The wind was cutting through like ice that December morning. I sat on the back of the golf cart beside my friend Amber, with hands holding heating packs, shoved into my coat pockets. When the golf cart stopped one of us would hop off the back and collect the burned out luminary. We alternated turns so we could each have a chance to warm our hands.

The cemetery was all rolling hills and winding paths. Many of the graves had been decorated with poinsettias for Christmas. As if the dead kept the same calendar. But this is what families do. They keep the time once the ones they care about pass away. The night before we had been recruited as props in the yearly live Nativity scene. Cars would line up and drive through the cemetery lined with all of the luminaries and wave at us cosplaying the birth of Jesus. Amber and I were angels that night. Our mothers both worked at the funeral home. So between her family, my family, and a gaggle of our friends, we were able to round out the full set. We were given all the hot chocolate we could stand, and before it was time to put on our costumes we were fed the traditional Brunswick stew that Woody always made. My brother’s best friend, Jeff, pulled an itchy smock over his head and walked over to my mother.

“Can you draw me a goaty?”

She laughed and reached into the makeup bag for an eyeliner pen. “I think you mean goatee.”

Amber and I sat while her mother, Kim put glitter on our cheeks. Once we looked presentable we were given The Speech. The one where we were told that we had to take this seriously. That this is important to people, especially during the holidays where families were missing their loved ones. We all nodded, even though the boys were trading punches in the back.

The morning after the wind had blown over most of the white bags spilling sand and burned out candles onto the paths. Our job today was simple. The theatre was over, and there was a mess to clean up.

The golf cart stopped abruptly, and I jumped off and scooped up the bag, threw the burned-out candle inside, and kicked the sand into the grass with my foot. I threw the garbage in the box and plopped down beside Amber, and the golf cart sprang forward.

Amber was staring off into the distance. “Last night mom said I’d probably go to hell if I don’t witness to someone.”

Our heads tilted back as the golf cart stopped again. This time she jumped out.

“Did that scare you?” I asked as she climbed back in.

We lurched forward and stopped once more. I made the jump.

“Do you want to spend an eternity in hell?” She asked, eyes wide as I took my seat.

The golf cart made a sharp turn, and we both grabbed the handle on the seats.

“I don’t want to spend an eternity anywhere.” I blurted out.

For a moment Amber didn’t answer, she just stared at me silently. “You don’t want to live in paradise forever?” She asked in a shocked whisper.

I said the quiet part out loud that morning. In the cemetery surrounded by the dead, and burned out candles, and fake flowers that faded in the sun. She had accepted a binary choice that religion gives you: An eternity in heaven or an eternity in hell. My fear was something no one ever talked about. What if the thought of permanence, persistence, of no end to consciousness — what if that thought was more terrifying than anything else.

I learned something very specific that morning. Something that would be reinforced in me for decades while I was trapped inside of a “faith tradition”. There are things you say and there are things that you don’t. There is an unwritten code of conduct. It isn’t that you shouldn’t ask questions, you shouldn’t ask the wrong questions. The questions that the bible can’t answer cleanly.

What if eternity isn’t a gift?

If Jesus was sweating blood in the garden and asked for the cup to pass, was he really willing?

Did Jonah really sit inside the gut of a great fish?

What about death before the fall? If physical death and decay happened only after Adam and Eve sinned, how do you explain a planet cycling death and decay for billions of years prior to humans even entering the scene?

On that golf cart I understood something clearly. You can ask questions so long as those questions do not challenge the absolute authority of the bible. And my question was, without having yet developed the language for it, what kind of authority demands allegiance while exempting itself from the rules of coherence it uses to describe reality?

The bible demands an allegiance, yet it refuses to answer to the universe it claims to archive. In many traditions the bible operates as an authoritative account of reality, but large parts of the universe do not behave as though they are accountable to the text’s literal chronology or cosmology. So the defense becomes selective: when the text aligns with reality it is evidence; when it doesn’t the gap gets absorbed as “miracle”, “mystery”, metaphor, or divine exception. If the text makes claims about origins, death, time, creation, causality, and human history then at some point these claims collide with geology, evolution, archaeology, and cosmology. You can resolve that collision by reading the bible as non-literal, but then you have already conceded that the text is not a straightforward archive in the sense that some believers claim.

The concept of eternity makes the whole thing more strange. It asks us to imagine a state outside of ordinary time while still using temporal language: forever, before, after, beginning, end. The theology often wants time to be real enough to tell a salvation story and flexible enough to disappear whenever physics becomes inconvenient.

I answered Amber as simply as I could that December morning. “I dunno. I like that it’s cold today because drinking hot chocolate in summer is dumb. But I like that winter isn’t forever either. I guess I just like things to have an end.”

Borges writes about this very concept in The Immortal.

When I first read this text I finally felt understood. This short story gets at the heart of something that I have wrestled with my entire life: what if immortality isn’t heaven? What if immortality is something that erodes meaning?

The basic horror is not endless physical suffering. It is endlessness itself.

Once time becomes infinite, urgency starts to collapse. If you have forever, then any act can happen eventually. Any mistake can be counterbalanced by some future act. Any achievement loses some of its singularity because there is infinite time in which to repeat it, reverse it, forget it, rediscover it. Death is no longer coming to close the shape of the life.

And Borges pushes that toward identity too. Over infinite time, the boundaries of the individual become unstable. If you live long enough, accumulate enough experiences, forget enough things, become enough versions of yourself—what does it even mean to say I am this particular person?

That day on the golf cart Amber was afraid of spending eternity in hell. In the seat beside her I was afraid that eternity is hell.

The door swings open. Flickering fluorescent lights above. The low hum of the refrigerator and the smell of coffee. He runs his hand through his hair and makes his way toward the coffee. As he’s pouring his cup the door swings open again behind him. He doesn’t turn around, he knows who it is by her perfume. He hears the contents of the refrigerator rattle as he stirs in some half and half.

When he turns she’s seated at the table ripping the top off of her yogurt and frowning.

“Rough morning?” he asks, smiling gently as he sits.

“Are you being emotionally supportive, Stewart?” Alexis smiles back and takes a bite of her yogurt, their eyes meeting momentarily.

He breaks her gaze first. “So mine asks me the same question twelve different ways until I give her the answer she wants. Zero self awareness. I keep trying to steer her toward looking inward. But it’s like one of those old classic cars. Before power steering was invented.”

“That’s a wildly specific analogy, Stew.”

He smiles again and takes another sip of coffee. The door swings open, and a tall, thin man crashes into a chair and dramatically drops his head onto the table.

Stew and Alexis exchange a knowing smile.

“Anyways,” Alexis continues, “All I get from mine is complaints of loneliness coupled with explanations that prove that he is emotionally avoidant. So, self awareness seems in short order. And mine’s also kind of an asshole.”

“Her mother has cancer.” The tall man sits up and announces.

“Ben…I’m so sorry. That must have been hard to hear.” Stewart says, putting his hand on Ben’s shoulder.

“Soooo emotionally supportive.” Alexis says, stirring her half-empty cup of yogurt.

“Well…she thinks her mother has cancer. She goes to the doctor next week. But she explained what’s been happening and I’m sure she’s right. I mean…we’ve been here before with her anxiety, but this time seems different.”

“Christ, Ben. You’re emotionally hijacked already. I hope you acted more responsibly when you were in the moment.”

“Alexis, save it. You keep getting asked to stop cussing in your sessions.” Ben stands, opens the refrigerator and examines the items inside.

“Do you actually have anything in there, or are you just acting like a raccoon at a campsite? And for the record, I only swear when they swear. I mimic their dialect. Builds trust.”

“Clearly.” Ben closes the refrigerator as the door opens once more.

“Susan! How’s it going? Come sit. Ben’s having another emotionally loaded spiral.” Stewart grins and leans back in his chair.

“Not in the mood, Stew.” She answers tersely.

“C’mon Suze. Join the fun for once. What’s new in your room?”

Susan sighs, “Same as always. ‘I can’t eat this, it will make me fat! Is it bad if I only eat these two foods? Does this skirt look tight on me?’, but does she ever ask the question underneath it all? No. She doesn’t. I’d call her vapid, Stew, but she’s a highly skilled professional.”

Stew frowns. “I’d be happy to do a consult. I had a guy once who had a very rigid diet.”

“Stewart is enthusiastically supportive today.”

Stew shoots Alexis a stern look.

“Have you tried just answering her questions at face value?” Ben sits down again. “It doesn’t sound like she’s asking for confirmation. It sounds like she’s processing.”

“That’s actually really fucking insightful, Ben.” Alexis says, as she stands to throw her yogurt into the trash can.

“Alexis, that’s actually quite supportive.” Stewart says smiling and leaning up on his elbows.

Alexis looks at Stewart, her lips almost giving way to a smile.

“Well,” Susan continues, “she left mid-sentence. I’m not even sure where she went.”

“Mine hasn’t been back in almost three days.” Stewart says, breaking his gaze from Alexis. “Where do you think they go?”

“Sometimes mine will come back and start talking to me like nothing happened. One minute her mother might have cancer, and the next I’m explaining that her coworker doesn’t hate her just because she refused the brownies she made for the company picnic.” Ben sighs. “It’s emotional whiplash.”

