I’m really into the phrase “crashing out,” I think it’s a good visual and sonic representation of the mental state of utter despair and hopelessness that comes for me every July since Noah died. And it’s nice to know that your whole mind can come untethered and still can be rebuilt into a functioning one in a few moments (or days, or weeks). The proverbial block tower that kids love to knock over just to build back up. The never-ending cycle of dirty laundry, clean laundry, dirty laundry. Entropy into order into entropy again. My grief goes around and around and around, almost always hitting a deep pit then my mind finding a glimmer of comedy to flip the switch to functioning again.

On my birthday, I went to see a movie by myself as a treat, then midway through the film I realized the pearl on my engagement ring had fallen off during the day at some point. I was shocked but decided to stay in the movie and cry in the appropriate parts of the story. I was a little dazed when I got out, and I had to awkwardly ask the people at the concessions to let me know if they found a pearl while they were cleaning. It honestly would have looked like a tiny piece of popcorn. Even though I already felt like it wouldn’t be found, I left a note that said:

Hitomi

lost pearl

(My phone number)

Unsurprisingly, I never got a call. I haven’t been wearing my engagement ring since my birthday. I would, but it just has a jaggedy metal screw thing coming out of the middle.

A few days later, I woke up from a dream where I was asking Noah to visit me in Chicago. He was acting very aloof, not even really looking at me. I started crying, almost begging him to come see me. I think he hugged me but didn’t say anything. When I woke up it felt like a slap in the face, so I just cried for like 10 minutes just being miserable. That night I found out a child we know died in his sleep.

A week later was Noah’s death anniversary. I dragged myself to work, came home to cry a bunch, then ended up going on a run at dusk because I didn’t really know what else to do. And I sometimes remember that running was Noah’s preferred method of processing (he never said this to me directly, but after he couldn’t walk, he did make clear to me that he needed running to process). Then I laughed with his family about I had to change 5 shitty diapers in a row that afternoon. The crash out had ended, for now.

In May, Arsenal won the league. Weirdly, we won it mid-week, so I was at work when I found out. I smiled really big and had to go back to work, where I probably laughed a little more than normal. I took the bus home, walked from the bus stop to my building. As soon as I got inside, I could just feel tears rolling out of my eyes. I sobbed when I got upstairs. It was a crazy release of the years and years of waiting I guess, and letting go of the armor sports fans wear to pretend that it didn’t matter that much or we didn’t care if we win or not. I really, really missed Noah. It was so strange to watch 24 gazillion hours of parade footage and not have Noah to show him only to realize he’d watched it all already. Obviously I have a parasocial relationship with all of the Arsenal boys so it was utterly exhausting, trying to keep up with all of their stories and goofy drunk celebrations and their world cup experience and vacations and now holy cow the league is back and like I said, time is a flat circle and we must endure the pit of despair and the glow of victory cycle. It’s weird to know that without Noah, I wouldn’t even care to know that Saka got his hair braided or Trossard went to Turkey (I am devastated).

I happened to be in Jamaica for Stephen’s wedding the final day of the season, and it was the perfect weekend, complete with incredible sunsets and infinite mangoes and jerk chicken and fresh coconuts and also somehow a rendition of “Thong Song” that devolved into chipmunk voice that still makes me laugh out loud. I wore my/Noah’s Thierry Henry shirt, and the workers were so sweet—even non-Arsenal fans were congratulatory and nice about it, even when I commented to one of them that I had never met a City fan in real life.

Last month, Noah’s brother Seth and his wife Marina had a marriage celebration in Vermont. I had the best time and also cried a massive amount while jumping up and down screaming LCD Soundsystem lyrics. It was magical to see the layers of his friends and his extended family mingling. Thankfully someone did acknowledge that I am sad not just because Noah wasn’t there but because we should have had a celebration like that. I think I love weddings so much because I have a lot of respect for weddings, the idea that a couple can gather people and commit to something and demonstrate their values through a party. Hospitality and hosting and planning and executing is all a form of value demonstration. I do it everyday when I set up the classroom or come up with activities for the kids. I get excited about different painting techniques I can introduce to the kids or go to the library and find the perfect book or do a puppet show with a stuffed animal turtle (if you have young kids—you must do puppet shows. Magic is real and they’re puppets). I make sure people feel safe and calm and excited in balance. I think it takes a lot of work but also character to make weddings feel good for everyone, to make it feel real and fun and meaningful. I’m grateful to have people in my life that are special like that, and I’m always learning to be more kind and generous from these big efforts.

A few days after my sad abandonment dream, I had a different one where I was hosting like a combo wedding/memorial for Noah and me. I was wearing a black and white dress, hectically trying to finalize my speech about how I wanted everyone to close their eyes and take a beat, then open their eyes and see if they saw any signs from Noah. Noah was definitely dead in this scenario, but he was there when I was trying to write about how he helps me make decisions that are right for me, and he was right next to me smiling, saying “I do do that” or something like that, and hugging me, and I said Yes yes yes laughing and crying.

Every death anniversary, I get in a panic about how Noah is going to be forgotten, or flattened. I think I fear being flattened as well, not being able to make new memories or keep thriving in a way that’s complex and wonderful. It’s so strange to keep aging when your person stays the same age, and photos of him look younger now, like Rori texted me on his death anniversary. I wish I could feel the day-to-day stuff that I know still affects me.

In other news, I’m starting grad school this week! It’s probably way overdue, but judging from the readings I’ve started doing, I’m in for lots of learning and cognitive ass-kicking. I am very excited to overuse my new highlighters and take sooooo many notes and have lots of hot takes. If you have any tips or tricks about keeping readings and research organized, I’d love to know! I’ve felt more motivated to read recreationally right before having to read a lot for school, too. Finally finished the whale book Fathoms and it was all very fascinating, if you want to chat about it!

I’m gonna go cut up an heirloom tomato, the part of summer that I still love unfetteredly.

Love, Hitomi

p.s. RIP to Dolly Parton, a person who focused her massive talent and worked so hard to make her dreams reality (so Noah) then used her fame to spread love and literacy. When someone does something for every child, I know they understand unconditional love.

My favorite Dolly song, and a cute video of her and Chet Atkins goofing off

Blond 10 years old, how time flies when you’re having feelings!

Hello from springtime. I’m so happy that when I wake up there is light, and when I get home from work I can sit in the light for a few hours then rush around to eat dinner before 8:30PM because I was just chillin’ in the sun. Humans are animals, and they don’t function the same during the winter and spring. I was going to write something about joy and how people do awesome stuff when they do things out of joy and not out of fear, but then a certain soccer team started squeezing my spirit to its limit this month, so I’ll write about something else that I’ve been noodling. (Check back with me in the summer about said soccer team.)

In the last few months, I’ve finally accrued enough furniture in my apartment that I have at least 3 spots I can sit on that isn’t the rug or my bed! It took me so long to furnish my place, because 1. moving big furniture on your own is damn near impossible (thus you have to schedule and/or pay people to help you, which takes extra planning) and 2. my motivation for furnishing the place has been low. Probably due to a little bit of work burnout and finally coming out of hibernation, and also my existential nihilism being very concrete in this case.

I was telling my therapist the other day that being with Noah during his illness and dying was the single most important thing I have ever done in my life and probably will be for my whole life. There is the relationship we built before the dying, but right now, that caregiving part feels like the most significant thing I’ve ever done. This realization helped me understand why I don’t know how to move through the world anymore. Anything else is petty, small, unimportant. And although I have many family and friends that mean a lot to me that I have a role in their lives, it never feels like I’m the crux of the thing. Which is good, that most people I know have multiple ways to be supported and loved. And the world definitely does not revolve around me. I think I’m insane for thinking that there is such a thing as the most important thing that I can do with my time on Earth. But that is how I feel, and it prevents me from feeling that anything else is meaningful. And sometimes fully functioning humans are also insane.

