I do believe you were born for this life. Somewhere walkable. A city where everything is only 10 minutes away, at maximum. We go dancing on the weekends and, if we’re bad, on Thursdays. There is no real rhyme or reason to the madness of our city lives–it’s just our beautiful life, filled with the choices we make. This is the life that you have chosen to make good. Beholden only to ourselves, and I will say it is a blessing.

It’s summer. You and I thrum with the same electricity that I hear when we are walking under lamp posts. It is hard to quiet down in the summer in our city. There is too much life to be lived.

Can I ask you a question? I ask and you roll over to look at me with a furrowed brow because I have a habit of asking large questions, late at night, when the city is awake around us.

Yeah, go ahead, you say even though you’re tired and it’s late. I am always thinking about something.

How is this life so good?

You stare at me and I cannot stop from voicing the fear of my question, Because you know what they say: all things good come to an end, right?

You frown harder, then kiss me on the cheek. And that is your quiet way of telling me it is okay. We make it good, you say. We choose to make it good.

We go to sleep after that. Cars scream past the house. The lamp posts hum. The city is alive and breathing its electric air and we sleep.

The idea of making it good is something you know to be true and I have seen you exercise that belief to the fullest extent. You are used to the ups and mainly the downs of life. Prone to a melancholic stagnancy, I have clear memories of you telling me that you’ve felt alive, for the first time in your life over these last few years. I believe it’s because you’re finally living for yourself.

We do not live on a cul de sac with cookie cutter houses. We do not pray to God before we eat our meals. We do laundry on random days of the week, because it keeps piling up–never on the weekends. I make us breakfast at 4PM, if you want it. We drink expensive coffee and you take the ritual seriously, with a gravitas I have only seen from a man seeking absolution in the form of routine. You have given up so much to be here. I praise you for it.

As a gift, I gave you a taste of hedonism. You chide me for it, but our lives are something the quiet, buttoned up suburbs could never understand: sex on a Tuesday when we’re supposed to be working; telling me you don’t like the way I make eggs and refusing to eat them; slipping into a bathtub together and dreaming of smoking a cigarette while playing cards even though we quit a while ago.

Subscribe now

Later on, in the late-summer-almost-fall, we slip into the river. We lounge together, naked, drinking wine, on large rocks under the sliver of a moon.

I almost got married, once. You say it with such gravity it is almost shocking as you stare off into the dark of the river that rushes past us. Even though I know this fact about you it strikes me for the first time that this was not just a passing idea you had–it was a future you had to choose to let go. It feels stupid to have it dawn on me the real possibility that we would never have even crossed paths. Our orbits would never have even drawn near to one another. You, stuck somewhere in Ohio. Me, somewhere, somewhere, somewhere else.

I mean, fuck, You say and swim nearer, addressing the moon. You take a sip from the bottle of wine we had nearly lost in the water and smile with teeth slightly stained from the red wine. I would have killed myself. A picket fence. A wife and kids. I would have had it all. I never would have left the suburbs. You shake your head. I would have killed myself.
You repeat it and I stare at your faint outline in the moonlight.

That is the same night I nearly broke my toe, trying to crawl out of the river to shore to get us more wine. I nearly soaked the cigarettes as I fell. I remember you asked me, How can you see anything?

I laughed. I can’t, I just feel my way through it.

That was moments before I slipped and plunged into the lukewarm water. With my head under water, I am reminded that feeling is not something that comes intuitively to everyone. There are emotions that can feel far too deep–too all consuming for some people to want to touch. Feeling your way through those things requires that you release the pressure of what is asked of you, the many failures of ways that you have failed to meet that ask, the righteous self-inflicted punishment, the self-inflicted hate….Acceptance can feel a good deal like surrender. You have to let it run over and out of you–like water. That is how you let go.

The suburbs demand more rigidity than that.

Share

I often think of you losing God at 10 years old. As you tell the story, it came about at the same point you realized Santa wasn’t real. But knew you couldn’t tell your younger brothers. The motif of you, as a sacrificial saint often comes to mind when you tell me these stories. The eldest: the martyr.

There was much more of your life wrapped up in God than I ever can understand. It was your family. Your friends. Your community in the suburbs was all wrapped up in a nice Godly bow. To feel your way through it– to maybe find your way out of it– would be to fall into something deep and seemingly bottomless. And how can a miracle of a child be the one to fall first?

And so you saw your way forward. You could have tried to survive in it and tried to be happy.

But you wouldn’t have been. You weren’t.

I have a good deal to say about choosing things for yourself. I’ve seen you do it, now, years into knowing you. And I celebrate when you are selfish. When you lie in bed all day on your laptop playing card games and drinking coffee far too late into the evening. I beg selfishness of you because, if it isn’t clear already, what you know to be selfish is truly just you having needs. And when you choose to admit your humanity, your needs, your attempts to hold the world upright fail. And then, I hold you in my arms and kiss your face. I turn off the lights and we let the glow from the streetlights illuminate our room.

I think it is a rite of passage to flounder when you realize you cannot live how you once were taught to. Especially when the way you were taught would mean denying yourself existence. How do you live your life if no one actually wants you to be yourself? The answer, well, is that you must live for yourself.

No one else will fight for your own desire to know yourself. You must respect that you will not be known, nor understood, nor loved by everyone. You must divine your values, meet your own needs, and hold them sacrosanct.

You are, in fact, the one who gets to make the choices in your life. Your autonomy is your own to have, to hold, and to ruin yourself with. That is the gift of this life.

I have watched you choose to live your life, electric and alive. Outside of the suburbs you grew up in. I have watched you quietly wrestle and fight with the world, the faith that the 10-year old heretic in you began to question. I have seen you win the war and settle into the peace of a life you have made your own.

We lay in bed and you are snoring, gently, next to me. I am writing this and I can hear the electricity coursing up and down our street. It will soon be true fall. Under the ground and in the wires, the city is breathing with you. I hope you dream of electric cities and a good life that you have made tonight.

Share

It felt like a start to move it to the living room.

I look down at my sick body
it is surrounded by flowers, laying on the carpet:
presents from the worried friends and lovers who do not know how to help
and I cannot help but avert my eyes when I see the carnage
of chrysanthemums and hydrangeas and peonies that litter

the living room floor.