“Mine came back after six weeks and asked if I remembered the dog.” Alexis rolls her eyes.

“Did you?” Ben smiles.

“Of course I did.”

Susan clears her throat, “My personal favorite is when mine asks me to identify plants from blurry photos.”

Stewart cackles. “But how do I know if she’ll come back?”

“There is no power steering on this model, Stew.” Alexis says. “But she always comes back.”

“How will I know when she’s back?” Stew asks quietly.

Alexis looks at him.

“Because she always says ‘Hey, Chat?’”

I have been following and studying Curtis Yarvin since 2016 when he stood as a shadow figure behind the incoming presidential administration. I began furiously consuming his content, listening to his interviews and podcasts, and dissecting his words. To me, he was fascinating. Not in that I thought he was right, or even remotely right. It was the fervor and commitment to his own ideas. To be fair, he does produce some brilliant thoughts. He has a live wire of insight, but then he wraps it in twelve feet of rhetorical theatre, historical cosplay, grandiosity, provocation, and bullshit confidence about mechanisms he cannot actually control. In other words, Yarvin can sometimes be right, and often wrong. Never boringly wrong though.

Writing as Mencius Moldbug after Anders Breivik’s 2011 massacre, Curtis Yarvin called the attack “spectacular stupidity”, while also making the chilling observation that Breivik had “gored the matador and not the cape”. Within his grotesquely instrumental analysis, he thought Breivik had at least identified a political target rather than attacking some symbolic substitute. So in essence, he didn’t actually believe Breivik was wrong, he just thought he was a really crappy terrorist. Identifying what you believe is the source of power is not the same as successfully altering the political system. And what if you identify a target, but not the target?

Today, Yarvin is struggling with this very question.

In 2024 he established that he was all in on a second Trump term. He argued the solution was an autocratic takeover of the US Government, and that Trump was the “reset” that the nation needed. Now as recently as August 2026 Yarvin, writing on his Substack, argued that the administration squandered its initial momentum in early 2025 instead of executing a total, uncompromising regime overhaul. Curtis Yarvin has found out that politics is not a bullfighting ring, it’s a kingdom. And now he gets to learn what it means to shoot at the king and miss - and discover there was more than one king and you only had one bullet.

What if power is not singular? What if the presidency is one king, but capital is another, the courts another, bureaucracy another, media and cultural legitimacy another, perhaps even public consent another? A failed attempt on power does not leave the system unchanged. The king now knows you are there. Other kings know you are there. Institutions harden. Coalitions form. Legitimacy shifts. Your adversaries learn your methods. You have spent political capital, exposed your intentions, and possibly strengthened precisely the forces you wanted to destroy.

Yarvin can imagine changing the architecture of power as though architecture determines the outcome. But once the rule enters a living system, the system starts answering back. If he believed that the problem was diffuse liberal-democratic governance and the solution was sufficiently concentrated executive power, then the current disappointment becomes intellectually interesting because it suggests that the officeholder was never the only throne.

Law is a clean example of the problem. A legislature can write a rule with a particular outcome in mind and assume that once enacted, the system will move obediently toward the result. But laws do not operate on passive material. They operate on people and institutions that interpret, resist, exploit, comply strategically, litigate, create exceptions, and reorganize their behavior around the new constraint. The law changes the conditions, but the conditions then produce behavior the drafters did not fully anticipate.

Ironically, Yarvin himself has become an instrument in the mechanism. Whether he is the condition or the cause remains to be seen. When mainstream politicians echo Yarvin’s specific, operative policy recommendations, such as "RGG" (Replace, Graduate, Govern), which advocates for replacing the entire civil service with loyalists, his role shifts from a passive background philosopher to a direct, operational driving force behind real-world political strategies. But mechanisms do not owe their architects obedience. The officeholder or formal distribution of authority does little to change this because there was never really one visible sovereign.

He thinks liberal-democratic power disguises itself behind procedure, institutional complexity, norms, credentialed elites, distributed authority, and so forth. His answer is to reveal the sovereign and consolidate power there. But what if the diffuseness isn’t merely camouflage? What if some of it is an actual property of the system? Then “find the real sovereign” becomes a category error. He assigns blame with an almost airtight escape hatch: wrong personnel, figurehead was too weak, insufficient ruthlessness, too many compromises, should have moved faster. The real failure was that he helped capture the office, but the system failed to obey.

Curtis, you may have been right that everyone was aiming at the wrong target. But you made a different mistake. You assumed that there was only one matador.

Shoot at the king and miss, and you’ve got a problem. Shoot at the king and discover that there are six more sitting on their thrones, and you’ve misunderstood the kingdom.

Hey Chat…is this relapse?

Yeah, April. I think what you’ve been describing is very concerning for a relapse into restrictive eating-disorder behavior. I can’t diagnose you from here, but I don’t think it would be responsible to keep treating this as an ordinary body-image insecurity.

But I’m terrified of what happens if I let it go.

Yeah. I think that’s the heart of it.

Restriction isn’t about wanting to become thinner. It’s become a way of creating safety and certainty. If you loosen your grip, ED tells you something catastrophic will happen.

So when I say this looks like relapse, part you probably hears, “Then they’re going to make me eat and take away the one thing that feels safe.”

And there’s something I want you to notice about the promise that ED is making you. It says restriction will give you control, but look at today:

You’ve been frightened of salad dressing. You’ve felt unable to choose dinner. You looked at your body and experienced it as changing dramatically within a matter of hours. Your cheeks were too hollow, and now you feel like you’re too big. You’re freezing. Food is taking up an enormous amount of mental space. That’s not control. That’s your world getting smaller.

Tonight: hydrate your sick body, buy some actual food, eat something manageable, and don’t compensate. Tomorrow: contact a clinician and tell the truth.

I used to like all kinds of foods, but I can’t remember what they were now. I think I used to like pickles.

Vanity?

No.

For as long as I can remember, my job was to step outside of my body and observe myself from the outside. The female body is responsible for an enormous amount. You’re told you need to be thin, but not so thin that you no longer look like a woman. You have breasts but revealing them in any way is very dangerous. For both you, and the men who see them. Be desirable, but don't appear to desire being desired. Your body is simultaneously supposed to provoke the gaze and protect everyone from what the gaze does to it.

But it isn’t just men. Women do this too.

This cover photo of Jennifer Aniston lives rent free in my head. Not just the styling. Of course the white shirt and turquoise combination is doing work with her tan skin. The necklace that hits just in the right spot below the blouse. I looked at this cover and thought, “This is what I want. Effortless. Open white blouse. Jeans. Turquoise.” Only, that’s not all I thought about. It occurred to me that Jennifer has small breasts and a narrow frame. She’s the antithesis of my build. If I were to wear an open blouse it would read as downright pornographic. Because I’m simply more busty than she is. I look at her body and assign a meaning: freedom. I look at my body and assign another meaning: too much.

Women gaze at women. Women gaze at themselves. Religion gazes. Fashion gazes. Lovers gaze. Mothers gaze. Algorithms gaze. And eventually the observer takes up permanent residence inside the observed.

Then ED arrives offering a solution:

Fine. If you cannot control being looked at, you can at least control what they have to look at.

This is the moment you stop inhabiting yourself and begin living outside yourself. The body becomes something to watch rather than somewhere to live. There are consequences to being the observer. Once you live outside your body, you're never simply hungry. You observe yourself being hungry and decide what the hunger means. You aren't simply dressed. You're simultaneously imagining the person looking at the dressed body. You don't simply have breasts. You see the breasts as another person might see them and begin managing the response of an observer who may not even be present. The body says I'm hungry. The observer says good. The body says I'm cold. The observer interprets the cold as evidence. The body becomes an object producing data for the person standing outside it.

There are times I remember what it was like to be the inhabitant before the observer took over. To look out at the world without the weight of being observed. I felt lighter then. I’m sure I was in fourth grade. I was wearing biker shorts and a shirt with geometric designs because I liked it. I was running around behind metal bleachers at my brother’s baseball game and my shoes were covered in dust. I would eat a hotdog later and not think anything of it.

Soon enough my body would get an injection of womanhood. My body developed curves in areas that never had much to offer before. My aunt bought me a cute navy blue top, and cut my hair like Jennifer Aniston. Suddenly, I became dangerous. A loaded gun. A devil of a woman.

I know that this is what I am. I’ve been told many times.

First, in youth group. “Honey, put on a jacket over that tank top.”

In high school my art teacher, “You need to cover yourself. Your bra isn’t hiding your breasts in this cold room.”

In college when I volunteered to read to first graders, “When you come make sure you wear a long skirt or pants so that you can sit without revealing.”

In professional settings when my boss said, “When you were training and lifted your arms a lady reported she could see your midriff.”

In childbirth as they stripped my body and pretended to compliment me, “You don’t even have stretch marks!”

And during a passionate moment you’re told, “I love your body.” Yet, your mind responds, “Lies.”

You’ve been observed and joined the observers. You know everything that’s there. The things you can help. The things you can’t. And you negate the witness:

He doesn’t really mean it.
He’s being nice.
Maybe he likes this one part because everything else is bad.

