Happy Christmas your arse, I

pray God it’s our last.

—The Pogues

It smelled like Florida today.

That thick and fecund heaviness of invincible growth, like mown lawns and the memory of rain; headless vines twisting around whatever won’t move. I was stepping onto the outdoor stairs near the student center on campus, tiny nuggets of grass blasted against the cement and the sun on my forehead like a blade.

I was instantly transported to Miami.

I used to teach at this super-chichi day school for Miami’s elite, and every morning I opened the door to my condo and was assaulted by that smell, the sky always blue and the tall green reeds near my doorway always swaying and vibrant. It was easy to lose track of the months with the weather on repeat. Lisa would be back inside, still an hour before the girls went off to their Montessori school in Cutler Bay, Sophie not even four and Grace barely eight. Lisa worked part time at night as a tutor for high schoolers; she told me how their patio furniture was nicer than most everyone’s regular furniture back in New Hampshire.

I’d then stand by our little gate that looked like a tollbooth in East Germany and wait for my ride from one of the school’s math teachers. Luis was a proud Columbian, well-spoken and always having boyfriend trouble; it seemed to me that he was regularly throwing the guy out until they made up by the weekend and everything went back to normal. His boyfriend was Cuban, a doctor, but was staying in the U.S. illegally. I sometimes wondered if their relationship was abusive.

“Fucking Cubans,” Luis would say as we zipped down the immaculate, suburban streets. “Can’t even speak Spanish. The other day, __________ says ‘vamos a lunchar.’” Luis then turns to me, roll his eyes. “‘Lunchar’? That’s spanglish. It’s almuerzo, you asshole.”

He had a point. But still.

And most afternoons I’d come home and kiss Lisa goodbye as she left to tutor, and I’d play with the girls. Our favorite was ‘The Shoe Game’ and we’d go over to the playground and the girls would run back and forth over this little wooden rope-bridge like the kind you see on pirate ships in cartoons and I’d whip their sandals at their feet as the girls ran back and forth and they’d just be howling, loving it, jumping and sprinting trying to avoid getting smacked in the ankles as I laughed this evil laugh and said “Ohhh, you’re both going to get it now! No one can dodge these forever!”

We’d then go inside and I’d make dinner or I’d order chicken and black beans from Pollo Tropical which was our favorite chicken place and we’d sit on the couch and eat and watch American Idol and try and guess who’d make it to next week’s round before I put them both to bed. And sometimes, as they were brushing their teeth or I was telling them a story, we’d hear a gator bellow in the nearby pond.

The girls shared a bedroom because the only home we could find before moving here was a two bedroom condo once rented by my school’s Jesuit priest. He’d bought a home in Coconut Grove and was happy to shift the condo over to us until we found a more suitable place. It was nice, though small, and our gated community was fine, but we lived in south south Miami. Crime was normal. Publix had an armed guard at its entrance. Payday loan places were on every corner. There were billboards in the neighborhood that said things like We’ll buy your handgun, no questions asked and 10 years for possession, 20 years for discharging, 25-life for injuring someone with a gun. Think about it. I once traced my fingers around the bullet holes in the plate glass of a shuttered Winn-Dixie grocery.

The move south was so hard. All four of us struggled to adjust, Lisa and I naïvely thinking it’d be all fun fun fun in the sun living in Miami. But it wasn’t. We missed our families, and the seasons: the leaves crackling in the fall and the first snows of December; seeing a plastic Santa and reindeer on the roof of an art deco ranch home in 86 degree weather wasn’t the same thing.

So we caved. Decided we weren’t meant to be Floridians and I flew to a hiring conference in Boston in February and received several offers to teach English at boarding schools in New York and New England. I chose New York. We thought we’d be happy.

Then, sometime around April, everything changed. We were making friends, Lisa was offered a job by my school, and they wanted to create some bullshit admin position for me just so I could make more money. Miami started to feel…good.

But we were destined now for New York.

The day we planned to move back, early July, we woke up to see everything outside covered in white. It was terrifying. How could it be snowing?

But it was only ash from the Everglades, another fire.

We laughed and told ourselves this was just another reason why we needed to get the hell out of Dodge. But our reasoning felt hollow because we liked it now, Miami, and had no idea what was waiting for us up in New York, that first picnic on campus, what would happen to Sophie, how she would almost die in my arms.

For now, we carefully brushed the ash off our car and the moving truck, sang Christmas carols. We could almost believe in lights and magic that day. Even as we left. Even as we said our final goodbye.

I don’t want to live like this

But I don’t wanna die.

—Vampire Weekend

The MRI was read and emailed to me in less than an hour—not a single problem with my knee but three wholly unique ones. Looks like no quick arthroscopy and a round of high-fives but maybe total knee replacement. Maybe not. First a run of physical therapy and then a new ortho surgeon to make nice with. All the while my knee feeling like chipped cement. So I’ll limp around for, what, maybe two months, as I shuffle between best intentions and stolid appointments, looking into someone’s eyes as they squint into a flickering screen with “How does the fifth sound?” Me pliable and on repeat: sure, sure, whatever it takes.

At night in my apartment, forcing the velcro back and dropping the brace onto the floor, I try and remember what it felt like to actually run: on the beach, on a basketball court, down a mountain between the stiff blueberry bushes, as Sophie chased me in our old backyard and I teased that I was faster, as I played with Grace between a field of goldenrods, as I sprinted the last 100 meters home from my every-other-day jogging routine, rejoicing in the sweat pouring from my body as I stood outside by the doorstep and gasped and breathed and closed my eyes.

But it’s also the Rogue with its busted transmission and me trying to wrangle a new car, the grifters at the dealership like members of the mob: it’s been 6 days and whenever I call to speak to someone in finance or in the shop where my next car is being ‘detailed’, they always redirect me to the kid who sold me the car to begin with though he knows nothing about finance or repairs, like they want to make sure they don’t tell me anything that the kid didn’t. And the kid, well, with his dewy eyes and auto-damp hair as if he just stepped from a salt and turquoise bath in Sedona. The first day I met him he excused himself from his desk and returned eating a cookie. But on the phone he likes to play “Wolf of Wall Street”: Yeah, yeah, I’m trying to pull some strings for you, bud. I’m on your side! I told you it’d take a while. Not sure, but soon! But what am I gonna do? The fall semester starts in a matter of days and I need wheels now, which they can provide. Maybe.

And it feels like I’m getting sick, this dry cough and my body weak as if I hadn’t slept in days, my blood seemingly replaced with the brute weight of mercury. And I need to spit-shine my syllabi for my four classes and contact new clients who have hired me to be their manuscript consultant/editor, 150,000 words to read and comment on before the last red maple leaf disappears.

I take a moment to remember there are poppies in the world, the kind that make all pain negligible, and feel anxiety sprout under my skin as I start weighing my options.

But Lisa went to Maine for the weekend and Sophie’s alone at the house, so instead we had the day to hangout together.

Hey, I said, Wanna go to the Brick Store?

She was thrilled because the Brick Store makes stunning pastries, and Sophie does too. The other night, she made sea salt, halva, and chocolate chunk cookies with sesame seeds. They almost made me weep.

On the ferry to Vermont, she had to get out of the car and stand on deck, she said, because the water and the air and sun made her happy and she couldn’t let all that feeling go to waste. It was nearly perfect outside and I couldn’t say no, stood next to her leaning starboard and watching Lake Champlain crinkle and part as if we were guests being ushered into a great hall.

At the store, she got this crazy French pastry I forgot the name of and a savory one with ramps and homemade pesto. She was beaming, took a few shots for Instagram, (are kids still calling it the Gram?) Then we scooted over to Burlington, hit a few vintage shops to look at fabulously underpriced furniture, t-shirts, and old books with hopes I’d find first editions. No luck. She bought a lamp that looked like a Tiffany and a 50 year old map of the Yukon mountain range. It was neatly rolled and she tucked it in the back.