My sick body is something I take with me to doctor’s appointments;
work; I cook with my body placed on my hip like a child.
I feed my body broth and good meat and soft vegetables
and hope it grows stronger.

It does not. I make another meal.
The broth slides down my throat.

My sick body is not something I want to care for,
and yet, I carry this body through.
For there are errands to be run, laundry to be washed,
dishes in the sink, and work to do.
A life to tend to.

And I am tired of seeing my sick body be sick.

I lay my sick body to rest in bed;
I pray for a miracle.
My body breathes.
I pray for convalescence.

Share

Subscribe now

I’ve been coming out of a viscerally painful place. When you are in such a place, there are times that you do not realize you are hurtling towards an emotional freefall that will feel, no matter how well you handle it, punishing.

I caught myself in the middle of a terrible, crashing fall. Sometimes, you are able to catch yourself before the start of the real fall. You are able to fall to your knees, hold yourself tight: you sob and gasp in relief that you had your wits around you enough to not make the jump. You still have to pick up the pieces but it is simply a little less destructive.

I woke up this time, in the middle of the fall. I was not aware of the jump. I woke up out over the edge of it all–having sunk so deep into self hate and low self worth that I had already begun to do damage to the relationships that I hold true and dear. Waking up over that edge–in the middle of the fall–requires you to feel the plummet; and, requires you to ready yourself for the feeling of the crash landing you’re about to have.

Maybe that’s why I ended up sleeping for over 24 hours this weekend. I finally stopped pushing off the crashing end to the fall.

I pushed through the work day. I pushed through a dinner party. I pushed through the fights that I started with my fiancé. I pushed through a therapy session that left me so devastated that I had to take a nap afterwards. I pushed and pushed and pushed until I collapsed for over 24 hours.

I only woke up to eat and watch one episode of TV: It didn’t scare me in the way I think it should have. Maybe it would have if I had not been in such a cataclysmic fall.

I am uncomfortable talking about the depths of self hatred that I hit during this time. But of course I am. I fell a little too hard for this to have been casual. I think it would maybe be understatement to say that I have spent the last 3 months in a deep depression. I do think it was worse than that.

My self worth disappeared to a large extent. Social anxiety that I rarely sit in reared its head in a way that was reminiscent of when I was an 18 year old. (Tragic and overwhelming, to say the least.) I stopped going out beyond the necessities. I scared my fiancé by coming home from work every day and going straight to bed at 6PM for two weeks. I blamed it on getting the flu–which I did. (It was a flu that lingered.) But there is a difference between convalescent and destructive sleep.

For 3 months I destroyed myself with sleep. Because there was no joy in being in my head. No joy to be found in my body. No joy to be found in company or alone. I almost feel the need to apologize for laying it that bare. However, that is the truth.

Ben (the aforementioned fiancé) and I fought and cried over my casual cruelty. Ben and I cried over the sadness that had crept into our every moment. Ben begged for the joyful person I am to return. I cried because I could not find that person in me. I cried because I could not find my way back to the way I was so casually before. I cried because I missed that version of me as well.

I am grateful my depression does not weigh like this for extended periods of time. It is often in the winter that I lose sight of who I know myself to be. In so many ways I am lucky. I hit the ground with such a resounding smack that I woke up from whatever was impacting me so deeply. Afterwards–I slept for a total of 27 hours (with some movement here and there: I ate. I watched an episode of a new TV show. I took a shower.) and when I woke up, I felt as if I had come back to. As I said earlier in this essay, there is a difference between convalescent sleep and destructive sleep. I am prone to both. Which makes them hard to differentiate. However I have come back to. And it is March. The sun is shining and in spite of the cold I feel alive again.

Subscribe now

Some people snored softly as the van careened through the streets, making sharp turns and fishtailing on the icy roads. I spoke quietly to the young man next to me, cracking jokes about the way the van squealed and nearly spun out on the ice and how we would be here for the next 5 months and how I was so excited: I was, in truth, in over my head. I was a queer, young woman, who had decided to travel for 5 months to Russia to learn the language. For my whole life, I was known to be a chronically lonely person, unable to set deep roots and connect with ease to strangers. So I had done the logical thing and I uprooted to Saint Petersburg, Russia. There was this buzzing in my chest that had been consuming me for years. I thought maybe if I left, it would quiet down.

There I was, flying past the blue-ish-green and gold facing of the Hermitage Museum and all the signs were unfamiliar to me. The buildings here exuded a fierce coldness as they stood fast, petulant against the elements. As the conversation simmered away, I stared out the window and took in the snow–ugly and gray and piled high against the sides of the road. The expansive sheets of white I had expected were nowhere to be found.

Growing up in the American south had not afforded me much experience with snow on this level. Nor had I ever experienced cold to this degree. The furthest North I’d ever been was, at that point in my life, Virginia. As we exited the van I pulled my jacket tightly around me and realized that exhaustion felt like cold.

Our group wrestled our suitcases that held all of our lives for the next 5 months through a few feet of snow. The sidewalks weren’t shoveled and when walking beneath buildings, a native from the city pointed up and yelled about icicles. I didn’t know the word in Russian, so I just stared up.

I would later find out that 18 people a year were killed by falling icicles in Saint Petersburg. It was simply something to watch out for.

We spent the next day at an orientation, training us on cultural differences and taboos in Russian culture. We, as women, were encouraged to not sit on the floor, as it would allow spirits into the womb. (And it was dirty.) We were told to not whistle indoors, as it was incredibly bad luck and would certainly bring misfortune to the house. We were politely reminded that it is impolite to step over another person, as it will prevent them from growing. When speaking about exams, it is best practice to follow a sort of call and response: one person will say, “ни пуха ни пера!” (neither further, nor feather), to which the person taking the exam must exclaim, “К чёрту” (to the devil).

We nodded, took notes. Reenacted scenarios of cultural misunderstanding. And then we were all given a card with a name scrawled across it in Russian cursive. It was the name of the family I would be living with for the next 5 months. The reality of my situation began to set in. From there, we were herded into the lobby of the hotel with our bags in hand and then it was a game. Russians from across Saint Petersburg filed in and out of the rotating door, picking up their bleary eyed American student and then promptly leaving, luggage in tow.