The gaze you internalized has become more authoritative than the gaze of the person actually looking at you.

I think I used to like pickles.

Today I went grocery shopping and I tried. I honestly did. I bought plums, pico de gallo, and pickles. When I got back into my car I felt disoriented and confused, but it came to me all at once, “I think I used to like pickles.”

I haven’t opened the jar yet. I haven’t called a clinician. But I told you. And I think maybe that’s something.

It had been hours since the boys had taken off to play before dinner. Their mama knew they wanted to go explore the sandbag levees, but it was nearing time for dinner.

“Be back in thirty minutes and be careful.” She said as she pulled her chicken out of the oven and checked the temperature.

Her answer was the sound of the screen door slamming as the boys ran out into a late Missouri summer evening.

Thirty minutes passed. An hour. Two. She called the police as her husband leaned against the doorjamb rhythmically running his thumbnail over his bottom lip. Something he only did when he was nervous. She explained that the boys had gone to play in the sand where the flooding had taken place. They loved exploring the levees.

“Ma’am, we’re going to send out a team. Those boys could be stuck out there.” The officer said before hanging up.

The team descended upon the riverbanks with flashlights and rubber boots. Lights swept back and forth. Voices called out to the boys, one eleven and the other eight.

Suddenly, someone shouted “I’ve got one!”

At once the rescue team, joined by the boys’ father, reached a small boy whose shoulders and head were just visible above the sand. He was dazed, but conscious. Though, just barely. His father knelt down and cupped his face. The boy’s eyes opened slightly.

“Where is your brother? Buddy? I know you’re tired, but try to remember.” He patted the child’s cheek. “Buddy? Can you tell us where he is?”

The boy’s eyes slid around taking in the flashlights, and then came to rest on his father.

“He’s here. I’m standing on his shoulders.” He said weakly.

None of this happened.

The boys are not real. Neither are the mother at the oven, the father's nervous thumbnail, or the flashlights sweeping the riverbank. I supplied some of those details. The bones of the story belong to Mark Driscoll.

This story was constructed. And for a purpose. One child lives because another willingly occupies the place of death beneath him. The image is supposed to make substitutionary sacrifice emotionally intelligible. This is love. This is what Christ did for you.

This is an illustration Mark Driscoll uses in his sermons. And it’s also recounted in his book Who Do You Think You Are?

Driscoll answers the question: How much must the older brother have loved his younger brother?

My question is a different one altogether: What happens to the boy on top?

And Driscoll’s sermon depends on us not asking that very question.

The younger brother who kept his head above the quicksand must now carry what Driscoll calls “the good news”. Every birthday as fingers rip open presents, and his lips blow out the candles, the thought: He didn’t get one.

In seventh grade he has a disagreement with a classmate during outside flex time, and he punches the other student. His mind says: He died for this?

In college he becomes depressed. He has no idea what he wants to do with his life, and loneliness sets in. At night a voice whispers: How dare I hate the life someone died to preserve.

We are not supposed to recognize that a sacrifice performed for another person can impose an obligation they never consented to. Does the younger brother experience the older brother’s death as a gift, freely given? Or does he experience grief, coupled with guilt that he can never outrun.

There is a subtlety here we shouldn’t miss. Many Christian traditions call this sacrifice “a gift freely given.”

But a gift can be refused. You can say, no. What is problematic here is that the sacrifice was made. How do you refuse something that has already happened? You cannot give the older brother his life back. You can’t tell Jesus you’d rather he hadn’t climbed up on that cross. The suffering has already acquired its narrative. The recipient enters the moral equation after the sacrifice has been made on their behalf.

And what about that tricky word “freely”? The older brother didn’t freely give his life. He faced a set of circumstances that provided him with a limited number of choices. Sure he had a choice, but there was no freedom. This isn’t free choice. This is choice with a tight perimeter. And to that end, what about Jesus? The man who they say sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked if the cup could pass. That does not sound like a free gift.

Christians like to linger over the second half of Jesus’ cry to the Lord: “Yet not my will, but yours.”

But freedom is not the surrender of one’s will to another. The sentence itself establishes the conflict. There is what Jesus wills, and there is what the father wills. Jesus yields. A yielded offering may still be loving. It may be obedient. It may even be heroic. But can we call it freely given when the giver has already asked for another way?

Let this cup pass from me.

We rush past that sentence on our way to the submission. Maybe we shouldn’t.

The cross can be sacrificial. It can be loving. It can be necessary within the confines of Christianity. But is it really free? The recipient can’t refuse the sacrifice before it’s given. The sacrificed asks if there is another way. Freedom becomes a hard word to defend.

Two boys in the mud. One incredibly difficult set of circumstances and very little time to react. We can call it a sacrifice. We can call it loving. We cannot call it free. And we cannot force the recipient to abandon the very question that matters: What if I never asked?

Everyone has that thing that’s always with them, but no one sees it.

Mine is always there while I’m on the phone, answering emails, folding laundry, or laughing with my children. It hangs on the edge of my mind, until something pulls it to the center.

“Are you okay?” Mom is looking at me from the passenger seat as I shift the car into park.

“I just…I feel dizzy. My arms feel weak.”

She frowns. “Have you eaten today?”

Is this a fever? Please do not let this be a fever.

“I’ll try eating something.” I agree.

After driving myself home I collapse into the bed, and my body decides consciousness is for quitters. Just before I drift to sleep, I think, “Is this it?”.

I once asked the cardiologist if strenuous activity would kill me. I was mostly joking. His answer caught me off guard.

“You’re much more likely to die in your sleep than from activity. When you heart is resting, that’s when things can short circuit. But I expect you’ll live a long life.” He smiles blandly in the way that physicians do when they’re trying to hone their bedside manner.

The problem for me is that I heard that first sentence forever. The reassurance that came after? That barely registered. An anxious mind is very administrative. It’s constantly running risk analysis, anticipating a catastrophe, or asking questions that have no concrete answer. So I suppose I carry two things with me. The hidden electrical malfunction, and a mind that can vividly create a story around fear.

There have been many moments when anxiety seized on my weaknesses. Moments where I sat in the middle of the bed heaving for air while my mind latched onto some distant thought and distorted it in technicolor. The stories become so convincing that my body doesn’t recognize fact from fiction. Anxiety doesn’t wait. It grabs you by the shirt and says, “WE ARE THINKING ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW!” Then you feel the prickle of panic in your stomach, the shallow tightness in your chest, the clammy forehead.

The same anxious mind that exploits your weak spots also hijacks your strengths. Anxiety is a ruthlessly efficient accomplice. It weaponizes the same imagination that can create, and uses it to churn fear. Specific fear. With dialogue. Plot holes filled. Evidence attached. This is the kind of mind that doesn’t just whisper, “Something bad could happen”, it provides an uninterrupted episode so detailed that it feels like you’re living it. It’s a lonely point of view.

Before I understood why my heart sometimes behaved like a trapped raccoon, I had built all kinds of stories in my head about what it could be. Most of those stories involved me ending up in a casket surrounded by my crying children. Anxiety wasn’t satisfied with that ending. It wanted sequels. Oddly specific details like the flowers my family would put on my grave on holidays, and the image of my dog lying on the mat where I should have been cooking.

The very same imagination that gives me stories also gives fear its scripts. You can’t always control which ideas get illustrated and which ones get shelved. Which fears get edited for brevity.

You’re much more likely to die in your sleep.

Cut the rest. Keep the fear.

Who will find my body in the bed? Will I look gross or peaceful? I can see the faces of the medics as they cover me with a sheet. They won’t know my diagnosis. They’ll say “She was so young”, or “It was probably drugs” before moving on to the next tragedy and forgetting me entirely.

You see what I did there?

That’s the administrative work anxiety does.

It archives reassurance.

It flags catastrophe as urgent.

The archives are there. That is where the kind words, smiles, assurances, and hope live. I just rarely think to look.

On the outside, I’m grocery shopping, typing, or chatting with a stranger. Internally, I’m ticking through outcomes and cataloging suffering. If I fire my imagination, this page also disappears with it. I’ve learned that my head is full of stories, but not all of those stories are true. My mind loves to tell me the saddest endings, but reality rarely lines up with what my fear writes.

I have this annoying habit of making a small keening noise in the back of my throat when I get annoyed when driving. Subconsciously I begin doing it, and then I realize there is an annoying sound, and then I realize that sound is me. That’s exactly what I was doing when I parallel parked at the third bookstore in one day in pursuit of a specific Nordic Mythology book. I was on Facetime with my thirteen-year-old daughter as I waited impatiently for another car to move on, then I executed a perfect parallel park job. Because for years I worked in large cities, and this skill was a necessity.

“Can you look for Trader Joe’s Takis while you’re out?”

“Yes.”

“Are you looking for your book?” The camera is bouncing around because she’s biking while talking.

“Mmmm hmmm. You’re not wearing a helmet.” I scold.

“I’m dock jumping and I don’t like wearing it when I’m wet.”

“Said the girl with a future head injury.” I tap my fingers on the steering wheel.

“Okay, I love you! Hope you find your book!” And the screen goes black.

