there are lots of steep hills in our woodsy town and we live at the bottom of one. it’s a perfect night in June and i never want it to end. so when Dad asks if i want to go home or ride another lap, of course i choose to keep going. i never know when to quit. on the way down our hill, Dad makes the turn to loop back up. i follow but i’m not fast enough. but i’m also too fast because like i said we’re going down the hill. so instead of the paved road i’m skidding onto our neighbor’s downward-sloping lawn. i frantically squeeze the hand brakes and backpedal, trying to stop on the grass, but it rained last night and everything’s too slippery and i’m flying very fast over the four-foot drop down to their driveway over the handlebars and the earth is folding in on itself and someone’s yelling “DADDY!” but it can’t be me because i don’t call him that anymore; i’m almost twelve.

it’s probably good i don’t remember the next part, but i wish i remembered even less. like waking up choking on my own teeth in the back of my throat. would love to forget that. i cough them back into my mouth and feel them slide around like evil little mints. this sensation will make my “losing your teeth” dreams horribly visceral for the rest of my life. Dad is kneeling over me and he’s crying a lot, even more than he does when we watch movies. my head hurts and i really hate how my mouth is full of teeth and blood. starting to think we’re not getting dairy queen tonight.

there are two new guys in uniforms here asking me questions and all i can think is how did they get here so fast. they want to know “what month is it?” it’s May; i still have to get a mother’s day present for my Mom. for some reason that answer makes Dad cry harder. i’m sorry. i know. i left it til the last minute. i’m always doing that.

the new guys keep telling me i’m going to be okay which makes me suspect i actually might not be. my head hurts but i realize, with growing horror, my face hurts a lot more. so i ask two questions in order of importance. One: am I going to die? “no, you’re going to live for a long, long time.” i don’t think they know that, but okay. Two: am i going to be ugly? “no, you’re a beautiful girl.” oh my god! i must be FUCKED!

this part i don’t remember but at some point, our neighbors come outside. they give me towels for the blood and a glass of milk to preserve my teeth in (this actually worked!). that was so nice of them. imagine you’re sitting at home enjoying a sweet summer evening in your quiet forest town and some kid crashes into your driveway and starts bleeding, for all you know maybe to death. and your first thought isn’t shh pretend we’re not home or maybe call a lawyer. it’s honey quick get the towels, not even paper towels, real soft bath towels that you spent money on and you’re definitely going to have to go to the store to replace because it’s 2007 and sure you can order stuff online but it still takes a while. and they’ll have to go to the store anyway because now they don’t have milk to put in their tea or cereal tomorrow morning because they used maybe the last of it to give some kid’s teeth a bath. did i ever thank them? do they even still live there? i feel like Mom got them new towels. it just seems like something she’d do. but did she remember the milk?

the paramedics ask some more questions. they’re giving diplomatic reassurance but i can sense i’m not giving the right answers. this is very disturbing to me, a child whose identity is not-insignificantly tied up in knowing the right answers. i’m forgetting things, maybe even important things. suddenly nothing is safe — a thief is rifling through my mind, stuffing memories into a sack. i don’t even remember how the paramedics got here even though their whole thing is that their car is really loud. how rude; they’re here to save my life and i didn’t even say hello — just am i going to die and/or be ugly? they said no, right?

my vision is blurring; the thief ransacks faster. what do i most not want to forget? my sister won’t be born for another month. so as i’m loaded onto a stretcher, i start chanting the names of my three best friends under my breath, over and over again, painting their faces directly onto the walls of my mind so the thief can’t pry them off. it’s so weird they don’t know this has happened yet. my away message probably still says something like “BiKe RiDe w/ DaD<3” or “f**k IRISH DANCING!!!!1!!1!”.

i’m not allowed to sit up or move my head in the ambulance which sucks because i can’t even watch how we speed past all the other cars. and i’m not allowed to sleep because i have a concussion and they don’t know how bad it is yet. but my helmet looks like something took a bite out of it so it must be pretty bad. Mom meets us at the hospital and Dad tells me to wiggle my fingers to show her i can still play piano. she was always worried i’d break my fingers playing basketball or something. but it’s never the things you worry about.

everyone at the hospital is very nice to me but when they shove the first tooth back into my face i do unfortunately kick someone. it’s just a reflex but they have to hold me down to do the next one. that remains the most painful thing i’ve ever experienced. they won’t sedate me or give me painkiller because of the concussion. i don’t even think that’s science anymore but i guess it was in 2007. still strikes me as a little barbaric. you got more pain relief getting your leg sawed off in the civil war.

the doctor gets to work picking gravel out of my face and informs me that at some point, my body will likely reject the teeth he’s just replanted back into my skull. this could happen anywhere between “two days or ten years” from now. not much to go on. after they pump me full of penicillin, i’m allowed to go to the bathroom. if i had to describe what i saw in the mirror it would basically be Harvey Dent if Batman got him out a little sooner. as soon as i look upon myself, i vomit.

the teeth last more than two days. they last more than ten years. almost exactly nineteen years later, one of them develops a weird little click. at first the dentist says it’s nothing, but i know my number’s up. these teeth were cut on borrowed time. they’ve survived the crash and braces and root canals and pressure from perpendicular wisdom teeth whose extraction i keep unwisely postponing. still, you’d never know any of it happened. i couldn’t eat solid food for months and it was years til i felt safe enough to bite into an apple. but my face and teeth have healed shockingly well. most days i feel like the paramedics were right: that i might be beautiful and really could live a long life (so far so good). i have some scars but nobody really notices until they’re close enough to kiss. my memory’s pretty bad but i’m not sure that’s part of it. all in all: things have gone more than okay, and if i’m suffering some consequence now, it’s long overdue.

that doesn’t make it easier to hear i’m going to lose the tooth. i cry a little when they tell me, then a lot later. i beg them not to give me the kind of fake tooth they give hockey players where you have to take it out every time you eat. part of it is vanity but mostly it’s because that’s just not an option for me psychologically. i’m already having the dream where i lose my teeth. EMDR has helped me stop having flashbacks while i’m awake, but like i said the dreams are still quite bad. sometimes i’ll wake up tasting blood, feeling for scabs and gravel on my face, coughing on phantom teeth. once i woke up from one so intense i vomited over the side of my bed. to be fair i was also hungover but i think it was mostly PTSD. i don’t drink anymore so if it happens again then we’ll know for sure.

the dentist said something must have happened recently to make the tooth break like this, but i can’t pinpoint what did it. maybe i grind in my sleep (#hustle) or kissed with too much passion or devoured a meal with too much fervor. maybe it was a little of everything. maybe this tooth is like a wrinkle or cataracts; all the benign little disasters accumulated by a life well lived.

the upside of seeing your reflection change so violently at a young age is that, at least in my case, it makes you treat the slower, gentler changes with much more compassion. what a gift beyond measure to see loved ones grow new lines in their faces, streaks of grey in their hair, subtle shifts in their teeth. obviously everyone can do whatever they want to their body but it does bum me out when people chat about their latest attempts to freeze themselves in amber like such a thing is not spiritually horrifying. it makes me think of everyone lost too soon, how i’d give anything to see them old. if i do live to see 40, 60, 80, i hope i wear the years i’ve earned. i hope i can look around and see everyone i love has gotten older too. it’s important, i think, to remember we are mirrors to one another. a good way to dishonor life is to erase all trace of it from your body. the crash lives on my face forever, yes, along with every other mourning and delight i’ve ever known. that’s where life belongs.

last year i finally started inking my skin with tattoos, which i didn’t expect to find so euphoric. maybe because these are the first permanent marks of my own doing, and i don’t have to wait twenty years to find them beautiful. twenty years from now they’ll still be here, although who knows what they’ll look like. r/agedtattoos is full of inked up folks slinging unsolicited advice at one another. usually the advice is “chill the fuck out” but very often it’s this is going to age like shit / maybe it’ll be decent if you never see the sun / just to be safe, you should probably bury yourself alive. even here, in an online community where you’d hope people might have a more playful relationship with their own bodies, gerascophobia is alive and well. feasting, sweating, basking, fucking, wrinkling, dying — this is the express purpose of the body. good advice will never encourage anything less.