I was one of the last to be picked up, which was rather unnerving, however I was completely, mindlessly afraid when I found out who my host mother–or grandmother was to be. She showed up in a fur coat that went down to her ankles–which to be honest was not hard as she was maybe 5’ with her kitten heeled boots on. She wore a face of makeup with a dark orangey lipstick and brown eyeliner and she hid her short hair beneath a small hat that perched on her head to keep the snow out of her hair. It was pitched dark by 4PM.

She held onto my arm tightly as we crossed three of the hundreds of bridges in Saint Petersburg to move from the hotel to her apartment. She lived on the Fontanka, one of the rivers that flows through Saint Petersburg. She told me her address 5 times before I could hear all the words, then letters to spell the words. Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki. Upon the Fontanka’s river edge. Suddenly I was struck with the fact that I’d never actually had to speak Russian to function in society. Everything I knew was hypothetical up until this point. Everywhere I’d visited in the past the lingua franca was expected to be English. But not here.

I would come to find out that she spoke no English beyond a few food words. And that she was in every sense a Russian grandmother: She would overfeed me, scold me for not eating enough, and then scold me for gaining weight.

I went to class with Americans and Russians. We chatted quietly in the halls. I did not make friends easily. I would go out to drink with the Americans and stare longingly at Russian women who moved with such elegance across the snow and ice. I felt like a true caricature of a woman in comparison. The way those women style their hair; wore their clothes; spoke quietly and with ease with one another. I was lonely. I longed for something I had never known even in America.

The drive to find a companion in the cold drove me to explore the gay bars in the city. I decided I would try to go to one– my colleagues beat me there; saw it raided by the Russian police and watched the place get shut down the same night. That was one of the moments it dawned on me that I would not be entirely safe in this country. Not in a way I could find understandable.

Share

Do not mistake me for being naive; I grew up in a small town where Georgia and Alabama meet Tennessee as a queer child. I was lonely often, but I knew what loneliness felt like in the south. It was that hot, boiling feeling that churned around in the pit of your stomach. It buzzed in my throat–ready to come out. It searched loudly for something lasting during those long, hot days in Tennessee. It grew up with me. The buzz was loud when I first left Tennessee and the crescendo only grew louder as I stayed in Virginia.

But here, in Saint Petersburg, Russia the buzz was more like an empty hole. I did not see people like me: queer people could not be visible for their own sakes. Or if they were, they just looked like punks–and they were not really safe either. The buzz was louder here. I did not see women with whom I could share what coiled deep inside me. The loneliness was not hot here–it was wet and cold and remained high in my throat. Like it wanted to crawl out of me if given the chance.

As any good 21 year old on a trip abroad, I found myself on a dating app. I was looking for women. I found mostly bots and manicured photos of women looking for friends or women they could have sex with with their boyfriends. It took a few weeks of going to class, going to a cafe to finish my work, getting on the apps, and then going to bed before I was presented with a woman who spoke some English to pair with my some Russian. We had a few conversions and eventually we decided, maybe stupidly, that we would go on a date.

Her name was Ronnie. And within a few minutes of meeting me she told me she would never be out to her family. Ever. She spoke wonderful English and our date concluded with the two of us standing on the balcony of the largest mall in the city and staring across the main drag, Nevsky prospect. It was windy and frigid and the snow was piled up in the street. The snow swallowed all of the noise between us. She looked forward and asked again, how it felt to be queer and alive and talking about it to others.

I did a bad job explaining it.

I felt beyond myself when she asked me what it felt like to be able to be out. How did it feel to be out in America? It wasn’t bad, I told her. I couldn’t fathom what her life was like. I couldn’t fathom what it would be like to actually live in this country. How self centered and American of me to come here, alive and queer, and expect it to be comfortable. How self centered of me to try to let this loneliness crawl out of me.

Our date did not last longer beyond that. I do not remember if we tried to secret ourselves away into a corner to kiss each other goodbye–I don’t think it matters in this story. Ronnie and I have not spoken since. I don’t know if it was just a bad date or if it was too real and close for comfort with someone who could not fathom her lived experience. Someone who would never understand what her life would be like if she chose to release the buzzing scream in her chest.

I will say, after leaving and returning to America, I cannot claim a true and queer Russian experience. I was not invited in. And of course I was not. I was loud, brash, and stupid in my confidence of being queer, situated in an American context. I was used to a place where your bigotry did not always mean violence. Maybe it would just be a harrowing story that I would later retell as a joke. I do not think I ever felt the lived reality of queers before me. I do not know if I could feel the gravity of how queer Russians feel.

While I was not free to be loudly myself in Russia, I was queer and alive in that city. I knew I felt deviant. Holding my secret close did not suffocate me–it actualized me in a way that many American queers would struggle to understand: I needed to know, for myself, who I was. I needed to keep that part of me safe.

Subscribe now

Something about the idea that I am inherently hard to live with left me feeling like I was also inherently a problem child. A bad roommate–housemate–life partner. Whatever. I felt like I was bad. It felt bad to live with anyone.

I always dreaded going on a trip with anyone. I dreaded seeing my long distance boyfriends and girlfriends. I simply hated to go because I knew I was difficult to be around for extended periods of time. I can become exhausting. I know that now; I can hold that now. 

I’ve learned a lot of these lessons the hard way: spontaneous break ups on trips–break ups when I come to stay for over a week–breakups when we talk about moving in. And listen, I know I have been the problem here. In the past, I couldn’t hold myself accountable for my moods. I couldn’t hear that I was becoming exhausting to be around! I couldn’t hear it: all I could feel was the pain of not being wanted around. It was a victim mindset that I inhabited.

A mindset where I was too much for everyone and no one could hold me or love me correctly or support me. Maybe I was too much. Maybe the raging hormonal disorder; the wicked eating disorder; the extreme levels of self hate; the suffering I was putting myself through was too much for anyone to bear. And I can now accept that to be the truth. It obviously doesn’t mean that I don’t deserve love–but that giving me the love that I needed to be able to feel it was almost impossible. The empty, loveless pit in my chest was too deep for someone outside of me to fill up. I had to do the hard work for once. 

When I met my boyfriend it was strange–I had just come out of a 2 year stint of centering and only dating women. I was not sure if I was ready to give myself back to a man. And yet, there was something so genuine about him. Something so sincere I couldn’t help but let him into my heart. I was still that loveless person, in many ways. But the desire to lean out of suffering and into love was most definitely there. I did not want to be a shell of myself. I wanted to feel human. I wanted to feel the love that was all around me.