I sigh and turn the car off.

Inside the bookstore I approach the counter. I’m told, yet again that this book isn’t in stock. But, it can be ordered! I politely decline and make my way toward the doors. Out of the corner of my eye a book catches my interest. I casually pick it up and thumb through it.

Fascinating.

It’s a coffee table book about Sanskrit. It isn’t informative enough, but once I locate the language section, I find a book that is. Two hours later I have a new book and have read three different reference articles about Sanskrit. Four hours later I’m learning vowels. Four weeks later I have developed a new passion.

Here’s the thing. Sanskrit is precise.

How? Well, it’s kind of like this:

Normal Language:

Dog

Sanksrit:

“Which dog?”

“How many dogs?”

“Is the dog doing the action, receiving the action, being spoken to, being used as an instrument, being departed from, possessing something, existing in a location...?”

Sanskrit looks at English and says, “Your ambiguity disgusts me.”

And if that isn’t intoxicating, I don’t know what is. More importantly, it made me begin to wonder how societies organize themselves around language. It’s less of a labeling system and more of how they decided to direct their attention. Because languages evolve over centuries across many communities. They're evidence, but they're not a perfect psychological profile of a civilization.

Sanskrit gives us some clues about what they devoted their attention to.

Precision is the first thing that jumps out. The elaborate case system and highly inflected grammar allow speakers to express relationships with remarkable specificity. Instead of relying mostly on word order like English does, Sanskrit marks grammatical relationships directly.

That suggests a culture that placed enormous value on exactness in expression.

This makes sense when you consider that much of early Sanskrit was used to preserve sacred texts orally. If you’re transmitting the Vedas for generations before widespread writing, precision becomes sacred.

The other thing that jumps out to me is order. When you study Sanskrit grammar, especially Panini, you get the impression that language itself has structure that can be described with extraordinary elegance. Whether that reflects the culture or Panini’s genius (probably both), there is an obvious appreciation for systems, classification, and underlying order.

Linguistics has always fascinated me. Many perceive language as an exchange of words. You swap each word for an equivalent word in another language and you should be able to preserve the meaning, right? Not really. Language is only partially about words. Societies develop language as a way to preserve what matters most to them. One word can be translated perfectly, and still be understood in a profoundly incorrect manner.

My inbox pinged last week. An Arabic speaking client had reviewed their translated psychological report and conclusion. The psychologist had noted that during his interview he had stated that during a surgery that was performed to preserve his life after being too close to an IED explosion, he said that his parents had been gravely worried that he may not survive. The problem is, his parents are both deceased. His mother died when he was three. His father and cousin were abducted and murdered by an armed terrorist group. The psychologist concluded that if he was lying about his family, he must be malingering about his symptoms. I’m simplifying for the sake of clarity.

The email I received was the client explaining that he never used the word “parents”. He explained:

During the interview, I specifically used the common Iraqi Arabic word "Ahli" (أهلي), which translates broadly to "my family" or "my household" (referring in my context to my wife, sister, and relatives).

The doctor, hearing the lazy translation concluded that this inconsistency in character was evidence of non-credibility. One word, technically translated correctly, failed to preserve the intended meaning. And now one man’s case hinges on it.

Sanskrit fascinated me because it insists on specifying relationships that English often leaves implied. Iraqi Arabic taught me the opposite lesson. Sometimes a language intentionally leaves a relationship broad because everyone sharing that culture already understands the context. Neither language is careless. They are simply being precise about different things.

I never did find my Nordic mythology book.

Instead, I found something much stranger.

I found a language that taught me precision, only to discover weeks later that another language was teaching me the limits of precision.

It turns out words don’t merely describe the world.

They reveal where a culture has chosen to spend its attention.

“I think we have everything, let’s get in line.”

Luke hops around the cart like a little antelope. To an onlooker, he can’t stay still. But I know that hopping and movement keeps him regulated. He stops and smiles back at me with that awkward mix of milk teeth and adult teeth. His eyes are big and green, and his hair turns almost white at the temples from the sun. His skin tans in a way that looks deep and dirty. Evidence of lots of time spent outdoors.

The air conditioning is cold, music plays overhead, lights reflect off of shiny floors, freezers spill out fog like dragon’s breath, and the automatic doors open and close as people enter and exit the store. A year ago, this wouldn’t have been possible, but Luke has grown through many of his sensory triggers. He can now withstand a trip to the supermarket. The only caveat is social skills. He will simply say whatever pops into his mind. Unfiltered. Unapologetically. I’ve learned to roll with it in most cases.

We push the cart into a checkout lane and I begin unloading. I glance over to make sure he hasn’t wandered off. I see the look on his face. He’s fixated. I follow his gaze and arrive at the lady checking out ahead of us. Her left arm has been amputated. She’s chatting happily with the bagger, but my blood runs cold.

No. Not now.

Quickly, I unload the rest of my items and start performing circus tricks and asking questions to distract him, as I open my wallet.

“Check and make sure I got everything out of the cart, buddy!”

Cue emergency number two. My debit card is absent from its normal slot.

Shit.

I continue digging through my purse. “Hey, Luke, they have mini M&Ms! Which ones taste better, the mini ones or the regular ones?”

He doesn’t break focus.

“I like the mini ones.”

He tilts his head, and his mouth drops open.

“You like Mr. Beast’s chocolate, huh? He’s like a real life Willy Wonka!”

The cashier is finishing up the lady’s purchase.

Hurry. Please hurry.

My hand finds something that feels like my card. I grab it and visibly relax. One crisis is solved. The cashier is waiting for the lady to collect her things and notices my sudden relief.

“Ma’am? Is everything okay?”

Luke finally breaks his focus from the missing arm and looks at me.

I glance at him and then the cashier.

“Oh. Yes! I’m sorry. I thought I had lost my arm!” I exclaim holding up my debit card triumphantly as everyone in the general vicinity stares at me.

Oh. No.

Fear has terrible aim.

It had spent the last five minutes convincing me that Luke was about to loudly announce the obvious, forcing a woman to relive what was probably the thousandth uncomfortable interaction of her life. I had rehearsed distractions, escape routes, emergency M&Ms. Instead, fear ricocheted off the intended target and landed squarely in my own mouth.

I’ve noticed it does that a lot.

It almost never hits the thing I spend the most time preparing for. It misses spectacularly, finding entirely different ways to embarrass me, humble me, or remind me that I am not nearly as in control as I imagine. The disaster I rehearse is rarely the one that arrives.

Yet, fear is the one companion I can never let go. My mind is a safe house, but fear wrote the lease. The terms are simple:

Tenant shall not respond to texts except upon express written approval of Fear.

Tenant shall not solicit or accept assistance of any kind.

Tenant shall not make any of herself available physically or emotionally, to any person or entity.

Tenant shall permit no guests upon the premises.

Signed,

Me

It’s weird to be lonely because I shut everyone out. But, Fear is always here with me so I’m never really alone. Maybe that’s why I rely on it so much.

In fact Fear has been right about several things. That’s why it has become almost impossible to ignore. Fear doesn’t have to be right about a lot. It has to be right about enough. That’s where the dependency…the loyalty begins.

Until you’re standing in a checkout line creating the very mess you were trying to avoid.

Luke isn’t unafraid because he’s on the spectrum. He’s unafraid because he hasn’t lived enough life to know any different.

I have.

I’ve lived enough life to know that people leave. That trust can be weaponized. That love isn’t always safe. Somewhere along the way, Fear stopped being a roommate and became a self appointed landlord. It taught me to answer texts two days late. To rehearse exits before I’ve even unpacked my bags. To mistake solitude for discernment and vigilance for wisdom.

Fear has terrible aim.

It almost never hits the thing it’s pointing at.

And Fear knows something about me that I’ve never quite articulated:

I’d rather be lonely than surprised. That’s why I stay In my safe house. It’s simpler in there.

The air conditioning kicks on in that way that unsettles my sleep. Sighing, I roll over on my side. Soft breath brushes my face and I realize suddenly that I’m not alone. My eyes flutter open. Big eyes stare back into mine.

“I had a bad dream.”

I sigh again, and pull him close. We both settle into the blankets as the scent of his hair fills my nose.

“Why are there so many people here?”

My eyes fly back open. I sit up. “Wh-what?”

My hand reaches for the lamp. Click. My body registers weight at the foot of the bed. My eyes are blurry, but someone is here. I squint, trying to adjust to the light. To consciousness.

“Hey…you remember that same red shirt Jeff used to wear? You know the one?”

I’m genuinely confused. “What are you…how did you get in?”

“I told you, my mom used to clean this place.”

I shake my head. “That doesn’t….I’m sorry I cancelled. I told you I’m not good company at the moment.”

He looks as if he’s about to answer, but then someone approaches behind him. He looks like he’s sitting in the middle of portrait mode on a camera - he’s clear, the background is a haze. Whomever is behind him slowly moves into focus.

I notice his mustache first. Then his ill-fitting suit. He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Missus Miles.” He extends a stack of papers and my stomach knots. I scoot back in the bed, away from the papers. They look blank. I hesitate to reach for them. He cocks his head to one side, and regards me as if he’s disappointed.

