results less striking

and like anything violent that happens, it just happens.

Then again, a chasm is also capacity

a muscle tears so it can lengthen.

The hollowness feels like a hunger, it’s a burden, it’s a lightness, it’s a potentiality.

Let me fill the cavern with a different kind of violence.

I’m a psychopomp

I’ll cross the river Styx again

as many times as it takes

even though I know what I’m getting into, this time.

(Image credit: Mind and Memory, Janie Olsen)

“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.” (The Denial of Death, Ernst Becker)

Recently I drove my car down the coast from Seattle to Los Angeles, returning to the same city where my fiancé succumbed to cancer earlier this year. As I put yet another thousand miles on my beloved Honda Accord I was hit with the question – why Los Angeles? In Seattle, I have my family and thus a context which is sacred to me. The boundaries are clear, and I exist happily within them- I am a daughter and a sister. In Los Angeles I was once a fiancé and now I am … what exactly?

Driving down the coast felt like traveling through a time lapse, in that strange way time folds into miles on a road trip. The evergreen trees of the Pacific Northwest grew into giants in the redwood forest, then faded into battered cypress trees along the central coast before disappearing entirely in the desert. As the landscape morphed, with it went the boundaries of my context, and now I’m left to ooze.

I find myself moving around Los Angeles as if I have no skin at all. In grief I have no way to cover up, I weep openly while drinking wine in a dark bar, I bring someone into a hug and hold them for far too long. The barriers no longer hold, and I am spilling over. It feels gross, it feels cringey, to be in this gooey state. To be so obviously in a state of becoming. When I meet someone new I wonder if they can see right through me, a creature held up with stilts and duct tape, lipstick drawn on the mass.

At the same time, there’s a sort of manic elation to feeling so off the map. I describe it to people as finishing the main story of a video game, then going back into the game and doing whatever you want. In the cheap PC games we would play as kids, once we finished the story my siblings and I would love to find glitches in the game where if you walked into a certain object in a certain way you’d enter a part of the map the developers never intended you to see. The recognizable shapes would morph and lose their colors, the sky would expand forever, and you could literally walk off the ‘map’ of the game. Experiencing profound grief gives you this kind of perception. My therapist described it as seeing the world with glasses for the first time, not knowing you had poor vision. On one side is disillusion, since no one really thinks the worst will happen to them until it does. The world becomes a cruel place where the rug can be pulled out from you at any second. On the flip side is immense gratitude for the fragility and resilience of life, the improbability of your lungs filing with air again and again. The world is revealed in its cruel clarity and its staggeringly beautiful matrix of possibility. I left the Garden of Eden, and now I’m aware of my nakedness.

I feel this new clarity like a lightning rod. Spending time in my childhood bedroom this summer was a return to my core, to my essential self. But this awareness comes with an awareness of all the ways I am falling short of that essential self, all the ways in which supporting a partner with cancer had caused parts of myself to hibernate. Yes, it’s all made up, it’s all precious, it’s all fleeting, your childhood ambitions were correct – now what! At 28, standing in the wreckage of the planned life of my twenties and staring down the barrel of my 30s, all I can feel is this gap. And closing the gap means trying and trying is cringe.

I have been thinking about cringe a lot recently, this knee jerk response I have whenever I try in earnest to take the most essential and precious parts of myself seriously (i.e: publishing essays!) while also trying to give myself grace as I reassemble myself, picking up pieces of my soul scattered all over the city like a bomb was detonated in my aorta. Sorry, I know I’m walking around with a missing ear and half of my stomach, I think they ended up at a noodle restaurant in Pasadena somewhere … cringe!

Cringe is biological. To “cringe” is a bodily response, a tensing, a sharp intake of breath, the heart convulsing. I’m sure the feeling of cringe has existed as long as we have been sapiens huddled together to ward off the elements. It serves an important social function, nudging us toward acceptable behavior. It’s an internal electric fence that lets us know when we are scaring the hoes. But today, in internet culture, “cringe” is not just an internal sensation, but a designation that can be hoisted upon another person for simply living their life. To quote myself from an earlier essay, cringe “is, as far as I can tell, an Internet insult for people who lack the self-awareness to reign in their earnest excitement.” Someone can be vibing out dressed up like a thicc horse at the Chicago bean statue and they can be filmed and posted online – cringe! Someone can get passionate at a protest, railing against a misogynistic figurehead speaking at their college campus, which can be recorded and posted online – cringe! Someone can shoot their shot in someone’s DMs, which can then be sent to a group text and scrutinized – cringe! Whoops, Foucault’s panopticon has been realized, and it’s making the lamest people you could ever imagine unfathomably wealthy and the rest of us miserable for no discernible benefit!

In a sense, we are all walking around online with our skin off. We document falling in love for the world to see, then sheepishly trash the evidence when the relationship doesn’t work out. We post questionable things during bursts of emotion that we delete later, even though our entire peer group has already seen it. To cope with the lack of skin, we all arm ourselves with irony and detachment, building individual igloos out of hard, opaque plastic. Ashamed of the flesh, the places where it hurts to expand, the aches of muscles being strengthened, we tuck it all out of sight. Large language models like ChatGPT rise to meet us there; because it’s not so much your actions in a vacuum that keep you awake at night handwringing, it’s the fact that others saw you, perhaps ridiculed you, perhaps pitied you. You have been perceived, as the kids say. To speak your fears to a robot, on the other hand, means you can simulate vulnerability without the risk of perception. The bodily response of embarrassment is removed and along with it the shake in your muscles as they tense that reminds you that you are alive, that you are an animal. When you bare your soul to a robot, without the perception of another human being to contextualize you, to witness you, have you bared your soul at all? If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to see it, etc. … when the robot mirrors your language back to you, as it is programmed to do, does your soul cave in on itself without another being to help you carry it? In that empty simulacrum of care do we become like robots ourselves, in love with our reflections like Narcissus, the only possible destination being psychosis and schizophrenia?

Cringe is pro-human and anti-technology. It is a sensation that exists in the context of other people, in the space between each other, within perception. It is also, importantly, an admission of our nervous system, our miraculous flesh that multiplies as it dies. I see the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the increasing amount of interpersonal socialization spent online as fundamentally anti-human, as lack of friction for the price of isolation. The antagonism toward humanity is painfully obvious for tech entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson (“the man who wants to live forever”, you may know him as the man who gets regular blood transfusions from his son…) and their anti-mortality philosophy seeps into culture at large whether we like it or not. But um- here’s the thing- immortality is impossible, and the denial of death, the denial of the biological, is a societal sickness that develops at the expense of life itself.

Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death hypothesizes that the denial of death (repressed in a Freudian sense) contributes on a societal level to the sickness at the heart of capitalistic society – the denial of mortality feeds the myth of perpetual growth that props up capitalism, the destruction of the planet, the erosion of compassion and connection with one another. It creates a healthcare system where financial health and physical health are interlinked, the moment the dominoes of your physical health start to fall in the wrong direction and prevent you from being able to work you lose your healthcare and face financial ruin. It’s almost as if you are punished societally for having a body that dares to fail, that makes mortality obvious.

In medieval times we had momento mori, skull and withering flower motifs in paintings to remind Christians of their own mortality and encourage a life free of sin. Now that we are no longer preoccupied with whether we will make it into heaven, the entire concept of our own mortality is no longer confronted. I think every person has a clear memory from childhood of when they realized they and all their loved ones will die. It’s obviously a painful realization, made worse by our intelligence, awareness, and propensity to consider ourselves as gods:

“…man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.” (The Denial of Death, Ernst Becker)

In The Last Unicorn, an immortal unicorn is turned into a mortal human being to confuse the red bull who is hunting her. As a human, she falls in love, and (spoiler) when she is turned back into a unicorn, she is aware of the horror of immortality, as mortality is the only thing that gives anything meaning:

“love was generous precisely because it can never be immortal” … “Whatever can die is beautiful – more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.” (The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle)

The Last Unicorn and The Denial of Death speak to me in an era that fawns over all things chrome, streamlined and seamless and feels antagonistic to all things human, complicated and biological. As Lorde said in her recent newsletter, within the chrysalis the nascent butterfly cells attack the caterpillar cells in order to transform. The ‘caterpillar’ cells fight back (at this point a denatured ooze) but are eventually outnumbered and overwhelmed by the new cells finding each other and taking shape. Death is laced into the fabric of living, it is essential for rebirth, and mortality is something a machine can never understand.

In this context, being cringe is a radical act. It is a rejection of the cop inside your head and the lame social media panopticon we find ourselves within. It is also an investment in humanity, injecting the threads between us with strength and trust. Daring to take risks and be vulnerable in the presence of other humans expands the boundaries of the electric fence for everyone else. In a culture that increasingly values cruel hierarchies and an administration that is willing to deploy violence to maintain them, comfortability with slipping outside of binary codes of social cohesion is essential. It’s serious to be cringe.

The past two years while my fiancé fought cancer remade my world and demanded an upheaval of my worldview. I silted ideas like sand and let anything that was no longer useful in this new world fall through the slits. One thing that fell through was the idea of “staying positive”. “Staying positive” while massive fires tore through California in the height of winter and the man I loved died painfully in a hospital felt like nothing more than delusion. It’s sanity enforcing to admit when things are not positive. In the rubble something else emerges that feels more truthful to me – staying soft. Returning to open arms after the universe has betrayed you, even if you have to crawl to them. Remaining open to beauty, staying porous, staying becoming, staying human, staying amorphous, staying animal, “going back to the clay”. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much what shape we ultimately take. Maybe we never take a clear shape at all. A thing that is constantly changing is a thing that is alive!

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.” (The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K Le Guin).

I turned 28 last week. Two days before my birthday was the seven month anniversary of my fiance’s passing. A day before, his tombstone was unveiled in a cemetery in Los Angeles, one thousand miles away.

This birthday was certainly weird, being the first birthday I experienced in the After Times. I had left the apartment I shared with my fiance behind in Los Angeles, and moved into my childhood home in the Pacific Northwest for the summer. I turned 28 while in a holding pattern, trying to enjoy the respite of towering trees, suburban gardens, coffee shops where I could always find a place to sit, and beaches where I could always find a place to park … while trying not to be stressed that the path I had painstakingly constructed, once stretching out in front of me like a glittering ribbon, had been obliterated. I came here to “process”, whatever that means, and to “figure out what to do next”, whatever that means.

