I got in the water. I sat in the waiting room. I drove up and down the FDR and memorized the depth of every pothole.

When the coast was clear, I took the first flight west out of JFK and landed in Bozeman in time to sit on a swiveled stool & eat eggs for breakfast. I got asked out by three men within 3 hours of touchdown in the state of Montana. I gave all of them my number, and then left my phone in the car and jumped in the river.

In the daylight, I drove up Flathead Lake, and this time I wasn’t afraid. No wide-eyed elk or broken boy to loosen my grip on the line between a false sense of safety and the open road.

In Whitefish, I dunked in a glacier runoff with a sausage-making, story-weaver from Texas named Bill. It was his 58th birthday & I watched every year of warmth leak from his eyeballs as the Montana sun crawled across the sky & the horses moved like a school of rainbow fish in front of our bare feet.

I fell half in love with a blue-eyed man with the Rockies on his shoulders & a Seger tattoo on his left ribcage under a tree in the rain while Marty Robbin’s played on a waterproof speaker & rosé slid down the back of my throat. I ran my thumb over the etched ink and then threw my head back laughing in his truck under a black & faceless sky. We woke up with our arms and legs tangled together like a bowline while somewhere nearby on an open stage, Chris Stapleton sound-checked to an empty, scooped-out lawn fit for the impending weight of 20 thousand pairs of dancing feet.

I said goodbye to that blue-eyed man even though I didn’t want to.

I drove south with a best friend and his pounding head resting against the car window as the Blackfoot River valley opened up in front of my eye line. We drove all day & then parted ways in an airport parking lot under a firebird sky. I always miss him when he leaves.

I booked a flight. A tornado ripped through New York City right on time to keep me in the great American west.

I stayed.

I rode a bicycle around Livingston at sunset and waved to every passerby.

I jumped in the river. I bought a tiny hammer to wear around my neck.

I wore red every day in that town.

On my own, I drove into the valley and stripped in a field of wild lupine on their final breath. I kept my boots on. I laughed and screamed and talked to whoever was listening in the belly of the Yellowstone. I thanked all of them for holding me.

I did all of this while she cooked dinner in the doorway, arranged the tomatoes on the windowsill, stirred the oats in the morning.

She only hugged me heart-to-heart.

Days passed & before I knew it, I was being pulled east again.

On my last night in Montana, I lost my legs and my periphery in a bar called the Fainting Goat with a lionhearted woman I was lucky enough to keep. The news came in sideways and through my gut while the bartender poured tequila & the three stranger women held me up in front of the sink, placing their hands on my body & their words in my chest. Magic flooded from their fingertips as the last tears left in that reservoir named [redacted] landed on a carpeted floor in a powder pink bathroom I bet I’ll see again.

The lionheart let me drink. I danced with a fly fishing guide by day and a novelist by heart. He spun me around in flip-flops and pressed the muscles in his chest against my shaking breastbone. He was strong. I can’t remember the song.

Back on Geyser where the house is green, and the walls feel like home, I walked across the lawn. The light was on, but I didn’t go in. Instead, I dropped flat on my back and let the stars hold me, listening to Chopin float through the open window and holding my breath. I found her in her underwear in the dark, Opus 28 no. 4 in E minor on the keyboard stand & the final blow leaving my chest.

That night, I dreamed in a four-poster twin bed under a quilt in 95 degrees that I was being buried by an avalanche somewhere frozen and blue. I woke up naked, blotched the swell from my eyes, and tied the shades back. Out the window, the magpies screamed at a black-capped chickadee. She flicked her head side to side and held still on the branch, their taunting like a force so ever-present, it no longer occurred to her to flinch.

I wrapped my fingers around the tiny hammer hanging from my neck.

I was free.

Through the doorway, she walked through the morning light & put the kettle on.

Hey B, nice bike.

But they don’t know I’ve got time to make up & I’m already gone.

It took four years for the sound of blood-stained panic in Spanish on a dirt road in the jungle to leave my body. Gravel lodged under soft, brown skin as my eyes rolled back and my nervous system waved adieu. The gentle hands of a man named Angel cradling my head as my warm body was lifted away from a mangled vespa, into a civilian car and then set down again on a plastic chair in a sterile room somewhere unperturbed & silent. Flies buzzing around my periphery as down the dark & curious hall, a Mexican soap opera played on a dated TV while blood pooled on speckled tile.

Fear sinks into the quiet places in the body and makes a home there.

It’s July & I’m riding my bike, but my daddy’s still sick, and I’ve forgotten what it feels like to not be afraid.

The last twelve months have torn me open in places only cancer can reach. I thought I found every crack in the frame when I watched his skin turn ashen and wiped the tears rolling down his face after he burned the prime rib on Christmas. Or when I wrapped a blanket around his shivering & disappearing frame on the FDR at 7 am in February, body limp and broken everywhere but in the unrelenting power of his hands, reaching for me across the center console as the sun broke over the East River and the harsh winter light hit our sullen faces.