Later, we sat outside and ate tacos at one of Burlington’s best taco places, the courtyard surrounded by sunflowers. One sunflower kind of drooped over the sidewalk and occasional pedestrians whacked their heads against its own head. We kept count. Then for no apparent reason I said I like eating outside like this because soon it will be winter and this will serve as a good memory to get us through all the frigid days. Sophie agreed and ate the last of her chicken tinga and this giant pile of cabbage she put on her plate from the salsa bar. It was her second helping of cabbage and she gleefully squeezed a lime over it all and shoveled it back, smiling.

I retold her the story how when she was little and we lived in Miami Lisa put a head of cabbage in the shopping cart and when she turned back around Sophie was sitting in the little seat quietly munching on the thing like it was a sandwich. Some meddling woman leaned in to Lisa and said “It seams like your daughter is hungry,” all judgy, and Lisa told the lady to mind her business.

Sophie and I laughed and laughed at this memory and then the bill came and I paid and we drove to the ferry dock and took the 30 minute ride back to the Adirondacks. Sophie again insisted we stand outside, but she was more melancholy this time, wistful, wishing she was back in Europe traveling and not waiting tables at some lakeside café for rich tourists.

You will, I said. You will.

Later that night, she watched the Red Sox make a ninth inning comeback with me. Then we shut all the windows, locked the doors, and she fed the cats. We said goodnight and she went upstairs and I went into Lisa’s bedroom, which used to belong to both of us, and got into bed. I remembered the brace still snug on my knee and sighed, turned my legs to the floor in the dark and sloughed it down to my ankle, kicked it free, winced. My knee ached, but now with the memory of the day, the weight of something good filling my bones.

No one can predict the size, the shape, or even the location

Of the room you will live a long time

—James Longenbach, “Suitcase”

Summer’s nearly over and it’s not the ending I imagined.

Month’s ago, I pictured resilience and hard earned wisdom. I envisioned packing up the apartment to move back home, wrapping my beloved tiny portrait of Italian canned tomatoes in tissue paper and placing it in a box alongside other photos and posters I carefully took down from the wall. We’d purchased the tomato print in Portland, Maine two summers ago from a refurbished gum ball machine during a family vacation. One of our last without all the sorrow.

I thought I’d pack it next to my photos of Marfa, Texas that I had framed and shown at an opening last summer—so many stark images of boiling clouds, of trees lightninged up from the desert floor; a single cattle skull miming its best O’Keeffe.

These would be stacked next to the rolled Bread & Puppet print that stated “AWE” above a highly saturated image of humble Napa cabbage. It’s the poster Sophie bought for me when I visited her last spring at Bennington College. She was having a really difficult time, overwhelmed, and I could sense heartbreak in her voice as she asked me to please come, anything, rescue her from campus and all the drama and pressure and pain of love gone sideways and cruel.

So of course I said yes and found a hotel a mile off campus and told Sophie I’m coming, sweetheart, I’ll be there soon, and drove the two hours straight down to the college and plucked her damp as a lily from some smoldering field, and together we escaped, drove as cleanly and as quickly as we could, found solace in nearby Cambridge, Vermont. She wept and I held her and listened and we walked and felt the air gather around us like water until, finally hungry, collected Chinese food and sat outside on paintless benches in a park and ate chicken wings and lo mein as an old man tried to climb atop his ten speed across the street but failed, kept trying anyway.

Popping fortune cookies from their plastic, we noticed how fast the clouds moved above us, April sunset streaked all pomegranate and papaya and Sophie felt like she could breathe she said and we laughed and tossed the empty white cartons into a trashcan. We loped into a bookstore and considered the bestsellers, the newly minted literary journals bright on the shelves and Sophie bought a cute cat stamp that reminded her she used to be a child.

And later, when we returned to campus, she felt brave enough to see Bread & Puppet, and we sat on the hard floor with her friends who loved her and welcomed her and I felt supremely happy as we listened to the music swell and gaped at the funny and grotesque puppets strutted before us and afterward she bought me that cabbage poster and I bought her a different one and I also bought one for Lisa that said “COURAGE” on a simple black and brown print of a boot with bent wheat stalks growing from it; when I met Lisa over 30 years ago she had the very same poster hanging in her dorm room and it always hung above us as we made love or laid close in the single bed and whispered about things that scared us or made us excited about the future, or when we studied on Sunday nights or listened to mix tapes sent to us by friends who went to different colleges or when we drank beers and said tonight will be beautiful and all of our friends will be waiting for us.

Lisa lost that first poster years ago—neither of us knows where or how. I hoped the second version would pull me closer into her orbit and would make her realize how much she needed me and that I should never have moved out.

After the Bread & Puppet show, Sophie said she felt better and that she could bear to return to her dorm and sleep but asked that I come over in the morning so I did, brought her breakfast from the hotel: apple juice and coffee and sticky blueberry muffins. We hugged and I told Sophie that graduation was weeks away and that she could do this.

An hour later, as I made my way up 87 North, back to the immovable Adirondacks, she sent me a video she filmed through her dorm room window of me driving away that morning and I could hear her voice, unmistakable, “Papa, don’t go…” barely a whisper but powerful enough to cleave a lake in two.

And tonight I lie in bed in my apartment, all the posters still neatly on the wall as I type this. Nothing is packed, I am just living and living and Lisa is home in her bedroom doing the same thing as our two daughters dream above her in their beds: Grace days away from moving to Brooklyn to begin her masters program at NYU, Sophie a couple months away from a new dance fellowship she was recently awarded. And then the house will be fully empty, save for Lisa and the poster I bought her. It hangs neatly framed on the wall in the dining room because Lisa said it would be most prominent there. And it is.

Everything you can imagine is real

—Picasso

I wanted to walk down to the cemetery to read poetry. Not to the graves, (what do you think, I’m nuts? Or worse…Neil Gaiman?) but just because it’s actually a very pretty graveyard, as far as graveyards go, and the July day even prettier; snapshot tease of what to expect in the fall here in the Adirondacks: sky an uncracked azure bowl, pieces of torn cloud softening the horizon. 77 degrees.

Perfection.

But I got about 50 feet down the dead end I live on, book in hand, reading glasses careful in my shorts pocket, phone too just in case someone needed to reach me about one disaster or another (I’m always catastrophizing), when, goddamnit, my knee started swelling again. It thickened, and the sudden on/off weight of stepping made me grimace.

So much for my declaration to beauty.

I turned and limped home, huffed onto the porch and back inside, snapped the blue ice pack out of the freezer and folded it into a paper towel. I plopped down in the living room, wrapped the knee, and played a round of Candy Crush. Gee, I thought, how can I let all this glamour go to waste?

I tweaked my knee two nights ago during my third performance. I’m in a play this summer after wanting to act my whole life. Seriously. For over 35 years I’ve dreamed of it. So I finally decided to audition.

“Melancholy Play”, by Sarah Ruhl, is a modern farce. I’m Lorenzo, the orphaned therapist raised on sweets who falls in love with his patient Tilly. In fact, everyone in the play falls in love with Tilly; she makes throwing herself onto couches and melancholia sexy. But once she unexpectedly discovers happiness, everyone loses interest. And then someone turns into an almond.

Anyway, I was running around the stage, fighting my rival Frank when I twisted something. Didn’t really feel it until the next day. I iced it, bought a brace. We re-orchestrated the fight scene so I wasn’t doing a lot of hard stops, turns, and jolts: I mean, at one point I climb onto Frank’s back, snap his head back by the hair, and threaten to drool on his face. During bows last night, my knee felt okay and I thought maybe I dodged a bullet.

But before I hold my impromptu book club meeting with the dead, my knee decides to imitate Dizzy Gillespie’s cheek. Ugh. At least I’ve got a few days off before the next show. It’s the same knee I hurt 20 years ago while teaching at a boarding school in New Hampshire—I was chasing one of my students during a snowball fight. And then again 8 years ago, stepping backwards off a case of wine at a resort where I was the sommelier. But that one also tore my quad, and everything was wayyyy messier. I’m just praying this time it doesn’t make my life rank with pill bottles and self-imposed exile, relegating me to a place of cauterized limbo where I feel just like Tilly in the play when she says, rather smugly, “I suffer so well, and so often.”