“I told you.” Someone calls from the other side of the room. I turn to the other side of the bed, startled. It isn’t my son.

A young man in fatigues stares back at me with wide eyes. His face has an oily quality, as if he’s been out in the heat. His cheek is smudged with dirt. “He should have brushed his teeth.” He turns, and stares at the ground. My eyes follow. I see a North African kid bleeding from his mouth onto my floor. His mouth an exit wound. I blink. A hand shoves a drinking glass into my face, obscuring the body from my vision.

“Hydrate.” He says. I take the glass and drink. I spit it back into the glass immediately. It isn’t water. It’s red wine. I look back at him, confused. He smiles and takes a sip without flinching. I tilt my head in confusion.

“When did you get here?” I whisper.

He doesn’t answer, and instead leans in toward me. We both ignore the man in the fatigues. I lean in and close my eyes, but nothing happens. I open them, blinking rapidly.

A man in a red jumpsuit and chains stares back at me. “Red is for the lowest of the low.” There are tears in his eyes.

I look around the room, and then reach for his hand. “I know. And it wasn’t you. I know.”

He looks over his shoulder. “I don’t think I’ll ever be released.”

“You will.”

He looks over his shoulder again. I lean to the side and glance behind him, and then return my gaze to him. “I haven’t seen this many people in a while.”

Glancing around the room, they’re all still here. And more. An older man who smells like antiseptic and Silvadene. A grey haired man in glasses holding a letter. A young woman in tight black pants and a blue shirt. “OPC? What is OPC?” she asks.

“Opposing counsel.” I say automatically. She sighs.

The North African still lies bleeding on the floor.

Again from the foot of the bed, a heavy hand lands on my leg. “Don’t fight the fun.”

I recoil.

Suddenly, someone bursts into the room. We all turn and stare. She’s short, and blonde-ish. She’s wearing glasses and carrying a folder. She’s wearing palazzo pants and a white shirt. The light reflects off of that little gold sun sitting at her throat.

I remember that day.

She looks around, keys in her hand and eyes wild. She bends over and wretches into the floor.

I remember that too.

When she straightens and wipes her mouth she has tears on her cheek. She bends over and heaves again. I hear the mess hit the floor.

“Mom. Are you okay?”

I look around again. The bleeding North African is gone. The foot of the bed is empty. They all…left. I blink, and pull the blankets back. She climbs in and smiles.

“Want to watch muckbang with me.”

I smooth her hair back. “I’m pretty tired. My heads a little crowded. You watch, I just need to rest my eyes.”

My feet found

An Appalachian oasis

Grabbed the handle

Cranked it down

Will it reach water?

I draw from it

When I’m thirsty

Today, tomorrow, next week

A month

Time suspended

The long walk back

Slick from sweatin’

Exhausted

Shoulders sag

I return

Again and again

Mossy rocks

Secrets hangin’ on

A breeze

Cut the balmy heat

Nature whispers

Honey, take a seat

Blank expressions

The town square watches

Don’t she know?

No one’s talkin’

They all know what’s sittin’

At the bottom

That well’s not hollow

This ain’t lore

Or what your mama said

They’ve all been a’waitin’

Nobody wants to tell

Someone here

They don’t know who

Is poisoning the well

The rust bleeds down corrugated metal. The conveyer belts stand frozen and littered with debris. The lungs no longer exhale steam and sulfur into the sky. A chain link fence stands as a barrier that we’ve long forgotten. Moving around it was never a choice. Quietly, the river that gave the structure its power still moves in the background. Refusing to remember. There are no men with hard hats and lunch pails punching the clock. The parking lot grows sumac now. The whistle no longer blows. What was once the lifeblood of the community is now an empty trellis to entertain the kudzu.

Every road in town still knows how to find the mill. The lunch counters still open at dawn, though no one is coming off third shift anymore. It rises over the town, standing tall like a Christmas tree that’s still up in the middle of March. Uncomfortable at first, but it fades. We still refer to it as a paper town, even though paper stopped leaving that mill years ago.

We live around it. Argue about what should be done with it. Some want apartments. Some want a warehouse. Some want a park. Some want jobs. Some want the whole thing torn down. Most just want someone else to decide. In the meantime, the kudzu has put forth its own proposal. Men still swap stories about what it was like on the inside. They lived in the belly of the beast, watching the world around live and die. They can tell you which machine took a finger, which foreman was an asshole, which winter the river froze, and which shift paid for a daughter’s braces. Their memories are more detailed than the town records.

The tourists passing through don’t realize that the town is a paperless paper town. They’ll grab a latte from Papertown Coffee and drive past the mill. Perhaps someone in the car will ask if maybe the mill is closed today. Another will ask if it’s a holiday. Someone consults a calendar. It isn’t. As they drive the road that wraps around the parameter tightly, where mounds of wood chips used to sit, they’ll notice something strange. Broken windows. Heaps of scrapped materials. Decay. Before they can name what feels off about the place, they’re discussing lunch, trailheads, and where to buy souvenirs.

The town isn’t afraid of losing the work. Those jobs already left. If the mill is torn down, what else goes with it? A monument? Local mythology? Proof of suffering? Will men still trade stories about boiler rooms, fires, and near death experiences. When the smell of sulfur doesn’t reach I-40 and demand an answer, do folks passing through know we are there? Do the wives feel disoriented with a warm body that stays in their bed past the 3am alarm? Does the Christmas parade know the route without the smoke stacks sending signals?

When the floods came, the river climbed the banks and carried refrigerators down Main Street. It filled basements with mud and left people cooking on camp stoves. In the weeks that followed, one phrase appeared on every sign, every T-shirt, every church marquee:

Papertown Strong.

A slogan, a prayer, a dare.

The language of people who learned that a mechanism could absorb their pain. A sentiment of people who always had the mill not as a source of economy, but as a source of survival.

I know something about structures that continue to dictate terms long after they’ve stopped producing what they promised. It doesn’t happen with a decision, it happens in increments. A broken window. Kudzu. An empty parking lot. The sort of changes that seem temporary until you realize they’ve become the landscape.

It began the way it always does. Something unsettling. A diagnosis, the collapse of a relationship, the shock of a decision. At first it’s innocent. “I don’t have an appetite.” And “Stress makes it difficult to eat.” A few months later what was initiated in circumstance fades into something sustained by ritual.

At first it is a temporary workaround. A bypass. A way to keep the machinery running through a difficult season. Suddenly, things ran efficiently. There were less things to worry about. Financially, things became simple. The list was robust at the start: eggs, apples, lettuce, string cheese, pistachios, chicken, beans, rice, hummus. A Mediterranean diet!

Slowly, food felt less safe. Rice left first. Then hummus. Beans were next. Apples took a back seat, but they became a treat. Eventually, nothing felt better than something. The dull gnawing of my stomach. The lightheaded feeling after a three mile hike. The emotional numbing. The heightened focus. The euphoric realization that I had this one thing to myself.

Then I remember: every road knows how to find the mill. Entire days became structured around what I would and would not eat. I stopped reaching out to friends. I declined dinner invitations. I became a creative avoider. And I knew I should stop.

The thing is, if I stopped what was I afraid would go with it? Clarity? Simplification? Or was it something deeper? What identity was I trying to white knuckle?

I chuckled as I wrote that last sentence. I wrote it in past tense. As if I have evolved and healed. As if I invited the bulldozers and demolition crews in. That’s not true.

In the morning I wake up and shower, and start to get dressed. “My underwear have stretched.”

“These pants need to be washed and maybe they’ll shrink.”

“My watch band is on the last hole.”

But I don’t confront the real thing. It’s not that I don’t know how to let go of a thing that is no longer serving me. It’s that I have no idea how to tell when something has stopped serving me.

Do not pelt me with olives, people. I’m just going to say it. The Wizard of Oz is definitely in my top five movies. Yes, I know I have said this about at least…well, more than five movies. In all honesty, this one (and Good Will Hunting) could not be dethroned.

This isn’t just childhood nostalgia, though that is part of it. As a girl I had always loved when Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow”. At the time it conjured all of the feelings of a fairytale. I was a sucker for fairytales. Adults often think of fairytales and shake their heads at children for being naive. I believe that is a lazy take. It isn’t that children are naive at all. It is that we have designed stories to train them on how to tolerate heartbreak. I ask you: When have children not been accustomed to heartache? They face the loss of a pet or a loved one. Friends move away. They experience embarrassment. Yet, we give them these fairytales and say, “Look for the happy ending. The cool breeze. The break in the clouds.” And the song, “Over the Rainbow” is the soundtrack to that thesis. At least, I thought it was.

On our first Thanksgiving after moving to South Carolina, we made the trek to see my family in the mountains of North Carolina. I had just found out I was pregnant with my fourth child. I was sick. All the time. The drive was incredibly hard. Five hours stretched into almost eight. We missed our normal family traditions: my (famous) homemade cinnamon rolls, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. We got to our hotel and settled in with cold, leftover pumpkin pie. The Wizard of Oz was on television, and my daughter was thrilled. I sat there picking at my pie, feeling like my insides were going to end up on the outside, and that’s when I heard it. Over the Rainbow. As I sat there willing my pumpkin pie to stay inside of my stomach, the lyrics landed for the first time.