But here’s the thing about cancer: it comes back.

Here’s the thing about heartbreak: it’s persistent.

This time, when Doctor Morris told us it didn’t work, I simply walked out of Pilates and then let out a sound unnatural over the BQE at dusk. Dew collecting in the curls framing my face as the sky darkened and the cars on the overpass failed to notice.

A woman undone. A woman standing on the overpass screaming.

That’s just flesh, & its careful way of rejecting what is poison. 

The light came back, and I am recognized by the dog again.

But 365 days is a long time to live with a vacancy. 

The yellowing of the sign illuminated by a row of half-lit incandescent light bulbs, flickering & towering over the pavement of a back road I have never seen & never driven. Its steel post crooked & punching through a once-carefully considered flower bed. Tubers with root-rot buried in the ground where a woman’s hand once dug freely. Her knees pressed to earth. A small cluster of forget-me-nots nestled beside slippery, degenerate wood.

Nothing to bother her and no one to note the curl of hair catching the wind & brushing the haunted part of the crook in her neck.

Nothing to kneel for and no one to place a rough palm covered in metal dust on the soft of her thigh where the hem of thin cotton rides.

She lifts her head. She looks around to see nothing & no one.

The light came back, and I am recognized by the dog again.

But 365 days is a long time to live with a vacancy.

Go see your friends & try to have a nice night.

The green buds on the lilac bush next to Moey’s grave were opening as I watched the blue jays barking at the chickadees in the crabapple. Another week and the bound-up purple cones would be visible from the bay window. I stared down at my unsteady hands and thought about the lilacs. The slight tremor humming through my slender fingers, an ache I had somehow grown used to.

I couldn’t remember the last thing I ate or the last time I felt the urge to pick up a knife and chop something. My arms were thinning with every rising sun as my hair grew longer and my limbs began to stretch. Back in New York City on a quiet street after midnight under the warm glow of a string of Christmas lights, Phil started calling me Gumby.

I was disappearing. The cherry blossoms were blooming.

I didn’t mind.

Okay, mama.

I ran the brush through soft waves and pulled a black pointelle tank top over my head. I grabbed a pair of orange tabs I found at a thrift market in Austin a month earlier and slid the old, worn-in denim over my hip bones.

Something about the way the threadbare cotton hugged my waist made me think of him. I braced myself for another visceral flashback.

Rough hands under dead stock, structured denim fraying at the cuffs reached out & grabbed at my waist.

My chest squeezed. Tiny pains shot through my sternum and climbed my throat. By the time I looked up & caught my own gaze in the bathroom mirror, the tears were already running down my clavicle.

Going out was a bad idea, and I knew it.

For four months, I had been living like this. Catatonic, unless I was breathless from the searing, white pain of a grief too big to swallow. Catatonic, unless it was time to sleep, in which case every last numbed ache came back to haunt me, leaving me shipwrecked & wide-eyed ‘til morning. A thin prisoner in a white nightgown tied to the hull of my own dreams.

I pulled on my boots and walked out onto the porch. The air was thin & the peepers were singing in Emerald Creek. I thought about turning around and going back to bed, but I was afraid of what my mother would say. I had been toeing the line between concern and amber-alert alarm for months, and I knew everyone was watching, waiting for the moment I tipped the scale.

With each step I made toward the car door, I felt the contradiction between my body, lurching forward & northwest toward the place his boots were sitting on a brick floor a few miles away, and my heart, frozen in the inexplicable & paralyzing fear he had put there.

A gravitational pull so strong, I’d say you’d have to be mad to drive in any other direction but toward it.

A fear so rapt, I’d say you’d have to be mad to go anywhere near the blank eyes that wielded it.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was sitting with my bare elbows resting on a tablecloth, staring back at two of my oldest friends as the waiter brought two glasses of white wine and a pitcher of water. I ordered a pork chop and tried to explain myself.

He’s here? Like, right over there? Mike said, pointing in the direction of Cave Mountain, the ski resort I could traverse with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back.

This was the worst part of the explaining.

Yes, the love of my life was sitting in his grandfather’s house a half mile away. The house my family sold to his, the beginning of a long and tangled lineage that had us intertwined from the Catskills to Brooklyn and back again. From our mirrored dayglow snowsuits to our tiny feet hiding under side-by-side tables in the dining room of our parents’ favorite restaurant, the thread that stitched us together was chosen long before the year we were born.

And ultimately, this was the reason I stayed away. I hadn’t been home since the last day of January. The day I stared into his eyes, begging on my knees on the floor of a 150-year-old barn for my best friend to come back. Searching his face and his eyes for the love I knew he possessed, the love I knew to be true, like it was the only thing I was put on this earth to do. Like without it, my heart might go stone cold like the concrete under my knees that we watched them pour and rake and level just months before.