I’ve always found a sense of warped pleasure in the late weeks of summer. It’s a strange time of year, a holding pattern of its own. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, the leaves on the cherry trees turning yellow at the end of August meant that the school year was coming, and with it endless months of darkness and rain. The days still drip with gold and heat while the night creeps greedily closer, the final bows of the curtain call. It’s a time that feels all the more textured and vibrant when thrown into relief by the darkness on its heels. A gasp of adrenaline that propels risk, a rabbit driven from its burrow. I’ve always turned a new age in this in-between time, glanced over, kinetic with anticipation. It always felt like I was getting away with something, like I had aged in secret, because the whole world began to turn its neck away from the carefree depths of summer and toward the regimented march of fall, when the real plot picks up again. I close my eyes as I sit on the beach, the sand radiating heat below me, the acrid smell of baking seaweed carried away as soon as it materializes by the cool breeze off the Puget Sound, and I try to make it all coalesce into … something. I try to find peace in late summer, the holding pattern, while I’m in between the gaping chasms of grief on one side, an impending return to Los Angeles on the other. I felt grief inside me like something I needed to expel, golden memories turned sour, making me sick. I wanted to crawl on all fours from the beach to the forest, find a dark corner and retch, my grief escaping from my body soft and steaming. It would make my body weak, but it would clear my mind. How can I decide what to do next, how can I formulate a new path from the rubble, when I’m hijacked again and again by this emotional fever?

Whenever I’m terribly sick, hunched over in the bathroom, I have a mantra that helps me through it- “my body is doing what it needs to do”. I wish desperately for my body to tend to this grief like it tends to an illness, like I’m an automaton, flesh over machinery, responding reflexively- output automatically to input. I watch a formation of geese fly overhead, and I’m jealous of the other creatures on this earth. I wish I had the instinct to know where home was, to orient me toward the next stage. Instead I engage with what my therapist would call “magical thinking”, and I decide that if I see more than ten salmon at the Ballard Locks on my birthday, I will have an auspicious year.

It’s hard to explain the mythic importance of salmon to Seattleites if you did not grow up in the Washington state public school system. We learn about ecology through salmon migration, we learn about civic debates by staging mock trials concerning imaginary dams which would block salmon from their spawning grounds. In my classroom, we even raised actual salmon from egg to fry, then released them into a local stream. Most Seattleites remember an elementary school field trip to the Ballard Locks, a canal which controls the ocean level by using gates to allow ships to pass between the inner lakes of the city and the ocean. Completed in 1917, the engineer Hiram M. Chittenden had the foresight to include a “salmon ladder”, a series of 21 concrete steps (or “weirs”) filled with water that allow salmon to climb up and down through the locks, along their migration path.

In this summer, when I was looking for something, anything to give me a sign, I found myself at the salmon ladder, witnessing an ancient migratory path on the day I completed my 28th migration around the sun. I had been to the salmon ladder before, but I had never seen it so dense with fish. I watched as they heaved their massive, silver bodies from one “step” in the ladder to the next, in one fluid-jerk motion, so fast that you would miss it if you blinked. One salmon making the leap seemed to inspire the others, as one jump would be followed by three or four more splashes, and then a period of silence as another brave fish gathered its nerve.

I overheard a child ask her mom, “how do they know where to go?” Indeed, this was the question on my mind, too: how do they know? How do salmon know how to make this 50 mile journey from generation to generation, how do geese know how to fly south in a perfect formation, how are animals able to orient themselves toward home?

I had always had this conception that animals know to do these things based on instinct. A hand-wavey explanation that you would tell a child: animals do what they do based on some sort of internal programming. They are hard wired to do the same things, the same way, over and over, species-wide. A simple matter of input and output.

However, this turns out to not exactly be the case. In the case of salmon migration, for example,

“Salmon can return to the very streams in which they were born by homing in on the distinctive scents of those natal waters. (Arthur Hasler confirmed this ability in the 1950s after having his own olfactory epiphany. While hiking near a waterfall, the familiar smells brought back long-buried childhood memories, and he wondered if migrating salmon experience something similar).” (An Immense World, Ed Yong).

In other words, it doesn’t seem as though salmon have a mindless instinct to swim up the river bed, unlocked like battleship coordinates from deep inside their ancestral DNA. Instead smell is tied to memory, perhaps not unlike how smelling the brand of cologne an unrequited crush from a decade ago wore can still send shivers up my spine. To me, this reads less like “instinct”, mindless output in response to stimuli, but “intuition”, a gut feeling based on memory, on emotion, on desire.

Ed Yong expands upon the concept of an animal’s unique perception with the idea of “umwelt”:

“... every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble – Umwelt … specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience – its perceptual world” (An Immense World, Ed Yong, 5).

Reading more about animal perception, how ants perceive the world through complex pheromone trails left by other ants, how dogs perceive the world through a sense of smell so sophisticated they can track the passage of time through scents left behind for days, how salmon can trek for miles upstream using the nostalgic smell of their spawning ground- I began to think about my own “umwelt”. The “small fraction of reality’s fullness” that I experience due to my unique perception. What is my metaphorical “umwelt”? Is it the Freudian iceberg of my past and subconscious and the resulting desires for intimacy, warmth, rebirth, connection? Is it the books I read, the music I listen to, the company I keep, the recipes passed down, the trust that’s been broken, the adults who were kind to me when I was small, my body telling me where it hurts, the memory of a kiss, every sunset I’ve ever witnessed?

That’s the thing about being a human- I’m not trying to use my perception to avoid predation, or hunt prey, or migrate south for the winter. I’m using it to decide what city I should live in, how I should handle my career - And, I guess, to decide on potential mates, which brings me closer to the animal kingdom …

The complexity of choices necessitates an abundance of guidance. And maybe, unlike animals, the tools we use to develop guidance can be cultivated. I read this beautiful essay from velvet noise recently about how “certain parts of you only emerge for certain people”, expanding on this article by Michael E. Johnson, which explains annealing metals:

“Annealing involves heating a metal above its recrystallization temperature, keeping it there for long enough for the microstructure of the metal to reach equilibrium, then slowly cooling it down, letting new patterns crystallize.” (Johnson)

Johnson goes on to compare the annealing of metals to the annealing of the mind. In a “high energy state” such as being under the influence of psychedelics, or in deep meditation, the mind can “anneal”, literally reshaping deeply entrenched neural pathways. He hypothesizes that being in love may cause a similar effect:

“...perhaps we can describe love as the result of a strong annealing process while under the influence of some pattern. I.e., evolution has primed us such that certain intentional objects (e.g. romantic partners) can trigger high-energy states where the brain smooths out its discontinuities/dissonances.” (Johnson)

I think anyone who has been in love has experienced this. You start to adopt the other person’s mannerisms, their speech patterns, even their lifestyle and ambitions, (or lack thereof…). I’ve felt that grief has a similar effect. My entire world has been remade, it makes sense that my mind is being remade too. It’s striking to me how similar grief feels to falling in love- the literal pain in your heart is the same twinge of a new crush, magnified a thousand times. And just as we should be judicious about who we let into our heart, who we let remake us, I’ve been judicious about what I let guide me through this grief. The people who’s advice I listen to, the books and poems I read, the new people I let into my life.

Thus, in a sense, perhaps intuition can be cultivated. In order to trust my decisions, I need to know that I can trust the “umwelt” that I have created for myself. When I am happy with my friends, with the work I put in to understanding myself and my fears, with the health of my body, with the quality of the art and media I engage with, then maybe I can let myself trust my gut feelings. Because the truth is, the body usually knows what is right for you before the mind catches up. For me, making the right choice has often felt like asking for permission to do what I already knew was correct. Like, I didn’t know, but I knew.

In grief, I’m asking for permission all the time. There’s a guilt in surviving when your loved one was unfairly taken from the world, and it can cloud my judgement. Dearly departed, am I allowed to be happy again? Dearly departed, can I take the care I used to give to you, and can I give it to someone else?

I saw decidedly more than ten salmon on my birthday. I couldn’t tell you how many salmon I saw, their bodies slipping over one another. Dearly departed, am I allowed to love again? Am I allowed to start that perilous journey from the ocean to the spawning grounds? My mind is afraid but my body remembers how it felt to be loved, I am drawn back to it, and it feels like surrender.

“My great happiness / is the sound your voice makes / calling to me even in despair; my sorrow / that I cannot answer you / in speech you accept as mine. / You have no faith in your own language. So you invest / authority in signs / you cannot read with any accuracy. / And yet your voice reaches me always. / And I answer constantly, my anger passing / as winter passes. My tenderness / should be as apparent to you / in the breeze of the summer evening / and in the words that become / your own response.” (Sunset, Louise Gluck).

God lived in a Lutheran church, off of Washington State Route 99. I felt him in rug burns, because the carpeted lobby boasted a large square stitched in carpet which was the perfect size for small legs to run the circumference. God existed in the million ways I staved off boredom during those long Sunday church services; in the orbital patterns in the linoleum floor of the bathroom, the brochures in the sitting area by the window about marital abuse and alcoholism. God existed in the lemon poppyseed muffins, cut into quarters and placed in paper cups, that euphoric taste that meant Sunday service was finally over and I could go home and play with my friends.

God existed in the stories of Jesus, of course, which provided the scaffolding of my moral compass, along with Barbie movies and Magic Treehouse Books. As a child born with the anxiety of a war veteran, for some reason, I became obsessively preoccupied with being a “good person”. To this end, I took in the lessons of the Bible and the lessons of Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper with the same stony reverence- treat others how you want to be treated, forgive your enemies, always be kind and beautiful even if you’ve been orphaned and are kept in wage slavery by a dressmaker… I would read The Boxcar Children before bed and I would also read the Bible, even if I found most of it to be dark and inscrutable. I remember reading the book of Judges, reading about a man being cut into hundreds of pieces with the same unblinking distant curiosity as reading about the life cycles of frogs. I tucked it all away without distinction.

Eventually, as I became aware of my own edges, how my hair split at the ends, how my toes bumped the end of my shoes, how the mascara I had begun to experiment with clumped at the tips of my eyelashes, I began to stretch against the edges of faith. As I sat in those pews during Sunday service, the words I had recited for years started to taste different in my mouth, like I could feel their texture for the first time. They felt like incantations, and I wondered if I created their truth by speaking them, like a witch. On one car ride home, I asked my mom if there was one God who watched over every person, or if every person had their own individual God. On another car ride, I asked if my dad was going to heaven, since he didn’t believe in God. I was distraught when I learned that the answer was no. I cried, asking my dad what would happen to him when he died as soon as we got home. “Well… I guess, nothing.” He said. “I guess … I think it’s the same as before a person is born. Nothingness.”

I continued to be active in church through middle school and early high school, becoming a Sunday school leader, attending youth group, and going to overnight church camp. But I began to feel a disturbing rebellion growing inside me … I began to visualize a small corner of my heart, and every time I chanted the words in “I give my entire self to God” with the congregation, I sheltered a piece of myself there, safe from the incantation. I thought if I made it small enough, maybe God wouldn’t notice.

Eventually the dissonance became too much to bear. As I grew, as my edges expanded, the curiosity, open-mindedness and kindness instilled in me from Sunday school began to grow into itself, like an overgrown claw circling around and piercing the flesh. How could I be a good neighbor, open-hearted and treating others the way I wanted to be treated, while rejecting other belief systems as invalid? How could I believe that my truth was the one truth? Even worse, how could I accept that simply having a different belief system was enough to shut an otherwise good person out of the afterlife? I couldn’t remedy that in my heart, and the small secret place where I stowed a piece of myself was getting cramped.