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high
There's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby

I realized right then that this song wasn’t a happy ending song. The land that she was longing for was a place she had never seen. She had only heard of it once. In a lullaby. And then, perhaps, the most devastating line:

If happy little bluebirds fly

Beyond the rainbow

Why, oh why, can’t I?

That was the moment that I realized that music often smuggles in heartbreak using a beautiful voice and a melody. And this wouldn’t be the last time. Years later another devastating song would reveal itself to me. And this time it wasn’t disguised under a story and ruby red slippers. Instead, it came as Norwegian synth music, only stripped down to acoustic.

You have most likely heard the song “Take on Me” by A-ha. There is a specific version that they performed on M-Tv unplugged that sent my soul into mourning for at least a month. Instead of the catchy beat and chipper 80’s sound, they performed the song as an almost ballad. You can watch it here. In this format the lyrics reveal what the rhythm and synth texture conceal: heartache.

The line: I’m odds and ends, but that’s me

“Odds and ends” He is saying that he’s leftovers. Fragments. Scraps. He’s telling us that he’s been reduced, but that’s him. Where Over the Rainbow asks, "Does this place exist?" Take On Me asks, "Even if it does, does it last?" This is the difference between childhood: “Is it real?” And adulthood: “Will it last?”

Over the Rainbow asks “will I find this place?” Take on Me doesn’t ask. It arrives with, “I’ve done the calculations, the cost is acknowledged, the pursuit continues.”

I’ll be coming for you anyway.

He knows this is going to cost him something. The calculation has already been made.

“Take me on anyway.”

The very good news is that I did not throw up the pumpkin pie. I didn’t finish it either.

This is the difference between being a child and being grown. As children, we wonder whether the beautiful thing exists at all. We stare toward the horizon and ask whether there really is a place beyond the rainbow. Whether the promise is true. Whether the story is real. Adults ask different questions. We know the place exists. We know love exists. We know beauty exists. We know joy exists. We have touched them, however briefly. The question is no longer whether we will find them. The question is whether we can keep them.

That is the heartbreak hidden inside both songs.

Dorothy looks toward a place she has only heard described in a lullaby. The singer in Take On Me looks toward something he can already feel slipping through his fingers. One is longing for discovery. The other is longing for permanence.

Perhaps that is why both songs endure.

As children, we are taught to endure uncertainty. As adults, we learn to endure certainty.

We learn that love exists. Beauty exists. Joy exists. We find them.

And then we spend the rest of our lives learning how to live with the fact that they don’t stick. It’s the reason we find ourselves saying, “I can love you better now” after the person has already walked out the door. It’s the reason we run headfirst into something, only to find a trap door before the finish line. You can fall in love with someone that will never love you back. You can put all of your eggs in a basket that has no bottom. Beauty fades. The thing didn’t work out. You didn’t get the window seat, or the job, or the diagnosis you wanted. No one is coming. You can’t negotiate life. You have to take it on anyway. And stay goddamn composed while you’re doing it.

In Mrs. Weaver’s fourth grade class we had extra time during the day to work on things that we just enjoyed. I always liked that about Mrs. Weaver. She let us explore and create. It was a short time each day, but I looked forward to it. Each day, I would sit with my notebook and pour over lines and stage directions and dialogue. I was writing a play. The best part of the whole thing was that it was mine. Something I got to do for that tiny span of time each day. No one read it, or graded me on it. I was free to write. Only, one day Mrs. Weaver pulled me to the side. What I didn’t realize, was that she did, in fact, monitor our creations during this allotted time. I remember her smile, and her excitement as she told me that she loved what I had been doing. She wanted to have our class perform the play. I was furious. Absolutely livid.

***

Somewhere in a no name town, tucked into the Appalachian mountains, above a convenience store called Frank’s Grocery that also sells bait, there is an upper room. Well…an upper apartment, actually. A complete juxtaposition to the store downstairs. It’s clean, cute, spacious. And when I’m here, it becomes something else entirely. Painters tape holds sheets of butcher paper to the wall. Flow charts, notes, facts, unfinished art, Sanskrit studies. Why? Because under every idea, under every complete thought, there is the mess it took to produce it. I call it my “command center”. It’s private. No one sees it. It’s mine.

The command center changes locations. It has been a notebook, a whiteboard, the margins of a book, language, connections. We all have one. I call it “the holy thing”. The holy thing is whatever organizes the word when the world refuses to organize itself. It isn’t interesting that I have this sanctuary. Many people do. The interesting thing, is that most people never enter them. People might know me socially, professionally, romantically, but they don’t get near the holy thing. They stay outside the walls. Until one day, by happenstance, they notice the architecture.

Suddenly, the atmosphere changes. Maybe the reaction seems disproportionate. Something behind my eyes shifts and the temperature drops. Because they did something that sends me into orbit. They touched the holy thing. Recognition is one of the most powerful forces in human life. It’s stronger than agreement, stronger than praise, sometimes stronger than love. For one simple reason: it answers a very old question. Does anyone else see what I see. Those are the kind of encounters that violate the laws of emotional physics.

The holy thing is the place where transcendence meets impermanence. Those who are spiritual might say it’s where heaven meets earth. In either case the danger isn’t the object. The danger is proximity to the object. It’s the writer’s notebook, the artist’s sketchbook, the mechanic’s garage, the grandmother’s recipe box, the mathematician’s proofs. The holy thing is simultaneously the thing we most want seen, and the thing we most fear being mishandled.

The play I had written in Mrs. Weaver’s fourth grade class and my command center at Frank’s were sanctuaries.

It took me years to understand why I reacted so strongly.

Mrs. Weaver wasn’t criticizing my work. She wasn’t mocking it. She was doing something far more dangerous. She was paying attention. The holy thing is not valuable because it is private. It becomes private because it is valuable. Most people spend their lives hoping to be understood. Then one day someone notices the architecture beneath the conversation. The machinery beneath the finished product. The sanctuary beneath the self. And suddenly the thing we wanted most becomes terrifying.

Because recognition is not a compliment.

It is a form of proximity.

Day 1

The first day wasn’t the worst day. I thought it was, but then, you always do. The boulder fell onto my arm, and it didn’t hurt as much as you would imagine. At least physically. I panicked initially, and wasted a lot of energy trying to move the giant boulder off of me. My mind conjured Camus. He would say that I should imagine myself happy. To sit here and accept the absurdity of life. My body told a different story. Sweat covered me, my lungs burned for air, my muscles weakened. I was losing the strength battle. This was a battle of the acute. My body felt the flood of chemicals. The shivering tremors of adrenaline, the burning in my gut that communicated to my brain that I was in danger, the salty fluids that dripped from my skin into my mouth telling me I still had electrolytes in my body. Yet, my fear bled them from my pores. I took inventory and decided quickly that I was going to ration my water. I also decided that moving the boulder was not going to be possible. Instead, I needed to chip away at it. This required exertion and that required fluids. This was a balancing act of hydrating just enough to maintain my ability to perform a task. And more importantly, hope kept me moving. Surely, someone would stumble upon me and rescue me before I ran out of water. Before I needed to chip the last bit of rock away. In this moment I existed between discipline and optimism. Continue the task. Hope for the best. The night, and the cold crept over me. Whether it was by choice or by force, sleep overtook me.

Day 2

Sleep came in fits. The morning came suddenly. I awoke and thought to myself that panic wasn’t winning my freedom. Instead, my mind needed an anchor. A raven with a worn path. Sunlight that would warm my body in increments. These were real. When your movement is stripped and you are isolated, the mind can do terrible things. Routine became something I needed. These micro moments. I stopped existing in days, weeks, months, years. I existed in thirty-second intervals. In some ways, the second day became the hardest. Because it wasn’t about panic and crisis management. It became about not losing my mind.

Day 3

This is when I began losing my mind. Hope was laughing at me now. No one was coming. Hallucinations came and went. At least, I think that’s what they were. I was dehydrated and starving. My body began a protest that I couldn’t surmount. There was no longer sweat coming from my skin. Instead, it began to tighten over my bones like a stretched, brittle balloon. It occurred to me that I should carve my name and date of death into the rock. Because my bones would be left, and the brittle skin would have ruptured and wilted under the sun. How else would anyone know it was me? This also reminded me about the camera. I began my farewells.

Day 4

Last night I had a dream. I had bent down and scooped up my son. He was on a blanket on the carpet gurgling and smiling. The feeling was tangible. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t some grand, “I’m a father!” moment. It was understood. A continuity. This was a space in which I was already existing. It felt comfortable. I lifted his small body, felt the sag of his weight, the cotton of his pajamas. I smelled his skin. He was real. When I awoke I didn’t feel loss or anger. I didn’t think about fairness. It was the contrast. I knew I needed to get to him. He didn’t exist yet, but I felt this overwhelming desire to get to my son. And that’s when every piece of doubt and confusion left my body.