At least my daughters are coming home in two days. They’re flying in from Madrid after celebrating Spain’s World Cup win with tens of thousands in the streets. It was crazy. The girls just happened to be in the capital; they’re not exactly soccer fans or anything. But who cares? Just like when Lisa and I first discovered Spain together over 30 years ago, the girls learned to let the swell of rhapsodic newness overcome them whenever it presented itself.

Spain was built for moments like that.

And to cap off their six weeks of backpacking—motherland Ireland to France, Denmark, and back to France—Grace and Sophie decided to spend the last nine days zigzagging up and down Spain, from the transformative heart-stomp of flamenco in Seville to the joys of devouring jamon and octopus and cold, dry sherry well past midnight. They marveled at the fractured brilliance of Gaudi in Barcelona while realizing their dreams down every Moorish alley they could fling themselves.

It made me think about Lisa and I all those years ago in cities like Mojacar, Granada, Malaga, Vejer de la Frontera, names like the Latin words for flowers. How in love we were, how deliciously unkempt. We dashed over glazed cobblestone and lifted our faces to the sun. I filled a pot of rice and water with saffron. Trundling on busses, we counted the bulls anchoring vast fields. We toasted absinthe until the world reimagined itself. How many acorns does an average pig eat, I asked the bartender as he dragged a blade evenly through the brick red meat, making sandwiches. We sat in someone’s busted kitchen in Seville, 2 AM, singing and clapping to live Flamenco—all of us, divine strangers, yet we found one another. Lisa and I were nearly bursting, and her eyes held the same blue as this Adirondack sky.

So of course, last night, the girls send us both a video of them raucous in the streets after Spain pulled off its incredible 1-0 win over Argentina. Sophie was filming, vibrating with joy. I could see Gracie with the Spanish flag wrapped around her neck, her arms raised—people chanting, climbing fountains and cars, hanging from balconies in ecstatic song. It all seemed one glorious wave swagged in gold and maroon beneath a heaven stunned mute, as if the angels were catching their breath. And isn’t that why we sometimes take our great loudness out into the streets? To prove to God there is more than one type of rapture?

Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable. But why does he so passionately love destruction and chaos as well?

—The Underground Man

I was thinking of Dostoevsky.

I know, a bit heady for a sweltering July day better served poolside, or, as they do up here in the Adirondacks, lakeside. But still, am I becoming that narrator from that novella? Is my bitterness swelling like a dying star and all I do with my free time is plot ways for retribution and revenge?

Kind of. But mostly against myself.

Walking down by the cemetery, I was inspecting a fallen tree after yesterday’s fast moving thunderstorm; sticks and dust and old ice cream wrappers were blendered up and spit out as rain sizzled the pavement. It was brief but violent. And this tree certainly took one for the team: it was quite big and smashed itself between the graves like a waiter collapsing drunk between tables. Somehow, not a single headstone was disturbed. Miracle.

Anyway, I was checking it all out, the heavy branches twisted up and off the grass like arms raised in drowning, bits of tree and leaves scattered everywhere, even obscuring the name “Betts” carved into a flat headstone and who, I discovered after brushing away the heartwood, died at age 6, in 1862.

But instead of thinking of how to best clean up the mess, maybe recruit someone to help drag away the debris, or even just take a moment to appreciate all these lives lost, their narrow plots now sullied by loose timber, all I could think about was my ill-fitting t-shirt. I was like, “Damn dog, what’s up with this bullshit gut of yours? Pathetic. Why don’t you clock more than 50 steps between the couch and the fridge and maybe go for a run you fucking piece of shit.” I stared down and pulled on my t-shirt again, as if doing so would resolve the issue. Little Betts was probably looking up through all that earth and thinking “Dude, you serious right now?”

So it’s moments like that, me finding new ways to undermine my sense of self-worth even as I know I should be trying to let more gratitude into my life, like I was doing just an hour before while meditating, thankfully so far away from my head and all its overthinking, searching for effective ways to embrace tranquility and tap into a more peaceful center (Christ, it sounds like I’m talking about a candy bar).

Look, as I’ve laid out before, I crave impulsivity and recklessness as much as I yearn for stability and comfort. It’s fucking exhausting.

I forever struggle to make good choices while acknowledging the delicious rush that comes with making worse ones. Partly to prove, (unconsciously anyway) what Dostoevsky wrote in Notes From Underground: we are not just piano keys striking the same note over and over, again and again, our entire lives—a single, immutable chord. We must always strive to generate surprise, even within ourselves.

And the longer I live alone in this place the more comfortable I become with this idea; I have to say, this house too has kinda grown on me with its farm sinks and wide plank floors. But the mice, well, they’re a pain in the ass—little black turds everywhere. That topic is for another day.

But the resentment I find in myself and my actions—sometimes simply for existing—how do I temper that? How do I cut myself some slack? Even as I swoon at this world, and discover beauty everywhere: flipping the pages of those street photographs by Vivian Maier, anticipating the cool burrata I plop onto a bubbling margherita pizza, gazing at a collection Hockney paintings online, or reading the jubilant texts from my daughters as they explore Barcelona together this hot, hot summer.

It’s a paradox. All of it. But I’m not going to quit searching for answers, even as I can’t stand myself. Even as I can.

I’m still here below

the chandelier

where they always used to read

us our rights

—David Berman

Yes, Father’s Day. It’s the real-deal to me. Makes me proud to have two incredible daughters: fierce, loyal to each other, brilliant, beautiful, un-takers of shit. Love them deeply. Right now, they’re sleeping off any leftover jetlag in Dublin, Ireland; Gracie’s gift to her younger sister Sophie for graduating from college. I was visiting after Sophie got home, and when she heaved some final laundry up the stairs she turned smiling to Lisa, Grace and me and blurted, “Now we all have our bachelor’s degree.” I was like, Damn, she’s right! How about that? And I was happy.

But that’s the safe thing to say, isn’t it? The easy thing. No writer’s gonna sprain an ankle extolling the virtues of their offspring. Fish. Barrel. You get it.

Because what I really want to write about instead is that two things can be true at the same time, that I can be bursting with love and also feel my mouth water like a carwash; this desire to blank out on 60 mg of morphine, or 5 hydrocodone clicking in my palm like baby teeth, or to light a flame under foil until the brown powder rises like a ghost and I squeeze it all into my lungs, filling me with such blasphemy and deliverance.

But remember this is polite company. And if you want to be liked, or even admired, you gotta stay in line and know your lane. You need to remind others why love wins and that we all want to serve something greater than ourselves. To be charmingly complicated is fine. Completely fucked up? Please.

But why not? Where is my kiddie pool of oxycontin that I can trust fall into? My sun shower of mezcal on a short Tuesday morning? Have you tried 7OH yet? That shit is pure cannibalism and before you know it your downward dogging it like those loose-headed peonies fragrant and dumb in every yard you walk past. After all, the weather’s changed and a breeze is picking up. Sure, I can love, love, love—but why can’t I also believe there’s no cure for loneliness?

Let’s get real: I can’t write about that. I have a job, expectations, responsibilities. But I don’t mind telling you I really do love my daughters. And I can picture them both right now, 3000 miles away, the oldest leading the youngest, or maybe the other way around, exploring, stepping into those great halls at Trinity College—the air so quiet as to render the act holy.

What do you think? That nothing can kill the world, not even love?

--Charlie Smith

In our 20’s, my fiancée Lisa and I moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, ostensibly for her to attend grad school at UMass Amherst—a year later I’d be working on my MFA at a small school in Vermont but it was low residency and I could live anywhere. But Western Mass was special to us. In particular, we’d gotten to know Northampton intimately during our undergrad days and loved it dearly, so why not keep building our lives there?