If you asked me when I was seventeen if I believed in God, I would say no.

Faith and religion had come to mean something thorny, something which contradicted my intuition. I realized that the secret space in my heart had always been that: intuition. I unleashed my intuition at last, giving it access to my expanding edges. I found holiness in books, in art, in creating music and stories with my friends. I was interested in religion in the same way I was interested in everything else, subsumed within an insatiable need to understand the world around me intellectually. I took theology classes in college, I learned about the historical events underpinning the Bible. I had no room for mysticism in my life - I was too enamored by all there was to learn. I didn’t think the two could co-exist.

If you asked me when I was nineteen if I believed in God, I would say no. I had fallen in love, and that was God.

Two years later, my love was diagnosed with cancer.

I believed everything would be okay because I was young, I was stupid, I was in love, after all, he had kissed me softly in the pink light of my dorm room. Yes, a robotic arm had made an incision in his ribs and cut out a malignant mass in his heart, but we watched the sunrise from his car after we talked for so long we fell asleep. He stayed up with me into the wee hours of the night when we first met as I waited for my laundry to be done, sitting there with me and holding me in warm brown eyes. Yes, six rounds of chemo revealed a birthmark on the nape of his neck as his hair fell out. Yes, the valet at the hospital asked if I wanted a frequent visitor pass (it might save me money on parking, I was there so often), but we drank cheap wine at night and watched the dust dance in the light in the morning. It would all be okay.

When we made it through cancer the first time, we wanted forever. That looked like marriage, which meant me converting to Judaism. I had never seen a potential end to our relationship until this moment. I couldn’t go back to resigning my intuition to a secret place, but I also couldn’t give up this love, after we had been through so much, after he had seeped into my being. I felt that love now like fish hooks in my flesh as I doubled over, sobbing on my bedroom floor. Even a cancer diagnosis hadn’t hurt as much as this. We walked around the streets of my apartment for hours, litigating our relationship and the necessity of my conversion like some bad Woody Allen movie. Eventually we came to some tenuous agreement- while I wasn’t totally sure about conversion, I also wasn’t going to let the relationship end over it.

Then the cancer came back.

If you asked me when I was 26 if I believed in God, I would say it didn’t matter, he didn’t care about me.

Suddenly, the edges of myself that I had carefully crafted as being apart from religion- the corner of my heart reserved for selfhood, my intellectual curiosity- no longer held. When the cancer comes back and starts to eat through one type of chemotherapy, then another, then another, and six rounds of chemotherapy become more like twenty, a person finds themselves on their knees, a person finds themselves looking at the sky, a person finds the scaffolding of their world destroyed. A person finds themselves needing to pray, and not knowing how.

The first rabbi I met with was a warm, millennial woman; slightly sardonic and quick to laugh. I was anxious to meet with her. I felt sheepish, an engagement ring on my finger, the dread of grief over my shoulder- a cliche of a person chewed and spat out by life and crawling back to that carved mahogany smell, back to light filtered through stained glass.

It’s humbling to entertain adopting an entirely new belief system, especially one as ancient as Judaism. To read ancient prayers and know they’ve been repeated, the exact same way, for centuries. That these prayers have comforted people as they faced the same specters I was now facing. Like standing in between two mirrors, your fractured self reflected back to you into infinity. I wondered why so few of my peers considered themselves religious, but I could speak fluently with them about astrology or manifestation, these (fun, but) individualistic lenses for spirituality. Do we feel like we lose the edges of our ‘selves’, when we accept ancient wisdom? Do we feel like less of ourselves, looking at the infinity mirror? For most of my life I had wanted those edges to hold firm, now I only wanted to dissolve.

The next rabbi I met with was slight, confident and soft-spoken. She had long curly hair and her eyebrows knit upward with compassion as she listened to me talk about my fiance’s cancer. I told her I was interested in Judaism not only to get married, but because I had spiritual questions. She asked me what spiritual questions I was having. I felt tears spring to my eyes before I could even answer her question. I realized it was love that had brought me here. Love had buoyed me through the horrors of cancer, it had given me the delusional bravery to get engaged in the face of potential grief, it had brought me to my knees and humbled me enough to seek ancient wisdom, to have the audacity to look to the sky and demand answers.

“I guess I was wondering … why me? Why Nick? If God is really in control … then what is the point of this? Of giving cancer to such a good person? Why us?”

She handed me a box of Kleenex as she answered. “Personally, I don’t think that God “gave Nick cancer”. I think he got cancer because he is an animal made of cells, and sometimes cells mutate. I do think that God gave him the nurses and doctors who have helped him. I think God exists within that love and care that has been given to him. I think God gave him your love.”

She introduced me to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, and the “I-Thou” concept. That God exists in “dialogue”, in an I-Thou relationship that acknowledges the fullness of the other, as opposed to an “I-It” relationship, which is transactional. It reminds me of the scene in Before Sunrise, where Celine says that “if any magic exists, it is here,” gesturing to the air in between her and Jesse, “in the attempt to understand another person.” This is something I had heard time and time again but had never made sense to me until now- that God is love.

I wonder about the “I-Thou” relationship between me and Nick, which had once existed as love, as a spark of divinity between two people caring for each other; a centrifugal force that felt alive in and of itself, now no longer spinning. For some reason after he passed, I found myself balking at the idea of him sending “signs”. That our relationship that had once generated an energy all its own was now reduced to one person pining and the other sending inscrutable “signs” like a PEZ dispenser whenever I was feeling low was a borderline offensive thought to me. I tried to imagine what he might say, the joke he would make, but that also offended me- like tying up his soul on strings and manipulating it. A hollow puppet of something that had once been alive and unpredictable. What “dialogue” can we have, if any, while honoring his autonomous soul, while not filtering him through the lens of my needs? A more honest idea comes to me, rings true in my intuition - that he had returned to oneness, that he had once been a soul in a body, and now he was dispersed, that he had returned. “To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return” (Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed).

If you were to ask me now if I believe in God, after cancer finally took the life of my fiance, I would say yes.

As I learned more about Judaism, something entirely unexpected happened - my intuition began to align with religion. I began to see the divine in what I already knew to be true - that God is … everything. In grief, your heart expands to hold a seemingly impossible weight- your love for a person, the pain of losing them, the loss of a future, the sacred past. In finding God, I expanded to hold the all of it - the cells that had mutated, the medicine that had failed, the concern in Nick’s eyes when he saw me sobbing in the emergency room that final night, the sunshine that warms my cheek and feels like a kiss, the smell of him in sweaters that faded within a month, all of the hands that helped me move out of the apartment where we lived together, the pain of a wrong step that dislocated my knee, the healing that came after it.

The other night I was on the phone with my Grandpa, telling him I was in between apartments, in between cities, in between chapters of my life. I didn’t feel the stability I had once felt, I had lost the path I was walking down. “It’s okay, though,” I said, “stability is an illusion.”

“It’s not.” He said. “You can find stability in God.”

There’s a time I would have rolled my eyes at that, but now I know he’s right. When someone you love dies, your love returns to the same place they return. To the world, which is God, which is everything. The edges of myself have dissolved, they had to, to hold all of it.

are they haunted objects or talismans?

My breath catches when I speak and trace the etymology back to you.

Is it a dead language if one person still speaks it?

Is your memory a xerox,

lesser with every copy,

does a birch tree come alive again and again?

When I dig for you will I always find you,

as a fractal folded in these layers of sedimentary rock?

Am I forever spiraling into you

or spinning out?

Is a black hole dead or does it contain another beginning?

Is potential energy alive?

I ask because I see it glitter at the edges.

Loving someone is the urge to dissolve the skin barrier

and here you are, dissolved into mine.

“Thank you so much for coming, everyone. I know how hard it is to commit to plans in Los Angeles, to drive/ Uber/ park, so it’s not something I take lightly. There are so many people here- I wanted to invite everyone who has been there for me in any capacity during the last year, which has meant the world to me, as well as new friends who I’m just now connecting with- which has also meant the world to me. I wanted to throw this party because I’ve realized - you can’t really control the bad things that happen to you. But you can make good things happen. That’s why I wanted to throw this party- to make a good thing happen!”

Weeks earlier, I had sent out an invite to my friends for a party at my apartment to celebrate “my pharaoh's curse being lifted”. I had been living in the apartment for almost a year and hadn’t hosted a single party. My fiance and I decided to get engaged and move into an apartment together after a scan revealed that his cancer had metastasized and was no longer responding to chemotherapy. He was in the hospital when I toured the apartment by myself, and convinced him that it was perfect. He proposed to me after we signed the lease that summer in between chemotherapy treatments and hospital stays, at a botanical garden, where his breathing was heavy under the hot sun. We had a few friends over once in a while, but never a party. Not until after he passed, on this night.

Days before, I was excitedly preparing. I bought food and drinks, and I baked a spinach artichoke dip. I invited everyone on the guest list to a collaborative party playlist which eventually stretched to be eight hours long, and listened to it every day.

After my speech I took down a fireball whiskey shot, gagging down both the sickly sweet cinnamon heat and a regurgitated wave of college nostalgia. I restarted the music, and found some friends to dance with. A few minutes later, I felt my left knee buckle, and I was on the floor.

I feel the need to defend myself with some context here- the party had only been going for a couple hours, and I was only a glass of soju and one fireball whiskey shot deep. I was not belligerent. Nor am I a novice to throwing it back- I was bussing it down in no way that was out of the ordinary for me. As far as I can tell this was some kind of freak accident, but if you were to narrativize this, I guess saying “she once threw it back so hard to Carly Rae Jepsen at her own house party that she dislocated her knee” wouldn’t be wrong.

I sat propped up against my kitchen island, my left knee bent slightly. If I didn’t move at all, I was fine, but if I tried to move my leg even a little bit, I was shot through with searing pain. The five or so people in my immediate vicinity looked down at me with concern.

I felt dazed. For two hours leading up to this, I had excitedly embraced friends from every far flung corner of my life, welcomed them into the home I once shared with the love of my life, danced and drank and laughed, marveling in the alchemy of a party with a great playlist. I was riding high and the reality of what was going on didn’t hit me. I wasn’t panicking, I was mostly just bummed that I had to stop dancing.

My apartment was so densely packed with people that I doubt anyone knew what was going on, aside from the five or so poor twenty-somethings who were suddenly responsible for my well-being. “Do we give her Tylenol or Advil?” “Do we call an ambulance?” “Can we set the knee ourselves?”

I looked into all their kind, concerned, young and inexperienced eyes. I couldn’t believe it- I had tempted fate once again, invited what I hoped might be an uncomplicated joy into my life, and instead everything had crashed to the ground. I didn’t feel self pity until later; at this moment it all felt so ridiculous I couldn’t help but laugh about it.