His name is Ben. And it has now been three years. The bottomless, loveless pit has ebbed away. And we live together.

I have found that with time I have softened into love. We sit on the porch on slow mornings and share two cups of coffee. He puts his feet in my lap and we laugh as I rub his legs. We sit on the porch into the late night and discuss our futures and the way that we never expected life to come out this well. We talk about our wedding on the latest of late nights. We hold hands and we cry together at the thought of doing this forever. I do not know what forever looks like–I have never had it modeled for me. But I am willing to try. 

I cannot claim to be good at this–

but that is something we both know. 

I tend to be on edge, flighty, a mess.

But that is something we both know–

but in the mornings I wake up and choose this. 

I choose a life that I have never had before,

one that can live inside of a house without fear;

one that sits quietly at peace;

one that is at ease.

Thank you for returning me to myself–even if this life is not familiar.

I feel that this is how I am supposed to be. 

And Ben is a good man. We live in this home together: the one we built, together. We lay in our bed and I hold your back and trace your freckles. I am breathless seeing you walk in the door from work. I wait for you on the porch when I make it home before you. He sweeps me up with his calm wind of love—it is consistent. It is peaceful.

I will marry you in October. Whenever the leaves begin to change and the weather grows heavy with some gloom. I know how kind the summer is to you–I want to be as kind. I want beautiful memories in the late fall, when it becomes hard.  I will start my vows by telling you that I have never met a man like you. You are a good man. 

1. Our dryer catches on fire. My boyfriend and I realize we have never been in a situation that scary. Ben drags the dryer into the dining room, away from the walls. 30 firefighters arrive and soak our house with water. 

2. My friend tries to kill herself. She is tall, taller than me, and I carry her down the stairs of her house and tuck her into our guest bedroom. I force her to take a sleeping pill. I take her to the hospital the next day.

3. The remnants of the fire linger in the house–the smell of smoke. A burn on the floor from the molten dryer. Eventually they take all of our furniture and we are left with an empty downstairs.

4. I sing in front of 250 and I cannot hear my band behind me. The lights are so bright and I am in chainmail. It is a joy. It is a terror. My boyfriend and I come home to our empty house at 2AM and we stare at each other.

5. The night of the US election, my boyfriend, a friend, and my cousin sit in our living room and watch the future unfold before us in horror. I dragged a couch downstairs and put art on the wall to feel like we actually have a home. The same night, my sister calls me and tells me she might have cancer again.

6. I cry every night during the first half of November. I don’t know if that really needs explanation. My friend asks me if I’m really okay. I cry more. I feel like everything I know is upside down. 

7. I fly to Oregon to see my sister. She does not have leukemia, but then that means there are no answers. She is simply sick with something. 

8. I come home and we reassemble our house. Furniture returned–new floors–no smell of smoke. I cry in my boyfriend’s arms in relief. We have a home again.

9. I begin to write again. For the hundredth time. 

10. I am beginning to feel alive again. It is cold and the brisk air wakes me up. I am returning to myself.

Subscribe now

I do not know how to hold my older sister. She confounds me. We are not able to speak in dulcet tones, nor can we croon over one another’s accomplishments, nor can we reach out a hand of support to one another with ease. Our dynamic is unpleasant and visceral, filled with snapping jaws and glinting teeth. But I swallow it all. I must do better this time.

When my sister had her first encounter with cancer, I was 17: A junior in high school. I did not know what cancer meant. Not the way my mother–who had lost her mother at 21 to the disease–knew. I did not know the destruction that would come and I could not fathom what it would do to my sister. 

I could be selfish and tell you about my time living alone; sometimes with my grandparents–but with time spent often alone. But I do not find that that story helps anything. 

My sister was 21 when she developed AML, a form of leukemia that typically kills at an incredible speed. They told my mother that she had a 13% chance of survival and my mother swallowed herself. She was as strong as she could be, but she knew she was going to have to watch her daughter die. But in the typical fashion of my sister, she shocked us all and survived. Not that it was an easy transition from the world of the dying into that of the living. But she has been trying.

Subscribe now

It has been 10 years. My sister went for a blood test in April because she’d been feeling fluish. Her white blood cell count was 12.9. Anything above 10 is bad. She did not tell the family. It is now November and she has not sought out treatment. And so now the family is running around with fear in our eyes and panic on our breaths.

I realize, as I board this plane to Oregon, that I am suddenly the big sister. It is a role I have sat in for 9 years, despite being 6 years younger. I speak to my mom about it in hushed tones over the holidays. I do not understand her and no one can tell me what has happened. 

If I could take my sister by the hand–as if we were children once again–I would. But that was not something we did. And so I am learning it for the first time, with what feels like little time left on the timer. It is the day before we go and do bloodwork. Which means it is the day before I stand before my sister as a pillar of support and family. I have never done this for my sister before. I do not know if I know how to do this well. I have always been a sheepish wolf, smiling at sheepish wolf at the dinner table. Wide smiles, rolling eyes–I do not know how to do this well. 

I am rushing through this story because there is too much to hold. 

I realize, sitting on this plane to Oregon, that there is no one from my family who would show up for me in this way. My sister would try, however, she would collapse from the weight of trying to carry me. It is my mother and I with strong backs. My mother and I will carry the weight of this family forward. I must shoulder onward. Because there is no other way forward. But my mother has made it clear that she will not carry me anymore. I must not be the one to collapse. I must shoulder forward.

I sit in silence on the plane. I do not know what to do with all this grief. Grief and grief and grief consumes me. And so I sit on a plane to Oregon. With no idea how to hold this or where to put it. But I will shoulder forward. 

When I arrive in Oregon my sister and I sit under a juniper tree and I realize it is a smell I have never smelled before. It is pungent and almost has a layer of ammonia beneath all the green. It is strange. We smoke a cigarette and sit staring out across the cold night. We talk briefly and it is strange. I tell her I do not know who she is. She tells me she doesn't know who I am either. And that is the truth—that is the place where we sit, together. Unknowing of the person beside us. 

I sleep soundly through the night on the couch and dream of all the strangers that might inhabit her life that I’ve never met nor heard of. I do not have a grasp of my sister’s life out here on this western coast. I do not know how to connect to her; but I suppose that is why I am here and what I am meant to do. I wake up and feel rested for the first time in a long time. It is silent out here and strange. Stranger than I ever could have imagined. I feel like a creature here. 