We’d been away for months traveling through Central America and Mexico. Much happened during that time but know this one thing: during a hike to a jungle waterfall outside Livingston, Guatemala, I decided to take the leap—back at the hotel afterward I asked Lisa to marry me, lifting the green and humid stillness from our bodies with just one breath.

She said yes.

But when we returned to the United States the world imploded with the news her younger brother had died just 10 days before; he’d snuck out and took Lisa’s car to a party. Up all night, he tried to get back home before anyone noticed and the next morning hit a van full of school girls going to soccer practice.

This was before cell phones and GPS and knowing where anyone is at any given moment just because you have a computer in your pocket. Her family tried to locate us based on vague itineraries we shared while traveling. They were able to get someone at the Peace Corps to hang flyers in Guatemala City asking that Lisa or I call home as soon as possible. Our families knew we’d be flying home from there but nothing else. I wonder if we’d walked by one of these flyers without knowing it, joyous and laughing, full of beer and vegetable chow mein after leaving one of the plentiful Chinese restaurants dotting the city.

But Lisa knew anyway.

The night of, Lisa bolted upright in bed. “He’s dead,” she sobbed. “He’s dead.” She dreamt of her brother, but then her father, collapsing in the driveway. I held her until she quieted and told her it was just a dream, that it wasn’t real. I remember how the sodium arc of multiple street lights filtered through our flimsy curtain, filling the room with something close to moonlight.

We lived with her parents for a couple months, trying to make sense of the devastation. We hadn’t made it back in time for the funeral. There was a report filed by the hospital that sat in a manila envelope in the kitchen of the in-law apartment we occupied below her parents’ home. Apparently, Lisa’s brother survived long enough to be taken to the hospital.

One afternoon, sitting around and bored, Lisa out with her mom, her dad at work, I opened the envelope and slid the report into my hand. It was several photocopied pages. I flipped through it until I landed on a section where the ER doctor asked her brother about his leg. “It hurts,” he said.

I slipped the report back into the envelope and didn’t read it again. As far as I know, Lisa never did.

By late spring, Lisa still planned to attend UMass in the fall and we were both looking forward to living together in our own apartment—though grateful for a place to live while we navigated options, life had become cramped under her parents’ roof.

One night, my brother Brian came to hang out and get loud and screw around on the PlayStation. We drank many beers. Lisa was out visiting an old friend from high school. Our horsing around grew more physical, our demands more slurred. At some point, someone emptied pills into someone else’s hand. We gobbled them up and resumed activities.

I remember Lisa’s mom coming downstairs bathrobed and unannounced. She was furious; I’d never seen her this angry. She was pointing back and forth at us I realized my brother had his jacket on. Oh, I thought. I guess he’s trying to leave? Or wait, did he leave and come back already? I stared at the coffee table; it was a brown forest of empties.

“How can you even think about driving after I just had my son killed this way?” Lisa’s mom’s eyes were radiant.

Brian looked at me and I felt like something very bad was about to happen.

“I don’t need this, man,” my brother said. “Look, you’re not my mom. I’m out.”

Brian lived about 45 minutes away; it seemed like it probably wasn’t a good idea for him to drive. Or even threaten to. The booze and the pills began to pig pile, heavier and heavier, and my eyelids fluttered.

Then I noticed Lisa’s mom was crying and pounded her feet back upstairs. My brother slipped out the sliding glass door and I heard a car drive away.

I sat down on the couch, carefully positioned my feet on the table so as not to tip over any of the bottles. The PlayStation main menu glowed from the T.V. Before I closed my eyes, I remembered my brother and thought, man, the balls on that guy. Hope he’s okay.

Some hours later, I woke to Lisa shaking me and demanding to know what the fuck happened. I said I wasn’t sure, which was actually true.

A month later, I was waiting in the kitchen of our new apartment. We didn’t have much furniture but I brought two chairs, an old kitchen table that needed a matchbook under one leg. I placed a dozen purple iris in a scavenged jar and placed it next to an $8 bottle of Cote du Rhone, two glasses. Lisa was in a nearby town with a friend working some off-the-books job.

I drove down to Northampton, found a full time job at a restaurant and then the apartment. All in one day. You could do stuff like that back in the 90’s. I signed the lease and told Lisa the address from a pay phone. She said she trusted me.

When she arrived at the building that night, I heard the downstairs door open, the unsure steps up the first flight of stairs. She pushed the front door open.

“Chris?” she called.

“In here,” I said from the kitchen.

The rest was magic. And the following years we lived in that little apartment, both before and after getting married, was mostly just as magical, at times beautifully angled and boundless, other times not so much, but lives built upon raw love and one delicious naivety after another—no more tragedies left to define us. That was to come later. With one of our own children.

Because how could we know? We were just stupid kids.

Chet opened his eyes, blinked. What was that sound?

He waited to see if he’d hear it again, but the bedroom was quiet. Chet tried not to move and instead looked up into the darkness. He imagined an angel stretched above him on the ceiling, staring back down. Chet turned to his right, slowly, and was relieved to see the outline of his older brother Brad sleeping in his bed, small hill of blankets rising and falling. Then Chet heard the sound again, like it was coming from downstairs. It sounded like a man crying. It sounded like dad.

“Brad,” Chet whispered.

Brad didn’t budge.

“Brad!”

“Why’d you wake me up,” Brad asked without moving.

“I think dad’s sick.”

Brad sighed. “Go to sleep,” he said. “You’re dreaming.”

Then they both heard a scream.

“See,” said Chet.

Brad lifted his head slightly from the pillow.

“Maybe he’s in trouble,” Chet said.

Brad sat up and turned on the bookshelf light between them. The room exploded in a sick yellow glow and both boys squinted. It was two hours past their bedtime.

The scream bellowed up from downstairs again, followed by what sounded like several men yelling back at the screamer.

The brothers locked eyes, terrified.

The house creaked as many bodies shuffled across the wooden living room floor beneath the bedroom. Brad and Chet then heard the woodstove poker and shovel fall in a bright clamor. Furniture shifted. The group of men shouted louder than before. The screamer yelled Take Your Fucking Hands Off Me! and was crying again. The boys were now certain it was their father.

“Brad, I’m scared,” said Chet. He swallowed and his throat felt dry, full of dead moths.

***

The boys got up and sneaked as quietly as possible to the top of the stairs. They looked down through the banisters. The living room was off to the left, flooded in electric light. Brad turned back towards his brother and put his finger up to his lips. Chet reached out and grabbed hold of the back of Brad’s pj’s.

Brad and Chet could see six or seven men standing in a half circle around their father. Brad recognized the men from the new church they started attending a few months ago. Dad thought it a good idea to start going again. It had been almost a year since mom died and they didn’t really know anyone downstate after they moved. But with New Christian Fellowship, dad said it felt like they had a family again. Besides the weekly service, the elders of the church held a small prayer group at a different home every Thursday. Brad remembered now that his father mentioned they were meeting tonight at their house.

Standing between the men and their father was Paul. He was the pastor and always wore a blue suit on Sundays. Tonight he was in jeans and a plaid shirt. With his good looks and feathered hair, the boys thought he looked like Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man.

“Get around him, brothers,” Paul said.

“No! No! I’ll kill you,” their father screamed. His eyes were wide and terrible.

“We command you to leave Dean’s body…in the name of GOD,” yelled Paul. He placed his hand on dad’s forehead and pushed, and dad writhed as if being burned.

Both boys watched, mouths open. Chet thought about that wild west commercial he saw that showed a horse getting branded.

“H-help me,” dad said in his regular voice.

“He’s falling, get him,” Paul ordered.

The men moved in quickly and dad limped into their arms as if he’d been murdered. His head rolled to one side. The men held him up and dad blinked and coughed.

Chet found Brad’s hand and squeezed.

“Hallelujah,” Paul said. “It’s over, Dean. It’s over.”

“You’re okay, buddy. Praise the Lord,” said one of the men. He patted dad on the shoulder. The other men hummed in agreement. Dad’s hair was streaked across his forehead. He seemed lost, turning his gaze from Paul and then back to the men.