The lilacs brought me home. I had never missed the May Day bloom in all of my 33 years on this earth. I knew I would be gutted, but I didn’t have a choice. The lilacs brought me back, & closer to him.

So close, I could see the lights go on and off on the back deck if I squinted and caught a faint glimpse of the cedar shakes between the pines and the clearing off C-lift. So close I could scream his name loud enough with the fury of every broken piece inside of my body, and perhaps, he could hear me.

The next questions I could barely feel as I answered them.

No, he hasn’t called, written, responded. Yes, he knows I am here.

I willed the tears in the corners of my eyes to suck back into my head. Surely, that could be done. Surely, I could be spared from just one public meltdown. I excused myself and walked toward the bathroom, my arms hanging by my side. Before I got to the end of the bar, I found his father in my path, staring back at me. The creases in the corners of his eyes softened as he drank in the thin slip of a woman I had become in the two months since he had held my body up in a parking lot with ice underfoot. A paper cup of hot tea too heavy to hold & the scent of the fireplace lingering on his collar.

In his hand, a brown bag filled with two take-out containers. I stared at the bag.

Picking up. He’s not coming out these days.

The tears rushed back out of my sockets and ran down my face. Something in my stomach lurched. Bile like kerosene lit up the back of my throat.

Don’t do that. It’s okay, Bridgette. Come here.

He grabbed me before my legs did that thing where they decided to stop carrying the rest of me. One guttural sob erupted out of my lungs, followed by a breath released for so long I thought I might pass out before I decided to breathe in again. I thought about letting gravity take control. I thought about how to make myself smaller, a red paper swan folded up into myself. Folded up into that bag and carried to wherever he was, wherever he could open me up again.

Ten minutes later & at the table, Mike’s eyes rolled around.

Jesus Christ. Can’t go anywhere. I’m sorry, B.

I picked up my fork and knife and cut into the pink rind of a medium-rare pork chop.

What a terrible mistake.

Humming under the layer of skin called squamous.

Pulsing through the veins of a man with forearms built for destruction. Beckoning a woman like a siren. Beckoning a woman like me, easily attracted to danger.

But I won’t fall for it again. And I’m sorry to admit, I move faster when I’m starving.

It’s going to take a man with a wingspan to lift me off the ground again. A man who can see his reflection in a puddle. Or a flooded-out creek bed in the middle of the night without moonlight.

I bet you think you’re that man for somebody. With your dirty fingernails and your back-to-the-earth blood oath.

While you do that, I’ll move between worlds. Water the plants, then walk a block in the wrong direction so I don’t have to talk to the ghost of your grandfather again. Explain to him why I couldn’t push a ring over your knuckle. Carry on the bloodline.

While I do that, you’re somewhere on your knees. Gripping horse mane and praying to O’ Silent Night.

But there’s nothing holy about what you did.

Just a father & a woman & a box of rusted screws. The way they roll across a cement slab after everything’s gone quiet. Sound proofing stuck to the ceiling where we did everything we could.

Swallowing my swan song like a final hungry squall.

My slender hand reached out. For him, a peace offering.

The Bayonne bridge tracked the glow as another day rolled back behind our eyelids; another chronology of light to be swallowed & forgotten. As I walked the pier, I dragged my feet through the doldrums of the season I call the Grayscape or the In-Between. I shoved my hands into my pockets.

Back home, we call this mud season. But there’s no mud here. Just filth & bottle caps leftover from January’s deep freeze.

Last year, around now, I was sitting in a towel on the couch of a small craftsman house painted yellow. Hair wet & droplets sliding down my breast bone. The air conditioning was blasting, and goosebumps rolled up from my shins to the tops of my thighs. I wasn’t supposed to be on my own, but she sat somewhere else, drunk on $18 martini’s in a Terminal I left 16 hours earlier in the quiet hum before the rush of dawn.

And so, I was in Texas alone.

Later on that evening, I’d watch the full worm moon rise overhead from a splintered bench in the front yard of the White Horse on Comal Street. Cigarette smoke coiled like a charmed snake as his eyes danced & the agave slid down my throat like honey. I could have been anywhere. I could have been nowhere. My heart, empty like a 30-gallon drum; waiting for anyone and anything to fill it up or kick it over or send it rolling into whatever was coming next.

If I only knew.

The honky tonk emptied as girls in boots and guys in pressed denim spilled out into the street and crowded the yard. Head’s tilted & eyes fluttering toward the black Texas sky.

Here it comes someone shouted.

A blood moon hung overhead. A total lunar eclipse.

The men went quiet & the women got louder as the great shadow sent a gray, bloodied film over the purple crown.