of course my tattoos will blur and fade. so will my eyesight. so will my memory. that part’s started. did i say that already? but however my little masterpieces age, i’ll always know what they are: the cartoon my baby sister carved into our piano. the view from my first apartment. the houseboat i always wanted to live on, and briefly did. the unfinished work of art i encountered shortly after finally falling in love. someday, i hope, there will be more. perhaps they’ll all end up as blobs, and my tooth will fall out a dozen more times in real life, a thousand more in my dreams.

so what? who fucking cares. i’ll get a new one and i’ll probably cry when they pull out the old one and i’ll hope no one will notice the change but me. and whenever i do notice i’ll try not to see my ripped-up face in the mirror or taste blood on my tongue. i’ll treat it like a tattoo, tie it to a sweeter memory. i’ll try to remember my parents, caring for a concussed, busted preteen at the same time as a newborn, spending money they didn’t have on a smile i could stand to look at. or two volunteers in uniforms telling a bleeding child she was beautiful and would live a long life. a neighbor’s soft towel and glass of milk. i’ll remember this scarred face is the only one of mine my sister has ever known. and once they’ve healed i will sink my teeth into an apple, feel the juice dribble down my chin, let it dry all sticky and sweet til it attracts bugs. sooner or later they’ll make a meal of me anyway.

a year ago, the first American pope was a source of global confusion. he was born in Chicago, hadn’t lived in the states for years, primarily spoke Spanish, and was sometimes described as “a more moderate version of pope Francis”. today, he gives speeches excoriating imperial capitalism, condemning warmongers in a Holy Week message: “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them… ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’” (Isaiah 1:15)

personally, i think it’s good that the head of a major world religion is staunchly anti-war. but many american catholics don’t share this relief!

while the hypocrisy of right-wing catholicism no longer surprises me, it’s still enraging in its stupidity. right-wing catholics — the same people who hiss that islam is a fundamentally violent religion, or shriek that “sharia law” is coming to boston — now seem displeased by their pope’s lack of bloodlust. they dislike that the ever-growing distance between their politics and their purported religion has become impossible to ignore. and for all the right-wing antisemitic and islamophobic conspiracies about other religions violating our constitutionally mandated separation of church & state, many american christians have made it clear they’d happily welcome a theocracy, as long as their own team sits on the throne.

let me clarify that i, too, am a hypocrite — i don’t believe in papal infallibility and wouldn’t exactly call myself a practicing catholic. but my entire education and upbringing were tied up in the faith, so certain things have stuck. some are ideological, like my politics, and a self-imposed moral code that makes me unpleasantly self-righteous in conversation (i’m working on it). others are habits bordering on superstitious: i bless myself before the plane takes off, still get ashes on my forehead, and “sacrifice” something for lent every year.

sometimes people ask why i partake in these public exercises. for years i’ve been trying to articulate an answer, and think i’m finally circling it: as much as i rebuke many elements of catholicism, from the infamously horrifying to the minorly irritating, what i resent even more is watching it be further diluted by such stupid, selfish, hideous people.

if you’re an adult catholic, at least one of two things is probably true: you either A) believe in the dignity of all people, especially the poor, sick, and oppressed, or B) you are obsessed with freaky little rules around which you might organize a life you can stand to look at. sometimes it’s both, but it can’t be NEITHER.

enter: the adult catholic convert. this is often someone who came from another religion, or no religion at all, and was drawn to catholicism for some ideological or aesthetic reason. maybe they got connected through volunteer work, maybe a friend took them to mass, maybe they never got to indulge their goth phase, or, if they’re the vice president, maybe they liked that “it was really old”. young adults are converting to catholicism in record numbers, so we have to pay attention. what kind of catholics will these be?

of course i mean no disrespect to the average convert, who finds something meaningful in their faith that allows them to connect more deeply with themselves and other people. i may always be a little suspicious of you, and won’t hesitate to pull rank on you as someone who wore a uniform for twelve years, but i support your journey and wish you peace. i mean significant disrespect to anyone who tries on catholicism like ill-fitting armor, intending from the start to wield it as a weapon — particularly to a massive audience (JD Vance, Candace Owens, Russell Brand, etc). i wish these people an intense disquiet.

one thing i notice about this type of catholic is that they seem totally unconcerned with protecting marginalized people — in many cases, they actively despise them — and they don’t seem on board with some very basic “rules” of the church. if you are a practicing catholic, and you do believe in papal infallibility, then sorry, but you should be anti-war, at least while Leo’s in town. because if you don’t particularly give a shit about other people AND you don’t care about the rules…what the fuck are you doing here? the answer is beginning to dawn on me.

this type of prominent catholic convert serves a very specific social function: the absolution of guilt. not in a sacramental way — quite the opposite. this type of catholicism is not meant to cleanse you of sin, just the icky feelings associated with it. you can see that strategy play out in this interview between JD Vance and Sean Hannity:

VANCE: “There’s something very deranged in the mind of the far-left in this country, where I really do think they feel more a sense of compassion for illegal aliens who have no right to be in this country than they their fellow citizens, and that really has to change… as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there’s this old-school, and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family, then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world.”

after predictable backlash, vance doubled down, encouraging people to “google ordo amoris” — the concept of “ordered love” proposed by theologians like St. Augustine & St. Thomas Aquinas. actual catechists have already written why Vance’s hierarchical interpretation is bullshit. many prominent catholics, including the past two popes, have frequently criticized Vance for pulling arguments out of his ass, smearing them on his forehead, and calling it doctrine.

but i’d argue you don’t need to be well-versed in any theology to recognize how insultingly lazy this line of thought is. vance’s harvard-honed style of “debate” is being used to distract from the obvious fact that yes, of course, a truly religious person must actually care about other people. one of the first things lessons of catholicism — the one Jesus said to remember above all else — is to love thy neighbor as yourself. they teach you this in catholic kindergarten. but Vance would like you to believe Jesus actually meant your literal, white-skinned, english-speaking, American neighbor.

i don’t say this lightly: no one is actually that stupid. anyone this intellectual and spiritual dishonesty “works” on is willingly gobbling doctrine-slop to smother the betrayal of their own humanity. in the world we’ve built, any thinking person, especially one that claims to be religious, should exist in a low-thrum state of perpetual ethical torment.

which is the greater sin: to fritter away the gift of life by endlessly hand-wringing over moral quandaries, or to blithely enjoy your passage through a fundamentally unjust world? i don’t have the answer to this and never will. but the question must be asked. especially if this world benefits you. it should, occasionally, keep you up at night. it should eat away at the the backs of your eyes. between the bouts of sunshine, the decadence of a good meal or cold clean water slaking your thirst, the kisses from your lover, the moments when a child’s hand closes around your finger, the doubled-over laughter among friends, you should listen to what comes in the silence. you should be curious why life has been so good to you, and so cruel to others, and how you can attempt to bring this into balance. why else are you alive?

the catholicism of the right-wing convert is wholly uninterested in introspection. its primary, and arguably only concern, is dulling every prick of your conscience, deriding empathy, inoculating you against it. it is designed to make you feel guiltless and even good about only wanting to live in community with people who look and speak like you. it launders fascism, white supremacy, capitalism, rendering all of these palatable, desirable, necessary. it coopts a religion built on infinite chances for forgiveness and twists it into a sadistic obsession with punishment. the teachings of christ are merely suggestions that, would you look at that, always punish others yet always absolve you. war is something that just happens. no use even trying to stop it. to dust we shall return, some sooner than others, oh well! but not you, NEVER you! subscribe to the Hallow app NOW for just $0.99 to secure your place in Heaven (limited time only).