My friends decided to call an ambulance. My fiance’s sister held my hand and said, “I hope the EMTs are hot at least.” And they were. They were hot.

I don’t think the majority of my guests knew anything was wrong until red and blue lights illuminated my apartment walls. I offered the EMTs snacks and drinks if they wanted them. I don’t think they took me up on my offer but they seemed (professionally) tickled by my situation.

“I hope these aren’t your favorite pair of jeans” a mustachioed EMT said, squatting down next to me. “I’m hosting this party”, I told him. “Why would I be wearing my b-team jeans?”

One of my fashion inclined friends valiantly tried to push my jeans up and over my knee, in an attempt to save them, but my knee was too swollen. They cut the jeans up the shin, straight through to the thigh, revealing my now totally askew left knee cap. My friends told me later that the sight of my wonky knee cap was really upsetting, but I knew I had entered the plane of the absurd, where something like this was no longer out of the ordinary. I looked at my askew kneecap and simply nodded to myself, as it only confirmed the uncanny realm I now knew I had slipped into for the remainder of the night.

The EMT wrapped my knee in an orange floaty and strapped my leg into it- and told me they may try to take the floaty at the hospital, but I could keep it if I wanted :’). Wait, hospital? “Can’t you just set the knee here so I can stay at my party?” I whined. “No,” he responded. “We need to take you to the hospital to take an x-ray before we set it.” I groaned. “Is that going to hurt? That’s going to hurt, isn’t it.” He shrugged, noncommittally, then asked me if I’d rather be wrapped up in sheets and lifted into a gurney, or if I wanted to try standing with my good leg. The sheets-and-lift-situation sounded incredibly painful, so I thought I might as well try standing on my own first. One of the other EMTs handed me a fireball whiskey shooter. “Do you want to take a shot before you go to the hospital?” I looked at the shooter, and sighed. “Yes.”

After that was taken care of, the EMTs were able to lift me up and onto the gurney using my good leg. My friends scrambled to get a hospital bag together for me, and I was told later that “Blow” by Kesha was playing as they wheeled me out. “You’ll probably be back by 3am, maybe the party will still be raging!” the EMT said.

My best friend Cayla told me from the edge of the gurney that she would follow behind me in her car so I had someone to drive me home. Once she had left and the EMTs had loaded me into the ambulance, I asked if I could have another friend ride with me in the ambulance. I had seen TV shows. I was also acutely aware of the eye-popping bill I was sure to receive after this, and I wanted to milk the experience.

I asked if they could turn on the sirens. The man driving said no, since this wasn’t a life threatening emergency. I asked if they could “just for a couple of seconds”. They said they could when they pulled into the hospital (they did not). So much for getting my money’s worth.

They said they were going to take me to Cedars Sinai, the hospital where my fiance had passed away a few months earlier. I asked if they could take me literally anywhere else. They asked me which hospital I’d prefer. I did not know of a single other hospital. Besides, I knew that ambulances charge by the mile, and Cedars Sinai was the closest hospital- that was part of why we chose this apartment.

I was wheeled into the hallway of the emergency room, a place where I’d spent countless nights, where I’d collapsed into a sobbing ball of limbs just months before, and many times before that. The overhead lights burned a lethargic yellow, the ground was speckled like birthday cake ice cream, a sage green stripe ran through the length of the walls. I could recognize this place with my eyes closed, by that antiseptic smell mixed with sour flesh, the beeping of mysterious machines. I knew that only one guest was allowed, I knew how to get to the bathroom, I knew what snacks were in the vending machine, I knew how much they would charge me for Ibuprofen, I knew they would give me a warm starchy blanket if I asked. I knew they were understaffed and that it would be hours before I saw a doctor and that I would likely never get a room. I knew that I would be leaving the hospital behind tonight, while people behind the other doors were going through the worst nights of their lives. I closed my eyes and counted the minutes through calculated breaths, dissociating as best as I could, wondering if the nurses found me dramatic for crying over a knee dislocation.

I’ve often found myself wrestling with God these past few years. The human brain looks for patterns, and when you’ve experienced enough bad luck even the most “rational” person starts to wonder if they’ve maybe done something to deserve it. I started wondering if the xylophone clicks of ravens I kept hearing were omens, and I started Googling things like “how to break a karmic cycle.” I have the sort of non-stop brain that is always trying to make sense of everything, and it is frustrating to me how little sense there is to be made out of death; something that everyone who has ever lived has had to face.

When someone close to you dies, you will start to hear the same cliches over and over, and “everything happens for a reason” is by far the one I hate the most. Ascribing that idea to the Christian, ‘loving’, paternalistic God I had grown up with felt like pegging a square into a round hole. I became snowed in with self pity as I laid in that emergency room hallway. It formed a small mound on my body, and held me down, my brain whirring as the hours dragged on. Had God decided to punish me for daring to believe my curse had been broken, that finally my bad luck had turned? That I had dared to defy him? I began to be sympathetic to ancient Greeks and Romans and Egyptians, and the polytheistic religions where gods who control the sun and the stars are just as mercurial and nonsensical as human beings. If everything really does happen for a reason, then surely some giant sky toddlers are in charge. And I decided that I reject whatever “reason” they have for things. I went home around 4am- the EMT who had wheeled me onto the ambulance had been optimistic.

After my knee continued to hurt for weeks, it became clear that I hadn’t just dislocated my knee, but had also torn a muscle. I had to wear a knee immobilizer for four weeks, then start physical therapy. Once I got the immobilizer off, my knee was so stiff I could barely bend it. The doctor explained to me that there’s a sweet spot with the knee immobilizer- you want to wear it for long enough that the torn muscle heals to the point where dislocating the knee again is unlikely, but not too long that the muscle becomes too stiff to regain full mobility. Keeping it immobile had healed the torn muscle enough, and now the work to regain strength and flexibility in the surrounding muscles, and to break down the scar tissue, began.

I’ve been thinking about pain recently, emotional and physical. Grieving while also recovering from a physical injury at the same time is just too compelling of a parallel to resist! The process of my knee “healing” was frustrating, and uncomfortable- my skin itched under the brace and my muscles became stiff and sore. I had a lot of time to think as I laid out on my couch, fat flakes of self pity settling on my ever growing mound. I thought there must be a point to pain. I dug through my memories for some retained middle school memories of Darwinism and thought perhaps there was an evolutionary point. Maybe it is the body signaling to your brain that something is wrong, that you gotta stop moving that thing! The pain which disincentivizes you from moving something helps it heal.

And then I started physical therapy, at I guess at that point, pain be damned, you gotta start moving that thing. The muscle has repaired, and now the work of rebuilding begins. I wondered if emotional pain had a similar evolutionary logic to it. Was there a cocooning period, which allows the broken part to heal, followed by a point where it has to be exercised again- opened up again- lest it atrophies, seizes up, and develops scar tissue?

I can now understand why people become closed off, defensive, and/or paranoid in response to pain. It seems that as we grow old, we tend to fulfill either the sweet grandma or the old crone archetypes. Life beats you down, pain compounds pain, and neural pathways become well trod walking paths; the broken places heal with scar tissue. Especially in a culture that values individualism/ getting yours/ protecting only yourself and your family over your community, we can’t be surprised when people become cornered animals in response to pain and uncertainty. Inflicting pain to avoid receiving it. I can recognize these impulses in myself, as I catch myself thinking about what games I can play to make people care about me more than I care about them, and in turn forgiving myself for being selfish, figuring that I of all people ‘deserve’ selfishness right now.

But I think the opposite is also possible- that you can heal from pain with increased capacity. I learned from dancing ballet that in order to gain flexibility, you have to stretch your muscles to the point that they literally break, and then grow back longer, with a fuller range of motion. What if you can heal emotionally in much the same way- gaining range of motion, increasing your capacity to care for others, to carry the pain of the marginalized, to even, gasp, feel greater pain yourself.

What does this look like, though, physical therapy for the heart? Ten reps of being a good person? I think, maybe, the reps are risk. Not risk for its own sake, like a daredevil’s stunt, but risk that allows you to live more authentically, like risking emotional pain to fall in love, or risking planning and striving for something stable even though circumstance could wash it all away at any moment. I think especially if you’ve felt a deep pain, then the risk becomes even more important. To not let yourself atrophy.

The hope is that if you can get good at risk for your own happiness, then you can get good at risk for someone else’s happiness. Someone who is marginalized, at the fringes of society- your neighbors who are being persecuted. I hope I can heal myself and get better at that type of risk. Maybe we don’t have to wait for one to start the other, maybe they are all part of the same thing. It’s all the extension of the same risk that allows a person to live a kind and truthful life.

I’ll admit I had a bit of paranoia about my knee - I had just witnessed some freak one in a million disease cause a cascade of health nightmares that lead to my fiance’s death. Laying in that very same emergency room, it felt like whatever cruel tempestuous god that had laid his finger on him had maybe turned their sights on me. But instead, my body started to heal. It was uncomfortable, it was frustrating, but I began to feel awe and appreciation for my body, for the painful work of healing. The beautiful work of it.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I can see it now when I look back. The first month I was dazed - sleeping to waking without much distinction, days and nights bleeding together, unmoored from reality. I had my family around constantly to keep a lid on things, to define the boundaries of the dream world. Then I was alone, and something sprung free. I can only describe it as a slingshot being set loose after being pulled back, back, back … a weight had been lifted and I shot into space.

I had no understanding of the weight of cancer - of constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, of living in between scans, in between treatment plans, in between hospital stays - until it was lifted. When you’re in love, and your loved one is sick, none of it feels like a burden. It felt unfair, it felt horrendous, it felt terrifying - but it never felt like a weight, until it was gone. I felt parts of myself come rushing back; my creativity, my need for socialization, my interest in myself. I was synthesizing something massive, and my brain was working overtime to compensate. I was remembering everything; random, tiny events, song lyrics, quotes from movies and books- and I was generating new creative ideas. I had always wondered if smoking weed was hindering my creativity, but nope - it turns out living with cancer and the impending death of your partner had a lot more to do with it. So that’s cool.

And I was going out. A lot. I was saying “yes” to every invite, even if I barely knew a soul on the guest list, which would lead to more invites, more parties, more late nights. I needed desperately to connect with people, I needed people to see me, I needed to be seen by people, to cobble together a sense of self in this new dream world of “after”. I felt like Chihiro in Spirited Away when she entered the spirit world - fading away in this strange landscape that had been normal just hours before. I say all of this to explain my mental state when I decided to attend the Golden State Furry Convention.

I’ve long been fascinated by furry culture. I spent much of my adolescence on tumblr.com (some of you don’t need any further context at this point, but I will press on for the rest of the class!). I had one foot in the hipster art scene and the other in dorky fandom spaces, a cultural tightrope I still walk to this day. Two seemingly opposite sides of the cultural zeitgeist desperately seeking validation and approval from an in-group. To this day I have problems picking a struggle.