I watched the frenzy like a wall-flower or a phantom, shoulder blades pressed against peeling paint, back sliding along paneled wood until I was secure & inside. Until I was alone in the honky tonk down a street I would never recognize.

Neons flickering, an abandoned stage & me. Safe from the shadows.

They didn’t know to take cover.

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This place always smells the same.

The bottoms of my small feet pressed into green, worn carpet. Pale-pink ballet tights damp from the run-off of another northeast winter’s snow.

While there, looking for something left behind, I found you.

The skis that lined the room towered around us like a fence. You, untethered and hiding under a bench. I leaned down to find your eyes full of mischief and abandoned obedience.

Hello?

Someone at the bottom of the stairs was yelling. She called out your name. Dark eyes flickered, but your body didn’t flinch. Dark eyes flickered, but you held my gaze.

I’ll keep your secret.

Twenty-five years later, I’d watch you pull that same trick, except it’s me calling your name, and I know exactly where you are.

Remember how much it used to snow? They always ask.

Yes, we do.

We were there. Together and apart. Circling the same ten-mile radius. Our bodies bumping into each other, preparing our hearts for the day I’d walk into your life & change everything.

You were never afraid to run from them, but I’m coming to realize you were always afraid one day I’d crack you wide open, and then, you’d have to run from me, too.

Prove me wrong.

It’s winter in New York, and I’ve spent too many months here without leaving.

The algorithm sends me wrinkle cream, wedding dresses, Jane Birkin subtitled in black & white, compression socks, the attachment style called avoidant & how it blows holes in a woman’s body, as if I needed to revisit, as if I can’t feel the quake moving through my rib cage & under my clavicle. Joseph Pilates in small white underwear, aging snowboarders, Botox, one thousand poems that I sift through & save, scenes from Fantasia, Townes Van Zandt shirtless sitting proud on a pinto, white cotton dresses, the correct way to imprint spine, 1990s Julia Roberts & for some reason that same Burt Reynolds-Sally Fields scene where she climbs into his lap in Smokey & the Bandit over and over and over again. I wish that one would go away.

All the while, there’s a Cooper’s Hawk with golden eyes turning my yard into a smattering of detached tail feathers & delicate bird bones. Ruby splatter on ice & a polka dot breast bent into an unnatural rest.

The day she came, my birds went still, so I held my breath with them.

The scent that fear churns as heart flesh pounds behind wiry cage.

Where I come from, the red tails hunt vermin. Swooping low like a barn swallow or a P-47 Thunderbolt, nose-first into the golden rod, nose-first into the pine. Where I come from, the beast of prey emerges silently from golden sway, beak pressed with wiggling white-foot or blinded star-nose.

Where I come from, the predator rarely kills their own.

After fourteen days, the ice in the harbor is starting to loosen. Piles of garbage encrusted in snow drifts & the aging hunchbacked sanitation man cursing quietly under his breath. This morning, I woke to a flurry of feathers floating past the kitchen window. Coffee in ceramic and razor-sharp talons perched upon my northern flicker. Picking her golden tail feathers one by one & flinging them over her right wing. Feasting on her tender neck flesh like a queen before a war march. Pounding dreadfully on her broken breast.

Forgive me.

I couldn’t save her.

There’s a fake Bonsai tree in the center of the lobby of the NY Proton center on 126th street, and despite their sympathetic eyes and their 7am blessings, I feel like I am on a white cyc about to shoot a scene for a film I never wanted to be a part of.

Blinding light reflects off the tile.

This flooring reminds me of something, Dad.

“Dave’s.”

We say it at the same time.

It’s the first smile I’ve seen in days.

In 2020, I got laid off and spent 6 months pulling boots on at 7am and jumping in the passenger seat of the truck. Gas station coffee in a paper cup & three trips to the lumber yard before noon.

Dad taught me how to load the nail gun. Fire away, Frank. How to rig the worm with a shim so the safety wouldn’t slow us down. No time for that. Which blade we needed to set in order for the chop saw to cut through cement siding. That stuff is nasty, Bridgey. Don’t breathe it in.

He was worried about my lungs, my throat, the particles of poison floating through my airways as I stood on the ladder holding sheetrock overhead or pressed down on the handle to make the saw blade run. He was never worried about himself. The truth is, I wasn’t either.

Iron horse. Indestructible. Unstoppable. Unbreakable.

Your dad is a bull. Your dad is a fighter over and over and over again.

The pandemic brought an influx of flush millennials and dreaming boomers running to my three-tree hometown for shelter and serenity. The one blinking yellow at the four corners became a traffic jam & all I heard on the line to get a sandwich at noon was chatter about the real estate cash-wars & how much the two-bedroom on Mill street went for. If they didn’t own, they bought & if they owned, they moved in full time. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Everyone was either crawling the walls or fighting.