soothing us out of our own conscience is such a lazy, reliable grift. yes, you have to care about other people. yes, you are a bad person if you don’t. you are not stupid. you already know this. you can be a good partner and parent and child and friend, but if the rest of the world remains theoretical to you, that is not enough. you can care about other people and still be kind of a bad person. that’s probably what i am. i’m not nearly as charitable as i could be. i keep more than half of my money. i don’t know everything my pension is invested in. i’m sure i’ve unknowingly profited off war. is my ignorance an excuse? of course not. i don’t claim to be devout, but i truly believe that every time i pass someone suffering on the street and don’t stop to help, every time i fail to speak up about an injustice, every moment i choose what is easy instead of what is kind, i am making a choice not to right the balance of the universe. and i will have to answer for that, in this life or the next. of course i will. every day i move through this world unscathed while innocent souls burn on my dime. if there’s a world beyond this one, why shouldn’t i taste some fire there? why shouldn’t you?

i get that it probably feels bad when your son points out the moral chasm between your weekly attendance at church and your celebration of mass deportations, or when your niece asks how you can be anti-abortion and also anti-affordable childcare, or when you see the breakdown of your property taxes and are confronted with how much of your life’s work has been allocated to violence, and how little you’ve done to change that. but don’t listen to those feelings. bad feelings are for people who are doing something wrong, and that’s not you; that’s never been you. you work hard and you go to church and sometimes you even tip the delivery person if they do a good job. you don’t deserve to feel bad. your son and your niece are woke bisexual communists who should have been sent to conversion therapy or the military and it’s probably too late for them now. maybe they’ll repent on their deathbeds. i wonder if a thumbs-up from the president will be enough on yours.

here, you’re drenched, come stand under here— a guy was selling them outside the subway. it’ll be broken by tomorrow. i can’t believe you recognized me. i didn’t recognize you, at first. i thought you were someone else, but someone older, so i won’t say who. you look great though. especially for your age, which i cannot remember.

a lot of people are looking at me today, actually. i don’t think i look particularly good, so i must look especially haunted. you ever have a day like that? when all the ghosts come out at once? even just now, when it started coming down, i ducked under an awning. turned out it was the flower shop my friend used to order from before she died. i’d never actually seen the place. is it obvious i’ve been crying? sometimes it starts and i can’t stop. one time i heard the wrong song at the wrong time and it set me off for, no exaggeration, nine hours. an entire workday at the crying factory. the next morning i looked like i’d doused my eyes in snake venom. and that was after i got sober. no, nothing dramatic. if anything i was too good at it. i was drinking on expert mode—hit my lifetime achievements sooner than most; had to retire the jersey.

why do i feel like you got divorced? it would be wildly inappropriate to ask. instead i ask about work, skipping rocks across the surface of our conversation. i wonder if you’ve been in love again. since you last saw me i have fallen in love, or at least in like, several times over, with varying degrees of insanity. the kind where a glimpse of hair sends you chasing the wrong person down the street, where your sneeze resurfaces the smell of their bed and in an instant you devolve thousands of years into an animal. a terrible illness. wouldn’t wish it on anyone. unfortunately it’s one of the only things that makes life worth living. falling as hard, as often, and as unluckily as i do is like being allergic to sunlight. probably even harder. not a lot of people know this, but in all of recorded time, my suffering is actually unprecedented.

this would all be less embarrassing if it had ever been reciprocated. that goes both ways, though. sometimes i’ve been the one who loves less. maybe my doppelgängers are getting chased too. i doubt it though. nobody ever thinks of us as much as we do. anyway, ideally i’d like to be loved in a way that doesn’t end in being chased down the street years later. i was thinking more like “now”. because i’ve been here a long time, and i’ve built a beautiful life, one where people are happy to see me on the street, even after twenty years. and so have you. a life like that deserves to be shared.

it’s so nice to run into you. you’ve been an incredibly convenient existential mirror for me—i was starting to feel like the ghost. i needed to be contextualized, anchored in time and place, and then you turned up! i hope i’ve done the same for you. because you’re different, and i’m different, and the bodega is still the same. we are the variables in a city increasingly bled of controls. so one of the greatest things two old strangers can do for one another is prove each other real.

of course, i’d love to get lunch. that would be great. yes, i know you’re sincere. i think you’re sincere. i’ll spend the next few months debating whether or not you’re sincere. but i’m always in the neighborhood. i’ll see you around.

after UA 2333 is delayed a second time, we order another bottle of wine. it’s a quiet night at Newark. the volume rises as we drink. we’re headed to the Carolinas for a long weekend, the first time i’ve ever taken off work for a non-funeral reason. it’s the dawn of a new decade and we’re excited enough about politics to door knock for a candidate in states where most of us don’t even live.

we board sometime after the third bottle of wine and land after midnight. Myrtle Beach is begging for the end of winter. we chat with our cab driver about the frustratingly squirrel-y nature of seasonal work, how you always hope you can cobble enough together to withstand the winter. spring break is coming up and he’s looking forward to the rush of visitors it’ll bring. he regales us with stories of wrangling drunk college kids; we laugh as if that wasn’t us two years ago.

the actual door knocking isn’t always as friendly. we’re in a very southern, working-class town, and you encounter some stuff you’d expect: “i don’t like bernie sanders and i want nothing to do with anyone who does,” growls a camo-clad white guy framed by a wall full of guns. fair enough!

“you know, i really like bernie,” muses his neighbor, a nearly identical guy in front of a nearly identical wall. “maybe not as much as you — i’m not sure i’d come all the way down from new york. but right now, he’s got my vote.”

others have, too, and not just older white guys: a Latina mother of young kids likes his childcare policy. a pair of college twins are voting to “cancel out their parents”. a 90-year-old Black woman has never voted in her life, but will break tradition this year to vote with her grandson. the number one thing you learn knocking doors is that there is no “typical” American voter: in moving and horrifying ways, other people’s politics make no goddamn sense. imagining you are an exception does not break this rule.

the weekend blurs by: our hotel room gets burgled. on top of a well-deserved hangover, i get vicious food poisoning. we wonder if it’s that virus we keep hearing about, but i recover quickly. two days later, bernie loses south carolina, which we expected. we watch from a barcade as nearly every other nominee drops out to coalesce around joe biden, which we did not expect. but you’d be surprised how easily you can weather heartbreak when it occurs within 5 feet of DDR.

on super tuesday, joe biden unsurprisingly carries south carolina. with few exceptions, the map is purple, but if you zoom in deep into Horry County, you’ll find a little blue pocket, exactly where we knocked.

2

there used to be a doorman in this building. entering feels like trespassing, but there are fewer rules in the city these days. people have fled: for their parents’ house, for the hamptons, for their parents’ third house in the hamptons. i could easily cross the river to jersey, but i’m wracked with terror at the thought of getting my family sick. and i’m paying rent here anyway. also, i’ll never be able to shake the feeling that leaving would be, on some level, a betrayal. i’m still employed, able-bodied, have no dependents. here i can be useful. not always — the guys at the liquor store recognize my voice when i call — but still, sometimes, i am useful.

the door-knocking campaign has shifted, with incredible speed, into a mutual aid group. delivering groceries and supplies feels like the only productive thing i can do. this neighborhood is now populated almost exclusively by those who have been left behind: the very poor, the very old, the very sick. Maria, the woman i’m meeting today, is all three, sticking it out in one of the few rent-controlled units of a high-rise. i text her that i’m coming up. by the time the elevator creaks its way to her floor, she’s already outside her door, masked up and impatient.