Since furries are ubiquitous in niche internet spaces, it wasn’t long until I encountered them.

Some of you may be asking, what’s a furry? Thank you so much for asking. A “furry” is a person who dons an anthropomorphized persona, or “fursona”. I don’t know when it began exactly, but I suspect that from the moment animation artists started putting a pen to paper and creating anthropomorphic characters that wore human outfits, a new culture was born. Are you going to tell me that Chuck Jones thought he could draw Buggs Bunny in full drag dozens of times, and had no idea of the possible consequences?

Furry culture is deeply tied to the internet, from the beginning days of internet forums. Thus, many furries assume their fursona as a kind of online avatar. Some, but not all, furries extend their fursona to the real world- wearing elaborately and impressively constructed “fursuits” to events and conventions. You can think of these “fursuits” as akin to a sports mascot costume, if the sports mascot was cool and awesome (and usually a little sexy, objectively.)

They always include a headpiece which attaches like a helmet, along with paws and a tail. The more elaborate fursuits cover the entire body, and can include a number of incredible additions, from mech suits to animatronic moving parts. Anecdotally, I’ve found that most fursonas are adjacent to dogs / wolves, and sometimes cats, but they can encompass the entire animal / mythological animal kingdom. I follow one on Instagram who is a trash diving badger, I think. And another who is a type of endangered moth. (Endangered moth awareness!!!)

I’ll admit, my interest in furries was not always one of innocent curiosity. I wouldn’t say it was malicious either, but as a teenager who was invested in the boundaries of ‘coolness’, my interest was a bit ‘get-a-load-of-these-guys’ coded. As if I wasn’t an AP student and a theater kid who was into BBC shows. Obviously, my ‘coolness’ line in the sand looked a little different than most people’s, which made my jeering even more egregious. I look back at my teenage self and shake my head at her, kindly but knowingly, because really, who was I to cast judgement in my Doctor Who shirt from Hot Topic. I was a sardine looking down at shrimp in the ‘coolness’ food chain, or more accurately, looking across? (Not that I consider ‘coolness’ to be a food chain, these days. Those who do are certainly at the bottom of it if such a thing were to exist, as far as I’m concerned!)

My sardonic jokes about the excesses of furry culture didn’t stop my friends from constantly speculating that I was in the ‘furry closet’ myself. Such accusations plague any curious person with an anthropological spirit. Of course I would laugh off such accusations. This is something I have noticed time and time again when I bring up my interest in furries. People seem to think that it’s a slippery slope, as if looking at a few flirty drawings of OCs will lead them down a dark path where they find themselves in a Hilton hotel, $40k in debt over a commissioned fursuit, sweaty after a hookup with a fox they met at a rave, wondering when they last saw their wife. Furries are associated with “cringe”, which is, as far as I can tell, an Internet insult for people who lack the self awareness to reign in their earnest excitement. The worst possible crime on the Internet, which seems to be stuck in an eternal junior high. In the case of furries, the “cringe” moniker is levied for their sincerity and enthusiasm for animal role-play. As if the average person has never ordered cat ears from Amazon for a last minute Halloween costume, or consumed risque photos of women in bunny costumes. Grow up!

In college, I finally had the chance to explore my interest in furry culture during a Digital Anthropology course. The assignment was to complete an anthropological field study on an online subculture. I didn’t even have to think about it for two seconds. I knew what I had to do.

For months, I went undercover as a fledgling furry in the tumblr.com furry subculture. The people I ‘spoke’ with (through the jank tumblr.com message interface) were all incredibly kind, funny, and creative. They told me that most furries are neurodivergent, and love animation and Disney movies. They tend to have issues socializing, so adopting an animal persona helps them be more expressive online and offline than they otherwise would be. It reminded me of an earlier stage of the internet, before social media, where people were identified by usernames and avatars. A person could truly ‘disappear’ online, try on an identity that was more extreme than their own, more adventurous, more flirtatious, more confrontational. It’s a far cry from social media, which reveals a paradoxically intimate and heavily curated representation of the self. I wonder what my relationship with the internet would look like if instead of agonizing if posting another Instagram story makes me look lonely, and obsessing if someone specific ‘liked’ my post … I was a hot ass snow leopard who was exceptionally talented at NSFW art. I would probably be having way more fun.

After my college assignment (don’t let the Trump administration know that I was spending my college education researching furries on tumblr.com, lest my alma mater gets dinged for “DEI” courses… I cannot think of a single better use of taxpayer dollars, and my dollars, personally), it seemed the story between myself and furries had drawn to a close. Until one fateful day in early March, 2025.

I don’t know why exactly, but in the wreckage of grief, furries rose again into my conscious mind, like a deep sea fish washing to shore as an indication of the impending doom of climate change. I knew what I had to do. I Googled “Furry Conventions- Los Angeles.” As luck would have it, a convention was coming up - the Golden State Furry Convention, on the last weekend of the month. Something about it felt right to me. My life had become so incredibly chaotic and outside of my control. Maybe I could introduce some controlled chaos. Maybe by doing something so out of left field, I could assert free will back into my life, or jolt my destiny into a new direction.

Unfortunately for me, the only day I could go was Sunday, March 30th, which would be the closing day of the convention. As I waited, I perused the online calendar of events I wouldn’t be able to attend with envy- “Overcoming Social Anxiety” followed by “Chinese Language Learning and Meetup” … A burlesque show and night market … a panel about the collapsing California kelp forest, improv and drag shows, a rave until 2am, a panel about tax preparation that was perplexingly labeled NSFW … curse my lack of forethought!

Finally, the day arrived. I typed “Hilton Convention Center LAX” into my phone navigation, my excitement mounting as the clock ticked toward my ETA. I could feel my heart racing as I finally laid eyes upon Southern Californian Furry Mecca, only to become immediately confused. There was no signage indicating a convention of any kind was taking place, and no instructions for parking. Why an esteemed brand such as the Hilton would neglect to inform their guests that such an important event was taking place under their very noses, I haven’t a clue.

I pulled into the hotel general parking area, and saw that parking was $70 (!). Not to be deterred, I drove to a nearby alley where a furry in a full black and neon pink doglike suit was posing for a photoshoot. My first furry sighting! I rolled down the window and beckoned this person / dog over. “Excuse me,” I asked, “where can I park for the furry convention?”

“Oh, you can just use the hotel parking lot.” I was told, unhelpfully. “Thank you!” I said, lying. I didn’t press further as I assumed this person / dog was leading me astray, or was operating at an insane level of wealth where $70 was an acceptable price to pay for parking.

I drove over to the hotel valet, and asked the valet attendant: “Where can I park for the furry convention?”

Without batting an eye, the gentleman informed me that I could indeed park in the hotel parking lot for $20, if I got my ticket validated. I paid a mental apology to the black and neon pink dog person, who had indeed given me parking information with a pure heart.

Down I descended, into the depths of the Hilton Convention Center LAX parking garage, to the 6th and final floor. I’ll admit, I hesitated at the precipice. I needed some courage before I crossed the River Styx into the underworld. I popped a small edible before exiting my car.

Because I was on the bottom floor, the ambling elevator stopped on every floor on the way up, packing me in like an anchovy with furries in various states of undress. Every time the elevator opened, a few people with decapitated, fuzzy, cartoonish animal heads cocked on their hip would look in dubiously, and I would say “come on in!”, hoping to endear myself to this new community I had observed from afar for so long.

Finally, we emerged into the hotel lobby. Nothing could have prepared me- not years of online snooping, not an entire anthropological college assignment- for the singular energy of a furry convention. It wasn’t even something specific to furries, although being surrounded by vibrant cartoonish anthropomorphic animal suits was certainly important context. It was something else, it was about being so removed from my own everyday reality that I was effectively stepping into a parallel universe that ran alongside my own, invisible to me until now. The boundaries that created my identity wobbled, like a denatured protein after being confronted with an acidic enzyme. My very DNA unraveled. I reverted to a childlike state of wonder.

Because it was the final day of the convention, the energy was noticeably deflated. The person checking me in for my badge told me that everyone was pretty hungover, and that I had missed most of the excitement. Although this was certainly disappointing, in retrospect I might not have been able to handle a furry convention at full blast. The muted energy was exactly what I needed to dip my toes into this world, a baptism by gentle river as opposed to a baptism by fire.

Since there wasn’t anything planned on the schedule in terms of events, I wandered around aimlessly. First, I found a string of booths representing different furry-adjacent organizations. One was organized by (I think) bunny furries, raising money for Los Angeles wildfire relief. I chatted with a representative, who told me that of particular interest to them was a business owner who’s Bunny Museum in Pasadena had been affected by the fires. I made a mental note to visit the Bunny Museum in the near future.

The next booth represented the Puppy Play community. I had seen these “puppies” before, at Pride events. To the casual observer, they appear to be people in leather, dog-like masks and leather bondage, who are “walked” on a leash by an owner, who is usually also in leather bondage. This was all I knew about it, and when I pressed the people at the booth for more information, they didn’t seem willing to get into the specifics of Puppy Play, but instead wanted to talk to me about volunteer efforts that the Puppy Play community engaged in. The most they would tell me about the Puppy Play lifestyle was that it was a “fun” and “playful” way to engage in relationships. It wasn’t until I read the brochure they gave me later that I learned about the role-play element of the culture; that you take on the role of a puppy or a handler, the one being taken care of or the one doing the caretaking. As I reflect on it now, I appreciate the clarity of that. I think we all get into relationships and want love, to be taken care of and to take care of someone else. But how often are we explicit about that? And how often can we switch roles, depending on how our needs change? I’m reminded of the concept of “disavowal” (not the Freudian psychoanalytic concept, but from the YouTube video essayist Contrapoints1) in the realm of sexual fantasy- that often we construct fantasies that break down the barriers of shame to fully experience pleasure (bondage, for example.) Hey, these puppies may be onto something!

Next, I encountered the Dealers Den; a large hall where various artists and vendors sold their furry-related wares. I was frankly blown away by the artistry and quality on display. I guess it’s not too surprising that people who craft elaborate animal personas and meticulously design fursuits would be creatively gifted. I struck up conversations with everyone who was kind enough to engage with me, from fursuit makers to digital artists to indie video game developers. Everyone was so proud and excited to tell me about their projects, even if they involved in-group context that I didn’t quite understand. One booth in particular boasted eye-catchingly beautiful and unique fursuits, and they showed me a custom fursuit they made inspired by Kodiak from The Thing, one of my favorite movies. They were also selling a number of stickers related to the California kelp forest (they ran the panel I missed!) and told me that in their free time they volunteered as scuba divers, diving to the bottom of the kelp forest to smash overpopulated sea urchins with hammers. They were incredibly punk rock.

After I had finished chatting my way through the Dealers Den, I noticed a curtained off entrance with a bouncer outside. This had to have been the 18+ NSFW room.