Not me. I was in the passenger seat of the truck, connecting my phone to dad’s bluetooth speaker so I could play Smokey Robinson and watch his eyes light up.

We need a new roof, the faucet is leaking, the back deck is rotting.

When I wasn’t on the job or in the truck, I was fielding calls & writing bills. In my 30 years observing life as a carpenter’s daughter, I had never heard my dad’s phone ring so much.

One of our bigger projects that year was to GC the finishing work on a multi-million dollar 3-unit condo at the foot of our home ski resort. My dad’s long-time friend, Dave, hired Big Hollow Builders once the framing crew from downstate threw up the sticks.

Every day that spring, we watched the thaw run off the mountain and dropped cardboard on the white flooring as we tracked the caked layers of an early Catskill’s mud season in and out of that beast of a building.

We hung 80 lb doors, made thousands of cuts of white trim, watched the tilers mill about on their knees, and yelled at the plumbers like clockwork every morning for showing up late.

Those six months Dad & I were inseparable. I watched his every move and could predict what tool he was going to ask for before he called it out. I learned his rhythm the way only a daughter could.

Now that I am considering it, maybe that part wasn’t so new. I’ve been hyper-attuned to my father since birth.

Every day that passed, I used more tools. Lifted a little bit heavier. Dad showed me the small plastic case where he kept the drill bits. Taught me to dig for the T6 with the purple ring around the casing. We laughed all day in our boots, singing along to Frank Sinatra or Jim Morrison as the light lasted a little bit longer on the night sky & the crocuses started to push through the dirt.

When May came around, Dad got lighter in his step as always. His eyes started to dart around as the truck tires tracked on wet pavement, watching the property lines & the bushes that line the ditches. His eyes started to search the same way mine do every May, patiently waiting for the first sign of purple peaking through the green.

One afternoon on the job, we were in the middle of something that just wasn’t working. Frustrated, Dad pulled the leather around his waist loose & dropped his belt on the floor, hammer crashing and screws spilling out of the bags & rolling along the floor.

Let’s call it, Bridgey. I know where the early one’s are out.

We jumped in the truck and peeled out of that place on two wheels.

A pair of matching heart beats as dad passed me the snips.

Lord, I’m going uptown, to the Harlem River to drown. Dirty water’s gonna cover me over & I’m not gonna make a sound.

I’m back in the Proton Center. Radiation is longer today than what we are used to. I sit in the waiting room, watching the sunrise over the Harlem River. I can’t stop humming Justin Townes Earl because it’s tragic and it’s beautiful and it’s right in front of me. My brain reaches for something else so I can stop thinking about him drowning, which he ultimately did, although in his own bloodstream and grief & nowhere near the Harlem River.

I take a breath.

Suddenly, I am sitting in a cold chair, hands clasped in front of me on top of a school desk. My pencil is rolling along the laminate, flirting with the idea of plunging over the edge. Standing in front of me is Mrs. Singleton; my seventh-grade English teacher. She is reading a poem she wrote about her father’s hands. Her father is gone. The pleats in her skirt are pressed, and her turtle neck is neatly climbing her swan-like neck. Her shoulders are concave. Her tears are streaming down her face.

She is brave.

Her grief twirls through the air and reaches into my chest until my periphery starts to fade out, until I feel just like her, trembling & in unison.1

I am crying. Nobody seems to notice.

My father stacks quarters on the mechanical horse outside his shop so the kids can play when he isn’t there. He drove 5 hours into the bleak backroads of Pennsylvania last February to buy that horse. I think it was the best day of his winter.

When you cut through the excitable volume and the ferocity of a well-made hatchet, he comes back all sugar water; the bed of a pickup overflowing with purple flowers.

Tonight I’m praying on pomegranate seeds and two-dollar bills. The sound of sisters and the scars that satellite my naval.

We always coiled money around the chandelier, wrapped a pinky around bone ‘til it splintered. A case of Korbel on cement in the basement & black ice under foot or tire as the potassium nitrate exploded over his parent’s house. Glitter & cardboard guts on a black winter sky.

But tonight, no soft-furred dog or wild boy to waken. Just a fire burning & an empty parking spot.

The shape of some things missing is too hard to mention.

The new year brings silver goals and dreams that are stainless. But I’ve always had a hard time dreaming. Call it an affliction of autumn or my obsession with recall. Call it whatever you want. As far as I’m concerned, the past has always been brighter & I’ll die on that hill. I danced my body through the threshold of this cursed year in the arms of a life I wanted to keep. Dreams laced like pearls around my neck & falling from my pockets every time he spun me around. Every time he promised me light. I let those dreams really run, like I had gas in the tank & nothing to lose. Like I had years to burn & a heart made of graphene.