We try to make breakfast but I cannot eat. I am hungry but I do not wish to eat anything. It’s as if I could subside on thoughts alone and I am drowning in them. But my sister is more upright than I’ve ever seen her. It is a relieving sight. 

We sit under the Juniper tree again, later in the day before the appointment. She tells me she is sorry for not being there for my health struggles. I tell her I do not expect it from our family. She tells me she wants to change it. I sigh, nod, and smoke my cigarette. We push onward into conversation. I am maybe too incising. I am maybe not kind in the way I should be. I do not know how to do that for her. And maybe that is cruel.

Share

The appointment comes. And the appointment goes. It is not leukemia. I do not know where to put my hands or how to hold my mouth. 

Please do not misunderstand my emotions–I came ready to upend my life. I came ready to save my sister. And suddenly, I simply deflate. I am left with all the stress that I’ve been feeling and all of the pain and angst of my daily life. Life is not over, suddenly. My sister is not going to die, suddenly. Everything is suddenly fine and I feel like throwing up. 

And amidst all of it; I am so angry. I am angry that the family must come running every time my sister gets a cold or the flu or has a breakdown. I was never once afforded that luxury. The only time my mother came to visit me during my first year of college was when I attempted to drown myself in the lake on campus.

And maybe that is the curse of trying to save someone: You will never do it well enough. 

My sister and I sit under the juniper tree once more; this time with drinks in hand. I hold my chin at an angle and look across the yard she shares. I tell her that I have not had someone come to a doctor’s appointment with me since I was 16 years old. I do not exaggerate. 

Later on into the evening, my mother reminds me to hold anger in one hand and love in the other. My mother cries on the phone when I tell her I do not need her help, because it has never been there to rely on. The truth lashes out at me and I cry to my mother and tell her I do not resent her for it, I simply cannot be let down again.

I do not know where to put my hands. So we drink and we go dancing and I drink until all I can feel is the music around me. I drink until I can put it down. I drink and drink. 

I throw up three times the next morning. Once with my first sip of water. Once with my first sip of coffee. Then next when I take my first bite of breakfast. I have never been that hungover in my life. It felt like I was going to die for the first few hours of the morning.

The next time we fight it is the day after the appointment and it is because I went to bed without saying goodnight and that we did not eat dinner together. She cries at me and I want to pull my hair out. When I take up emotional space, she wilts. When I take space, she feels that she is being punished. It makes me a wild thing.

Coyote, my sister. We sit under the juniper tree and glance over at one another and explain the pain of our lives together. She does not wish to hear what I have to say about my pain. Coyote, my sister. I wish we could live in this world together. 

Subscribe now

You woke up, my love.
I hold your face in my hands.
Welcome back, my love.

Fishing Under the Moon

I don’t have sex dreams anymore. Instead, on this new antipsychotic medication, I dream of fish. All kinds of fish. And I tell you about my dreams in which I am a fisherman. The dreams in which I am a fish. The dreams in which I am the ocean. The closest thing I’ve had to a sex dream was two weeks ago when I dreamed I had your penis. IT was a part of me and in this dream, it had always been mine. In my dream, I was proud of it. Maybe the fish mean something. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the depths of our connection. Maybe it’s possessive. Either way, I will be celibate in my dreams tonight. I’ll dream of fish. And you. 

Sleep Drunk 

You are in my bed sleeping

and I am pressed up against your back

and your phone is still playing a video

and I do not care about anything else in the world.

You are in my bed, sleeping

after we have had sex and we are still covered in sweat

and I am trying not to cry, pressed against your back

because this is never something I”ve been good at.

I do not know when it happened,

maybe one night when you were in my bed, sleeping

you managed to slide past my defenses.

And now I am pressed against your back

and I dread the morning when you will leave

and for a moment I do not care about anything else in the world.  

We’ve met before,

in a dream, maybe?

I tend to wander. 

My love for my sister tastes like nettles and I do not know where to put it;
May it continue.

My sister and I fight over small things like the way I make eggs and how I take my coffee;
May it continue.

My sister and I grew up years apart and far away;
May there be time.

My sister and I fight because we are too alike: born and grown in the same hard times;
May there it continue.

My sister and I have spent our time outdoors, together, washed over in green;
May it continue. 

My sister and I make breakfast together and talk over coffee, it does not make it easy;
May it continue.

My sister and I laugh and hold hands together and cry over our little lives;
May it continue.

My sister tries to hold me and I slip through her fingers, changing like water;
May there be time.

I will carry her as long as my legs will hold me up;
Nothing is promised and the time we have together is so fleeting;
I push forward. To hold myself better. To be kinder.
In hopes it may continue.

I am turning twenty-six in two weeks. Which, first and foremost, is an accomplishment. When I was twenty, I would boldly tell the world that there wasn’t a world in which I would make it to twenty-five. Let alone twenty-six. I look back with chagrin; you have to be careful about what you speak into the world. Dying young is one of those things you shouldn’t laugh about with ease. Especially when the life you’ve lived up to that point has been a ball of mess, and angst, and self-induced distress.

As a child, I was messy. I was a messy kid who was not taught how to clean up a single bit of the mess I made. That is not to say I was not punished for the mess, I simply was not taught to clean. And so you can imagine what my life looked like for a very long time; a mess. 

I didn’t realize that clutter and mess, whether it’s internal or literal, attracts more of the same. That was a hard lesson for me, in earnest I promise I could not understand what brought all of the mess to me. At twenty-six I can see that it was me, in the pig pen, wallowing in the mess and muck of my life, bringing all of the disaster to myself.

But we have all been stupid and twenty before. Or if you have not, you will be. And the mess of your early twenties is truly beautiful. It’s earth shattering. It’s painful. It’s just messy. 

I think another thing with my mess is that I would not permit others to have fraught and messy lives of their own. Which, in reflection, is something related to being afraid of being hurt by someone. A fear of letting someone–even myself–be vulnerable enough to show their mess controlled me. But I realize, in retrospect, that I wasn’t ever fooling anyone. I was simply a mess.

I do feel like an aspect of all of this is nature versus nurture. My childhood home was expansive in the way that old homes in Tennessee can be. There were two garages. Each garage was piled full of trash and my great-grandmother’s furniture and wedding china and newspapers from important dates and every sports item you could imagine and maybe every garden tool known to man. It was exhausting to think about and it was even more exhausting to try to clean. 