One of my favorite phrases that I use in my professional work is “It’s not about you.” When a kid’s yelling at you that they hate you, when a parent is angry and acting passive aggressive (or full-on aggressive, tbh), when a co-worker doesn’t like you, etc. etc., it’s good to remember that you’re not the center of their world, and you also can’t solve every problem that they have. I’m pretty good at stepping back and saying, “This person is really angry right now, but the only thing I can control is how I communicate with them and help them feel safe.” or “I need to take some space from this situation so I don’t take it personally.” It bums me out when someone doesn’t trust me, but I also know that it’s not 100% because of things I did or said, because people perceive and interact with the world from their own special perspective, which can be laden with preconceived notions or preferences or bad days. And sometimes people suck! And nothing you can do can change that.

So why am I so bad at using “It’s not about you” when it’s about Noah? It feels unfair that he’s not here to just straight up tell me that it’s not that big of a deal. He did tell me that I should take a few months off work and get over it (implied when he died). I don’t know if it was his depression talking or him actually thinking that it was going to be helpful for me to hear that from him. Spoiler; it didn’t work! I need him to come back to life and tell me, yes, you can buy a couch and not feel guilty. You can make friends and do new things and not feel like you can’t make future plans. That I don’t need to have one huge purpose to be alive. That I can go from one thing to another to another to another until I die, and that’s also a good life.

I return to this thought again and again, that it’s really hard to have your partner die young, because then there is such a long path of possible futures that you can always compare your life to. It feels never-ending. I don’t always feel sad or angry or resentful about it, but people around me have gotten married, had kids, moved to different places, built careers, have a community, and of course keep having birthdays. It’s hard for me to not look over constantly at the life Noah and I had planned to have. I’m almost 4 years out since I’ve lost my planning partner. I’ve scrambled around for almost 4 years, and I’m not that much better at feeling settled and planning ahead. People keep asking me if having all of my stuff together feels grounding. And it does, in that there isn’t a tiny part in the back of my mind always recalling random items in boxes that I know I packed sometime in the last 4 years. That part has been excised, and that does feel pretty good. Resolved.

I got a desk the other day, which was a big step. Now I can sit at the desk facing a window, looking out to the honey locust leaves budding out from the branches outside (do you notice how fast leaves come in once they decide? It’s like when I got shelves and a water purifier and a couch inside of 3 days.) and eat my breakfast and dinner. I can set up my computer to browse the web, or do my fucking taxes. I can paint big popsicle sticks to use for garden markers. I can cut paper on my cutting mat without hovering over it on the floor. I can embroider in the sun. Just so you know, when I get a real lamp to go next to this desk, it’s all over for y’all.

Anyways.

Some delights from the last few months:

Cherry blossoms in Jackson Park in Hyde Park! It’s kind of fun as a Japanese-American person to see the obsession with cherry blossoms creep into American culture. The ephemeral nature of the blossoms means that you have to go see them when you can, and even if you plan to go see them in full bloom, the wind or rain might wash it all away before you get there. You must recognize the inevitable loss of the beauty if you want to appreciate the beauty. It’s really nice to do hanami with my nephews, even though they were more interested in two older boys who were wrestling and rolling down the hill near the Yoko Ono sculpture. But again, my little nephews won’t always be wrestling, and wrestling with them now is a gift.

I went to visit New York last weekend, with the main goal being seeing Julian’s solo show (only up until this Sunday, please go! It is so special.) but ended up meeting Melissa’s dog, cheering on Jess running a half marathon which inspired me to go running more, going to a coffee shop with surprisingly good dim sum, having some good heart-to-hearts, watching my baby nephew dance to “Ganja Farmer,” and eating some quality slices. I think New York still makes me emotionally volatile because it feels like Noah should be there, it’s the last place where I saw him living before he got sick again. And this might be a stretch, but seeing the river of people going in and out of subways, it feels strange that none of them are Noah. I told someone that New York has so many people that it feels like you see people you know all the time. But it’s usually the type of person, not the actual person you know.

I finally watched The OA and liked it a lot. It is quite sad, like the OA’s life is like a Russian novel but I guess that’s fitting for her. I’m sure some people would find this show cheesy or annoying in that the story didn’t get fully fleshed out because it got canceled after 2 seasons. But I enjoyed the magical multiverse-ness of it, and the movements, and the friendship of BBA and the high school kids. One of the parts I loved the most is when BBA hesitates to cash a check that was written for her inheritance from a dead relative, because it’s the last piece of that person, even if he didn’t sign it himself. I briefly contemplated not cashing the checks from Noah’s bank accounts when I finally closed them this year because I didn’t want the money to just be merged into my own bank account. It’s really stupid, but again grief doesn’t really care if something is stupid or irrational. It only gives mundane things so much significance until it’s too heavy to hold. The only reason I did cash them is because my immediate thought after considering not cashing them was Noah thinking it was the dumbest thing. So I did cash them, don’t worry.

I found out about Rec League, a social media platform that’s kind of like Pinterest but more personal and with clear authorship. I’ve been trying to make daily-ish recs and it’s a nice exercise to write down why I like specific things. It’s a little bit of externalizing my internal thoughts about my objects that I’ve been reunited with, like all of my mini spatulas and rice bowls and special chopsticks I bought in Kappabashi. Some of the people on there have really good taste and are gem-finders, and it’s kind of fun to find people who have overlapping interests as you but in vastly different contexts. Here’s my account, maybe you should make one and we can see each other’s recs! It’s definitely less infinite scroll-y and more early social media platform vibes where people’s personalities feel real! I like the premise of recommendations being the basis of a post instead of rants or crime stats or the news, it’s a little bit more goofy and some are actually very useful or inspiring! Like this Punch Brothers cover of The Strokes’ “Reptilia” that I learned about from a post. Excuse me, what?!

I hope this season is full of ephemeral beauty, wherever you are.

Love, Hitomi

We had our first False Spring in Chicago recently, which was awesome, except for that I had this sinus infection that had been bothering me for 3 weeks so I probably didn’t take advantage of a gorgeous 3 day weekend as I should have. Then it was back to windy cloudy blustery, so back to Brave Irene I became. Although I was getting to a point of the winter where I was in a groove, knowing how to dress (thank you to Marina and Seth for my fancy 100% wool hood thing that I wear nearly everyday), cooking hearty soups, reading a bunch of books, and going to sleep early.

I am also contemplating my goal of working less hours, playing more to increase my humanity and sanity as well as my ability to contribute to the world in a way that I want to in reaction to the current world. Grief has squashed my delusion that I can do everything I want to do with the time I have. I cannot. But I can make changes in how I live to align better with my priorities and values. Does everyone know that you don’t have to work all the time? Emails are made up?

I’ve felt so powerless at the start of the year, with ICE murders and occupation of the Twin Cities, which mirrors so much of what was happening in Chicago in the fall. Here’s an article about Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, who was killed in September by ICE agents in Chicago. I often say this about police killings, but it should not matter who you are or what your politics are or if you were a good mom or dad or good at school for police to decide to shoot and kill you or not. My college friend is a teacher in Minneapolis, and the way that her community is coming together to support families who are affected by the ICE presence is so amazing. It makes me think that getting to know each other and distributing resources ourselves are the only way to keep our fraying society together. And right now I don’t feel like I have the strength to work towards the world I want. Might seem silly, but if we all worked 30 hours instead of 40 hours a week, I think we could do such epic mutual aid and solve homelessness and abolish ICE and take care of all children. And the wealthy people who don’t work aren’t doing that because their interests are not aligned with distributing wealth, so little people gotta work less. Please let me know if there are books and articles I should be reading about this! I’m sure so many smart people already have ideas and methods to make this reality!! Is this just the Black Panther Party? Should I just move to a commune already? Is this just basic socialism?