I got it all wrong. I backed the wrong horse. And now the year just tastes like metal dust & hemoglobin. Medical glue & diesel.

So tonight, I’m praying on pomegranate seeds and two-dollar bills. The new sounds I heard come out of the back of my throat. The layer of skin I grew to keep myself warm.

I’m praying on my father’s hand that is holy. On my acquired skill to define grief; the way it quietly moves in through an open window one day & floats alongside a body like a static ghost. The way we learned to get along.

I’ll drink to that.

Watch the sky melt like a creamsicle or turn shades of violet like the bruise under denim on the inside of my thigh.

Let the wind throw our hurt around. Let the wind blow our bodies close.

Across the street, the air smells like clove and charred oak, and I try not to catch your eye through the neon hue. But it’s warm inside & gravity is greater than logic & every day that we are here together we are losing light & gaining heat.

Your hands in my hair. Your hands in your pockets.

Willy sits with his spine compressed to the right & I watch as his neck cranes & his eyes talk while his mouth moves & my throat tightens.

I want a love that feels like light rising up and rolling behind the eyes.

Everyone stops talking.

*thank you, Willy- for saying something pretty enough to write down.

Look at you, sis, a civilized head of hair.

I laughed as we crossed Canal Street, walking past ceramic dishes and bundles of bok choy piled high on the Bowery. The soft faces of multigenerational gatherers staring back at me behind imbalanced vegetable scales and plastic bags blowing in a high Friday breeze.

The truth is, I have never been civilized. My hair; always an extension of that expression. There are women who grow up brushing their hair in front of a mirror, counting the strokes as the bristles go from scalp to length, and then there are women who grow up tangled and braided, attracted to the colors of the earth.

A half hour prior, I watched as my little sister rolled two fortune cookies in between her thumb and her index finger, waiting for the moment one of them called to her. She closed her eyes. This one! she exclaimed, passing the packaged prize across the table of the Cantonese restaurant. I think this is the right one for you. I laughed as my practical & perfect little sister showed just an ounce of her witch. We opened them at the same time. As she cracked the cookie, her jaw dropped, the sugared compartment completely empty. No way, an empty fortune?

I slithered the thin parchment out of my own.

Good things come to those with patience.

She exploded with joy, another cosmic triumph.

I bowed my head and started to cry.

Biblical rains fell on Mitchell Hollow Road as Antonia held her hands over my body.

I feel a cold fire inside of you.

Hours later, the Batavia Kill swelled while the surgeon sharpened her knife & blew air into my belly. Chartreuse leaves wet on the stick & the white lilacs bloomed first. Dad says he can’t seem to figure out why. Something about a north wind.

We picked ramps the day before I got sick and mom panicked to the nurses in the ER that perhaps she picked poison. A fever dream and an IV drip while the poppies we planted last May started to push through the dirt. In dreams, I ripped the seedlings from the earth, replacing them with poisonous bulbs.

They said when the anesthesia was wearing off, I called out your name.

Remember that day last spring you tilled the earth? Sweat beading down your spine & blooming through a gray t-shirt as your body fought to readjust to humidity. I’ll never get used to this. You’d say, as a tiny pain tinned inside of me somewhere low and nervous.

And then, you brought me upstairs and showed me you didn’t mean it.

How much love can leak out of a woman before she becomes weightless? Sinewy but emptied, hands somehow still clutching at branches, searching for red buds but coming back bloodied from brambles and barbs. And how much can she hold? They said the organ I was carrying was dead, gangrenous. Leaking infectious fluids into the abdomen. They taught me a new word as I clenched the polyester of a day 3 hospital gown. Peritonitis. Who knows how long I had a view of the river from the sixth floor window. Lucid while the fog burned off and the night nurse wrapped a cuff around a wiry bicep. Tape beginning to curl but still stuck to soft skin where the purple bruises blossomed.

When the rain finally cleared dad pointed the peaks out in the distance. I was asleep, but he will always talk to me anyway.

There, Bridgey. Thomas Cole. You can finally see home.

Forty miles north & across the river the sun began to rise over Big Hollow valley & don’t I know you have to be half-crazed with love to talk to someone who can’t hear you.

My rings slipped over my knuckles and fell off my fingers one by one. I lost my biggest love & with him, lost 20 lbs of flesh between January and May. Then I lost an organ and almost made an early departure from earth in the ER in the hospital I was born in. Half the year I don’t remember. The other half I wish I could forget. I forged on through my thirty-third year with my eyes wide open & the tenacity of a broken bird refusing to land. Every surface I touched I left behind bite marks, broken nails, the heat from my heart left smoldering inside the rubble of a half-built, abandoned barn.

I didn’t know I could go so dark.

I deleted my avatar’s a few times, read four billion pages of fantasy, fought my therapist on all his good advice, & worried my family sick.

The wheels came off, the roof caved in.