***

The boys were at school when their mother died. She took 31 valium and laid down on the couch as Days of Our Lives played on the TV with the sound off. Dean worked a part time job at the new pizza place around the block, and when he got home he found Janice like that and thought she was napping. He didn’t want to bother her, so he went to the kitchen and drank a Pabst Blue Ribbon over the sink.

Dean stared out at the backyard and thought about the yellow jackets’ nest Chet discovered the other day. He was picking wild grapes when they swarmed up his pantlegs and stung him multiple times. Janice even called the police Chet was making such a racket. She was still pulling them out of his hair when the police arrived. Dean snorted. What did she think the police were going to do, lead those things away in a row of tiny handcuffs?

Dean finished his beer and dumped the foam down the sink. He belched and turned back to the living room. Dean stopped in the doorway a moment to admire his wife’s figure; she kind of looked sexy and disheveled on the couch like that. Dean smiled.

“Hey babe, I think I’m gonna pour some gas down that yellow jacket hole tonight. Wanna watch the fireworks?”

Janice didn’t move.

“Babe?”

***

The day of the funeral, it was the boys’ job to answer the front door and let the grownups into their home. Dean was in the living room as some of the other men spoke to him in soft tones and kept his glass full. Every room of the house was packed with strangers dressed in black standing in small circles. Chet noticed the adults spoke with a quiet intensity, like they were discussing something that frightened them.

Dean told the boys after the service that they should change into something their mother would have loved. Chet had put on a pair of wide gold corduroys and the green turtleneck he wore last fall when he played the part of the turtle in the school play. His mom waved from the front row every time Chet came on stage, and it made him feel like he was the only person alive.

Brad put on jeans and an old white t-shirt.

“Why you wearing that,” Chet had asked.

“Because mom used to say she loved me just the way I am.”

Chet narrowed his eyes and felt his face grow hot. He went into the bathroom and locked the door. He thought he couldn’t breathe and pulled the step stool out from under the sink. When he stood up high enough to see himself in the mirror, he realized it was the first time he had ever seen himself cry.

***

“We should go to bed,” Chet said. “I think dad’s okay now.”

Brad didn’t move. “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe he’s okay,” said Brad.

The church men turned the flipped ottoman back onto its legs and had dad sit down. Someone picked up the woodstove tools.

“I’ve been having dreams all week,” Dean said.

“Oh yeah,” said Paul. “About what?”

“Janice.”

Paul looked at one of the men and all of them kind of stopped their small talk and refocused on dad.

“Remember what I told you, Dean,” Paul said.

“No, I know. I know! But she was my wife…I loved her.” Dean’s voice cracked a bit and he put his hand up to his eyes, squeezed.

“Dean, what she did to you, and your boys, was a sin. She committed the worst kind of sin,” Paul said. “There is no forgiveness for that. Least not from God.”

“That’s right, Dean,” said a wiry man in an army jacket. He stepped closer. They all did.

Paul squatted down and looked Dean in the eyes. “I’m just glad we were here tonight with the Lord to help you.”

“Amen,” said the wiry man.

***

The boys crept back to their room and got into bed. Brad turned the light off. They heard the men leave their house shortly after, and then their father walk upstairs. He stopped in front of his bedroom and the boys heard him sigh. Then he walked in and closed the door.

Chet looked up at the ceiling and hoped the angel was still there.

“Did mom sin,” asked Chet.

“I don’t know. I think so,” said Brad.

“Why?”

“Because God says it’s wrong.”

“No, I mean why did she do it?”

“You mean, the pills and everything,” Brad asked.

“Yeah. Why did she, you know, sin like that?”

“I don’t know, Chet. I’m not sure.”

“Well, I miss her,” Chet said. “All the time.”

Chet started crying but was trying to be quiet about it.

“Brad, I’m scared. Should we pray?”

Brad turned over in bed and faced Chet in the darkness. “Okay,” he said.

“Lord,” said Brad. “Please bless us and keep us safe. We rebuke all evil and we ask for your forgiveness and protection. Please watch over us tonight.”

Chet was nodding along and his fingers were entwined. “Yes, Lord,” he said.

“And Lord, please help dad be strong, and please make sure he stays safe too and keep him protected from evil spirits.”

Chet felt himself growing calmer. His breathing had slowed to normal and he closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said.

Brad went quiet and Chet wondered if he was feeling as sad as he was and was about to tell Brad it was okay if he wanted to cry, and that he loved him, and that dad and God did too.

“And Lord, don’t let Chet be such a pathetic little crybaby.”

Chet opened his eyes. “W-what did you say?”

Chet turned over and looked at his brother, but it was too dark to see him, see his face. All he could make out was Brad’s outline; it was motionless.

Brad then made a sound like clearing his throat.

“Stop it, Brad. Stop it,” said Chet.

“You fucking little pussy,” Brad said. “Mom killed herself because of you. You’re the reason. You weren’t even supposed to be born.”

“That’s not true! No she didn’t! Don’t say that. Don’t say that!” Chet sat up. He thought he was going to scream. Or worse, throw up.

“Why don’t you ask her yourself,” Brad said. His voice had become much deeper. Like a man’s voice.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Chet whirled around toward the bedroom window. He was panting and his mouth hung open.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The shade was drawn but Chet could see the outline of someone outside touching the glass, feeling it with two hands.

“No mommy,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” Chet felt the warm flow of urine spread across his lap and under his thighs.

“Don’t be rude,” said Brad. “Go ask your mother if she’d like to come in.”

How A River Splits A Forest

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It was a bright October morning when Lewis Sidwell discovered a hatch door protruding from the grass in the middle of his back yard. It had not been there the night before. The hatch looked metallic and appeared to be about three feet wide. On top was a small metal wheel that Lewis assumed was for locking and unlocking. The whole thing reminded him of a movie he saw as a kid about a U.S. submarine sneaking into Tokyo Bay.

Lewis was in his thick brown bathrobe and holding a mug of coffee. The mug was a birthday present from his daughter Stacy and featured a cartoon unicorn saying “Shit’s About To Get Real”. He hasn’t seen Stacy since she left to backpack Australia with a man she met through one of those online dating services. It’s been a year since they’ve talked.

Lewis squatted down and placed an open palm on the little steering wheel; it was freezing. He quickly pulled his hand away and dropped the mug into the grass. Lewis stood up and felt he was going to panic; his breath was coming out in a kind of heightened rasp. He cinched his bathrobe tighter and stood back. A monarch butterfly silently zig-zagged around his heaving chest.

“What the hell is going on,” Lewis said, and his own voice scared him. The sun was radiant and all the maple trees seemed shot with fire, the leaves brilliant ruby and cadmium.

A garage door rattled up behind him and Lewis let out a small sound; it was his neighbor Kris. Lewis took two steps toward his neighbor but stopped; what if Kris saw the hatch and thought it was Lewis’ fault? Lewis stepped to the side to block the view.

Kris rolled a wheelbarrow out of his garage. He was shirtless and had a blue bandana tied around his thick mop of blonde hair. Almost 50, Kris seemed to be one of those people who magically never aged.

Lewis waved at Kris, but then put his hand down.

“Hey, Kris,” Lewis chirped.

Kris stopped and looked over. “Hey Lew,” he said. “I should be able to finish the fence today.”

“Sure, sounds good,” Lewis said.

Kris’ French bulldog Daisy had taken to shitting in Lewis’ yard lately and it finally came to a head after Lewis’ wife Maggie traipsed through a pile unseen and dragged it all through the house. After the three of them met over a bottle of malbec at Kris’ house, Kris agreed to build a fence, even quoting some poem by Robert Frost that mentioned fences. Kris fancied himself a ‘literary type’ and Lewis found it insufferable. Maggie said he was charming.

“You look like a Bigfoot or something,” Kris said.

Lewis looked down at his bathrobe and then back up. “Yeah, Maggie always says I’m going to get shot in my own yard by hunters. Oh well.”

Kris smiled, and then shrugged his shoulders in a way that said our little interaction is now over and continued pushing his wheelbarrow into his front yard. The wheels were rusty and a steady squeak filled the air.