Twice in the last few months, I woke up about an hour before my alarm. I saw my window was glowing. I pulled my curtain open, and the moon was almost full, shining so brightly. It was almost blinding. In the warmer months, Noah visits in the shape of graceful, whimsical creatures: butterflies, dragonflies, cardinals, foxes, bald eagles, snapping turtles, gorgeous poppies, etc. But in the frozen tundra of Chiberia, he is not able to visit in those lively bodies—so I think he went all out and is visiting me as the moon. There is something to it, Noah presiding over the window of time where the moon shines quietly while most people sleep, right before the sun comes up and everything gets busy. I don’t know what he’s saying when he visits. But it does calm my mind.

The other day I fell out in the middle of the night though, because I had a weird realization about how in a year and a half Noah would have been dead 5 years, and I’m gonna turn 40, but I still feel 33, because that’s the age he died at, and the age I was when he had to start getting treatments again for his returned cancer, and it’s the age where I presumed I would be getting married to him, and I guess in some ways I haven’t figured out how to live the person I am now, yet. I was crying, and it hurt. My nose was stuffy, and my sinuses hurt. I was having cramps, and they hurt. My heart hurt, metaphorically and physically. I was in pain because I was alive. I lumber around with this body and sometimes it realizes something terrible about Noah being dead, and it clangs the bells and all the alarms go off and has to be devastated. But it could also have been the sinus infection that I needed to get antibiotics for.

A way that I’m trying to play more as mentioned earlier, is going to see more art. Some of my friends had told me about the Anselm Kiefer show at the St.Louis Art Museum, and it was closing in January. So I took a cheeky Amtrak down to hang out with some pals and also see some of his gigantic art! Unfortunately the show is gone now, but so cool to see the great hall of the old building transformed with 20 feet tall paintings. Here’s a video of him pouring hot metal and biking around his warehouse studio. I think he captures some of the magnificence of rivers, oceans, and other big natural elements in an aggressive way, which I appreciate because I’ve always thought that the Mississippi River is full of deadly whirlpools that can suck you under the surface, like my sixth grade science teacher had told us one time.

Another artist’s show that I saw right before it closed (when you have little executive functioning left after working really hard at your job, last minute is the best minute to do fun things) was Elizabeth Catlett’s show at the Art Institute of Chicago. I missed seeing it with my family when they went, but I ended up going to see it and getting a membership to boot, which I think I’m old enough to do. Lemme know if you want to go and I can take you for free! She has some epic linocut prints and political posters that are stunning, as well as gorgeous stone sculptures of faces. I was actually most into her lithographs, especially her depiction of babies…I feel like she captures the roundness of babies so well. Faces are so hard to put down into a drawing, but Catlett is so good at it.

Hopefully soon the days will be long enough where I will feel inspired to make more stuff, but right now I’m in a rest and consuming mode mostly. This year is definitely starting off much stronger in terms of my reading books habit, and the books I’ve read so far have been pretty quality. I don’t know why, but last year I wasn’t super into many of the books I read and when I started working in the spring my reading totally dropped off, so I couldn’t get into a groove. I guess same with my writing, because here I am not having posted here for like 4 months!! Anyways, recently finished Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America, both of which I loved immensely. Actually I think some of the scenes in Pachinko triggered the aforementioned menty b due to someone’s husband being really sick and injured and dying. But it’s still an amazing saga of a Korean family who immigrate to Japan and how their lives unfold. After reading it I was amazed at how expansive the story got, and it reminded me of how I always feel after thinking about how long my grandma has been alive and all the things she’s lived through. How the book starts out about one person and her long life is in context of larger world events but also big life events for her and her family. But the way the book is written, there are details to the everyday things, like going to the market, or cooking dinner, or attending school, or going to work, that it feels real, even when dramatic things happen along the way. I sort of related to some of the characters in that way, having Noah die after a terrible gruesome medical condition is dramatic in some ways, but I didn’t feel like it was dramatic as it was happening, except for those acute situations where people were saying he might die. Every life is like that. Maybe our little minds can’t compute epic, dramatic events until it’s a little bit in the rearview.

Soon I will write about going to Barcelona (!) or what I’ve been cooking or the importance of joy in the pursuit of greatness (Alysa Liu/Ebere Eze of it all) or something like that, but today all you get is moon thoughts.

Love, Hitomi

p.s. Thanks to people who subscribe for newsletter, and to the people who signed up in the last few months probably wondering wtf is the point of subscribing was! Time is a flat circle!

p.p.s. A poem about moons from a Spanish poet the Spaniards told me about:

Two Evening Moons
by Federico Garcia Lorca

I

For Laurita, my sister’s friend

The moon is dead dead
— it will come back to life in the spring

when a south wind
ruffles the brow of the poplars

when our hearts yield their harvest of sighs

when the roofs wear their grass hats

The moon is dead dead
— it will come back to life in the spring

II

For Isabelita, my sister

The evening sings a lullaby
to the oranges

My little sister sings
“the earth is an orange”

The moon weeping says
“I want to be an orange”

You can’t be — my dear — 
even if you turn pink
or a little bit lemon
How sad!

In the original Spanish:

Dos lunas de tarde

I

Laurita, amiga de mi hermana

La luna está muerta, muerta;
pero resucita en la primavera.

Cuando en la frente de los chopos
se rice el viento del sur.

Cuando den nuestros corazones

su cosecha de suspiros.

Cuando se pongan los tejados
sus sombreritos de yerba.

La luna está muerta, muerta;
pero resucita en la primavera.

II

A Isabelita, mi hermana

La tarde canta
una berceuse a las naranjas.

Mi hermanita canta:
La tierra es una naranja.

La luna llorando dice:
Yo quiero ser una naranja.

No puede ser, hija mía,
aunque te pongas rosada.
Ni siquiera limoncito.
¡Qué lástima!

Yesterday was Noah’s 37th birthday. His mom posted about it and said, “Noah would be 37, in his prime”, which is a speculation that I totally agree with. Envisioning Noah if he hadn’t gotten sick again when he did, he would be in his prime. He’d have a banging illustrator career, having finished his MFA at SVA, illustrated a USPS women’s soccer stamp, and starting his professor career. I’m pretty certain we’d have a kid, too, especially if COVID hadn’t happened. I think we could have had a kid that is around the same age as my oldest nephew.

I’ve been forced to envision futures that are not really what I’m wanting to envision. Having my own apartment. Finding a job in a new city. Making friends with new people who don’t know Noah at all. I didn’t think I was the type of person who daydreams about the future, like a kid who knows what kind of wedding dress they’d wear or the type of house they’d live in, but when the path I thought I’d follow got cut off so thoroughly, I am realizing that I had been envisioning. A lot.

I haven’t posted here in a long time, and it might be because: 1. I was in a depression pit around Noah’s death anniversary (July 31st) this year 2. As a way to get out of said depression established care with a primary care doctor and got referrals for therapists, and started seeing a new therapist! 3. Chicago, where I live and work, have been inundated with militarized oppressive terror, and 4. I got my own apartment and have decision paralysis about buying all of these items that I need to sleep, cook, and live functionally in my own space, which I haven’t had since spring of 2020, right before COVID. Have you ever written down all the things that’s making it difficult for you to come up for air? I think it makes me feel like a little more at peace at how furiously I’m paddling underwater while trying to look like a functioning duck above water.

It seems as though every session I have with my therapist ends with us bemoaning the emotional burden we all carry because we live in a society where capitalist work is prioritized over emotional expression and collective support. I think generally I’m disgruntled at how our world is right now, and I refuse to be part of it in some ways. Which is a very Hitomi path to take, in that as a kid, if I liked my teacher, I’d work extra hard and be happy to problem solve and have a good attitude. If I didn’t like my teacher, I’d make everything harder than it is, and my work was shit. Basically if “can’t tell me nothing” was a person. So of course I’d be stubborn and unable to pivot now that the best situation I had in my life (being with Noah) has been taken away, I can’t envision something good, because what would be better than what we had made?