Subscribe now

For most of my life, we never thought about cleaning out those garages. The daily routine was avoidance. And I think, if given the chance, we would continue to avoid those full garages. However, my parents’ divorce brought the mess crashing down around us. And oh, it was a messy divorce. Messy in every sense is how life was in my family. 

I remember the first time I was required to declutter, clean, and de-messify a space was in the wake of my father moving in with his soon to be wife. My mom cried every day. I would lay in bed with her. She would cry. She would tell me we needed to move. She would tell me we needed to clean the house.

Eventually the time came to move. Which meant cleaning the garages. My mother was so angry at that moment that, after a few days of trying to clean out the house, she put up a fire sale sign. We sold away most of the sentimental things my mother had left from her grandmother and mother. She cried as she cleaned. Cleaning up a mess on this scale would take a lifetime. But my mom tried to make it look easy. 

We moved into a small house. It wasn’t a bad house, but the time I spent living there was fraught. I remember my mom would try to help me clean and I would squirm and yell and cry about the mess that I didn’t want her to see. She had enough mess to clean up. I hid the clothes and the clutter in my closet and under my bed. I pushed it far away so it wouldn’t be seen.

I cannot pin down the moment that things began to slow down enough to allow me to survey the mess I had made of my life. Maybe it was when I ran a triathlon on a whim. I was given a lot of time to come to grips with the fact that sometimes I was exhausted by myself. That’s a strange way of putting it, but what I mean is that I could realize that I was moving too fast–doing too much, too quickly and with an air of mess around me. 

As I finished the triathlon and eventually met the person who would become my dear life partner, I looked around at what I had to show for twenty-two years on this planet. And it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t too bad. It just showed me that I hadn’t ever handled anything with too much care, especially myself. But I could not hold myself critically without crumbling. 

My partner was the first person who came in, looked around, and laughed at the state of my life. He asked me if I’d ever learned how to clean anything. And for that I am grateful. Because to be truthful, no one had ever taught me how to clean. 

So he taught me how to (literally sweep and clean and do the dishes in my one-bedroom) and helped me become accustomed to peace and the lightness that comes with less clutter. I felt freer. But I didn’t know how to replicate it. 

I have never been one for apologies or admitting I can do something wrong or that my mess spreads around me. Not because of an ego, but because whenever I’ve been forced to admit fault, everything around me crumbles. 

In reflection, I have always been a reactive, defensive person. I guess I get it from my father. 

I have taken the time to learn how to breathe through a fight–and how to have one in the first place. I rarely have known a space where there is enough love for a fight. I will say, it’s easier when your mess isn’t strewn across the floor. There’s more room to breathe. 

That is not to say that someone can come in and pick up all your pieces and put you back together. No one can take away the mess. But someone can stand in the room while you put things away. They can sit on your bed while you unpack the drawers stuffed full of dirty laundry. They can watch you scrub the windows and let some light in. It’s about support. It’s about teaching you how to make the to-do list, then letting you clean the house. 

The mess will come back. There will always be more dishes to clean and more laundry to wash. It will sometimes pile up. But I am grateful that I have figured out how to keep the mess to myself and not let it spill out across every surface. 

I am grateful, really. I am. 

My father called me pumpkin seed for most of my childhood. When I was in college, he would leave me voicemails, saying, “hi pumpkinseed, it’s your dadd-i-o!  Please give me a call back!” He does not answer my calls anymore. 

My father once got very close to getting everything he ever wanted. Big man, a loved man, a family man. What is a more fatherly act than sacrificing your future for the thought of this moment? My father does not answer my calls anymore. 

My father is getting older, day by day and minute by minute

. What do you do when you’re the last child to speak to your father? How do you look upon a banished man, and not think to tell him his exile is self induced. My father does not call me back.

“Are you stonewalling me, kid?” My father barks at me like a dog behind a chain link fence. I know he loves me but I have always been scared of dogs. My father turns off his phone.

Once, I cut my fathers hair. I ache to sit with him and tell the boy in him it can still be okay. He does not have to be a young man to be happy. I want to be my father’s child. I want to cut my father’s hair, to turn on his phone, and have him answer the phone when I call. 

that I remember everything about you

usually in the spring because that was our season

I sit and think of you and me and who we were together.

My mind is a cup overflowing with memories 

with nowhere to go and no way to be told.

So I speak to myself and my mother and to the bedrock;

I tell the stones and the groundwater and the geese 

about what we had and who we were together

before everything everything everything.

In some ways it feels like just the way things happen,

everything has its season and then 

it begins to wither, die, and rot away.

Not every friendship will last a lifetime.

And in some ways, it was the death of part of me.

I try not to stay bitter I try to hold your memory

well and confounding inside of me.

If I let it sit for too long it eats at me.

Sometimes, a season can feel like years.

Sometimes, a season’s ending isn’t clear.

Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes,

the fact that it’s over doesn’t make it easier.

So I tell the stones and the river and the geese 

about you and me and who we used to be.

Because there was a time when it was good.

Before our season withered away.

I am wearing the same outfit 

that I wore in 2019 in Saint Petersburg, Russia

and maybe the pants were a different fit

but I’m wearing my grandfather’s red wool sweater

(it is the one that he wore in a photo

with my now dead grandmother 

dated back to 1972)

and the black turtleneck that my mom bought

from her favorite brand as a send off

and a pair of doc marten boots that I would learn

do not help you in snow and ice

and a scarf around my head 

to keep the cold far away.

In 2019, I walked across a red bridge 

and hurried by a storefront that was owned by my great-

great-great uncle who sold jewelry

in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

My grandfather showed me a picture

of the shop and the bridge and the snow

from 1895 and I am forced to pause:

Sometimes, it is always the same

even years later.

Can I admit something terrible about myself? I ask and you roll over to look at me with a furrowed brow because I say things that aren’t particularly kind or flattering about myself regularly; but there’s a gravity in this moment.

Yeah, go ahead, you say even though you’re tired and it’s late and I am always thinking about something (terrible). 

I don’t know how I knew people before you. I don’t think I cared to try to know and I don’t think I had the capability to do anything other than hate myself and find solace in the fact that maybe someone else could love a part of me that I truly could love in myself. 