It’s mostly all a blur, but let me try to recount…

In February, Sophia packed my suitcase for me, rolling my clothes into tiny perfect shapes as I sat on the floor staring at the old airline tags still wrapped around the handle. JAC to ORD faded between the barcodes & the fine print. Ice slid down my esophagus and sent a sharp pick through my left clavicle.

I fantasized about lighting the bag on fire.

Days later, the sky opened blue as I floated in 4 feet of powder on a rental board at the summit of Robert Redford’s playground. I cursed the Rockies for being so pretty. I tried to lean into the monstrous landscape the only way I know how; by learning the land & finding the story in her valleys.

I read about Mt. Timpanogos at 8k feet and dreamed of her wildflower display in the summer; read about the bar they dismantled from Thermopolis and carried piece by piece to Sundance in the name of Butch Cassidy & somebody’s bright foresight for preservation. I thought about my dad. I thought about the man I loved.

I barely slept in Provo Canyon.

Spring came neither like a proud lion nor a soft lamb.

She charged me like a rodeo bull.

In March & April, I traveled to Texas, Portland, Florida, Virginia, & Mexico all within 9 weeks. Some of the airplanes were for work, some were in desperation to physically distance myself from the carnage left behind in the wake of my broken heart. I cried at so many dinner tables, in so many airports, in living rooms and showers and kitchens and bathrooms, in so many public and private spaces. My friends, the trees, and strangers, all my witness. Some days, I did nothing but force my legs to carry me to class and then back home again. Along the way, I tried to love the cherry blossoms & the flowering Bartlett pear. I tried to stop counting time like it was all I had left. I made quarters bounce off my abs and fell in deep dedication to my Pilates practice. I somehow managed to stay physically connected to my body through all of it, even when my heart and soul decided not to. I worked hard to reconnect.

I am so proud of that.

By early May, I had strengthened my body just in time for gangrene to leak into my abdomen, causing an infection called Peritonitis that had me naked, sobbing & vomiting in the bathtub as my mom held my hand and made the final decision to drive to the hospital.

A wild rain storm slammed into the windshield as we hydroplaned down 23 with the hazards on. I rolled on my right side across the backseat, eyes closed & my mother’s voice lulling in and out as fever ripped through my thin frame.

Bridgey stay with me, can you hear me.

I couldn’t respond.

Seven hours & four liters of fluids on an IV drip later, the green traveling nurse from New Jersey rattled off my labs.

Her white blood cell count is high but that is likely from the food borne illness bacteria.

I watched noise come out of her mouth as her lips, filled with botox, didn’t wrinkle & her eyelashes grew longer. She was a character in a dubbed TV show; she was a figment of a fever dream. She let me walk to the bathroom to pee on my own as she notified the ER doctor to discharge. My mom, sitting in a plastic chair, watched me walk back to the curtained off bed, favoring my right side as I slid hospital socks across a cold tile floor. Her nurse’s gaze sharp & attuned.

I laid back down and my phone rang.

My sister’s best friend’s voice came through the speaker.

Listen to me. Do not leave the hospital. Ask for a CT scan. Bridgette. Do not go home.

Mom walked to the nurses station and told them we weren’t leaving. I worried about radiation. Which made me worry about fertility. Which made me think about him, 35 miles and 1,800 feet north in elevation asleep in a room I could move through like a cat in the dark. I willed him to wake up. He didn’t. A wheelchair arrived and away I went with a bald man with graying sideburns. The iodine slid into my veins like a sanguine hug as they sent my body through the tube. Two hours later, the doctor came back with a puzzled & panicked look across his face.

Well, it’s a good thing we did that scan.

Everything went black.

I wasn’t prepared to be cut open, but what took me down harder was the dark empty room I found myself sitting in after the euphoria of evading the reaper wore off. Dead ivy climbing the walls of my brain as outside on the edge of every green lawn, the lilac’s bloomed. I listened to everyone move through life around me either in a heightened state of clarity or as if I was a child lost in a grocery store, scanning faces trying to find familiarity. Is this depression? I would ask my therapist on a zoom call from the recliner in the big room that held me, my belly swollen with stitches and glue. Yes. But you can climb out of it & I will be right here waiting for you on the other side. There are angels that walk among us. My therapist is one of them.

It took 8 weeks for my body to fully heal. I lost more weight after surgery. None of my clothes fit. It was the first thing everybody said, everywhere I went. One Monday morning in June, I put my sneakers on and walked to the studio. Mariola gave me a huge hug. At the end of class, tears slid down my face as I peeled myself off the reformer. Everything hurt, there was scar tissue where there had once been muscle, and I felt so weak. Mariola sat on the floor with me for an hour and let me cry. We talked about love, about how a broken heart manifests physical pain in the body, about regaining my strength. She promised me I could do it.