Lewis waited for Kris to be out of site. He turned back to the hatch.

Maybe I should open it, he thought.

A window slid up behind Lewis and he turned around. Maggie was in the second story bathroom and poked her head out.

“Lewis, I’m sorry what I said,” Maggie offered.

Lewis stepped back and felt the cold lip of the hatch beneath his heels, sure his bathrobe was hiding the rest.

“It’s okay.”

“No, no it’s not. I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “Please come inside and let’s talk about it.”

Lewis looked up and remembered what she said, her accusation, and wanted to scream a million obscenities at her like knives.

“It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it,” he said. Lewis then wondered for one terrifying moment if Maggie had the hatch installed as a kind of punishment.

Maggie swooped her long raven hair to the side and smiled. “Come inside before some hunter thinks you’re a bear,” she said.

Lewis smiled back.

“I will,” he said.

Maggie pulled her head in and then slid the window down with a thunk.

Lewis turned around and sighed, bent down and picked up the coffee mug shining dumbly in the grass. He looked at the unicorn and his heart sank. The last thing Stacy said to him before she got in that car was You think you love me but you only love yourself. He rubbed his thumb over the unicorn’s face and then closed his eyes.

This is bullshit, Lewis thought. This isn’t real. I refuse to give this charade any more energy. I’m not even going to look at it. No. I am going to go back inside my house and let my wife seduce me, then I’m going to enjoy some Belgian waffles in the kitchen with her, and then I’m going to come back outside and mow the yard for the last fucking time this season. That’s what I’m going to do.

And with that, Lewis turned toward his house. Kris’ dog Daisy was leaping and yelping behind the half-finished fence.

“Daisy,” Kris barked.

Lewis smiled. He cinched his bathrobe. When he got to the porch door he was too far away to hear the whispering from beneath the hatch.

And then the sunlight played atop the hatch wheel in such a way as to make it seem it was carved from diamonds, or a secret stream, or anything else you could imagine that is both beautiful and rare.

The last memory I have

Is of a flower that cannot be touched

—Galway Kinnell

Pollen complicates the air like a bad idea; who’d know it only desires life? But it’s not the breathing that gets you—it’s the fine lines and finger dragging. All receipts point to yellow and my windshield’s duly blessed. Maybe I should take stock in the fact that the world keeps breaking forward like a drunk groomsman, indifferent to my complaints, my meager sighs and outpourings; it doesn’t give a shit about our sorrows.

It just keeps punching above its weight.

Daffodils receding with their Basquiat crowns, once good and proper in their sentry rows. Now it’s trillium with their earnest windmills, studding forest and trail up here in the ADKs, and lilacs abundant with their sex and eyerolls. This’ll be followed by the nodding peonies—babyheads fragrant to a congregation of ants. Don’t overlook the bladed iris, plotting in the singe of June with their unctuous purple and all that shock and awe.

See? Even me writing this doesn’t change a thing: I’m still here and my family’s there. That’s that.

I read somewhere that it takes 1-2 years to return to a sense of normalcy after divorce. Years? Who’s got that kind of time?

Maybe that’s all I got. Things could be worse (insert intrusive thought here). One task that seems critical is the disentanglement from institutionalized conditioning: I’ve been ensconced in relationships with women—girlfriends, fiancée, wife—since I was 18. Almost 40 years. Honestly, I don’t know how to be alone. And that’s not exactly a superpower.

Learning raw navigation is critical. And I have been dutiful on that front. Solo traveling yields small surprises. Yes, strength compounds like interest and there are certain dark corners that become less fraught. But let me tell you a story.

Lisa and my oldest daughter and I went to Burlington for the day. We wanted to see if we could manage small joys. We ate a pleasant lunch at a Vietnamese joint, mint flecking the air at our little table. Then vintage shops where we held t-shirts up to one another and said, “Ohhh, this is so you!” Rain splintered our walks between buildings but we didn’t care. Then my youngest called to say fuck it, I need to get off campus and can I take a bus up to meet you guys? Three hours later we welcomed her, yes, ensconced her half dizzy with her stories about weirdos and desperation on that bus, and how, being all together, we finally felt whole.

Later, fancy pizza and anecdotes from dance—my youngest daughter’s major—and how her latest performance was filmed so we could watch her again, the way she raises warm coals in our throats when she moves the way that she does. Effortless.

But it was the drive back to New York that night that was the clincher. As the car gripped the black road ribboned against Lake Champlain, my oldest told a joke and we all laughed.

That’s it. That’s all.

And as we laughed I had a profound sense that, if even for a moment, we were almost beautiful in our laughing because nothing could hurt us. A nuclear flash could have frozen us and that moment would have still remained impenetrable. We were perfect. I closed my eyes and thought if only we could plant our flag here. Like we once did. Because that’s the part of “institutionalized” that I love. Fatherhood. Family.

But we can’t. And as I look out this window at my car and see pollen fill the windshield I wonder if I’ve the type of washer fluid that smears. Or is it the good stuff? Will I need to haul out the rag and bucket? Will I wipe and grimace as Lilies of the Valley ring out all around me?

You look like
A perfect fit.

—Aimee Mann

I have known a preponderance of recurring scenarios: the wrist-to-forehead, eyes skyward, dashing hero shaky on the precipice. A Ryder truck’s worth of sullen whoas. Desert knees cracked atop some “Father, why have you forsaken me” mumbo-jumbo.

When it comes to self-actualized wallowing I can slug it out with the best of them because there’s no pity I haven’t partied.

And yet…

Now I find myself in the least enviable position of all. Finding hope when the stakes are actually laden and dynamite-heavy, not imagined.

Lucky me.

So I tell myself to remember hope is active. Hope cannot be hermetically sealed. Hope is the destroyer of sumptuous laments. Hope rips around the corner kicking fine dust and colored pebbles. Hope punches you in the balls and tells you to stand up straight cuz it needs help finishing its brownie sundae. Hope is a steady cam in a Steve McQueen car chase and all you have to do is say amen.

I have vigorously held onto hope. There are so many hearts in this world that I have known, so many lives that speak to my own. They’ve ferried me over crested ruins in one piece. They’ve taught me how value is a beautiful and unmeasurable thing in this long procession towards daylight. I have been made whole by hope. Hope has kept my life off the heap dreaming of my atomization.

But lately, not so much.

But it’s not your fault. We all swim through such heavy desire as to make our mouths water; so many antidotes decoding rough pleasure. But let’s be clear: I’m certainly not a fan of ash, some final dark hallelujah. That’s a song I fear singing. And always have.

I’m talking more earth-bound, more stock and trade, ‘usual suspects’ stuff. I dream them everyday; all these hungers but only one mouth. I name them as I enter the same room I always enter, lifting them like children to the sun and promising that they will never die.

It’s not like all my time in this little apartment is dedicated to loss and losing; there’s also the completely terrifying to occupy my time.

I haven’t been able to shake this “event” that occurred a year and a half ago, Christmas 2024. And I want to be completely clear with you: it’s 100% legit. Real. True. As in: it abso-fucking-lutely happened. If it were anymore real it would be parked outside in my driveway waiting for a spit-shine.

We arrived home Christmas Eve after spending a week up in Montreal. Lisa, Grace, Sophie and I wrapped presents late and went to sleep even later. We were tired but happy.

At 6:30 am Lisa woke up and went to the bathroom. She came back to the bedroom frantic.

“Chris,” she said. “Chris! I think there’s something wrong with the heat. When it turns on, the smell! The air! I think carbon monoxide is coming out. I can’t breathe! We need to wake the girls!”

Her eyes were flat and black.

I got up with her but didn’t feel anything in the air or sense anything out of the ordinary. In the dining room, I kept breathing in and out and tried to get my bearings, see if anything felt “off”. But besides feeling tired, I felt fine. Our cat was walking over the heating grates, mewling for breakfast.

Everything was normal.