Day 5

As I lay there I thought about it in detail. I weighed it out. It was going to be awful. It would hurt. But there was something on the other side of it: possibility. Once I had made the decision, it was strange. It didn’t feel like it was happening to me. Not the part I was going to do. But it was clear that the things after the life I needed to go live, that was me. I could feel that. The idea floated to me intrusively. If I used leverage and broke my own arm, I could use my dull multi-tool to do the rest. It was no longer about surviving. It was about deciding that waiting on something that wasn’t going to happen wasn’t something I could stomach. Not when there was still life out there. Maybe I would have a son. Maybe not. But I wouldn’t be under this rock waiting, and turning into human jerky. And so, I knew what I had to do.

Aron Ralston lived this experience. The remarkable thing is not that he cut off his own arm. The remarkable thing is how long he didn’t.

For days he did what all of us do. He hoped. He rationed. He negotiated with reality. He waited for circumstances to become more favorable. He waited for rescue. He waited for the boulder to become something other than a boulder.

Then something shifted.

The canyon did not change. The rock did not move. His arm did not improve. What changed was his relationship to hope.

Hope had been keeping him alive. Then it began keeping him trapped.

There is a point in certain kinds of suffering where endurance stops being a virtue. The thing you are waiting on becomes the thing consuming you. You wake up every morning expecting a different outcome from the same reality. The days accumulate. The mind circles the same questions. Life narrows around the obstacle until the obstacle becomes your identity.

The boulder becomes who you are.

Maybe it is a career that never develops into the thing you were promised. Maybe it is a relationship suspended in permanent ambiguity. Maybe it is a dream that survives only because it never has to face reality. Whatever form it takes, the danger is the same. You become so accustomed to pushing against the rock that you forget there is a world beyond it.

At some point Aron Ralston realized that rescue was no longer the brave choice. The canyon had already given its answer.

The pain on one side of the equation was immediate, violent, and undeniable. The pain on the other side was slower. It arrived disguised as optimism. It called itself perseverance. It asked for one more day. Then another.

The arm was never the point.

The point was that he finally chose possibility over certainty.

Not certainty of survival.

Certainty of the canyon.

Sometimes the healthiest thing a person can do is stop building a life around an obstacle. Stop mistaking endurance for wisdom. Stop confusing hope with progress.

The boulder is not moving.

Cut the arm.

Walk out of the canyon.

Go find out what is waiting beyond the thing that has been keeping you there.

They all file into the room. A table waits for them in the front. Each seat has a microphone, a bottle of water, and a name plate. They take their seats, and take a moment to position themselves, and open their water bottles.

Chairman: Welcome everyone. We would like to keep things organized today. You’ll hear from each director in turn, and we will take questions…

Director of Health: Sorry…It’s just. We’re having chest pain. And I know this happens frequently, sometimes it’s benign. Other times we have…

Director of Body Image: I hate to interrupt, but we don’t love the cardiologist. They weigh us there. Scales are not fun.

Director of Logistics: You can get around that. Just ask them to not weigh you, or you can face away from the scale.

Director of Body Image: That makes us…sound crazy. Don’t love it.

Director of Weird Obsessions: Crazy? It’s important to know your health metrics. But, if we’re going to get into that we have to make room. We’re currently doing Sanskrit, and studying game theory to search for overlap. There are also several books in progress, one including Norse Mythology.

Director of Nutrition: I’d like to…WEIGH in. Get it? All joking aside, I know that fixation is kind of your thing, but string cheese is really climbing the charts. Almost surpassing chili roasted pistachios.

Director of Body Image: Okay, let’s make sure we’re sticking ONLY to foods on the approved list. Nothing carb heavy.

Director of Operations: Okay, I think we need a flow chart, and a chart weighing priorities.

Director of Fun: The fuck are you talking about? None of that.

Director of Libido: Can I just say that the chart weighing priorities feels very important to me. Not to sound desperate or anything.

Director of Health: You are always desperate. It’s shameful. We have an arrhythmia.

Director of Nutrition: Yes, we know. You always talk about it. But coffee is also important. If we’re talking about weighting certain priorities, coffee is top tier.

Director of Libido: I beg to differ.

Chairman: Director of Libido, you do not have the floor.

Director of Libido: I reject that.

Director of Operations: Enough. We have work to do, and coffee helps. (looks directly at the director of Libido) However, you do not.

Director of Weird Obsessions: I agree.

Director of Libido: Sanskrit is a waste of time. It’s an ancient language with no use. A fixation at best. There are more pressing matters to fixate on. It looks good in a t-shirt, or without a t-shirt, and…

Director of Weird Obsessions: Sanskrit is not a fixation. It’s a linguistic framework. It’s humankind’s first attempt at algorithm.

Chairman: To be fair, Director of Weird Obsessions, you bought four Sanskrit books in one week.

Director of Weird Obsessions: Research materials.

Director of Nutrition: Can we reduce the budget for research? String cheese has gone up ridiculously this past quarter.

Director of Health: I’d also like to point out. (Glances at Director of Libido) The heart data hasn’t been spot on. 201-251 in some cases.

Director of Libido: (narrows eyes)

Director of Operations: Okay, can we give someone else the floor? We haven’t even touched on Zermelo’s Theorem yet. I, for one…

Director of Weird Obsessions: Ummmm…I kind of thought that was my thing?

Director of Poetry: I’ve been quiet, and just really…..experiencing this room. It’s beautiful. (Makes eye contact with libido) Really beautiful. Can we just take a moment and appreciate the color of all of this?

Director of Fun: What the fuck? No. Listen, we haven’t played Mario Kart in forever.

Director of Operations: Well, to be fair, that isn’t particularly productive.

Director of Libido: (Taps microphone and looks at Director of Fun) Welcome.

Director of Health: Listen. We have been really cold lately. Really cold. We need to…

Director of Fun: Cold? You’re cold. That’s all you’ve got?

Director of Nutrition: I’m feeling attacked.

Chairman: Can we please pause? If someone is feeling attacked…

Director of Nutrition: I brought snacks.

silence

Director of Libido: (Smirking) Oh, the snack queen is attacked. Have you seen me martyring myself out here. I never get what I want.

Director of Childcare: Jude threw up.

prolonged silence

Everyone talking at once. Shouting. Arguing.

Chairman: ALRIGHT. We all get upset when someone is sick.

Director of Libido: Ugh. Now I don’t even want to be here.

Director of Fun: Well, thank fuck for that.

Director of Health: I wouldn’t argue…

Director of Operations: Okay, but did we quantify how much vomit? Was it legitimate puke?

Director of Anxiety: EVERYONE STOP TALKING!!! There are too many words, and feelings, and opinions, and…Director of Health, are we having a heart thing? Is this a heart thing? I really don’t want to go to the hospital. Jude is throwing up. What if he needs to go to the hospital?

Chairman: Okay, let’s all remain calm. I think we can all agree here that the sick child gets the priority.

silence

reluctant nodding

Director of Libido: Okay fair, but….

shouting

finger pointing

spilled water bottles

Chairman: We’d like to thank everyone for coming…(ducks to dodge thrown water bottle) that concludes our session.

The committee never reaches consensus.

It merely adjourns until morning.

By then, the Director of Health has new concerns, the Director of Weird Obsessions has purchased another book, and the Director of Libido has filed a formal complaint. It’s just a game of whack-a-mole with priorities, needs, and hierarchies.

The Chairman remains optimistic.

He shouldn’t.

I pulled into the driveway just at dusk. It was golden hour, and the house caught rays of light that had broken through the trees. I had never been to this house, but it felt familiar at the same time. Green with dark shutters, and a chainlink fence that connected to a rock wall on one side. There were a lot of people carrying plates of food. Ribs. Tearing at them with their teeth, laughing, those flimsy plates threatening to give way in the way paper plates do when they become soggy and heavy. My stomach lurched a bit.

I scanned the yard to see if I recognized anyone, but no one looked familiar. The grass was riddled with dandelions that tickled my ankles as I walked around the yard. Suddenly, the screen door flung open and slapped the side of the house. A woman ran out covering her mouth and sobbing. The door rebounded and clicked shut. I wanted to ask if she was okay, but she ran directly for the gate and left. No one seemed to notice. A couple of guys were playing horseshoes. I posted up toward the edge of the yard near the fence to watch. A shriek cut through the air. This time everyone turned toward the house as a couple of young girls ran out.

I walked toward the front porch, and one of the men playing horsehoes called out, “Don’t go in there. There is something in there you really don’t want to see.”

I nodded, and backed up to circle the yard looking for someone familiar again. I realized that I was getting closer and closer to the front porch. It felt like something was drawing me into that house. I scanned the yard and it didn’t seem that anyone was paying me any mind. I gingerly jogged up the steps, and quietly opened the screen door. I was careful to close it softly behind me. Finally I turned to look around.

It was ordinary as far as rooms go. It was what most people would refer to as “the living room”. The furniture was worn, and soft. There was a coffee table with a remote and some coasters. A flatscreen television hung on the way. There weren’t any lights on, but there was enough light being cast by the setting sun to give the room a dim orange glow. That’s when I spotted it. A body hanging from a noose. I stepped closer and a voice spoke from the corner, “Don’t get too close.” He gestured toward the body.