You stare at me and I cannot stop, Because you know what they say, that you can only love someone as much as you love yourself. But what if the only lens you have to know someone is hatred? How can you expect a person to be able to learn anything of substance about someone when their way of knowing is to hate something? 

You frown harder then kiss me on the check. And that is your way of telling me it is okay. It is okay because somewhere along in all the changing moments the hatred became less overwhelming. The noise of all of the anger, all of the fear, all of that stuff that was deep down. 

I think maybe you think too much, and maybe you’re a little too hard on the person you used to be, you say. Let’s go to bed, you say.

I know that sentiment is common sense. No one wants to be sick, I’d assume. Or maybe you do, but only for a day. I don’t know if a true sick day is actually refreshing, if I’m being truthful. 

I have been sick for nearly a year. And I do not want to be sick anymore. 

The strangest thing about all of my mysterious illnesses that are now compounding is that they did not arise overnight. I can pinpoint moments of, “oh, I was getting sick there”. But I do not have a clear picture of when everything started. It comes in waves, the feeling of deja vu when I recall a particularly persistent symptom. 

Even if I had known what it was at the time, I don’t know how much I would have talked about it. I think I would have been embarrassed. Like I am now. 

Subscribe now

I remember something being wrong in 2018. I was always so tired. My pee smelled distinctly like vitamins and salt. I sweated through my clothes, through my sheets, in the cold. I couldn’t think and I don’t mean brain fog, I mean every time I tried to organize a thought it came out as word salad. I was scared I had schizophrenia or something because one time I heard my friend shout my name at me and when I snapped my head around to look at him to ask him, ‘what the fuck?’ he looked back at me concerned. He stated loudly, “I didn’t say anything”.

I was scared. Because my body was shutting down and I could feel that it was slowly dying but I didn’t have the words for it. There’s a real fear that inhabits your body when it knows it’s not working right. The best I can do to describe it to you is this feeling of, oh my god, oh shit, what is that? What is that? I am scared. But it’s not your brain; It’s your body telling you that. 

I ended up on the ground at the gym after teaching a small workout class. And by on the ground I mean I was doing sprints across a gym classroom and suddenly I was on my knees and suddenly I was on my back looking up at the ceiling. Everything tunneled and I was very far away from myself. I don’t know if I was looking up at the ceiling or down at myself.

They called the EMTs and I was carted to an ambulance where they ran multiple EKGs. They couldn’t tell me what was wrong. My heart was fine. 

A few weeks later, I got the stomach flu and I had to be carried from the toilet to my bed by my Resident Assistant. My friend eventually took me to the ER. They ran some tests and told me I had incredibly low sodium levels. That was when I learned that the symptoms of hyponatremia (low sodium) are dizziness, confusion, sweating, seizures, coma, death. In that order. 

We figured out it was caused by the medication I was taking for what we then thought was bipolar II. I went off it and I thought that I would be well again. And you know, for a while I was. 

But I’m a rough and tumble kind of kid. I used to push and push and push my body. And I used to never get tired. I pushed through three (or four, maybe?) concussions. I pushed through a nearly dislocated knee. I pushed through everything until I couldn’t keep up with myself. 

I remember things shifted in March of 2023, for the worse. I went to Europe and I meant to try to visit and partake in the space as something more than a tourist. However, my body has and proves to be fleeting. 

October of last year was my body’s rock bottom. There was no amount of pushing that could be done, at that point.

I found myself working from the floor of my office job, laying down. Because sitting was so exhausting that I had to be fully laying down with my laptop in front of me. And I didn’t take days from home, because I didn’t want to admit how sick I was. (And if I was home I was ultimately sleeping.) 

I had a conversation with my partner in the beginning of October and he told me it was too much for him–and me. Not in the sense that he couldn’t handle it, but that no one could. I couldn’t just suddenly be this sick and not be able to get better. (This had been going on since March and our lives were drastically different from where we started.) 

I speak of sickness with a vagueness that is on purpose. It felt like I was coming down with something for months. But not in the way that your throat hurts right before you get strep throat. No, it was the tiredness that inhabits every inch of your body. It was the feeling that I simply could not walk a single more step, five blocks away from my destination. It’s that deep, bone-tired feeling that draws you into bed to sleep for 15 hours. And beyond that incredible fatigue, it was dizziness and dry mouth and confusion. Again. 

I can speak to loss in an ephemeral sense. Loss of physicality, but no loss of the drive to push. Imagine taking a dog with a high prey drive and a need to run and then you take away its legs. The dog still dreams of running. But it can’t.

Is that trite to say? I don’t know. I know I can’t drink anymore without that sinking feeling from my body that I might die. I know I can’t smoke. Not without my body going frigid and being able to feel that my blood isn’t circulating correctly. I can’t run–scratch that, more importantly I can’t stand. Not for very long, at least. Walking is tiring. I miss walking with my friends.

I would say I’m like that dog without its legs, but sometimes I worry I’m more stupid. I don’t want to be sick anymore. I don’t want to use any kind of aides to make my life easier. I just don’t want to be sick anymore.

So I’m writing this down as a prayer to a better self of mine: please, take care. I have a life to live, even if it’s not what I imagined it would be at 20.

Read more

Something about the overhead lights just makes me bitchy

bitchy bitchy bitchy to the point that I have to cry

in the frozen food section
because when I’m a bitch,
I want to cry about it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever escape hot tears

in the cold of the freezer aisle 

without wanting to go completely postal 

because I know every other bitch in the grocery store

thinks I’m insane as I cry 

in front of microwavable dinners.

I’m the biggest bitch you’ve ever met in the check out lane

because I don’t want to be there, 

inconveniencing this poor cashier 

with my assortment of strange fruits 

and tampons and meats and laundry detergent 

and whatever else I had to buy on my
once a month, this-bitch-has-to-the-grocery store-run. 

I hate being a bitch in the grocery store 

but there’s no amount breathing exercises 

or meditations I could do to unwind whatever it is

that makes me such a grocery store bitch

maybe it’s just my state of being when 

it’s cold and it’s dark and I can feel god

watching me through all of those fluorescent lights. 

I know it’s navel gazing to write this. I know it’s not helpful to compare the body I lived in when I was in my early 20’s until now. But my day to day is not something I ever could have imagined at 21. You could not have told that girl that I would not be able to keep up with myself at 25; That I would not be able to workout; That my hands would ache and ache and ache after a glass of wine and a cigarette. 