But Lisa was adamant. And honest to God, she is not prone to hysterics: “I don’t want to ruin Christmas, but…I have to call 911. Something is wrong.”

“Wait,” I said. “Wait. Are you sure?”

Lisa didn’t answer and just called. The operator told us to wake the girls and go wait for help out in the car so the fumes wouldn’t “get us”. We rousted the girls and went out in our bathrobes with the cat. I was upset because, deep down, I knew nothing was wrong. But how do you tell a mother not to worry when she thinks her children’s lives are in danger?

Soon enough, it was pandemonium.

Red lights splashed the neighborhood as a wail of sirens ricocheted between the chimneys. Soon, a grinding ball of men clamored into the house; in a few minutes the Chief stood in the doorway and gestured for me to come inside.

Nothing was wrong, he said—no carbon monoxide. He even showed me how his detector remained silent no matter how long he moved it over the vents trying to elicit a beep. He even changed the batteries, tried again. Nothing. The Chief smiled awkwardly, shrugged. He felt bad and offered a couple of well meaning excuses to explain why there were over 10 firemen all standing around in my kitchen instead of being back home with their families.

Lisa requested and got checked out for carbon monoxide poisoning in the nearby waiting ambulance. We sheepishly went back inside our house. I think I actually waved as all the men drove away. Besides the three or four fire engines, I had never witnessed such a long and rusty cortege of rattling pickup trucks in my life.

Christmas felt, if not ruined, utterly strained. We were all tired and felt uneasy. Maybe humiliated? Nonetheless, we tried to have a good morning. We drank coffee, shared cinnamon rolls, opened presents. We laughed and hugged. Like all dads, I carefully bagged up the crumpled paper lying about the floor. Everything felt normal again.

Later, we ate a beautiful Christmas dinner.

That night, we played a game we had opened as a family gift: it was a drawing game like the old game “Telephone”, but you sketch your answer instead of whispering in someone’s ear. You draw a picture in what looks like an old fashioned cook book with a spiral binder and thick, laminated pages. Someone tries to guess what you drew by flipping the page and drawing their own guess and then passing it to the next person who then draws a guess of that guess on a new page and so on as it makes it way around the table. There are 8 total pages, and each page has a tab numbered 1-8. We noticed in my book (and only my book) that there was a duplicate page: page 2 was printed twice. So when you closed the book, the tabs went 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

I ran my finger across both 2s.

I then held and flipped between both page 2s and figured it was a error made at the factory. We all commented on the strange mistake. We played the game anyway and drew our pictures and passed the books around and laughed and tried to guess what each person drew. When my book finally came back to me, the extra page 2 was missing. It simply vanished. First I was confused, then I wanted to know who removed it. Everyone thought I was joking. We moved stuff around. I pushed back my chair and looked underneath the table.

“Come on,” I said. “This isn’t funny.”

But the extra page 2 was gone. And as each cardboard page was attached securely to the spiral binder, it couldn’t have just fallen off. The longer we couldn’t find it the more weirded-out all four of us got. Finally, we said that maybe we didn’t see it right, must have made our own mistake. But everybody knew that wasn’t true. We ultimately did our best to ignore it and turned in for the night.

Two days later, we were lazing around, watching a favorite Christmas movie of Lisa’s. Grace turned to me on the couch and asked, rather casually, if I’d seen the news.

“What news?”

She showed me the article on her phone—it was a national story: on Christmas morning, another family of four much like us: a husband, a wife, and two daughters, died of carbon monoxide poisoning, probably around the same time Lisa woke up and felt something was off. The family that died was similar to us: they were in New Hampshire when it happened—we are all originally from New Hampshire. They were in their house by a lake—our house is by a lake. They were all the same ages as us. The husband was a teacher. So am I. Their oldest daughter was a teacher, so is Grace. The youngest daughter is a college student, so is Sophie.

I read and reread the story, too nervous to speak.

When I shared what happened with a friend he said: “Maybe the point of the missing page 2 was to show you that your family was very similar to this other family, but that while they died and vanished from this earth, yours didn’t. One page 2 disappeared while the other remained.”

To fall asleep with the joy that is Christmas waiting for you, only to never open your eyes again. Was this supposed to be us? Our mirror family, side by side. And then one page is simply removed.

Look, it can’t just be me. Right?

But whenever I hear someone say “Love language”, as in, “Oh, giving little unannounced gifts is my love language” or “Helping others down at the rec center is my love language” I want to immediately lose my inside voice. This even includes when I say it—because I have to; nobody’s invented an alternative yet.

We need to be better. Can’t the Language Police abandon their January 6th-like attack against the word ‘invaluable’ for a minute and huddle up on this? We need to discover a less-cringy way of letting others know that we feel great joy, satisfaction, and yes, even love, in doing a certain special thing for them.

No? Yeah, I was afraid of that…

In that case, my love language is cooking. Not only am I really good at it, but I truly love watching the looks on people’s faces when they taste one of my dishes. It could be a coriander-pumpkin crème brûlée and the way their eyes light up when they shatter that burnt sugar crust, or serving roasted salmon with a pistachio-blood orange glaze to a chorus of Ohhhhhhs around the dinner table. It makes me feel like I am nourishing them both inside and out, and it sometimes brings a core happiness that writing can’t touch.

I’m not exactly sure why it matters so much to me. Well, that’s not completely true because, for one, I’m Irish-American, and well, an infinite tapestry of the sullen potato ain’t something to get all drooly over, and two, I grew up poor and in New Hampshire and neither bodes well for adhering to the food pyramid; I ate lasagna with cottage cheese and boiled pastrami on bulky rolls with margarine. By age 9 the most exotic thing I had ever eaten was a bowl of granola—I never knew flavor could be so loud!

So that’s a part of it; I needed to rewrite my history and discover what real food was. Or could be. As a young teen my very first jobs were in restaurants. I took home ec in high school when everyone else took typing. In class, I discovered all of the five French ‘Mother Sauces’ and how to properly poach an egg, debone chicken and sear red meat—we had moved downstate to Exeter and these dudes had a budget. I introduced little concepts like “salt and pepper” to my home and revolutionized the dinner-making and food-eating process.

When my mom (now divorced from my dad) told me and my three siblings not to eat any of the food after school because meals were carefully planned out, or, more times than not, there was really no food to eat, I found ways around that by employing my newfound baking skills and whipping up batches of fried apple turnovers and cinnamon doughnuts and lemon meringue pie because all the ingredients were stored away in corner tins or as condiments in the fridge and remained unknown and unaccounted for. She couldn’t come home and stand in the kitchen incensed, holding up a bag of half eaten cookies we opened out of shear desperation, screaming “Who opened the cookies!” as we all darted into our rooms.

It felt like I was getting away with murder.

After Lisa and I got married and our two daughters came, my skills only increased and the kitchen became my domain. I did most of the food shopping and prepared 6 or 7 dinners a week. At Christmas, you’d win my heart if you gifted me an All-Clad stainless steel sautee pan or a Le Creuset ceramic baking dish. I taught our girls that grilled meat needed to rest before slicing and that in a pinch buttermilk could be substituted by mixing white vinegar with regular milk in order to make it curdle and lend that important tang.

For over 25 years, my family knows that food is my, well… food is my love language. (internal wince)

So that’s why I find it so frustrating that ever since I moved out of our home and into this little house by the river, alone, that cooking doesn’t mean two shits to me. But I had an epiphany sometime after my umpteenth microwaved burrito: I have no one here to show that I love them.

Lisa will cajole me, push me on this: “Really? No salads? No special roasts or meals or whatever?”

Nope.

“Come on, you love cooking.”

And I tell her that I know that, that I do love cooking, but that the fire jumped ship ever since I moved.

“It’s just that I only really want to cook for people that I love.”

”Exactly,” she says. “So why aren’t you doing it for yourself?”

And the answer hangs silent between us, unspoken and harder to accept than I wish, so I just smile and sip my water and stare a little longer into her eyes.