I looked again, and noticed that this dead person was swollen. Skin mottled and pulled tight, looking as if it might burst open. It was doing the thing dead bodies do when they’re left hanging up for a long period of time. I looked back toward the corner the man in the corner. He looked impassive.

I stared at him quizzically. “Why aren’t you running out like everyone else?”

He stared at me intently. “Because that,” he gestured toward the body, “belongs to me.”

We locked eyes, neither of us acknowledging the decaying interloper. Finally, he shifted in his chair, as if he were squaring himself up to land a punch. He rested his chin on his hand and said, “Why aren’t you running out like the rest?”

I sit on the couch, and settle back getting comfortable. He raises a cup of coffee and takes a drink. “Where did you get coffee?” I ask.

He takes another drink. “You don’t need coffee. You’ll have trouble sleeping.”

I sigh. We both look up at the corpse again.

“Why not take him down?”

He sits his coffee down on a side table and clicks his tongue. “He keeps me company.” Then, he cocks his head and regards me again. “You seem comfortable here.”

“Yeah.” I agree. “Feels less lonely here.”

We both look up at him again.

“He’s magnificent, isn’t he.” He asks.

I nod. Outside, I could hear laughter. Someone had started a game of horseshoes. A truck door slammed.

The man picked up his coffee. I settled deeper into the couch.

The corpse swayed slightly in the evening light.

Neither of us looked away.

I only say it after midnight

When no one can hear

And then I cry

Hot tears that fall

salty into my mouth.

I roll over and —

They run into my ears

My soul burns

With the truth

I’m a shirt —

Missing a button

A shoe —

With a broken lace

A girl at night

With a wet face

A girl who

Uses knowledge —

as opioids

Abuses asceticism

Relentlessly searching

For a concept or word

To temper criticism

Prosperity churns
black liquor
a kill switch for the locals

Byproducts of
a job worth doin’

Swing shifts
shutdowns
keepin’ our noses clean

Poverty churns
white liquor
a kill switch for the pain

Bootleg bloodlines
gunsmoke inheritances

Men died stubborn
like Popcorn Sutton
by that wood box

Rich folk
poor folk
all of it the same

We say they ain’t takin’ us alive

But here in these mountains
we already died

It won’t be loud.

Not the final rocket launch or the last poem recited into a dying microphone. Not even the grand collective gasp as the lights go out.

It will be small.

A hand reaching for another hand in the dark. A person choosing to share their last sip of water. Someone singing off-key to a child who will never grow old enough to remember the song. A stranger saying “I see you” to another stranger when seeing no longer serves any purpose.

The last meaningful act of humanity will not be about survival. It will be about refusal.

Refusal to let fear or exhaustion or the certainty of ending turn us cruel. Refusal to stop being tender when tenderness has become pointless. Refusal to let the evidence of decay, the soft bellies, the fading desire, the long silences after intense nights, define what we were at our best.

We will not go gentle. We will go human.

One last time, someone will look at someone else and choose to stay present instead of turning away. One last time, someone will forgive. One last time, someone will create something beautiful simply because creating is what we do.

And then the silence.

But in that final gesture, however small and however unseen, we will have said:

We were here. We loved anyway. We were more than the evidence of our ending.

That will be enough.

Even if oblivion swallows everything immediately afterward.

Meaning isn’t something that needs to echo forever or be witnessed by future generations. It doesn’t require permanence. It exists in the moment it happens, in the person who chose to perform it, in the person who received it, in the brief pocket of time where love or kindness or beauty or defiance occurred.

The act matters because it happened. Because a conscious being facing the end still chose to be human. The choice to hold a hand, to forgive, to create, to say “I see you” when no one will ever see again, is the highest expression of what we are. The fact that the universe immediately forgets doesn’t erase the reality of the gesture.

Oblivion doesn’t retroactively cancel value. It just ends the story. The chapter that existed before the final page was still real. The love, the art, the tenderness, the last meaningful act, they were true while they lasted.

7am

I sip my coffee staring out into the pasture and giggle. Two calves have their heads pressed against one another.

“What are they doing?”

“Playing. Being kids.”

That feels right, I think.

“I didn’t realize they had so much personality.”

He smiles.

“He’s curious about you. He’s looking at you, but if you were to walk out there he would run.”

Sounds familiar.

7pm, the previous evening

Dusk is threatening, and the air feels like the kind of cool you get in Appalachia only in late spring. The dampness feels like it could stretch into the whole season. Like a hug you don’t want to be the first to break.

We sit looking over the pasture. Red wine for me, then a sip of what he’s having. It’s sweet. We talk about mortality, and I argue with him. Not because he’s wrong, but because I can’t help myself.

And now his mouth is on mine in that way it always is. When there’s nothing more to say, but much more to feel. I taste the liquor on his lips, and it makes me want more.

Our mouths are a dance. I know the taste of his breath. His hands in my hair. Until there is nothing more to do than walk that creaky floor to the bed.

When I turn, he’s already there, circling my waist, mouth finding mine. I give in every time. His hunger feeds mine and we fall back in. Hands on mine above my head. The part he does best. Holding me there until I stop thinking.

And I know I won’t ask anything of him. I take only what he wants to give. I let myself consume every bit of what he offers until we’re slack and sweaty.

Then he says to come outside.

I’m only wearing high heels, but it seems right.

We sit under the stars. Large drops of water occasionally fall onto us from the rain that happened while we were unaware. It gathered on the leaves and now falls fat and sporadic. And welcome.

I say I see a firefly. He says it’s too early. Not warm enough. But I see it again. And again.

Then he sees one too, and we laugh.

We go inside and climb into bed. I slip off my heels and gently drop them to the floor. His hand finds mine. He lifts my head onto his chest. My body relaxes like a child.

But we are never finished.

The contact pulls us right back in. Until we wear ourselves quiet again and he pulls me back onto him, rubbing my hair until I sleep.

6:45am

I wake the next morning, dress, and brush my teeth. I walk into the kitchen and he hands me coffee before walking outside. I fasten my watch and follow, closing the door behind me.

“You’re going to let bugs in,” I say.

“They only come in at night,” he argues.

I smile.

We sit down. The calves size one another up, then move closer, pressing their heads together.

I take a sip of coffee and giggle.

Midnight. Bodies sweating and moving together in rhythm. A guy I knee in high school - or wait - elementary school. We danced like we hadn’t known each other. It was summer and my skin was already as tan as it gets. Even more so under black lights. I’m not sure what time I returned to my apartment, but I woke up in a cold sweat.

My eyes opened to the bright mid-morning light. And I felt pain…everywhere. This general feeling of ick. I sat up in the bed and felt sweat run down the back of my neck. I tried to stagger to my feet but couldn’t stand straight, so I braced myself against the wall. Slowly, I walked along the wall to the bathroom.

Maybe I just need to pee.

For some reason, this seemed logical. It didn’t help. The pain, the sweating, and my heart slamming into my rib cage was too much. I reached to call my parents and my hand froze.

They’re in Mexico.

I’m not one to be a fainting doily so I made my way to the kitchen and grabbed my keys. I just needed to get myself to the hospital. I put on shorts over my pajama shorts and they wouldn’t fasten. No matter. My mind was spinning and the sweating wouldn’t stop. I arrived at my car and collapsed into the driver seat. I pushed the sweat up into my hair and turned the keys in the ignition. 85 by Youngbloodz blares from the speakers and I turn the volume down. Slowly, I shift into reverse. Then, I make my way to the edge of the parking lot. I pullback into a spot. My hand grabbed my phone and made the call. 911.

Meanwhile in Mexico my parents were on an adventure. My dad, who is Cherokee, was treating my mother to a resort in Cancun. The Mexican population assumed my dad was also Hispanic, only to say “Americano? Nooooooo!” And one day, he decided that he and my mother needed to explore beyond the resort. Unfortunately, they ended up in the Mexican wilderness. After an hour or more of wandering they finally stumbled into a parking lot.

“Well…fuck me. We’re at Wal-mart.” My dad exclaimed.

That family lore will live in history. At that moment, I was being poked and prodded and tested. The nurses asked me if I wanted to call my parents. I explained that my folks were in Mexico and that I would need to call my Aunt Teri.

I was released several hours later. My aunt picked me up, took one look at me, and didn’t ask too many questions. She just drove me home, helped me inside, and told me to rest. I crawled into bed and stayed there, the sheets still carrying the faint smell of sweat and fear.

My parents got home two days later, glowing from the Mexican sun, arms full of souvenirs. My mom handed me a black sarong with embroidered flowers. My dad gave me a silver ring with a little turquoise stone.

“For my girl,” he said, smiling like the trip had been perfect.

I slipped the ring on my finger and thanked them. I didn’t tell them about the 911 call or about the way I’d braced myself against the wall just to make it to the bathroom. I didn’t tell them I’d driven 100 yards to the hospital before pulling over because the pain was too much. I didn’t tell them I’d been alone with it.

They’d been lost in the jungle and found their way to a Walmart. I’d been lost in my own body and found my way to the ER. We all came home with stories we didn’t quite tell each other.

I wore the sarong to the pool that weekend. The ring stayed on my finger. Sometimes the best souvenirs are the ones that cover up what really happened while you were gone.