Now comes the time where I must discuss the sexual element of furry culture. I think furries have spent a lot of energy distancing themselves from the sexual aspect of the fandom, and I understand why, as this seems to be all the general public is willing to latch onto. When I asked about this in my anthropology project, they complained that everyone thought of furries as sexual deviants, fetishists- but this was not the case. Although, they also told me that once tumblr banned porn, most of the furry community left the site in favor of Twitter, so … surely that is indicative of something.

Look, I think when people focus on the sexual aspect of furry culture, they are focusing on the wrong things. I think most people get legitimately hung up on the idea of people literally having sex in full body fursuits. This sounds uncomfortable as hell, but is otherwise not of particular intrigue to me. Again, I’m more interested in disavowal. In how sex is wrapped up in so many cultural layers of shame and squeamishness, uncomfortable historical power dynamics, abuse … I can relate profoundly to wanting to explore sex not as myself, in the context of being a woman in the United States of America in 2025; but as a hot ass anthropomorphic snow leopard, crafted to be like myself but elevated, more whimsical, more confident, less serious, less of this depressing and complicated world. Basically what I’m saying is, don’t blame people for preferring role-play to enjoy sex, blame the goddamn Puritans!

All this is to say, my memory of the 18+ section of the Dealers Den went by in a blur, and not just because my edible kicked in at that exact moment. I remember a wall of dildos, and a booth for leather bondage, and a booth of what looked to me to be fuzzy uh … body appliques. I inquired about an NSFW body pillow, shocked to find out it was $75 without an insert included. They are making bank, these guys. (I did pocket a business card.)

Around this time, I found that my energy was depleted. I headed to the elevator, then realized that I hadn’t actually spoken to any furries! How could I have been so foolish? I turned around and walked right back into the lobby, where most of the remaining furries were lounging. One person listlessly played accordion on a couch, adding a certain European sophistication to the ambiance.

I approached a pack of people dressed in colorful wolf-like fursuits and asked for a picture, then I struck up a conversation with one dressed in a green and blue full suit.

I looked in his large cartoonish eyes as he asked if I was a hotel guest who had wandered into this convention. “No, no,” I said, “I googled ‘furry conventions Southern California’, found this one, and bought a ticket. It has been a dream of mine to attend a furry convention, and I decided that this was the year. I am a big supporter.”

“Wow!” He responded. “That’s wonderful! We need more people like you in the world.”

He told me that he and his friends travel the world, hopping from furry convention to furry convention. “Which is great”, he said, “because splitting a hotel room four ways is really cheap, and you can explore a new city with a built in community.” Um, excuse me, did furries discover the cure for the male loneliness epidemic?

He told me that “it’s a dark world, and furries just want to spread silliness.”

I left the furry convention feeling bone tired, and somehow born anew. I drove home in the golden late afternoon sunshine in a total daze. It’s only in the months that have followed that I’ve come to realize that I was experiencing a moment of genuine awe, a feeling I have only ever experienced in the presence of breathtaking natural vistas- a moonrise in the desert, the small infinity of a tide pool, sleeping under a blanket of stars. That feeling of smallness, of cosmic vertigo, of being a part of something unknowable and ancient. I saw God at the Golden State Furry Convention. I was reminded of possibility, of free will, of being embedded in the tapestry of humanity, every unknowable thread connected to every unknowable thread. I felt the gift of being alive, the power of a persona, and was introduced to the radical act of playing, of creating art, of spreading silliness. The rules are all made up, all boundaries can be changed. We exist for such a fleeting time, a bat of a butterfly’s wing - maybe God didn’t put us on this earth to suffer, but so we could all gather in the basement of a Hilton hotel, in fursuits, the sound of an accordion in the distance, experiencing cosmic vertigo as the edible kicks in.

To make matters worse, I’m reminded of those painful brunches with vestigial friends where everyone tries to convince everyone else that they are completely innocent in their blatantly abhorrent dating stories. It is abundantly clear that promises to “grow and be better” are secondary to “throwing my romantic adversary under a bus”. It’s the second hand embarrassment of seeing a drunk couple fighting at the club, the frustrated compassion of seeing a wounded animal lashing out at a vet tech. (Although to be fair, if I wanted actual growth and reconciliation, I would be watching Couples Therapy… or the vastly superior Netflix show Love on the Spectrum. Love is Blind is for watching toxic heterosexuality implode like a gorgeous supernova).

Of particular interest to me was the confusing mutual ghosting of Ben and Sara. After they called it off at the altar, Ben was supposed to join Sara in Nashville when Sara noticed that Ben had removed her from “Find My Friends” (an app which allows you to track a person’s location via their phone). Allegedly, Ben thought they had called it quits before then. Ben then reached out to Sara, who returned the ghosting. Call this a pub built on top of a Civil War battlefield, because ghosts are abounding!

Madison also came with receipts (literal printed text messages) alleging Alex of calling Mason … weird? Or being fake? I actually could not follow it, and the printed text messages blown up to the size of a 8.5 x 11 piece of paper made the entire enterprise of iMessage look cringe by association. Making matters worse was the “smoking gun”: a few skull emojis. I felt like we needed that kid from Adolescence explaining to his cop father the differences between purple and red heart emojis. Profoundly unserious behavior on display here. (I am on Madison’s side by the way.)

What I felt from this, over and over again, was the decimation that follows the end of a serious relationship, and the deeply embarrassing act of rebuilding yourself. Looking back, looking inward, looking around … piecing it all together while assuring yourself that certainly you did nothing wrong. “In my head I did everything right, when you call I’d forgive and not fight.”1 When you are hurt, a person’s previously mysterious intentions become knowable, because they hurt you. If someone hurts you, their only intention was to hurt you, right? It must be nice, to be given that sort of momentum. When you are rebuilding out from the core of a psychic wound someone inflicted on you, then rebuilding must feel active, like taking vengeance. But what if the psychic wound wasn’t inflicted by someone intending harm … but some random one in a million disease, killing your fiance. I can’t hold onto anger, it dissipates into the air upon contact, rejoining what is clearly sadness, the true oxygen. Anger feels more productive than sadness, the action items are; causing pain to the offender, or steeling your defenses against the next thing that tries to hurt you. Sadness is frustrating, it just feels like the amniotic fluid of being alive. There’s no escaping it, you just hope to stop noticing it once in a while. Although, there is a sort of energy to sadness, it seems to crest, break, recede, crest, break, recede… I think about how varied terrain wouldn’t exist without the cyclical violence of tectonic plates. I don’t always feel that I’m changing, but I feel the violence, and I know I’m not the same.

When Nick passed, I was suddenly made aware of the sense of self that is propped up by virtue of being in a long term, loving relationship. It’s not something I was aware of, until it was suddenly gone. When someone loves you, and you love them, it’s like your love is a wooden stake for two climbing vines, you grow into it, as you grow into the other person. It’s a profoundly destabilizing experience to have that ripped from you. Like a fragile vine fallen from a tree trunk, folding in on itself. It has suddenly made me self conscious in a way I haven’t been since I was a teenager, catching my own eyes in every reflective surface I passed, to make sure I’m still holding together, or something.

Still, there’s some romanticism in being self conscious. In feeling like the main character, like a nucleus of possibility … there’s also the other side of it, of being seen. There’s a romanticism to that too, of wondering what people think when they see you, what you might do to catch an interesting person’s eye. I’ve been in a bit of a manic (colloquial, not medical) phase, investing heavily into being a 365 party girl. Saying yes to every party invite, even when I only know a single person, which leads to invites to other parties, which leads to coffee dates, which leads to more parties… I’ve felt a rush to fill my life with after, with people who never knew Nick, to prop myself up against something different. A need to connect, to find a little flame in every soul, where I used to have a bonfire. I adore my friends, but I think that’s what makes being in love different- that constant renewing connection, like those joke birthday candles that relight themselves. You fall away from each other just to “fall in love again and again”.2 Like you are two people spinning a carousel together, keeping something beautiful in motion, an endless spiral. Now that I don’t have that, I realize that’s probably where my desperate need to socialize is coming from. It makes me sad, thinking that maybe all those connections add up to some poor facsimile of that eternal spiral.

All of this is warped and magnified again on social media, that vast organism. I feel a need to splay myself out, like an animal cadaver in a science experiment. I want someone to find my organs, to figure me out. Then immediately after that, I want to Henry-David-Thoreau-it in a cabin somewhere and “throw my cellular device in the water”3. A constant oscillation between posting mysteriously enough to not be cringe, but revealing enough to be seen honestly, pique the right person’s interest, and welcome them into my soul. And of course, it has to fit the aesthetic of the grid, without trying too hard… reveal that you are sad enough to not be intimidating, but you are certainly happy enough to not be a drag to hang out with.

It’s been three months since Nick passed, and I was thinking about launching a dating profile. There was something depressing to me about planning a wedding four months ago, and then creating a dating profile alone in my bedroom. Instead, I had some friends over to help me decide which photos to use, and to weigh in on answers to prompts.

A few of them had been in the trenches of dating apps for quite some time, and they took the assignment very seriously. You can have one picture with alcohol, but that means you probably shouldn’t have one where you smoke weed, since it’s a bit redundant. You should include a couple pictures with friends, so people know you have a social life. People scroll through these so fast, make sure your hottest picture is on display first. You can have one or two sardonic responses to prompts, but the others should be sincere. And by the way, what do you want? Do you want a long term relationship, are you just looking to have fun? You have to choose in the profile, so it’s clear…

Social media makes constructing a sense of self so literal, so limiting. It’s a sandbox, where theoretically anything is possible, where you should be yourself, But of course, in actuality, there’s a minefield of unspoken rules. With screenshots, the threat of people talking behind your back and storing your embarrassing moments on their camera roll forever is always looming. It’s a befuddling and treacherous microcosm of the outside world - a frustrating prison that could have been a playground, in a kinder timeline. Even the drama of the Love is Blind reunion (and the show itself) occupies these online spaces; the Find My Friends app, Instagram DMs, printed out pictures of text messages. Dating and human connections are more and more entwined in the digital world, for better or for worse. In sickness and in health…

I try as often as I can to re-contextualize the online world, to rebuild myself within it in a way that feels joyful and authentic. I’m reminded of the manifesto “Glitch Feminism”, which posits that true freedom of expression exists in the “glitch”, both literally online by hacking and creating new possibilities in binary code, and metaphorically by shedding the shackles of social convention, the limits of gender ideology, and for my purposes, the rigid rules of dating.

“As glitch feminists, this is our politic: we refuse to be hewn to the hegemonic line of a binary body. This calculated failure prompts the violent socio-cultural machine to hiccup, sigh, shudder, buffer. We want a new framework and for this framework, we want new skin. The digital world provides a potential space where this can play out. Through the digital, we make new worlds and dare to modify our own.”4

I accept the glitch into my persona, both online and offline. I am growing to accept that going into the dating world, my circumstances are not normal. I haven’t been jilted by men, I’ve been jilted by the universe, by cancer, the cruel side effect of multicellular evolution. Cancer feels like a glitch, my whole life right now feels like a glitch.