In late July, I buried the last scab on my belly under a hydrangea bush in the Hudson valley. I thanked her for holding me together. I walked back to the pool in a maroon bikini staring down at the the three scars I now bear. I was never going to be the same.

Hours later, a white witch with a beautifully placed crooked tooth pulled my cards and told me I belong in a helping profession, that I need to keep writing.

She also told me I need to let go.

In August, I traveled to Scotland on my own to see Emily marry the love of her life. I shared at least 7 meals with Aaron and laughed the whole time. We saw a meteor from the Perseid shower drop across the sky the night of the full sturgeon moon while sitting in a garden in the middle of the Scottish countryside. It was so bright and so close, I thought it was a rocket. We drank champagne & then danced on somebody’s coffee table. Aaron, you are an irreplaceable friend. (How can I ever repay you?)

I traveled to France to swim in the sea with friends old & new from different corners of the earth. Maxime dove deep into the turquoise and came up for air with a red starfish on his head. Lou collected seashells for me and brought them home in a treasure box. I told Bono I wore red to my grandmother’s funeral while sitting on the terrace of the tattooed villa surrounded by caviar sliding off crackers in 98 degrees. He said red is the color of the earth and you look like a woman connected to the earth. I couldn’t disagree. I traveled to London to feel the baby growing in Elise’s belly. I braided her hair. I always miss her. Rory & I cried in the kitchen past midnight. We were talking about father’s.

And on it goes.

Cristina saved my life, Joe left me 800 FaceTime messages throughout the year knowing damn well I was afraid of my reflection. Phil gave me my new favorite book and dropped soup & saltines when we thought it was just food poisoning. Elise loved me like a best friend should all while mothering, working & wifing on another continent. Mike sent letters from Laramie and postcards from Alaska and made sure I had oat milk for my coffee at 8am after drinking way too much tequila on a bar stool on his last night in Brooklyn. They all reminded me of my value. That I am full of love even if I can’t see my light.

Summer’s end curled around the edges of September pulling my body into the next and most significant shift of my life. Illness.

Every move I’ve made in September is for my dad.

So far, the strangest thing about my worst fear coming true is that when it happened, I was ready. I slid into the role of strength like a second skin, like I was born to be reliable & brave. I’d say this comes as a surprise but the truth is, showing up for my loved ones is the golden thread I’ve always stitched. It’s showing up for myself that has me breakneck, running barefoot through reels of memories, searching for the moment I unlearned self love.

Identifying that truth in itself has been a radical act of love. The rest is just the journey.

As for dad, I’m not sure I have the words yet to elaborate & the road ahead is long, so for now, I’ll leave it here:

Dr. Shu asks Dad what he does for a living.

I’m a builder.

He asks what he builds.

I build everything what do you need, Doc? Want me to put a new kitchen in for your wife tomorrow? I can build you anything. Whatever you want, Doc.

Just get this thing out of my throat.

I have no idea what warranted such a destructive storm to weather but I do believe in goodness and this year, I sure as hell received a lot of it.

James Baldwin says “So what can we really do for each other except– just love each other and be each other’s witness? And haven’t we got the right to hope– for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are? Don’t you think so?”

Yes, I do think so.

To the bodies & heart’s attached to the shoulder’s I’ve been standing on; check your mailbox’s. I’ve been typing & I love you.

To 34– time is a thief that has frightened me in ways I didn’t understand until this year. Grief is an estranged and hungry animal. My heart could use a place to rest.

But I am so happy to be alive. I love being here, even with a broken heart, even when a gray film has settled over my favorite colors. I refuse to lose sight of what matters most and that lives within my dad’s heart of gold. It lives within my gratitude for every stranger, teacher, friend, and doctor that carried me through to another October. This one certainly feels different.

And lastly, to whatever is coming next; good luck trying to take me out. I’ve been to hell & back. I’ve got a whole lot to lose and no intention in doing so. I’m in the business of giving a damn. I’m in the business of loving.

I am hopeful, I am writing. I am all dressed up in red.

I was born in October when everything that aches bright goes quiet and prepares to rest. I was born to hold the weak, in love and in healing.

I am here today to hold myself. I am a woman of grace, I am a woman who dreams. There is nothing I can’t weather.

I am a woman on fire.

We’ve seen so many doctor’s and nurses today, their names are all starting to blur together in a swimming pool of low blood sugar & fluorescent light. But their faces, I remember. The way they held my hands.

So far, the strangest thing about my worst fear coming true is that when it happened, I was ready.

Dr. Shu asks Dad what he builds.

I build everything what do you need, Doc? Want me to put a new kitchen in for your wife tomorrow? Whatever you want, Doc. Just get this thing out of my throat.

Metastasize

Spread

Carcinoma

Biopsy

Grade

Stage

Plasma