My current roomies who are extremely thoughtful invited me to not one but TWO author talks in one week, and it was very nourishing and encouraging, especially for my stunted envisioning abilities. The first one was Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about her new book Theory of Water. The thing that I loved was her explanation of one of the power of artists, musicians, and children was that they are able to envision a different future than what we can see right now. And imagination is needed to get out of problems we’re stuck in. At some point during the talk, she said, “World making is struggle.” We can envision all we want, but getting there, it’s going to take lots and lots of work, and it will probably take a long time. She also looked to the professor (Dr. Uahikea Maile, who is Kanaka Maoli from Hawaii) she was having the conversation with and said something like, isn’t it amazing that the two of us are having this conversation right now, after all that’s happened to our ancestors in the last 400 years? And to think about what we want to pass down, teach, and preserve.

The second one was Ross Gay, who is one of my all time recommended authors for everyone (I mean everyone). I was so excited, and Terese had never read Ross Gay, so I was blabbering on about how he’s gonna make you laugh and cry and he’s got such a wide emotional range, especially for a man, and he’s into gardens and basketball and babies, all the good things. That he finds delights but also can talk grief in a super powerful way. And he delivered, all that and more! It was so awesome, like seeing Messi in person. He had a series of “plays” about a dog (his dog) and the owner (him) that were so goofy and silly, he was cracking himself up. He also read some poems that made me start crying instantly, thank goodness Rachel had tissues in her bag. My favorite thing he said was that the dearth of public feeling is fucking us up as a society. He said that we don’t all need to be feeling the same way, but to be feeling emotions with other people is so important. He also said that he wants to undistinguish the individual and acknowledge the collective, as a philosophy around his teaching. He also said teaching is how to notice things, which is straight up a Noah MacMillan proverb.

I’ve spent a large portion of some concerts in the last few months crying, the type where tears are just rolling and rolling down and my voice is cracking as I sing along. At the TV on the Radio show a concerned looking younger woman offered her spot so I could see the stage better. I got to see Mannequin Pussy, a band that makes music that I can directly channel my rage through, and it was magical to hear all of these ladies chant-singing “Loud, bark, deep, bite” and screaming against fascism. It must be said that my work day involves public feeling in a contained space–we’re not quite public, because we know each other so well (some of the kids have known each other, basically 80% of their lives) and expressive emotion is the default at this age–but either way, I’m exposed to feelings. If you’re in a touring band, your job is to elicit public feeling with your art and energy. Not everyone’s day is suffuse with public feeling, weirdly. (See what I mean, I avoid things I don’t want to do, like getting a desk job.) But the two talks were good to remind myself that there is something meaningful about what I’m doing, even if I feel 100% lost. The other day, one of the dads stopped in the middle of our chat recounting his kid’s day and thanked me and my co-teacher for working so hard to come up with interesting activities for the kids, changing their diapers, that it’s really hard work. It felt like such genuine gratitude, I think I even pulled out the “Thank you for saying so.” Little does he know that I’m learning so much from the kiddos, how we can keep working on this world when it feels so slow moving, or even backwards moving, if we can have their vast imagination and the determination that only babies learning to walk have.

For the equinox, I baked this carrot orange olive oil cake that was a big hit with my co-workers, and it reminds me of Noah, a big carrot cake guy. I also said that witchcraft must be perpetuated during astronomical events, and baking is kind of a witchcraft. I’m grateful for people who realized you can raise some batter and it be sweet and that will bring lots of people joy.

Let me know if you want a postcard/address change announcement from me, I’ll send one if you send me your address.

Happy birthday Noah, miss you desperately.

Love, Hitomi

And a Ross Gay poem to close:

To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian

Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September sun to it
and she
has a hose too
and so works hard
rinsing and scrubbing
the walk
lest some poor sod
slip on the
silk of a fig
and break his hip
and not probably
reach over to gobble up
the perpetrator
the light catches
the veins in her hands
when I ask about
the tree they
flutter in the air and
she says take
as much as
you can
help me
so I load my
pockets and mouth
and she points
to the step-ladder against
the wall to
mean more but
I was without a
sack so my meager
plunder would have to
suffice and an old woman
whom gravity
was pulling into
the earth loosed one
from a low slung
branch and its eye
wept like hers
which she dabbed
with a kerchief as she
cleaved the fig with
what remained of her
teeth and soon there were
eight or nine
people gathered beneath
the tree looking into
it like a
constellation pointing
do you see it
and I am tall and so
good for these things
and a bald man even
told me so
when I grabbed three
or four for
him reaching into the
giddy throngs of
yellow-jackets sugar
stoned which he only
pointed to smiling and
rubbing his stomach
I mean he was really rubbing his stomach
like there was a baby
in there
it was hot his
head shone while he
offered recipes to the
group using words which
I couldn’t understand and besides
I was a little
tipsy on the dance
of the velvety heart rolling
in my mouth
pulling me down and
down into the
oldest countries of my
body where I ate my first fig
from the hand of a man who escaped his country
by swimming through the night
and maybe
never said more than
five words to me
at once but gave me
figs and a man on his way
to work hops twice
to reach at last his
fig which he smiles at and calls
baby, c’mere baby,
he says and blows a kiss
to the tree which everyone knows
cannot grow this far north
being Mediterranean
and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils
of Jordan and Sicily
but no one told the fig tree
or the immigrants
there is a way
the fig tree grows
in groves it wants,
it seems, to hold us,
yes I am anthropomorphizing
goddammit I have twice
in the last thirty seconds
rubbed my sweaty
forearm into someone else’s
sweaty shoulder
gleeful eating out of each other’s hands
on Christian St.
in Philadelphia a city like most
which has murdered its own
people
this is true
we are feeding each other
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe
never again.

I kind of forget that it’s summer on and off, despite complaining that “It’s so hot,” because July is my landmine month filled with birthdays, anniversaries of people’s weddings, and ends with Noah’s death day. It feels like the longest, sloggiest month since he died. I realized that I’m doing a lot of dopamine seeking-reward loop behavior, just doing a hundred things at the same time, like listening to a podcast while having a show on mute in the background and also putting away my clothes. Also stress eating but taking too long to start cooking dinner and ending up eating it at 9PM. It feels like an obvious move to avoid sitting and thinking about what it means that it’s been almost 3 years since Noah died.

Earlier this month, I actually went to see Noah’s nephew, the first person since he died to come into this world that is related to him biologically. I now have this sensation of missing the baby (who is a shrimp and a baby bird and I’ve already begun art appreciation with him), then immediately missing Noah. Not sure if it’s because he’s so closely related to Noah, or it’s some other strong connection. I can’t wait to make homemade crunch wrap supremes with this boy. I want him to listen to all of Noah’s playlists. I want to see if he can kick a soccer ball with any proficiency. Babies are crazy. You put so many ideas and thoughts onto this person who is already their own person but also the most helpless wobbly-necked alien being. It’s really not fair for them, that adults with baggage have to get involved in their life immediately.

Last month I went briefly to Japan to visit my grandma and uncle, mostly. She’s changed a lot since the last time I saw her. My uncle and I talked about how things are going with her, with some random convos sprinkled in. We were talking about movies (he still likes Jim Jarmusch but feels he fell off a little), and he said that American movies have lots of words, that the characters talk so much. I had just gotten assigned to teaching in the toddler classroom, where the kids are 15-24 months old and not everyone is talking intelligible words. Some of the kids babble in full sentences that are not understandable to us, but they are definitely saying lots and lots of stuff, and some kids are talking intelligibly. I was thinking about how I have to understand and respond to people who are speaking to me in a language I don’t fully comprehend. It’s almost like being in a foreign country, except that I’m responsible for the people’s well being and have to change their diapers.