I’m all too aware of the ephemeral nature of connection, of being alive. It’s like I’ve woken up from a dream, a mass psychosis. I exist outside the binary code. The “rules of the game” are now incomprehensible to me.

What do I want out of dating? Nothing clear, nothing defined. To throw my heart, which is impossibly fragile, and impossibly strong, into the universe that has jilted me. Now that I no longer have Nick to catch me, the universe will have to catch me. It can always love me as deeply, and disappoint me as profoundly, as the love of a single person. The love just exists in a mosaic now; many different pieces suggesting a whole, the connective tissue now exposed.

And what of rebuilding myself, that embarrassing tectonic project? I realized that I have another relationship like a carousel, that spins constantly into itself. My relationship with myself. The only relationship of constantly renewing connection that we are guaranteed to have for the rest of our life. I’m working on that relationship, and being interested in myself like that again. Falling apart to fall back together.

Lauren had been trying in vain to convince Dave in a previous episode that she was “the most boring person alive”, her own mother sitting across from her nodding in solemn agreement. Sure, she made no excuses for hooking up with a guy a few weeks before the show, but it was harmless and bled not into her current connection with Dave, she insists. Trying to peer into Dave’s empty eyes through my TV screen, I can see the wheels in his head turning lethargically like an old rusted water mill as he tries to make sense of this. As he explains it, he knows her ex, and his friends know her ex, and his friends have offered conflicting information.

Of course, nothing can be taken for face value on Love is Blind. When you are on TV, with a constant awareness of Twitter feeds and Reddit threads dissecting your every move, these contestants are balancing a double act of personal public relations manager and authentic human being. It’s possible Dave simply didn’t like Lauren after all, and was trying to save face by concocting an image of her as a dishonest person. It’s also possible something more human is going on here, and Dave was looking for any excuse to save himself from that steep legally binding plunge of till death do us part.

Does anyone actually ever get over anything? Can you ever trust anyone at all? Can you trust yourself? As I step tepidly into this world of dating a couple months after my fiance passed away, I feel a great desire to protect my heart constantly battling with an even bigger desire to reconstruct myself through connection with others.

To complicate things, watching these games of possessiveness and distrust unfold onscreen, I find myself turned off completely from these unwritten rules of dating. An elaborate dance to try and protect yourself by seeking evidence that you can never know or trust the person sitting across from you, ever. These contestants seem to be dancing around the nucleus of the argument, that being their own feelings, but as the gravity of the nucleus drags them, they trip over their own feet. Rehash the factoids, the ‘she said he said’. Never look at the gravity of the nucleus, even as it dictates everything.

Cancer in a relationship demands total honesty at all times. There are no games to be played with a person when you are scheduling dates around chemotherapy appointments, when they’ve had multiple surgeries, when you’ve spent more nights than you can count with them in a hospital room. Why play coy, why ransack their text conversations with girls, monitor their social media likes, or pull away just to watch them chase you.

Total honesty looked like Nick hearing me break down in an empty alley near the Amsterdam red light district, after the whirlwind of travel caused my heart to spill on the cobblestones, a month after the cancer had come back. Looking at me with frustrated compassion as I said “what if you do beat the cancer? What if it comes back when we are forty, with children, and it kills you then?”

These outbursts were rare, but he always had patience for me. He never wanted to be spared from my darkest thoughts. He wanted to hold my hand through them, to sit with me there. His superpower was to face down cancer so bravely that he somehow had enough space for my neuroses. His own fear came much, much later, and I like to think I sat with him there, too. Now I grieve, and I sit with myself. Facing it bravely enough to have space for my own neuroses, a different kind of precarious double act.

So here I am now, in the dating world. Do I drive a person away by being too forward? Will they collapse like a hot house flower under the weight of my interest? It’s hard to bring myself to care about chasing someone’s heart away, like they are a timid forest animal. But I worry that not everyone has had this experience, this specific type of honesty driven by total devastation. I worry that they’ve been playing this game so long they are experts, and I’m a mark. Does honesty cut through the game, or does it reveal me, belly up to a carnivore?

When I was in high school anatomy class, my teacher said that ants don’t feel pain because they are built knowing everything they need to know. I’m reading a book now called “An Immense World”, about how various animals perceive the world, and the chapter I’m currently reading concerns ants. In high school, when I learned ants were “born knowing everything they need to know”, I thought perhaps that they were built like little atomotons, with intricate machinery inside. An Immense World explains that ants actually respond to chemical signals. Ants leave chemical trails, they secrete specific chemicals, they follow the chemicals of other ants in order for the colony to function. Humans on the other hand have basically no perception of chemical signals. (Not even “pheromones”, which have been extensively researched with no satisfying evidence.)1

Maybe it would be nice, maybe it would make us more honest in the dating game, if we were simply responding to chemical signals. But instead we play complicated and treacherous social games, borne from the fear of ghosts, from a need to protect ourselves. Maybe our version of “chemical signals”, red and green lights to a potential partner, can simply be communication. Two things have to happen to make this work - trusting another person, and trusting yourself.

Real connection with another person risks pain. Unlike ants, this seems to be unavoidable for us humans. It always heartened me though, that pain is biologically intended to teach us something. Unfortunately for us, as the YouTube video from “Bizarre Beasts” on the woefully inept pumpkin toadlet mentions, biology is a C student.2 Going through my fiance’s cancer and eventual death, I always bristled at glib cliches about “silver linings” or “lessons”. I don’t think pain is necessary for growth, or that pain is always transferred into pure insight. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” but it also makes you fragile, unable to follow through with a bikini wax appointment because you couldn’t imagine sitting on an examination table while someone rips out your hair with hot wax. Grief is making every small pain feel like an unimaginable indignity, while also propelling me into impulsive emotional decisions because I figure I’ve been through worse. (Double act!)

Pain has given me perspective, but it heals in the form of scars. “Wisdom’s a gift but I’d trade it for youth”3. Maybe every pain rattles around in your body forever - the body keeps the score. Maybe we never “get over” anything. Scar tissue forms- what was once soft and indistinguishable from the rest is now hardened and obvious.

What do we do about the pain, then? If it’s unavoidable, then maybe it can be minimized, with honesty- our chemical signals. It’s not so simple of course- it involves trust. Not only for another person, but for ourselves. I need to understand myself intimately - my own pain and how it spills onto the cobblestones, over the shoes of the people who love me. For a long time I was uninterested in myself, because my world was eclipsed by illness and caring for another person, and because I thought the way to understand myself was to understand the world around me. While that’s true, I think I now realize that I can also understand the world around me by understanding myself. I feel just as mysterious to myself as any other person, vast and shadowed. Can I ever really know what any person wants or intends, I barely know what I want, what I intend!

A huge preoccupation in Love is Blind seems to be if a contestant can apprehend, for certain, the core of their partner. If they are trustworthy, if they are “there for the right reasons”, in a short span of time. The problem, besides the fact that you can’t know someone fully in a matter of weeks, is perhaps that there’s no “core” at all. Maybe a person is a collection of selves, photocopied a little differently with every new iteration. Waves beating ceaselessly against the shore. A collection of pain, healed over scars. As Diane says in BoJack Horseman: “I don’t know if I believe in “deep down”. I kinda think all you are is just the things that you do”.

Finding yourself, connecting with other people, sending the right signals, minimizing pain … It seems increasingly to me that the answers are scattered in a million places. In art, in conversation, and crucially, built from vulnerability with other people. In honesty, in art and connection that risks something. The truth of it all is that people change you. I’ve been hurt in an unfathomably deep way. I can’t wait to be taken on a ride again.

“...Spin me round / in our unknowable circumference. / Radius me. Break me in half. / I don’t care what I turn out to be. / Paint me: make me different. / Make me cry and make me laugh. / I don’t care what we turn out to be.”4

I don’t want to try and ascertain for certain whether these people really love each other, or whether a person can fall in love in such a short amount of time. Love is such a complex and mysterious emotion. I do believe in instant connections. When I met Nick, my fiance who passed away last month, it was like I had been struck by a bolt of lightning. Loving him felt like being held hostage. I had no choice in the matter, my whole world split open from underneath me. He was a meteor that remade my entire world.

I’m not so much interested in the validity of the contestant’s love or connection as I am in this strange timeline. The contestants check off relationship milestones every other week- dating, engagement, honeymoon, moving in together, meeting each other’s loved ones, marriage. Time is warped and flattened. The past becomes a mystery, the present becomes a pressure cooker, the future a looming threat. Of course paranoia seeps in, every potential bump in the road or salacious ghost of the past becomes a powder keg.

My relationship lasted eight years. In the beginning everything was new to us, and time was our friend. It stretched out lazily before us, a friendly horizon, a place where the sun invariably rose and set. Cancer takes a wrecking ball to a person’s previous perception of time. It changes from a friendly horizon to a Brothers Grimm fairy tale forest, every threat and anxiety is a tree immediately in front of your face. Beyond that anxiety is another, then another, then another. It infused our relationship with new intensity and commitment, as it slowly eroded our innocence.

Grief has caused time to collapse once again. My present is caught up in a shipwreck of both my memories and a destroyed future. I exist right now in the eye of a storm, simultaneously feeling so many contradictory feelings that I feel perpetually off balance. The present is the truth, the past is a myth, the future is a sadness. May his memory be a blessing. May his memory one day stop causing me pain. I have absorbed him deep into my cell tissue, as his body rots in the ground.

I recently rewatched the first installment of the Before trilogy, Before Sunrise (dir. Richard Linklater). I’ve watched these movies dozens of times, usually around transitional periods of my life. No matter how many times I’ve seen them, I always come away with something different. I think this is in no small part due to the film’s focus on time. The trilogy follows a couple at different phases in their lives: when they meet, when they reconnect a decade later, and then again ten years into their marriage (spoiler!). Driving the theme home, each movie is filmed ten years apart. The characters have aged alongside the actors playing them.

Watching Before Sunrise this time, the passing of time was the strongest element that stuck with me. Because the characters meet serendipitously on the train and live in different countries, it’s almost as if they will both die when the sun rises the next day. Unlike Love is Blind, there is no pretense of a marriage here. Gone are the practical conversations about having kids, moving to a different city, and financial debt. In a way, this type of chance encounter where the future is completely off the table inspires the most honest connection. They don’t have to posture or sell themselves as potential lifelong “partners”. All that matters is understanding one another, or at least the attempt. This is something Celine, the female character, echoes from the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber when she says God exists in the “in between”- in the attempt to understand another person.