Maria has a favor to ask: could i please knock on 14F and check in on Gail? “she hasn’t been answering my calls,” she huffs, more irritated than worried. i agree, hoping i’m about to play mediator and not medical examiner. but it’s not like i have anything else going on.

the fourteenth floor is similarly deserted. i knock on Gail’s apartment once, twice, heart sinking. i’m thinking of how to deliver Maria the news, who we’re supposed to call, when i hear a crotchety “enough with the knocking!”

Gail is fine. she spoke to Maria yesterday — a claim Maria disputes when i deliver this missive — and will call her back tonight. in future visits, i don’t hear anything else about Gail. but there aren’t many more. a few weeks later, i ask Maria how she’s doing, and she never responds.

3

the 43rd day of the strike starts well before sunrise. studios have been trying to work around writers’ picket lines — which many crew members refuse to cross in solidarity — by telling people to show up hours earlier than their call sheet specifies. but the real times keep getting leaked to us. we’re all in different unions, but we negotiate our contracts against the same bosses, and nobody understands exploitation like an IATSE crew member or a Teamster. our struggles are naturally linked.

the decision to honor a picket line is particularly high-stakes for IATSE crew members because if they don’t cross, they don’t get paid. they’re willingly sacrificing food on the table to support a strike that isn’t even theirs. but tensions are understandably rising: how long can this go on? every day we’re told the basic dignities we’re asking for are unreasonable — an outrageous, insulting lie, but standard fare for the billionaires we’re up against. one of them was quoted saying they’re not coming back to the bargaining table until some of us are homeless. they put that in the news!

only a few of us are needed for this morning’s early shift, so it’s just me and one other writer holding signs by a studio side door. the Teamsters begin to arrive. an older white guy in a Celtics cap disembarks from his truck, hands fisted deep in the pockets of his truly baller bomber jacket. he fishes out a cigarette and lights up, watching us warily.

after a few minutes of excruciating silence, i strike up a conversation and smile when i hear his accent. his name is John. i ask whereabouts in Ireland he’s from, and he says Sligo — should have known. he sounds just like my grandfather. i ask if he’s spent any time in Dromore West; he says he’s from just down the road. turns out there’s great surfing in Dromore West. news to me, and probably also to my grandfather.

our conversation is brief but light. John mostly seems relieved i didn’t ask to bum a cigarette, and gives me a nod before clambering back up into his truck.

a few hours later, the line of crew members refusing to cross the picket line is twice as long as the actual picket line. after we’ve bought out the entirety of the nearest dunkin to thank them, we get word the studios are violating a neutral gate to load equipment. our morning crew was too small to send anyone to monitor it. i sprint down a punishingly long LIC block. if even a single truck gets in, production can resume, rendering today’s picket line — and the crew’s sacrifice — almost meaningless.

there are no trucks pulling in when i arrive at the gate. instead i see John from Sligo, parked across the street, engine stubbornly switched off. eventually, he looks up from his New York Post. in lieu of a smile, he flicks the brim of his Celtics cap.

“it doesn’t even fucking matter,” a young woman sobs into her phone on the street. she is young; possibly ‘first election’ young. i know her; i was her. my heart breaks for her. you can’t even play DDR anywhere around here.

and why shouldn’t she feel that? when much of our future seems written in poison? so much of this moment is fueled by delusion: too many, too exhaustingly obvious to list (racism, sexism, transphobia, genocide denial; i could go on). but perhaps the most insidious myth is that everyone, yes you, even you, can and will and even deserve to become, at any cost, a rich, powerful, untouchable billionaire. this myth has persisted for so long we’ve had to change the first letter. it’s a powerful elixir, dripped as distraction into the ears of increasingly isolated Americans. and there is steadfast refusal among “the opposition” to present an equally compelling counternarrative.

not all the “founders” of this country despised the monarchy. some only resented that they could not be part of it. and because monarchy is built on stolen things, they found a place to pillage, people to enslave, and let their little experiment play out. i think it’s safe to say it failed, long before today, though we won’t admit that for some time. there’s too much shareholder value at stake.

a society with capital at its center is barely a society at all, but a merciless, insatiable, mechanical beast. it’s a meat grinder dressed as a slot machine. play another round!, it coaxes, next one could be the jackpot!, as you are ripped apart and made more easily packageable. we are rapidly approaching its natural endpoint. pretending otherwise — pretending this system is remotely worth the destruction it inflicts — is utter, indefensible delusion. but it means everything is permissible, nothing is forbidden, if it can be sold as an offering to the god of money. capitalism is man-made, not god-given. there are people paid handsomely to make you forget this — or worse, to convince you that you won’t live to see the worst of it, so nothing you do here matters.

here is a possible delusion of my own: what we do with dwindling hope is actually the only thing that matters. when up against massively entrenched, powerfully funded delusion, the idea that we can win might feel equally delusional. let it! who gives a shit! embrace toxic positivity! tell yourself, over and over again, that the world we deserve is possible, because it is. so many gifts will be destroyed. our capacity for imagination must never be one of them.

i think it matters that a few folks in South Carolina lent their voice to something radically unexpected. that while Maria was trapped in a tiny apartment in a sick, ghostly city, one of the last things she ever did was check in on her neighbor, even though she was fine. that John from Sligo didn’t cross the picket line when he easily could have.

they will try to ban reproductive freedom nationwide. stock up on pills and organize to get abortion protected in your state anyway. they will try to outlaw the only line of defense for unions. unionize your workplace anyway. they will threaten you with RICO charges for any protests that threaten the capitalist war machine, particularly Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. protest it anyway. they plan to enact mass deportations, to criminalize trans people out of public existence, to abolish gay marriage, to end vaccinations, and, of course, to sever every ripcord that might slow our planet’s skydive into hell. will any of that be enough to drive you into the streets? to risk injury or arrest? it’s rare that the enemy so clearly illustrates how they intend to destroy you. we can anticipate most of what’s coming. are we going to accept it? the answer to this question is the only thing that matters.

why does it matter? i don’t know. some people would probably cite gods or philosophers. my delusional non-answer: it just does. even if we squander every gift, even if there’s never any record of anything we built together — it matters what we did here. every act of altruism, solidarity, and love-borne sacrifice is a miracle. none of it is ever done in vain. the miracle matters until no one’s left to remember it, and we’re all still here.

my friend KC does not want to swim — bad experience as a kid. i get it. my mother is the same. long before i was born, a near-drowning in montauk scared the sea out of her forever. we rarely got near it, and when we did, my sister and i were barely allowed to wade past our shins. now, as an adult, i seize every chance to venture out as far as i want. even out of practice, i’m a good swimmer, and have always been fearless.

i wander in. the water is so refreshing it feels holy; the sheer pleasure of it makes my teeth chatter. i flip onto my back and let the sun singe my face, buoyed by salt and giddiness, playing mermaids by myself. besides my friend back on shore, nobody knows where i am right now. the freedom is heady. i could swallow the sky.

plenty of people are enjoying it with me. occasionally i’m blessed with a buon giorno, which is all i’m capable of volleying back. an older woman asks a followup i don’t understand; all i can muster is “acqua…bellissima”. she throws her head back and laughs, not unkindly, as she paddles away. it looks like she hasn’t seen shade in about forty years. she might be the happiest person alive. today i am in the company of people who know how to live well, and i don’t even feel like an impostor.

i float on. for once, the passage of time is none of my business. whenever i remember, i let a foot drift down to brush against the sand. if i chose, i could stop floating, root my feet back into the ground. i can still stand; i am still safe.

going from safe to not safe is a very fine line that often gets crossed without you realizing. you can’t always pinpoint which drink did you in last night, that corner you shouldn’t have turned down, the moment you began caring for someone enough that losing them would wound you. you were safe and then you weren’t.

the next time my foot drifts down, it touches nothing, and my body jolts in surprise. still unworried, i swing my arms above my head, propel myself underwater and down a bit, then again, a bit further — nothing.