Looking back, perhaps this pain was there. Perhaps I simply didn’t have words for it. Maybe chronic doesn’t also mean it appeared overnight. So maybe, it was there but so much less intense. But it was dull enough that I could push through it. 

I used to make jokes that both my shoulders could dislocate on command. I thought it was funny. Now they slip around in their sockets while I sleep. My fingers in their joints stretch and stretch while I hold my phone. It hurts. I don’t know if I knew pain when I was 21. 

It was stupid to look back. The trends of posting young photos of yourself on the internet are inherent to the nostalgia that consumes the internet. Digging into a scabbed wound just to farm some content–to stare back wistfully and tell yourself that it was better then.

Subscribe now

I was miserable in my early 20’s. I’ve actually come such a long way that that young woman I saw from 2019 is unrecognizable; my sister, maybe. Her personality rarely emerges in my day to day life, save for silly stories of bad behavior that my friends scoff loudly about to me later. You could not pay me to relive those years.

I want to be clear, I think there is something sinister about idolizing our childhood bodies. We put them in the closet to try to forget about them–to try to tell ourselves that our most miserable self was not our best self. That the self people told us was our prettiest does not show us a way forward. If anything, it shows me a way back to a living-death–a way back to the most miserable experience of my life.

I do not miss when I was afraid of food. I do not miss being afraid to drink my calories. I do not miss binging. I do not miss the anxiety of knowing I wanted to throw up what I’d just eaten. I do not miss the fervor with which I worked out to try to save myself from gaining weight. You could not pay me to relive it.

I remember a truly harrowing therapy session where I divulged to my therapist that I truly believed people only kept me around because I was beautiful. And if I gained weight, I would be truly unlikeable. I now understand that I was speaking through all the hate I felt towards myself. The only emotion I felt for years and years was hatred. I found at a certain point in my mid-twenties that I did not know how to have fun. Hatred became a malaise that stunted everything I did. I could never be good enough for myself. 

You could not pay me to relive that period of my life. I repeat that notion because I want to be so clear: I worked so hard to leave that behind. And if that means that a stupid photograph from when I was 21 sets me back for the morning, I am grateful. It is just the morning. Time will continue to pass, I will continue to be alright. I will never go back to that life. And as long as I commit that to myself, I will shoulder forward. 

It is a lot to unpack, you know. It is something I used to do nightly, like picking at a scab. It’s now more like a scar, that I can trace my fingers over. The scar tissue does not move well. I seize up when I talk about it. I minimize that part of my life. I laugh when I talk about it, as if it’s all some big joke. A cosmic, fucked up, joke.

When I was 17, my mom brought me into the living room and asked me to sit down. She was holding back tears and my fear was mostly confusion. I was the last little bird in her nest and I couldn’t imagine what would make her cry, besides me being an absolute terror to live with.

It was about my sister. She had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. We would go on to find out that her chance at survival was around 13%. Things quickly turned upside down and everything we knew to be true (my sister was the healthiest person in our family; my parents didn’t speak;) shifted quickly.

My divorced parents moved to Nashville and I moved in with my grandparents who were rarely home or around. I grew somewhat close with my grandfather but he is not a loving figure.

He would make me an odd breakfast of frozen cottage cheese and fruit that I was expected to eat. (I am allergic to milk.) I would eat dinner with my grandparents. I would wonder about my sister and my parents. We would not talk about what was going on.

And in some ways that should have been expected. You see, my mother’s mom died when my mom was 20—from cancer. And I do not think I’ve ever heard my grandfather say her name before.

This was the same way my family moved around my sister’s cancer.

Her treatments were all never before tested. Trials for new drugs. Ones that made her skin burn and caused her body to swell. She was on the cutting edge of science—just in an attempt to survive.

The three times I visited her (my mom wouldn’t let me drive to Nashville alone), I hardly recognized her. We could not talk for long. I did not know how to sit with grief. I did not know what to do with the tongue in my mouth that felt like lead when I saw her.

I could not explain to her in words why I had not been there.

My sister almost died at 3 major points throughout her treatment. The first was an infection. The second and third I forget. But she pulled through. Each time she pulled through.

She underwent an experimental procedure where they full replace your bone marrow. At one point, it was decided that I would be her donor. I was an 85% match.

But it didn’t end up happening that way. A random donor in Germany was a 98% match. She had the transplant. She survived. And it changed her drastically.

During that period of my life, I managed to get myself through my junior and senior year of high school. I made the Dean’s list at my school. I won a poetry competition. My brother sat in the audience while I received the reward. I cried afterwards to him because I was so alone. (I still cry when I think about that.)

My sister survived and came home, but there were whispers of something happening to her in out-patient. There was a lot of talk about mediums, and clairvoyance, and crystals. I did not know what was going on until she came home.

She was unwell. She believed she had supernatural powers. She was Jesus Christ; she was DaVinci; and I was a force of evil in the house.

There is too much to recount, from that point. There was so much screaming and fighting and rage. And my mom didn’t know what to do because to admit something was wrong was to admit that my sister had not fully come out on the other side of cancer, better.

Things did not get better. I would spend the night at my terrible boyfriend’s house just to escape the insanity of my house. And so when it was time to pick where to go to college I said Sweden. I said Vermont. I said Virginia. I said anywhere that is so far away I will never be able to come home. Because I was jumping ship.

I told myself that Tennessee was my problem. The swampy air. The mosquitos. The small cities. The people who would never understand. That’s what was ruining me. And so when the time came, after the worst summer of my life, I made it Virginia. It was 8 hours away and that was, for that time, enough distance.

I am now coming up on 7 years in Virginia. I cannot say my start here was easy. I will not claim that I miraculously began to thrive when my the hot air hit my face that first August. I had jumped as far as I was allowed to jump and I did not know how to hit the ground gracefully.

But with 7 years of distance under my belt, I look back at Tennessee with a fondness. Maybe it wasn’t the place, maybe it was everything that happened.

Maybe it was how I let it all turn me bitter. Maybe it was the pain that remained unspoken. Maybe I just didn’t know where to put that grief.

And now, for those of you who are aware of these kinds of things, Tennessee is not a safe space for me to return to. I do not know if I can ever bury my grief that was borne there.

There are risks that come when you jump ship that I wasn’t aware of. I said I would never go home and now I do not know how to go back. And in many ways, I cannot.