Our friend Jess (who I made a painted octopus for! because she reads this blog and takes me seriously for my offers of art!) said the other day that some people would have been friends as cavemen. I think what that meant was that before cultural commonalities or clothes that you like or taste in art, there was still friendship and affinity between people. We ended up in this conversation because I was saying how I don’t fully understand how Noah’s friendships with different people worked. Even if I want to replicate their friendship or try to be there for people in the same way Noah did, it’s really going to be so different, because the other person and Noah had their special bond and way of communicating that went beyond spoken or written language. Noah wasn’t the most language forward person, I think. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t good at talking or writing or communicating with language. I feel like he didn’t have to use language as much because his presence, his body language, his demeanor communicated clearly. I think I’ve spent a long time trying to be like Noah, but recently I’ve come to terms with the fact that Noah isn’t replicable, and the best next thing is to be myself, in a way that Noah would have been proud of, or fond of, or thought was cute or kind or excellent. Again, I will never live down the Noah cult allegations because I say stuff like this. But whatever I’m doing well, I think it’s because of the time I spent with Noah, and I had something to do with it, too, but he was a major catalyst. That’s the baseline I’m working from when I interact with people close to Noah, that they know how it feels to be loved and trusted by him, and that they brought him delight.

I actually think being with one-year-olds have opened my eyes up to human connection a lot more than working with slightly older kids. With 2-5 year olds, I feel like I can get to them verbally so much more easily. I can find their interests and start a conversation, and that’s usually my in. One of my bosses said that I talk to the kids a lot, in a good way. It shows me that I’ve relied so much on language, to make sense of my world and to find ways to problem solve and to feel connected. I’m trying to bond with kids who don’t talk, who may smile when I make a funny face, or sing a song, or happen to catch them in a moment of joy that isn’t hampered by being witnessed by an adult. They can sense that I like that, and if they like that I’m slightly more joyful, then we keep connecting. It’s truly cavepeople shit. Sometimes we connect when I hold their big feelings, which I am significantly better at being in grief.

Because writing and talking has been my primary way of processing grief, I think this realization about language and our reliance on it has been really helpful. Of course I listen to music and sounds, hike mountains, feel desert sun, watch movies, eat food, exercise, etc. and it helps me perceive my grief in different ways, too. It’s not that I haven’t been feeling my feelings, but it’s that putting words to what I’m doing felt like the processing. But maybe it wasn’t really getting to the core of the thing. Holding my new nephew, knowing he’s part of Noah’s biological family, it’s a strange and visceral connection. I will always love pointing out things and naming things to babies, but I know that how he feels when I hold him is really, really important.

As mentioned before, I’ve been scrolling away, watching a gazillion short videos on social media, numbing and avoiding my July dread. It’s good news for the readers of this blog, though, because here is a massive portal to what brings me joy in a depression season!!!

Always on the grief/loss train: Subway Takes Guy’s regret, Hanif Abdurraqib on grief as recalling, Suleika Jaouad on living, Tina and Mikey on sort of aging, Anthony Bourdain on life, and sorry will never shut up about La Chimera

True about love: Elmo needs a tube blanket, cats with coffee, Tunde on direct eye contact, Maya Angelou on laughter and love, SZA is Mr.Rogers for girls

Just funnies: Peekaboo x Stayin Alive, Born Slippy, Dan Deacon sings anthem at Camden Yards, wider ducks (thanks Alex, the original bird man), Angel’s Landing is the scariest hike I’ve ever done, I fear Kai has entered his zaddy era

To be soothed by softness: A field with Dev Hynes, monkeys in an onsen, young David Byrne dancing, baby capybara he just like me fr, Björk never misses 1, 2, 3, Bad Bunny holds a bunny, Myles has no doubt

And of course a big moment in recent history is that the CLIPSE IS BACK. Malice comes back and the first song on their album is him talking about his dead dad. I love the dynamic of the brothers in interviews, Pusha being gregarious, almost silly sometimes, and Malice just sitting there quietly making faces when need be. Their Tiny Desk concert ends in the perfect way.

Recently, when Noah appears in my dreams, he is not sick. Soon after he died, he’d appear in my dreams sick, sometimes bedridden, sometimes in a wheelchair, sometimes missing his organs, his torso like an empty zip lock bag. He was in my dream the other day, working on illustrations as if it was a typical weekday, wearing a cool white woolly starter jacket. I gasped at the jacket and asked him, “Are you ready for me to steal it from you and look cute?!” And he actually let me put it on and smiled. Not something that would have happened in real life because he hated me getting food stains on his light-colored clothes. So thank you to my brain for creating special, unrealistic visions.

I was thinking about how truly shitty dying must feel. I write mostly about how it feels to be left behind, but sometimes I sit down and think about how Noah died and it really is the most harrowing thing I’ve ever seen happen to anyone. I totally get why people want to die in their sleep suddenly or be instantly killed in an accident, because then you don’t have to feel yourself slipping away. Cognitively, physically, mentally, your relationships and sense of self deteriorating in all ways. I’ve thought about this probably too much, so I am going to be weird when it starts happening to me. Judging from the fact that I’m not at peace with Noah not being in my life, it’s probably going to be extremely painful and terrible. But I also probably feel way less self-conscious about being terrible and saying the worst things I’m thinking (see this blog), so maybe I’ll just be fine. The heaviest part of knowing that he died is that he really, really suffered. Full stop. No silver linings, no “but he was kind to everyone despite his many hospital stays where he thought he might die.” Those things are true, and his suffering was massive. I have lots of gratitude. When I try to think about how he was trying to cope with dying though, I can only believe in the deepest, darkest despair. I haven’t found a way to really wrap my head around it; almost three years later, it’s still too big for me to comprehend or process. People like to say that at least he had me to make him laugh or smile or think good thoughts. I’m happy that I did that, to the extent I was able to. But it does not negate his utter suffering and willingness (his will was so damn strong) to continue to care what everyone thought and felt.

Which brings me to my take of the day. I think some thoughts and feelings are secrets and taken to the grave. Somethings are secret forever, and that is fine. I hold a few of Noah’s secret thoughts in my brain and heart, forever. I’m not going to tell you or anyone else. Ever. For someone who writes publicly, it might seem weird that I am super pro-secrets, however, I’ve always appreciated the independence secrets give you. Nobody needs to know everything about everyone, and some things really don’t need to be said aloud, or aloud to more than one person. You’re not entitled to knowing everything that I know, and knowing why I make decisions; I’m not entitled to your mind and memories and decisions, either. That is cool! I like that! I trust you to have thoughts and decisions that are right for you. (Obviously if you’re going to harm someone, please get help so you don’t.) If you want to tell me something, that is okay. If you don’t want anyone else to know that, I will keep it a secret. I think my secret keeping skill comes from my ability to throw a huge amount of information into an infinite pile in my mental abyss, after the initial recognition of the information. Sometimes I hear news that I’m supposed to keep secret and have a huge reaction, tears and everything. But I’m able to keep my mouth shut, because happy news or sad news I think should generally come from the mouth of the original secret-giver. This is a double-edged sword, I guess, because Noah didn’t want to announce to people that he was bedridden at home and without medical intervention recourse in the last months of his life, so I just didn’t really announce it to his friends and extended family in a way that I think I would like to have done in order for everyone to say goodbye properly. But I prioritized his agency more than anything in this matter, because I was also constantly thinking about his shrinking control over his own life.