when i resurface i realize everyone is very far away. i’m the furthest out by far. it isn’t until i start to swim back that i notice the undertow. i’ve stood to my ankles in stormy waters, felt how they can suck the weight out from under you, but this is the strongest i’ve ever felt under a sunny sky.

the shoreline does not approach as quickly as it should. i fall into freestyle: face down, legs fluttering, arms pumping. it’s not working. when i turn to breathe, i inhale liquid salt instead.

now i am choking, but not enough to distract me from the humiliation. how am i the only one out here? did everyone else feel it coming? do all the [indeterminate sicilian town] locals know what time the current comes? why did no one tell me?

my strokes become erratic. it’s the panic that gets you. it steals your breath, wastes it on things you can’t even use. the harder you fight it, the quicker it comes. this is what happened to my mother, i realize, remembering her relaying the spirals of her mind as she began to drown. two to three minutes to lose consciousness; five to ten for the rest.

death and i are not well-acquainted, but we’ve passed each other on the street. we’ve had a few run-ins — always sudden, sometimes violent, usually bloodless. it’s partly why i’m on this beach: after a flurry of bullets missed me by inches, i fled my gun-hungry homeland for italy, where that violence is more politely gatekept. all to say, i know what it feels like. i know how hard the heart can beat once it realizes it almost stopped.

it’s with this kind of heart that i crawl my way up the sand, after an amniotic burst of a wave finally floods me gasping back to shore. wet pebbles lodge beneath my fingernails as the water laps around me. i press the heel of my hand down, watch its fossil fill with water, allow myself to be kissed by the thing that nearly killed me.

fearlessness, i realize, is not the same as bravery. i’d just never let myself get far enough to know i should be afraid. the absence of fear means nothing. it’s so easy, pretending to be brave when nothing has happened to you yet.

the wind is already spiraling my hair dry. the sun seals the salt into my skin. later we will drive home through wildfire smoke. a few days from now, it will get so hot here that snails will cook to death in their shells.

once my legs stop shaking enough to stand, i make my way back to KC. she drops the book from in front of her face, squints up with a smile. “how was it?”

deep in my chest, a miner hammers away in haste, trying to excavate some precious gem before the walls of the cave crumble into a tomb. “bellissima.”

three years later, i will bike along the coast of portugal. this time i’ll be there for a purpose, not just to outrun myself, though grief and fear will still be nipping at my heels (for new and terrible reasons, i’d like to tell myself; never any of the things we were actually worried about). the air will be thick with salt, slicing through my lungs.

there will be a beach i like better than the others. i’ll squish the bike’s tires into the sand, prop the handlebars up against a rocky cliffside. i will strip down to my swimsuit and run headlong into the sea until i remember, stopping myself once i’ve splashed up to my shins. the current will tear the sand away from my feet, a new record for the strongest tide i’ve ever felt. the waves will crest too high for something so close to shore. they will beckon me in, one step, then another, until — BAM — one will explode directly onto my body with mathematical precision. it will hurl me back, airborne, skidding me onto the sand. the wind will be knocked out of me. it will feel like getting bitch slapped by Poseidon but i will laugh, and cough, and smear sand out of my eyes and into my hair. i was being safe! i was careful and it hurt me anyway.

you think know what it will feel like and you won’t. how could you, when you never step in the same sea twice? when water rises where it wasn’t meant to go? even if you run from it, seal yourself off in some cave, one day you will wake with wet ankles and remember, too late, that people still drown in caves.

love, water, death — it will find you wherever you are. all you can do is meet it well.

even if it’s not a bother to anyone else, it is to me. why is this happening? i thought this part was over. it’s not even your birthday or anything. starting to get the sense that grief isn’t linear, i would tweet if that verb still existed. anyone else notice this? it would get 5.6k likes and a few wellness check texts i’d feel mortified for accidentally soliciting. it’s sad that website’s dead, but probably good. it’s cowardly, inhuman, for me to outsource my manufactured catharsis to thousands of strangers. death should be something you have to sit with.

i chalk up the slump to being exhausted and on my period, but it lasts longer than that. little things, or no thing at all, will set me off. i thought time had begun to seal the gaping hole in my chest, but it was only filled with moss, and now some mystery wind has blown it away. it feels sickeningly good to grieve so acutely again — the last time it hurt this much, you were closer. you had just been alive. it always felt like you were just around the corner. it doesn’t feel that way anymore. though still, at least once a week, i start to text you, see the last message, and remember.

it’s a few days before i pinpoint the likeliest source for the resurgence: in all the time i knew you, the longest we ever went without speaking was about six weeks, after which we both agreed: how did this happen?! that was too long! never again! it’s been nearly three months. how did this happen. how did this happen.

your mother wrote me a letter. i’m sure it was one of hundreds she’s sent over the past few months. the source of your unshakable manners. she deserves a response i haven’t found yet. next week i will be in a new country, watch another sun set in a place you’ve seen, and hope you tell me what to say.

between now and then, i will see fifteen things about that guy we love, that place we went, that show we love, that guy we hate. every time, i will try to talk to you.

sometimes i remember, and try to talk to you wherever you actually are, which is not in my phone. whenever i feel i’m being pulled apart in seven different directions and i’m late and in pain and i’m ransacking my room or my purse because i can’t find my earring or my charger or my fucking keys or all of the above; when it would be so easy to give in, to snap or scream or cry — not on the subway, in a more inconvenient place, where i’d feel a moment’s satisfaction for the small, ugly price of hurting someone else — that’s when i remember to talk to you where you are. i’m not like you; i’m unconscionably selfish, still asking things of you, the patron saint of showing up for people. even when you’re exhausted, even when it’s inconvenient, even when they don’t deserve it. 

every time i talk to you — every single time — my hand closes around whatever i seek. overwhelming things feel possible again. i decide to be okay. i think of what a good friend you are, what a good sister and daughter and neighbor, how much better i am at those things for having known you, and reach for my phone to tell you.

https://www.radiolollipop.org/amy

you haven’t visited in a few nights. that’s okay — i was honored you did at all. although i’m not even sure it really was you. maybe it was my own desperate, bereaved conjuration. maybe i managed to claw my way to where you are. maybe it was you taking pity, and now you’ve moved on to other dreams because i’ve finally been able to grieve you with other people. but i want to talk to you, not just about you. i want you to stay in the present tense.

there is shrapnel of you everywhere. you gave me this mug, this jacket, the heels i’ll wear to your memorial. but the best gifts you gave are the ones i can’t touch. like how you taught me to trim flowers so they’ll last longer, and now my apartment is always in bloom. i know i’ve thanked you for that before, but i want to again. i wonder if you can see the beautiful red gerbera i’ve spent hours admiring this week, bending the pliant stalk, thumbing its layers of petals like a flipbook. when you were in between, i would try to send you images of flowers and stars over skylines and sunlight sparkling on water. i wish i’d had this flower then.

it feels so strange to not know where you are. it’s been a while, but there was a time when we knew where the other was at every second of the day, and the answer was usually together. you remain the most-ever contacted person in my phone, which still suggests i text you, call you, look at this photo of you from six years ago or six months ago or six weeks ago — yes, please; show me all of it, everything i remember and everything i don’t, everything i took for granted. remind me of all the small things that circled the heart of it: that people could come to you feeling lonely and lost, and leave feeling loved. and i don't know why else we're here, if not to do that for each other as much as we can.

today i watched the eclipse among a throng of our former coworkers. the cast and crew of the broadway show next door fled their theatre to join us. people lined up on all the fire escapes. a bunch of children shedding the skins of adulthood, coming together to stare directly into the sun. the giddiness is so special i forget what has happened.