In one scene, the couple stumble upon a poster for a George Seurat exhibit. Celine points to La nourrice (1882–83) and Anaïs Faivre Haumonté sur son lit de mort (1887). In both paintings, the human figures appear almost smudged, their edges fading into the background like smoke. Celine remarks upon how the figures in the paintings always appear transitory, like they are blending into a powerful environment. It’s a somber reflection, that we as people are here one moment and gone the next, our edges fading to the mercy of time, sickness, natural disasters. The reality of this, of being “transitory”, also sparks incredible honesty and connection, if you can gently welcome it into a relationship. It’s like dreaming with your eyes wide open. (This scene is dissected beautifully in this piece: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4427-transitory-figures-one-scene-from-before-sunrise?srsltid=AfmBOoqJqasi0HM4YlZRZcscSq8ffkIGKyzq1ObgSOBPYpnA791PTIf6).

Of course, being at the mercy of time is reflected in Love is Blind in a totally different way. Much of this has to do with that beautiful human delusion: marriage. The contestants on Love is Blind, and indeed in many of these dating reality shows, seem to view marriage as some kind of salvation. As a missing puzzle piece that will make their lives complete. Over and over again, the contestants fall into clearly ill fated relationships, all based on the “prize” of marriage at the end. Desperation is the fuel, marriage the north star. The person almost matters less than the ring.

I’ve been reflecting a great deal on that wonderful delusion, as my engagement ring gathers dust in a soap dish in my kitchen.

I knew I was being delusional when I suggested that we get married. We had just gotten a scan result that was disastrous. The tumor(s!) were growing. Chemo had stopped working. “What are we going to do?” He asked. “Let’s get married”, I said.

I felt a need to call the universe’s bluff. Isn’t that all that marriage is? Someone could die from a car crash much more readily than they can die of cancer. Yet we all want to promise each other “forever”. It’s about the intention, not about the reality, not about our rapidly decaying flesh, rapidly mutating cells. I thought if I could throw a party big enough, if I could surround the both of us with love that was strong enough, if I called upon old traditions and an even older religion, I was daring the universe to take it all away from me.

I wrote Nick a letter shortly before he passed last month. Mostly I wanted to grant him peace, to walk into that dark night with as much solace as I could possibly give him. I didn’t “know” then, but I “knew”. Here’s a segment (presented below with all the original grammatical errors for posterity):

“It’s been hard to think about marriage right now, obviously. It’s all about making promises for the future. Cancer obviously blows up the idea of the future, and of promises. It makes me realize that marriage is one of many human delusions. I think it’s a wonderful delusion, a wonderful promise, but it feels like twisting the knife right now.

Then I think about the promise of a relationship. I think so much of our conception of relationships is based on promises of the future. Promises are easy to make. I’m always frustrated by them. But I love the idea. So what of our relationship, now that we can no longer make promises for the future? Then a relationship is about something else. In a way, it’s totally selfless. It’s completely about the other person. It’s completely about the present moment. It’s not about promises, it’s about real commitment. It’s giving everything and expecting nothing. I could be mad about being robbed of a promised future, and I am mad, but I also have everything, right now.” (12/27/2024)

I ended the letter saying “I will love you forever”. And that’s the only eternity I could have promised him. I think it will always be true. We may have never gotten a wedding, but we will always have that. I’ve been reflecting on the tragedy of our love being forever tinged with sadness, every simple memory becoming bittersweet. It feels unfair, like a distortion, a perversion. But my dear friend Bianca told me that maybe one day instead of feeling like a distortion of what was once a simple love, it will become one of the pillars that holds me up. I think that’s what the Jewish saying “may his memory be a blessing” really means. And if time is blown up, the past and the present swirling into my presence, then as Peter S. Beagle writes in The Last Unicorn: “There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends”.

Last month, my fiance died after living with cancer for seven years. We had been dating for eight years, and were engaged for almost one year.

Grief is mind numbing in its enormity. It seems like it can only be expressed in metaphor, and the metaphors are often inadequate. I understand why so many of these metaphors revolve around the ocean, perhaps the most enormous physical reality our minds can comprehend. Grief is a tsunami, you have to ride the waves of emotion, survival feels like treading water, etc. The destruction, the beauty, the life force, the way water cycles from vapor and ice and back again, always, to the sea.

I’ve had a desire to write it out, try and make sense of the destruction. I find that I can’t do it, I can’t stare at this beast in its face. I would rather write about Love is Blind.

I wouldn’t call myself a reality television aficionado, with the exception of The Bachelor. The Bachelor got me through many dark and rainy Mondays in Seattle when I was in high school, watching with my mom. I had never been in a relationship before, and something about it all felt so adult to me. Of course I knew it was all artifice, and I caught onto the circular patterns of the plot, the peculiar language contestants would use on dates. “Building walls / breaking down walls”... “I can see myself falling for you / I’m falling for you / I love you”, “Can I steal you for a second?”. While I could see the scaffolding underpinning the operation, I could see that the emotions were real. The show always starts off silly and light hearted, and then proceeds like a death march toward tears and heartbreak as women are slowly picked off. It’s real. And like it or not, as much as my alternative/hipster self would have denied it, these women shaped my idle dreaming of what life might look like as an adult. I always wondered what it might mean to be “bubbly”, to have long shimmering hair running to my waist. Cut to my present self watching the show at 27, realizing with horror that I’d be considered an older contestant on the show, bubbliness and waist length hair never materializing.

My fiance was the only person I had ever seriously dated. As much as I would have loved an Indiana Jones situation, where the crystal skull is quickly replaced with a bag of sand, someone swooping in to fill this gigantic gap instantly, it hasn’t happened yet. And it probably shouldn’t, if I’m being honest. I wouldn’t date me right now, I can’t expect anyone else to want to. And I’m terrified of dating. I have only ever known it through the lens of reality television. So here I am, watching Love is Blind as a recently ... ‘decoupled’ person.

To quickly explain Love is Blind for the uninitiated, the show revolves around dozens of young, attractive white collar professionals from a specific city. They all go on “blind dates” with each other, separated from each other by a wall in the middle of a small room. The show refers to these rooms as “pods”. Each room is stocked with a couch, pillows and blankets, and a fully stocked bar cart, it seems. Over the course of a few weeks, the contestants go on blind dates with various other singles and eventually whittle their “connections” down to one person, with the goal of proposing marriage. Only then are they revealed to each other in the most socially awkward scenes ever filmed for reality television, involving an inhumanely long hallway. To be honest I usually skip these scenes, as even for a person with an unusually high cringe tolerance these scenes are unbearable to me. Usually you can tell right away if the respective parties find the other attractive or not, and that’s all the information I really need.

While some fans enjoy them, I find the pod episodes to be the most boring part of the show. They reveal just how vapid and uninteresting first date conversations tend to be, or maybe shine a light on the less than stellar conversational skills the average person tends to have.

After the pods, the engaged couples move onto a “honeymoon”, usually in Mexico or Central America. This is where the show really picks up, as couples respond to each other’s physical presence. It’s not uncommon for at least one couple to buckle under this weight. The answer to the question the show poses, “is love blind?” is answered every season- nope. No it is not. The physical appearance of the people in these relationships tends to pretty much harpoon or buoy the entire relationship moving forward.

After the honeymoon, my favorite part of the show starts- the couples move in together. Sometimes in what seems like an apartment provided by Netflix, and other times into someone’s literal home. This is when the Seinfeldian (delighted to find out that this is a real world) antics ensue. Can they balance work and their new relationship? What rights do pets have to personal space? Can each half of the relationship perform their gender roles to the other’s satisfaction? Is telling your fiance she shouldn’t eat an orange fat shaming? These are the kinds of philosophically resonant questions you can expect from the latter half of Love is Blind.

Finally, the remaining couples tie the knot. Or not. Perplexingly, some couples make it all the way to the literal altar before rejecting their fiance. I don’t know what is going on with these production agreements, as less and less couples have actually made it all the way to the altar in recent seasons. I suppose this is for the best, as rejecting someone at the altar is obviously a traumatic experience that people should be spared from. Of course. But as a viewer … it is certainly lacking some pizazz.

I have obsessively watched every season of Love is Blind. Well, maybe “obsessively” is the wrong word. I watch it with the wary intrigue of someone keeping tabs on a friend’s ill-fated relationship from afar. But watching it now feels completely different. In a happy relationship, I could watch with a detached indifference, like a scientist watching lab rats. I would watch with relief and astonishment, assured by the fact that I’m decidedly out of the dating pool, safe from the nonsense. Now, I’m among the rats. I’m trying to make sense of the surroundings of this new cage, the strange substance I’m being fed.

What is it about Love is Blind that strikes such a chord with me? When I tell my friends I watch it, they are all impressed as they find the show too long or too cringey to sit through in full. If I’m being honest. I’m usually on my phone as I watch, as sometimes the sincerity and awkwardness of these interactions is too much to bear. What keeps drawing me to it?

I’ve always felt that Netflix has picked up where psychological experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment left off in the 1960s-1970s, but this time it’s televised and the subjects get lucrative brand deals at the end. Love as Blind for its part purports to be a “social experiment”, at least for the first few seasons. The Ultimatum feels particularly diabolical as a show which purposely tries to break apart long term partnerships by having the couples split up and date new partners, with the “ultimatum” of marriage or a breakup with their original partners facing them at the end. At least the deranged experiments of the midcentury had the veneer of science, while Netflix bravely recreates psychological torment for simple viewing pleasure and revenue.

While Love is Blind has always existed in a similar universe to The Ultimatum, it feels less mean spirited. Maybe it’s because these people are strangers to each other and thus owe each other less. Regardless, the contestants are still entrusting a private business with their hearts and souls, especially putting faith in the casting process, which has let quite a few psychopathic men through the cracks in the past. From what I can tell, though, that’s just dating in the 21st century.

Since my friends are all in relationships themselves, and I’ve never dated, Love is Blind feels like a finger on the pulse, a cross-section of data on dating. The data is skewed of course, the contestants always seem to be middle to upper class young professionals living in cities. Of course I know that it’s a reality show, which already attracts a certain type of person, and that the show is cast to bring about interesting plot lines. But with a lack of personal experience, these shows have always been how I assess the world of singledom. So, what does Love is Blind have to say? I can tell you this much right now, it’s not looking good! Here are some things I have noticed that I would like to expand upon further-

• Can speed dating work as a concept? Can you ever really know a person in such a short amount of time?

• Quirky conspiracy theory / Joe Rogan podcast influence on date conversation

• David entering a line of men on Love is Blind professing to have “changed”, moved on from their shallow narcissistic ways. Can people (men) really change, or only by degrees?

• “Attachment styles”- social media therapy speak and the havoc it wreaks on interpersonal relationships

• The cult of entrepreneurship

• Politics as a now unavoidable feature of dating

If any of these topics intrigue you, dear reader, let me know. Not that you have much of a choice, if I’m interested I will probably write about it, unless self doubt and procrastination put an end to all this. Thank you for indulging me!

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