Some of you are probably thinking, wow, you should tell some part of these secrets to someone, like a therapist maybe? But the thing is, some secrets are so dumb. It’s like, not even worth mentioning to anyone or would have dire consequences. But the fact that Noah told me in confidence, I feel strongly that I should keep that secret. Some secret thoughts I have, I will speak to a therapist about because it is meaningful and maybe I can resolve in the future with the help of professionals. Some secrets are not necessarily even secrets, it’s just memories and conversations only Noah and I were present for. I like to share them when they pop into my head, so I can put them into the world in a way that makes it real.

I was getting bummed about how reality seems to be warping irreparably in society, with so much misinformation flooding our world. I keep getting suggested content which either has 1.incorrect usage of words and 2.unsubstantiated claims! Obviously misinformation on facts about food or ocean temperatures or political corruption are terrifying and there should be a way to know what’s actually happening (as much as possible with the real data we have, then amended as we know and understand more). But when I think about what reality is in terms of people’s lives, it’s so hard to pin down what it really was. My friend and I were talking about how there’s always two sides to a story, that two people in a situation can have totally different takes on how the situation went down. I think my attempt at holding onto the story of Noah’s and my relationship has such a lopsided feeling. I know I’m missing at least 50% of the memory, then warping my side to fit the image of the trip or date or life we were living. We’re all inherently unreliable narrators and our memories are flawed and degraded like JPEGs each time we visit it. Like the more I listen to the same music, the grooves in my brain associating it with a certain feeling or memory gets deeper and deeper, and maybe it prevents me from seeing it in a different way.

I think I’ve said something about how “talking to Noah” as if he were alive is really difficult for me, aside from random funny things or apologies when I damage something of his. It feels like there is no spontaneity or surprise or mystery. I’m mining the decade of our time, cobbling together a response that I think he could have given. It’s a little like a LLM, but with information I retain in my brain about Noah with the grief filter over it. I get frustrated because it’s so much less satisfying than Noah actually responding to me in real life. He is much more thoughtful than I am, and he would actually have seen how I’m doing and be able to help me in the way he only knows how. I don’t even need to make an AI chatbot of Noah. My brain is trying to make it, and it blows. It keeps returning to the same familiar grooves of thought and keeps me stuck.

So I try to sleep and dream. I wake up and pull up my Notes app (I used to have a dream notebook by my bed; it will make a return when I have my own place) and furiously type what happened in the dream. Some excerpts from recent dreams:

“I was listening to a podcast where I was asking Harrison Ford if we could have one more session because I wanted to talk about Noah again with him. Talking about the moment of death.”

“Noah looks healthy and drawing with a bunch of kids. So am I. I drew a bunny and we opened cans of sardines and I hug and kiss him. We talk about how it’s okay to study once a month like when there’s a test—no need to study alllll the time.”

“It looks like I’m driving in Italy or somewhere abroad and end up flying off a cliff onto a wire bridge thing. Not a car bridge, just a series of wires for a few minutes and then a voice says ‘Stop’ but I flip over and crash into the river. Before I do, I grab the white woolly jacket, my phone is in my shorts, my passport, my memory stick/SIM card. I crack the window before I fall into the water so I can swim out.” (This is from the same dream as the beginning of the post)

Maybe my conscious mind is too rigid that I can’t think of new things that Noah would do. Maybe if he was alive he’d let me borrow his white items of clothing someday. (As I spill coffee on my shirt right now…) Maybe he’d be the same in certain ways. Maybe his thought grooves would have just gotten deeper like mine. I think my mind will be thinking about what it meant to him, how hard it was, how joyful it was. We’ll never know what was really real for him.

I’m going back to Japan for a short trip in about a week to see my grandma again. I’ve gotten the new Ocean Vuong novel (and 9 other books) on my e-reader, which I’m excited to get into on my long flight! His first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is soooo good if you haven’t read it, a quote from it about memory:

Genuinely, I forget so much. I can’t remember all of my secrets I might have told Noah that he has taken away from the land of the living. I’m kind of happy about it, let secrets disappear in the care of your loved ones. Until I also disappear with the secrets, I’ll try to keep having dreams and talking to Noah that way.

Love, Hitomi

The word productive has such a weird connotation in my mind, because it feels so based on profits and maximizing and doing everything with efficiency, which I’m always trying to fight against. But I have been working for (money) the last two weeks! Working does feel productive to me, in that I’m doing lots of work. I am working at an early childhood center, “floating” in all the classrooms, ranging from infants to up to 5-year-olds. Because I’m not assigned to one classroom for a long time, my job is to be kind to the kids, kind to the other teachers, kind to the objects and space of the classroom, kind to the families dropping off and picking up. It sounds like a children’s book. But you’d be surprised how relevant children’s book ethics is to real life. Some books are copaganda or extremely shaming or rely solely on conforming without critical thought or boundaries, so please be careful which one you read and take to heart. (Or if you want to recognize the truly surreal nature of life, maybe you’d like to read Good Night Moon or Pickle Things or one of the more obscure Maurice Sendaks or honestly any Japanese children’s book, holy cow.) But there are so many books about being kind, having real emotions like anger, worry, sadness, even grief. So it makes me think people who don’t understand those things were never shown those things as a kid, and they never thought to seek them out once they realized that they were missing those things. Or they never had that realization, yikes. It’s amazing to think every adult was once a child, but also very terrifying at the same time, just watch the world burn because of people. I do believe stories we tell each other can become reality; I read fiction not for nothing.

Teaching is more than watching kids, but it is watching kids. The most important skill I’ve honed as a teacher is observation. Seeing how they move through space, interact with people, and how they feel (and how they show how they feel). It’s all there, you usually just have to watch long enough to see. I think. There are of course times where I watch and watch and can’t figure out the inner workings of a person. And there are families and doctors and therapists and other teachers who can see them better. And sometimes some things are unsolved mysteries, but you have to continue to be kind and show love and persist. It’s really humbling to not know what to do when you’ve been teaching for more than a decade. But everyone is always changing, whatever worked the day before ceases to have any effect, and you bump heads about a million different new things, and progress and relationship is not linear, and there’s so much pressure to be “good.” I think grief brings me lots of peace, in that I don’t really care that much. I care that I repair things when I make mistakes, but I don’t fear making mistakes or asking for help nearly as much as I used to. I’m fine either way, truly. I will have difficult conversations with a kid and have no illusion that it’s going to have the effect that I hoped for on the spot. I have the patience of a tortoise. I tried to help Noah as best as I could. He still died. But I tried, and just because he died does not make my (or his parents or his family or his friends or his medical team’s) efforts meaningless. This is probably one of my strongest beliefs now.

It’s okay to never get what you want. I didn’t, at least for one of the things I really wanted. When kids cry and cry when they’re really sad or angry that they didn’t get what they wanted, I know how that feels. It’s not the same, but it’s to me pretty much the same. So I have lots more empathy for the frustration and sadness of children. I try to accept them as much as I want other people to accept mine. This is what I mean when I say kids are people, and every person was a kid. I am deep down a four-year-old, always asking “Why?” questions. My secret weapon is visual composition, much like a four-year-old making a drawing. I don’t remember being four, but I’m pretty sure I liked it and I liked going to my childcare center a lot. They had great lunch.

I’m heading to one of Noah’s friend and roommate’s wedding in St.Louis, where his boys will be gathering. I wish he was here so all of the pieces fit. I love that people are growing and making their lives, but I wish it was different. It’s really nice when two people want the same thing, I know that. I think it’s maybe the strongest feeling in the world, for two people to want the same thing and circumstances and choices allow for it to become real. Some people may call it love or friendship, but I see it everyday, when two kids want to make up a game called Super Kitties and they both have their own superpowers and they can run around making magic happen on the playground. It takes no time, and it disappears without warning.