this will be one of my favorite memories in new york, i decide. and you are in so many of those. every day i’ve lived here i’ve known you. maybe that’s why i turn to talk to you as if you’re right beside me, and am startled to find you’re not there. instinctively, i search for you among the crowd before i remember. the nauseating wave of grief is so strong; it sweeps the feeling from my legs and drowns my hollow chest. i am surrounded by people i only know because of you, and you are not with us. the equation of our company makes no sense without you. you are here — i felt you; i just turned to find you — but we can’t see you or hug you or hear you laugh. the nausea retreats but the tears don’t. at least i have these stupid fucking glasses.

if you have to leave, you deserve to know the totality of the loss. it’s immeasurable, incomprehensible, some Lovecraftian nightmare that, if confronted straight on, will drive us mad. no one can behold it all at once. i wish you could feel your own absence. even before, any room you left would grow colder and quieter. people would instantly miss you. now you’ve left a chasm. when i encounter those who loved you too, it stretches between us, impossibly vast. our shared love for you is the bridge that lets us cross. we are all looking for you, but you’ve gone someplace we can’t. you are beloved, and our heartbreak is proportional. it requires a comfort only you can give. we are meager understudies left to perform your role for one other. the hole is enormous; it is world-breaking. of course earthquakes and eclipses should happen in your wake.

as the pseudo-darkness settles over the city, there are cheers, followed by a moment where it gets very quiet. i wonder if we are all thinking the same thing, this crowd of friends and strangers, gazing up into the sky, searching for what we cannot see.

donate to Radio Lollipop

no one else knows it’s there, besides the doctor who found it. i figure the brief catharsis i’d get from telling anyone wouldn’t outweigh the guilt i’d feel, infecting other people with an anxiety whose only cure is time. there’s nothing to do but wait, and i’ve only been doing that for a week. people who have dealt with serious illness — who have actually suffered, and written about it much more eloquently — have often said the waiting is one of the hardest parts. (agnès varda made one of the best films of all time about it.) patience is a virtue that eludes me even under better circumstances, so a mere week of waiting — particularly at the end of a year half spent on strike, where all we could do was hold out and wait — still feels torturous.

it only takes a few days of feeling powerless over everything but your own thoughts to become convinced that higher consciousness was a mistake. if humans really did evolve because a monkey ate a magic mushroom, it’s a miracle that monkey didn’t immediately kill itself. but all of that spiraling is about to end, because i am about to find out whatever my body is hiding from me. schrodinger’s cancer is about to be diagnosed or dispelled. i really hope it’s the latter, because if the number of hours i have left on earth is significantly lower than i assumed, i’ve just wasted one of them in the waiting area of the radiologist’s office, mind spiraling at lethal speeds.

as i wonder who i should contact about writing a will, the receptionist finally calls my name, my full name, which always catches me off guard. you only hear it at the doctor or when your mom is mad at you.

this woman is not my mom, but she might be mad at me. “ultrasound?” she monotones without looking up. normally i can respect the clock-in-clock-out mentality, but this is a weird energy to bring to work when your job involves talking to people who are worried they might be dying.

“yes.” i decide to mirror her vibe and pepper in a touch of cuntiness. “my appointment was for 8:30.”

“are you wearing deodorant?”

“what?” panicked, i sniff my collar. it smells fine to me, but i did wear this sweatshirt yesterday. even in the context of this present situation, smelling bad without realizing it ranks high among my worst fears. “do i smell bad?”

i don’t mean it as a joke, which is convenient, because she does not take it as one. “you can’t wear deodorant for an ultrasound,” she explains. “it can interfere with the machine.”

“oh. okay. nobody told me that. well i can wash it off in the bathroom or —”

“unfortunately we’ll have to reschedule,” she interrupts, typing something on the same computer she just told a previous patient wasn’t working. “do you have availability next week?”

NEXT??? WEEK?????????

i beg for an alternative. i offer to go home and fully shower if they can fit me in today. she is unmoved. i get the sense if i threatened to stab the greasy communal sign-in pen into my eye she wouldn’t have blinked.

eventually it’s clear we’re getting nowhere. my throat closes up mid-sentence as i struggle not to cry, or scream, or vomit. that finally gets her to glance up. whatever she sees in my face makes her concede a crumb of empathy. “don’t worry. almost all ultrasounds come back negative. and you’re young.”

i clamp down on my tongue to stop myself from biting out what i want to say: “thanks. thanks so much. do you seriously think i don’t know most ultrasounds come back negative? do you think i haven’t spent every waking moment on WebMD for the past week? i was hoping for something more concrete, like a scan from a machine built by scientists and engineers that a doctor could look at, but your fucking hunch is a close second. do you also want to tell me that most biopsies also come back negative?? WOW!! are you taking new patients??????” i want to storm out and stomp across the bridge home in the freezing wind just to soothe the heat of my seething rage. i want to blame this on the US healthcare system but haven’t figured out how.

instead, i swallow the unkindness i want to unleash on the woman before me. for all i know, “don’t worry” might be the most emotionally generous thing she’s said to anyone all week. she could also be an irredeemable bitch! but such judgments are outside my purview. in a week i will not remember her face. i smile. “next week is fine.”

another week passes, doubling the time i expected to have to keep this to myself, and i grow comfortably more insane. all the usual things help: getting up early, going for a walk, listening to music, being around people, exercising. infuriating! some days i don’t do any of that. one of the greatest rights a human can exercise is the refusal to do something guaranteed to make you feel good, for no discernible reason.

i continue to stew on the receptionist’s use of “don’t worry”. i’m not worried! i’m angry. my time has been disrespected, but worried?! why would i be worried! the doctor said she’s not worried, so i’m not either! i do lament the fact that it’s on The Good Tit. and i seriously grapple with the possibility of a slow, wrenching death for the first time. i’ve had a few close calls but they’ve always been freakish, sudden accidents. my family’s baseline physical health has been blessedly healthy, but shit happens. i almost got hit by a truck last month. if anything, my mind has been a far greater danger to me than my body. i always figured if i were to go young it would be something like that — even though on some level i know that the most coveted ending life can give is the privilege of aging, a slow and gentle wasting away in itself. these endless thoughts of death are obviously amplified by relentless images of barbaric, agonizing mass murder in the news. it makes me wonder if we all go to the same place. i hope not. i hope there is a hell.

it seems reasonable to demand that, during our three-minute interaction, the receptionist should have considered all the conclusions i’ve come to in the past week. she does not know i have already decided i would not tell anyone. that i would take a trip to oregon and never return. that i would have a party and invite everyone before i go. maybe a fake wedding — that’s the only thing that seems to get everyone you love in the same room, until the next thing, the thing which requires your presence but not your participation. she does not know i’ve been thinking about how to ask for my sister’s social security number in a way that’s not suspicious so i can make her a beneficiary on my accounts and in my will, which i still don’t know how to make. she doesn’t know that i’ve been calculating how to soonest hit my deductible before the exact date my health insurance would run out if my contract isn’t renewed for next year. she does not know that every unexpected pain or twinge confirms the secret fear that there is something horrible growing inside me, has maybe always been there. she does not know how angry i am at myself for all the times i was not present, the nights i wish i remembered more of, everything i meant to do and didn’t, everything i never said, all the love i was too scared to seize; to say nothing of all the things i might miss, books i want to read, films i want to watch, faces i love growing lines i might not get to see. maybe my assumption of a quick death was a coping mechanism — the FOMO is more tolerable when you don’t know it’s coming.

on the other, less self-obsessed hand: she very likely did know what i’ve been thinking. just because she has zero bedside manner doesn’t mean she’s ignorant of the harm people’s minds are capable of inflicting upon them. it’s very possible she’s gone through this herself. our exchange was a particularly low moment, but parts of this period of temporary insanity have taken my mind to less myopic places. (nearly) every frazzled or nasty person i’ve encountered has allowed me to practice empathy i did not know i possessed. how many of them have just received terrible news, or are waiting to? how many times have i crumbled with gratitude at the smallest kindness when i most needed it — a free cup of coffee, a door held open, a well-timed compliment? maybe even, under other circumstances, a “don’t worry”? how often do i offer up that love to strangers in return? what a gift it is, one i’ve ungratefully received, to have known enough love on earth to make even the thought of leaving so painful. i would miss everything, even curmudgeonly old bitches at the radiologist’s office.