I could have started my story here—

A December Saturday highlighted with a matinee because we all loved the movies though not all of us matinees—my youngest daughter hated the grim recognition of daylight palming your face in the parking lot afterward, everyone blinking and stunned next to the skittering cellophane wrappers and hardbolted light poles happy to announce nothing. To go from all that darkness and emotion to the ordinary drudge of afternoon responsibility—too jarring.

But we found compromise and figured hey, who doesn’t need a little Jack Black in their lives? Even at midday? The demands of holiday shopping was still clearcutting the world and we needed a respite. And popcorn.

But an early morning quarrel between me and my wife hazed the proceedings, made the plans feel sticky at best. But I’m not anything if not dogged and warmed my car up, the four of us soon to be in our quarters of two up front, two behind. Then there’d be the 45 minute journey to Plattsburgh, long black highway salted with traffic and the occasional SUV strapped with the fragrant body of a green balsam rigid with hope. Children underneath in seatbelts craning up and wondering who this year would be allowed to place the angel.

I figured that by the time I handed our tickets to the kid in a maroon vest and lopsided nametag things would feel almost normal again, the fight just another blip in an endless signature of hurt; because as a family we believed something good was always just about to save us. We just needed to get there. And as the kid ripped the tickets at his guillotine angle and handed the clump back to me with “Enjoy the show,” we could almost believe we made it. Again.

But as the car sat chuffing outside in the cold, Lisa told the girls to just please go without her, maybe the three of us would enjoy the movie, but that she simply couldn’t, and was crying, and I came into the bedroom and found them there like that, standing between two worlds of relief and sorrow, neither daughter sure if they’d be entering or leaving something by the choice they made. And I apologized, told them I was sorry, and said maybe the movie together another day, and Lisa agreed, and the girls decided to go off on their own for the day, the best choice, no picking one parent over another. So they bundled up and hugged us and said goodbye, that they’d be back by dinner.

Then they fled, though no one would call it that.

Afterward, I understood I had no place in the house and left. I went to the apartment I had just rented a week before; until that point it still felt exotic, like something that wasn’t real or truly mine, a stand-in security blanket as we figured things out.

But as I pushed through the front door, keys jangling and kicking snow off of my shoes, I realized I had always been there, maybe years, choosing to shuttle between my life and my marriage with routine and apathy and ordinary detachment. I had been meticulous in how I built my walls.

That’s where I should start my story. At the place I didn’t understand was actually the beginning: years earlier, my life a phantom settlement no map could lead me to because I didn’t know the difference between beginnings and endings.

I took my coat off and hung it up, turned on the living room light. I blew into my hands, clicked on the heat and listened to the furnace be born. What now, I thought, and gazed out a window ensconced in white Christmas lights. The girls had helped me earlier in the week buy them. You need something cheerful, they said, and I took them to the apartment and hung them up, convinced I would never need them, that I already understood what it meant to fill your life in light.

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And your darkness is shining

My darkness is shining

—Alex Ebert

All my life I’ve lived in relative ignorance of the power of curtains. I know that sounds insane, but what I mean is that I’ve always viewed them dispassionately, with a kind of utilitarian indifference. When closed, they kept the neighbors guessing or they allowed me to turn my back on the night. When open, they spoke of abundance. But they never once served as a kind of marker.

Now, everyday I trundle downstairs and pull the curtains wide in my apartment. First the living room, where I leave the third window for last because it faces south and is usually the brightest. Then the kitchen, unfolding slats of sunlight against the succulents. It’s at that point I remember I should water them but decide against it because…succulents.

This is the day, I think.

At night, maybe the glare across Netflix is too distracting, so I close them early. But regardless of when I close them, I always do. And when the rings swoosh together like two hands in prayer I think This is the end. Not just to daylight, but to my severed thoughts, to the babbling unloosed from my car radio, to the joy in texting my daughters, to the personal missteps I recalculated as I walked the campus parking lot, to the long stare I offered the chicken and the pork chop glinting behind the meat counter, to the upstairs bathroom I occupy last with its single toothbrush. But ultimately what I’m left with is my own image, I can see myself forging a life nearly half as helpless as the day before. This is good, I tell myself. Because it is.

So I gather my days like this—a borderless calendar of openings and closings that always restart and reset my life. Maybe I can be better tomorrow, I think. And then: maybe I’m better at dreaming annihilation. And then: Maybe I can be better tomorrow.

I never knew I had so much control.

When I was little, 7 or 8, I wandered through the house nearless weightless, a ghost. There were so many rooms to explore. I don’t remember my parents in any of them. I imagined that the curtains kept the roof from blowing off. Because I was shown a toy house with no roof and was told that I should think of that house exactly as the one I lived in. The town fire chief told me this.

I was meeting with him after my father brought me to the fire station. I had been caught up in the thrill of lighting fires. It was the one thing I believed I could control. My parents both smoked so matches were easy. And I liked fires—they were predictable—they always showed you their intentions.

So the chief made me look down into the roofless playhouse and told me I would burn my own house down if I continued lighting fires. That was that. And then he showed me the rooms each family member would die in if I continued.

Right before I fall asleep in my apartment, I look at the curtains in my bedroom, the ones that cover the window facing the road. There is always a thin white strip of light slicing down the middle. It’s so white I pretend it’s moonlight because there is no mystery in streetlights. And then my eyelids do their thing, and I grow very still, and I think how when I step into my dreams they’re always undone by color, and these great parcels of light, and who am I to deny so much wanting?

I’m just the guy you’ve been dreaming of.

Wait, not exactly. But when considering all options, I’m way better than the “next in line, please?” vibe thrown at you in the gas station this morning. I mean, like…way. Because I radiate the lowkey hope of a true second-chancer—I’m fearless because I already lost.

Sitting here, hands in my pockets, (scratch that, I’m in my underwear in bed propped on a writing pillow, the scratchy kind like someone’s scootched up from behind in Temu-heavy overalls).

Don’t judge, I’m trying to save a buck. Besides, the real desk’s all the way over there, across the room. Who’s got time to commute?

Look, I’m stalling.

This first post is less a rebirth and more a reclamation. I’m taking back my time. The room’s been silent for too long; my voice is in need of a workout and I need to confront it—need you to confront it. Like, maybe not in a Full Metal Jacket kind of way, screaming about jelly donuts as we all do push-ups, but you know what I mean.

Right now, I’m currently in my apartment. Alone. Marriage was a thing I did for almost 30 years, and I was pretty good at it.

The counting part, not necessarily the marriage.

I mean, that’s not completely true. I should cut myself some slack: we raised two amazing daughters. They are on their way towards themselves, successful both in their own right. They know they are loved and that love lives inside them.

And my wife and I are not cage match rivals extolling the virtues of a well-timed bodyslam; we love each other. We’re seeing a counselor once a week. But can we BE in love with each other? That’s the great unknowable. That’s the sticking point. And after years of misunderstandings, grievances, pain and loss, we needed the split. We simply cannot define ourselves as people separate from the hurt, or even each other.

And this town ain’t exactly a haven for group sharing and processing. Maybe a thousand people live in this little hamlet in the Adirondacks and I’m shacked up next to a river in a house that’s 150 years old. A nearby waterfall serves as the evening white noise.

My basement used to be a tavern and when the loggers finished their flume work for the day they’d all saddle up at the bar downstairs, unlatch their mugs from the wall, and tap themselves a beer warm as pondwater. I can’t imagine any sterile, ice cold thirst quenchers at that point—you could still die from a careless hangnail and the Civil War was less than a decade old.

150 years later and not much has changed. But the rent is fair and I’m only 10 minutes from my family. They live next to a Lake Champlain. Some days it looks cobalt and others seasick green. This past winter, it froze over for the first time in years. On this side, a ferry disembarks every half hour for Vermont and if we wanted to, we could board in under a minute from our front door we lived so close.

They still live that close.

I want to explore again. I want to feel the pull of good communication. I want to try and understand how I got here. And where I’m going. Maybe you can too. Wanna Thelma & Louise it? Take my hand.

We can only go down from here.