A little short one today because I think I thought too much for the last month, and now it won’t all fit in one entry. But when Bad Bunny’s new album came out a few months ago, I listened to it a lot and the song “DtMF” (Debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve) and loved it because I also always feel that I should have taken more photos (And videos! Sound recordings! Handwriting!) of Noah while he was alive, and love drunken collective singing. May there be lots of that in all of our futures, weddings or not! Also on the Amtrak I’m on, every time we leave a station, he gives the next station, the ETA, then “Here we go.” Which makes me think of Noah and I saying “Here we go! Grab some buds!” after hearing that on a Budweiser ad. Anyone else? It’s just us?

Love, Hitomi

We were having a conversation about how differently we perceive our ability to label ourselves. My sister-in-law was saying how she heard someone who had just dabbled in violin lessons say that she was a violinist, whereas she would never label herself that, despite having played violin seriously for years and years. I was thinking of what nouns I could comfortably use to label myself, and most of them are quite obvious, like woman, sister, daughter, auntie/obachan, and teacher, which is a professional label that I feel like I’ve earned over my decade and a half of teaching. I tend to say what I’m doing instead of labeling, “I went on a run today.” “I am cooking dinner.” “I painted a painting last week.” (These sound like Duolingo sentences.) I could call myself a runner, a cook, or a painter, but I usually don’t. Funnily, I feel like Noah called me a cook unironically a few times. One noun that I actually like using is widow. I think it’s such a strong noun. I liked being a girlfriend and a fiancé also, but it gives me gravitas and I feel more important about myself when I label myself as a widow. Not everyone gets to be a widow, and I think if you do label yourself as that, it tethers you to the person that died. I feel indignant all the time about my life circumstances, and the word widow really kicks people in the face in a way that I like. Like if I have to deal with the fact that I’m a widow, then I should be able to wield its power, a double-edged sword. Also I will not have people argue with me that I shouldn’t call myself a widow because we weren’t married. Just don’t!

There is a word people used in the past for widows, which is relict. Someone or something left over. And relic is used to denote something left by a saint or martyr, such as the Shroud of Turin or a saint’s shriveled up hand (and many other quirky body parts) displayed in the basement of a church. It’s sort of funny to think of widows as relics, like something that still remains on the physical world while the saintly figure has gone on to the afterlife. When some people die, they’re canonized, put on a pedestal like a saint too, I guess. (When some people die, we celebrate though, whether it’s rude or not.) I think of Noah as a saintly figure, in a way. He had so many traits that I try to emulate still. I learned from him so much, probably more than any one person in my life. I might even say those of us who knew him are all relics of Noah. He affected us and left something for us to enjoy and reflect on. In a pejorative way, I am stuck in the time of Noah Alive, but who isn’t flooded with nostalgia sometimes, wanting things to be simpler by someone being alive again?

A few months before Christmas, I was really wanting to make a mini altar for Noah. There are many little altars on the streets of LA, Lady of Guadalupe or Jesus, obviously those candles they sell at the botanica but also in the Food4Less; they’re really fascinating to me. I like the ones where it’s hand painted, or obviously made and maintained by a person. Noah and I toyed with the idea of having an altar for our idols in this fashion, with images of Arsene Wenger and Prince and Megan Rapinoe for example. As I’ve said before, I don’t really have a religious view so I don’t have any saints or gods to worship. But I do feel protected by Noah, his TPF is what keeps me on the level day to day. So I got some balsa wood and started chopping it into shapes and TackyGluing them into little shapes. I have some acrylic paints left from when I thought I was going to make little paintings (I made a few, ok, I’m not a painter), so I decided to paint them fun colors and decorated them with tiny prints of Noah photos. I ModPodged them and even made little foods he’d like with Scupley clay (sorry wow this post is sponsored by Blick Art Supplies! But doesn’t it feel like we’re in Infinite Jest territory, soon our years will be named after corporations for real). I got so into it that the desk I was working at became a messy swarm of wood shavings, seed beads, and discarded altar stands that stood 1/8” too tall. I just kept making them and making them, and eventually I had enough to bring as Christmas gifts for Noah’s family. I kept one that I especially liked, an orange one (his favorite color) with clouds and a picture of him from a birthday hike we did in Missouri one year. The altar sits on the dash of the Civic now, because when I went on my long drives in the South and Texas/New Mexico, I felt like Noah was wrapping me with extra protective vibes. One of Noah’s brothers is gonna put his on a magnet so he can have it on his fridge, and I was thinking that’s also a good spot, for him to watch you cook and season things properly!

One of the altars I remember in my childhood is the butsudan (Buddha altar) in my grandparent’s house. It was almost like a cabinet with double doors that opened up, I think made of lacquered wood, small items like candle and flower stands covering the stepped stand for little Buddha. My grandpa would get us to put a mound of rice on the little goblet for the Buddha before we started eating dinner. I think there is something to having a physical space that you make offerings, to contemplate. I also remember that vague feeling of “I can’t do anything bad in front of the butsudan,” but I don’t remember if it was because that was explicitly said to me in their home, or I just inferred the vibes. The minds probably benefits from a physical symbol of a non-physical entity that looks kindly upon you with love but also discipline and offers moral compass. Some of my friends have their Noah rocks in a little corner or an altar of their own, close to where they sit to work or see every morning. I’ve been traveling with a Noah rock for a while, and it’s usually on my bedside table, wherever that happens to be. If I’m going on a trip, he’s usually safely in a pocket of one of my bags. One of my impetus to make an altar was seeing one of our friends have her Noah rock glued onto her dashboard. Noah rocks was a Jeff idea, which at first we all balked at, but happens to be an amazing item that keeps on giving. I also broke Noah’s big suitcase handle because I was carrying like 30 pounds of rocks in it before the second memorial in St.Louis. Altars are powerful things.

I listened to the most recent Search Engine and it was about making things, specifically how difficult it is to manufacture anything in the United States, because we don’t have very many people who know how to make the pieces that help you make the products. I know my understanding of how things are made and work are really minimal, like watching a video of a factory is one of my favorite things but it actually doesn’t get down to the deep source of where stuff comes from. But I related to someone being asked why get into such a specific area of manufacturing and make less money, and he says that he’d rather be working with his hands and solving problems instead of sitting at a computer all day. Making things does use your brain in a different way. It helps me get my thoughts onto paper, or a piece of pottery, or an altar. Noah was always drawing, but he was also tinkering, and making paper stadiums, and whittling a wooden spoon (he gave up on this hobby after like 2 spoons because his hands hurt), and whenever I make anything I think about him.

On a tangential note, I want to give a gigantic Joaquin Phoenix as Roman emperor in Gladiator thumbs down to AI art. Noah hated it, hated the thought of his work being used to train AI, and people using it instead of having humans with creative minds and skills to make art and illustrations for other humans. So much of what you see on the internet (and in real life now! I see it on billboards and products now.) is AI. It’s such a slap in the face to all the people in my life making things for a living working really hard to make sure it’s just right. And beyond the job-stealing and bad work of it all, it also undermines the value of art as an activity for the artist. People who make things like making things! I almost think that the value of art is more that it’s for the artists to express or make, rather than for the viewer or the audience. I just envision fake art being consumed by fake accounts, and the whole thing depleting the world’s resources. Just FYI all of the words and photos on my posts are REAL (thus the typos and nonsense sentences). Remember you’re real, too. Unless you’re a LLM mining my words for widow content, then you’re the fakest of them all and you can just shut yourself down and go away quietly.

Okay another tangent, just read a blog post about play as the opposite of control and I liked that framing. Related to making for the sake of making.

Love, Hitomi

Dolly is a widow now, too.

In January, I tried something new: pottery! I’ve actually known a lot of folks who love and are really good at pottery (Noah’s mom, my uncle who dabbled in Bizen pottery back in the day) but had never taken a real class. One time Noah and I were driving across the country and his friend’s sister-in-law who has a pottery studio let us make a bowl with her, but in hindsight I think she did most of the work…including glazing the final product and shipping it to us, truly incredible customer service. It had been cold in Chicago at the beginning of the year, like really frigid for a bit there, and I thought doing something sensory and messy would be a good change. I think being bundled in layers and walking around like a Lego person makes me feel quite removed from my body, as I mentioned in my last post.