my childhood friends and i celebrate an early christmas together. i can’t wait to see them, but am dreading it a little, because it’s hard to keep a secret eating you alive from people who knew you in kindergarten. thankfully, as always, my own shit melts away in the presence of friends who have become family. there are new jobs and degrees and relationships and a BABY to celebrate! our conversations about parenting and money and dating are as meaningful and fulfilling as the endless late-night AIM sessions we’d have about books and music and, even though no one was doing it then, dating. in the years of my childhood before my sister was born, i was excruciatingly lonely. my friends always saved me. they are doing it again now, without even knowing, just through the gift of their company. time flattens out. we are five, fifteen, twenty-five, someday we might even be thirty. everyone is going to live forever.

the next morning, we linger over breakfast before two of us catch the train back to the city. the conversation doesn’t drag for an instant. we lament the fact that this is the first year christmas doesn’t feel at all like christmas (work, family, the hottest december on record, active genocide being waged in the biblical birthplace of christ, etc). i still don’t disclose the lump, but lean into the rawness and confess this gathering is the thing i’ve most enjoyed in months. that’s not something i’d usually say out loud. maybe i should change that.

we switch to the subway. my friend is getting off one stop before me. before she goes, we share a long hug goodbye and i promise, for real this time, that i am going to visit the city i thought she’d only called home for a year, but it’s been three.

she disembarks, and the entire train spills out with her. alarmed and alone, i double check the station: this shouldn’t be the last stop. are we being held? did the route change? there’s no announcement, not that i can make those out half the time anyway.

the momentary silence lasts just an instant long enough to become purgatorial. it’s only long enough to take a breath. and in that breath it comes to me: whether it’s today, next week, in a year, or in fifty, i don’t want to die alone. inevitably, something like this will happen to me again, and inexplicably, we’ve built a world that doesn’t support being sick or disabled, whether from birth or through age, even though almost none of us will spend our entire lives fully able-bodied. we have only each other.

these are things i’ve said before, and meant, but always carved out my own life as an exception. for a while i craved — and relished! — a ferocious independence. i never seem to realize how cold, how stubborn, how needlessly stupid i can be until it’s pointed out to me. (“why didn’t you ask for a ride?” “you can’t date if you don’t put in any effort,” “do you want me to hold one of those four bags while you put on your mask?”) but that’s beginning to change. maybe it’s the unforgettable, worldview-changing solidarity and altruism i saw during five months on strike. maybe it’s the thought of getting sick and suffering alone. maybe it’s being confronted, over and over again, with the evils of the world, and realizing one of the most powerful things a person can do is refuse to be afraid of loving other people. whatever the reason, in this moment alone on the train, it’s all caught up with me. i fear i am dying, and can think only of all the love i’ve received, and not been able to return.

for someone terrified of revisiting the loneliness of their childhood, i’m building the prime conditions for a lonely adulthood. i love my sister more than anything in the world, but don’t think i’ve put in the hours of quality time to prove it. i keep imagining i’ll have more time to bond with my parents, and never prioritize it. i adore my friends, yet i can barely say out loud that i treasure their company. i enjoy physical intimacy with people, and afterwards i turn away to prevent the emotional equivalent. i over-invest myself in a job i love because it’s an excuse to not try anything new. i get hung up on relationships that could never have been, that i didn’t even really want, because it stalls the vulnerability of being actually known. i find out i might be sick and let the knowledge fester inside of me along with whatever else might lurk there. all my martyrdom is cowardice. i fear the full extent of my love would be too much, so i convert it into borrowed time, a currency with no return, backed by less than nothing.

the tide of passengers floods back onto the train, and i am not alone.

there’s a new receptionist at the radiologist. i don’t want to point fingers, but i get in much faster this time.

the moment i’m seen, i confess: “i put on deodorant this morning but remembered like ten minutes later. i washed it off right away and changed my shirt and can clean it off more here. please, please don’t reschedule again.”

the nurse frowns. “it doesn’t matter if you wear deodorant.” and steps out to let me change.

within the same hour, i find out i am both healthy and employed for the new year. my friend tells me to buy a lottery ticket but i forget to. it doesn’t matter. i’ve already won.

for the past several weeks, i’ve been too exhausted to drag myself to get groceries, rationalizing the avoidance by telling myself i’d also be too tired to cook and it would all expire anyway. so i subsist on free picket food and the occasional restaurant indulgence, stretching out the leftovers over days. last week was my birthday, so the fridge is stocked with lovely treats from friends to fortify my arsenal against starvation. it may not be healthy, but i am not hungry.

i cave into a scroll through the site that has consumed much of my youth and ungratefully vomited it back out. like much of the internet, it’s a borderline unusable cesspool now, but it still has its moments. it’s amazing any social media ever actually “worked”, considering it is, by necessity, an incomprehensible blend of complete strangers, desperate brands, chaotic bots, and people you know with varying degrees of intimacy, all of us fumbling at some nebulous sense of community while pissing our every thought into the wind. 

for instance, somewhere between the 10th and 957th barbenheimer joke of the day (i love them all!), i notice someone i used to sleep with share a post that gives surprising insight into what they like in bed. i realize our last encounter, while perfectly adequate for me, might have been lacking for them. the gradual cooling over the past few months suddenly makes sense. it’s jarring to encounter something that obliquely impacts your real life between quips about cillian murphy visiting his gynecologist. i’m also vaguely irritated i’m finding out via a meme, when i could have found out the old fashioned way (i.e. human speech), and we both might have had an even more enjoyable evening. i wonder, for the billionth uninspired time, whether the internet is more catalyst or mirror. have people always been this strange? or is it just more on display? i guess i’m not much better, writing about it here.

oh well. sex is an audition and sometimes you don’t get a callback. i don’t dwell on it, but keep the new information on layaway in case the opportunity presents itself again.

without fulfilling (or any) work, home-cooked meals, exercise, sex, or meaningful hobbies, i am left to seize on small, passing beauties. a cute dog or baby can buoy me for hours. when i allow myself to purchase a (non-alcoholic) beverage, i close my eyes and savor the sensation of liquid pooling over each of my taste buds. i get politely stoned in the middle of the day and sit on benches around the neighborhood like some sort of retiree (a dying profession!). the last time i was marooned without a job, i wasn’t living anywhere half as beautiful as this.

our apartment is beautiful, too. my roommate has an incredible green thumb, so the place is lush with flora. whenever people compliment it, i give him all the credit (not that anyone who knows me would assume i could be responsible), but still feel like i’m laying claim to something i have nothing to do with. whenever he’s away i get to water them, and luxuriate in the task. watering plants is the perfect chore: it requires two hands, prohibiting any cellular distraction, but it’s simple enough that your mind is free to wander. folding laundry and vacuuming are close seconds, but until Tide gets its shit together, neither of those fill your home with the scent of earthy afterglow. tilting your wrist to trickle a stream from a watering can (inherently bespoke, even if it’s plastic) into thirsty soil can make anyone feel gentle, ethereal, effortlessly fertile — like Drew Barrymore in Music & Lyrics, who appeared to have parlayed plant-sitting into a sustainable career.

my roommate’s horticultural talent is tragically not contagious, but i do feel the foreign impulse to make something grow of my own. like most of my recent personality developments, it’s impossible to tell whether this is a natural consequence of aging, post-covid PTSD, sobriety, or a pathetic attempt to regain some semblance of my recently-shattered creative outlet. whatever the cause, it’s a lot less destructive than some of my other impulses, so i give in easily. i buy a snake plant, a tiny cactus, and a plant whose taxonomy i cannot remotely recall, which should tell you everything about my qualifications to be a plant parent. i then let too many weeks go by, during which i remember to water them but not much else: without proper pots, they sit patiently in plastic limbo until the café/flower shop near my apartment has a sale on ceramics. there’s a compact vase i’ve had my eye on for a while — an audacious leopard print, which i usually never go for, softened by a palatable stripe of teal. very 70s. it would look good with the snake plant and overall vibe of our apartment. as a rule, i love any accessory that might make a guest wonder, “did david bowie ever do blow here?” and at 40% off, i can no longer resist.

the process of repotting brings a level of stress i have to imagine is on par with surgery. i haven’t done this in a long time. i might never have done it, actually; more likely i stood uselessly beside my mother while she did all the work.

i inherited plenty of things from my mother. a knack for gardening was not among them. i forgot how exposed the roots are at the bottom. the soil crumbling around them feels too much like blood spilling out of veins. panicking, i scoop up what i can with the doomed desperation of Jackie Kennedy in the back of the Lincoln. 

the vessel is the tiniest bit too narrow; i shouldn’t have trusted my ability to eyeball it. but eventually the compact dirt obliges, slipping inside with an ease i don’t quite trust. it’s not until the job is done that i realize this vase may actually be a cup.

regardless, it looks happy in its new home, if tilted at a strange angle. i’ll rotate it and hope its crawl towards sunlight will even it out. despite my own black thumb, i’ve always loved plants’ catlike instinct to seek out the sun, a reminder that they really are alive. in 4th grade i did a science project where i talked to plants & played them classical music to see if they’d grow faster, compared to a control group i would ignore. the experiment proved nothing, since i felt too guilty to actually ignore the control group, and because the “study” i’d based the hypothesis off was undoubtedly total bullshit. (what scientific journal would i have even been able to access?? i was 9!) but i enjoyed doing it. tending to them made me feel close to something holy.

once it’s all settled, the soil redistributed, i see something i hadn’t spotted in the old pot: a tiny shoot of bright green, brand new, peeking out below its siblings. the sight of it makes me worry this was all wrong, too much, too soon; that this transplant will inevitably kill it. the vase i loved so much was always destined to be a grave; a manifestation of my failure, once again, to make anything beautiful last.

eventually the anxiety ebbs. the plant does not wither before me. i bask beside it in the sunlight, resting in the pyrrhic comfort that the worst is bound to come — but not just yet.

the one upside: drinks are a quarter of what i’d pay back east. here, for the first time in my life, i feel rich. i can buy rounds here — which is useful, because the friends i came with left, and i’m having to make new ones. there are still a few seniors i know, and i insist on buying their drinks, honoring tradition as recent grads once did for me.

i remember how acute the class division felt on the weekends: if you had access to a parent’s credit card, your night could start whenever you felt like it. if you had to pay for shit yourself, you’d refresh your bank app on 11:59 every other thursday, waiting for the clock to strike midnight until the $80 or so you cobbled together from part-time minimum-wage jobs would hit your account. then you’d run to the ATM that wouldn’t charge you a fee, wait in line, feel a sense of camaraderie with all the other broke bitches, then run to get a cab to this very bar, sneak sips from a flask as you wait in line again, annihilate your consciousness with alcohol. we would do this for (at least) three consecutive nights, rinse, repeat. i am grateful that i don’t miss it, but at 23 i still drink too much — it’ll take me several more years to realize how easily and eagerly this place bred alcoholics. (god forbid anyone smokes a blunt, though!)

the night always ends at 3AM with the same few songs played in succession. i flirt with the idea of staying until then, realize i don’t want to, and decide to leave. powerful! brave! and easy, since most of my friends are gone.

buzzed but not quite drunk, i breeze out of the bar into the warm september night. summer always seemed to last so long here. there are no cabs around, so i open the lyft app, thinking on how it didn’t exist when i first got here. a few weeks into my first semester, i had to walk miles back to campus alone at 3AM. cops pulled over to yell at me, thinking i was a sex worker. i felt unsafe enough on the streets to indulge in the white girl luxury of pleading for a ride home. they spat “this isn’t a taxi service” and sped off.

lyft is almost a taxi service, but the nearest car is 14 minutes away. i roll my eyes with east-coast impatience. a year ago, i probably would’ve ordered the ride then gone back inside for another round. but i am 23, eons older and wiser than the seniors inside, singing and swaying to piano man, everything ahead of them.

the door to the bar jangles open. out of the corner of my eye i see a guy lean against the wall to my right, fiddling with his phone, undoubtedly doing the same thing i am, for in the end we are all predictable algorithms. i don’t fully look at him until he says my name.

oh. wow. god, he looks good. this is honestly the last thing i fucking need right now.

i can’t remember the last time i saw him, but i remember the first. the sensation of missing a stair, of forgetting my own name. the sudden calm that time he put his arm around me after that party where we talked all night and walked home together in the middle of the street. the utter certainty that this was a person i was destined to be in love with. that time we stood on a balcony overlooking the ocean and i realized if he wouldn’t kiss me now, he never would. and the night at this very bar, when one of my best friends kissed him — following me around to make sure i’d see! — and the ensuing devastation of an almost cartoonish betrayal. he hadn’t known what i felt, but she had, and that was worse. i’ve been the crying liability drunk girl exactly thrice. the other two times were because somebody died.

some sort of greeting is choked out of me. i ask what he’s been up to, because i genuinely don’t know — i quietly unfollowed him on everything a while back, for my own sanity. as he talks, i relax into the relief of realizing i genuinely don’t feel anything for him anymore. it was a brief, intense, youthful fancy. i hadn’t been in love with him. i had been in love at him, which was slightly easier to recover from.

he tells me about his life. i smile and nod politely, like i hadn’t called a doctor shortly after we met because i thought something was wrong with my heart. like he wasn’t the reason my palms sweat for the first time. i hadn’t known they could do that.

“so,” he says, stepping a little closer. “it seems like you’ve really been killing it in new york.”

i freeze a little. he looks good even under these stupid neon green lights. i probably look like shrek. but by the way he’s looking at me, i might not. he is not yet close enough to kiss, but he could be. if i still wanted him.

the lyft is still 10 minutes away. a thousand possible lifetimes could unfold by then. we’re back on the balcony. we’re in the middle of the street. we’re meeting in the dining hall for the first time. i’m telling my friends about him. i’m wondering how he feels about me and haven’t yet been proven wrong.

a cab pulls up — a regular one, not a lyft — and i choose.

“yeah, i kind of am,” i shrug with an insouciance i do not feel. “well, this is me — so good to see you! glad you’re doing well,” etc, etc. banal pleasantries spill from my lips as i grab the cab. i fumble with the sliding door, utterly fucking up the smooth exit i’d intended.

once the door is shut, i beg: “can you please take me back to campus?”

the driver turns to me, glances to the beautiful man outside, sizes up the situation. “twenty dollars.”

“twenty?!” i shriek — it is usually three. but he has shrewdly and accurately assessed my desperation to get out of there, so i accept defeat. i cancel the lyft and eat the $5 penalty, telling myself $25 is a small price to pay to avoid the self-destruction i inevitably would have wrought had i stayed.

i never see him again. i don’t regret my choice, and don’t think about it much — despite writing about it now. but i can’t forget it, because it became the blueprint for how i fall in love: quickly, consumingly, with a spark whose absence i’ll never settle for. there will be other almost-loves, old flames i’ll allow to briefly reignite. there will be many more times i feel so beautiful and so certain and am wrong anyway. mostly, there will be people i let close enough to kiss, but not close enough to love. there will be plenty more people i am in love at, and vice versa. i wait, with varying degrees of patience, to be in love with. i am still waiting.

let me begin by saying: you are not getting your money’s worth and i fully understand if you cancel your paid subscription! i am very grateful for you anyway!

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