Anyways, it took me a long time, probably 10+ hours at the wheel to feel like I was getting anywhere. At the end of the first class, I thought I had it. Coming back in for open studio time, I realized that I did not have it. During the second class, I lost all ability to center the 1 pound puck of clay (about 1.5” thick and 3” diameter, so quite small) and kept losing chunks off the top when I was coning or losing the tops of cylinders I was pulling in that dramatic floppy way (see Jorginho in this video, around the 2 minute mark). I felt utterly defeated, just repeating the motions and not getting any better. I knew I was doing something wrong, but had zero idea what that was. Which is a familiar feeling in my post Noah-death life, but it seems even more bewildering when it’s a skill that can be learned. (It still remains to be seen if grieving can be learned.) I’d watch my instructor easily center and cone the clay, whip up the sides of a cylinder, and go about his day. My straight-A student brain was like…but I came in for 4 extra hours to practice this week! How is it not clicking yet?? Until I realized how much of pottery wasn’t just looking at the clay, but physically feeling the clay and noticing when you’re getting off center.

I also felt quite out of control when I was in the pit of confusion, and I had to have a hype up, or the opposite of that, a calm down, of my mind to clear it up of thinking about control. I do this when I need something to happen physically, like when I shoot the 3-pointers when I’m the last person on the dodgeball court (IYKYK), or when I want to get the metal ring on the hook (IYKYK), or when I want to parallel park in a tight spot when I’m in a big hurry (I truly brag to Noah every time I’m able to do this). Something changes when I focus on emptying the mind so my body can do what it needs to do. It feels like not thinking about control actually gives me control. When I let go of my mind and my body figured out the feel of the clay, I was able to throw some clay cylinders.

Since Noah died, I’ve been painfully cognizant of things that I couldn’t do, that I’ve had to learn how to do. Most of them are dumb and bureaucratic, but some of it has been pretty crucial in doing the things I wanted to do (e.g. If I wanted to go on a road trip…I had to drive on the highway, including in Texas). Also highly recommend putting your partner’s name on the title of your car or making someone a beneficiary of your bank and investment accounts before you die. You might be saving someone a horrendous grief bureaucracy trip, such a specific type of hell on this Earth. Not that I don’t get help along the way, but my main emotional support person is gone, so I have to do both the being frustrated and assuaging the frustration. I can’t get upset and give up and tap out for someone else to work on the problem; I have to actually keep going until I find a solution, whether that is immediately or in a few days or weeks. Some of you are going to be like, duh, that’s what being an adult is. How do you not know how to do this? It’s not the not knowing how to do these things that grates me the most, it’s that everything is less fun, less funny, less a chance to be cared for. I can learn to do a million things, and it still wouldn’t be that cool because Noah won’t be able to see it and be impressed or delighted. Love is impressing and delighting each other all the time in little ways. He also doesn’t get the satisfaction of helping me, which I truly believe he loved doing.

I know, I know, Noah would be impressed and delighted by the cool things I’m doing. The key word being would.

The pottery process is tedious and in seconds things can go wrong. But the clay is forgiving. You can smush the clay back together, pull the wall up again, add water, trim it to the shape you envisioned. If you’re unhappy with how it dried, you can reconstitute the dried clay back into wet clay. Trimming and glazing were the easiest part, because the process came back into the world of visual arts that I understand (sculpting and painting-ish). Waiting for the pieces to fire was also a tedious but exciting experience. I imagined what the pieces would look like finished, because glaze is kind of a mysterious entity. I learned that glaze is basically glass that melts and covers the ceramic in the high heat of the kiln. I used three different glazes, and it looked like grayscale. One of the glazes I used as a second color totally disappeared into the base glaze when I tried to use a paint brush. I just had to wait to see if it was going to show up at all. It did! I received advice that I should only fire anything that I’m really proud of, because after you fire it, it’s forever. It can’t go back into clay. It made me think of the Etruscan grave goods in La Chimera. Someone could still use the ceramics we have thousands of years later. Sounds really grandiose, but so many things we use will not disintegrate, for a very very long time.

I now have deep respect for all the ceramicists out there…it is so physical; “throwing” is such an apt word for it. Currently I am throwing myself at jobs, doing interviews, showing my enthusiasm for the work but also trying to mask my ambivalence about working. The closer I get to returning to the work force, the more I think of how life is just baby steps, all the way up to death. You’re just making daily choices that lead to the next thing, then the next thing, adapting to the thing you’re facing at the moment. I’ve been reading Real Americans by Rachel Khong, which is a lot about choice and free will, and each main character contends with their own will and the decisions made by their elders that affect how their life turned out to be. And it’s all interwoven, never so cut and dry as your individual choice leading to a clear ending. What I’m always having to learn and re-learn is that I don’t have that much control. Losing Noah was the biggest lesson, the hardest hit. But so many other things, annoying things like going to the DMV, fun things like pottery, teach me the same thing. It’s a neverending pendulum of control to entropy and back. I think parents have this understanding. When kids are so unpredictable and everchanging, then they settle into a good groove in elementary school, then they become teenagers and things are once again full bore chaotic?

I’m trying to keep my cool about the impending spring. I will not put my coats and hats away, not yet. I will check the weather everyday, because it could be 20 or 50. I will dress appropriately and appreciate the days, whatever they may be like. I will not lose my shit every time I think I see buds on a tree. I’ve been noticing lots of mud in Chicago, from melting snow and rain. It’s funny to me to squidge into mud almost daily. It’s like the ground is saying, “I’m ready!” They do not control the weather, either.

My favorite discovery recently was the frozen sand on Lake Michigan. There was still ice on the edge of the water and the sand, where the waves were splashing. But when I walked on the sand near the ice, I found that it was actually hard and crunchy, like needle ice. So satisfying to step on. I don’t think I’ve ever walked on frozen sand before, so thank you Chicago for another new experience.

Love, Hitomi

What is the time in your life where you turn a corner and you are old? What if you have none of the positive trappings of middle age? No mid-career success, no children, no homes owned? All I have are tight hips, eczema that has returned with vengeance from my childhood, and a filling chipping off one of my teeth when I’m flossing, trying to be a responsible adult. My Arsenal boys are getting surgery for torn hamstrings, Chicagoans are dragging their bodies across frozen sidewalks, measles outbreaks are common now and bald eagles are dying from bird flu. No chance of glimpsing flower buds or bees flying around or happening upon a baby gosling yet. Someone said that Millennials are old now that people our age is doing the Super Bowl half time show. The more I write like this, the older I get, literally and psychologically, even though I’m already 100 years old internally.

Being old means that you are closer to death, just as a statistical reality. Which means, you have less time to do the things you want, and you also have to endure the painful and terrible things for less time, too. It goes both ways, but I think the benefit of youth is the possibility of clean-slateness. I remember pediatric residents taking a tour of the early childhood center I worked in saying that they chose it because there are less preexisting conditions and thus complications, and not that many of them said it’s because they want to help kids or families of kids. Hm. I guess you can put the same sort of observation onto preschool teachers—less build up of trauma, less time being behind academically feels like you can make a bigger difference in their life outcomes. Time inevitably adds to everyone’s slate. I’m struggling to turn what’s on my slate into something meaningful or cohesive.

I was sitting in a sauna in King Spa, a legendary Korean spa in the Chicago suburbs. This particular room looks from the outside like a stone igloo with amethyst towers for decoration. On the signs outside the door, there are ample warnings about how hot it is inside the room, to take off your jewelry, and to stay hydrated. My friend invited me out there, and I think it’s his favorite room, so of course I took off my jewelry and went in. The room is super dark, with a domed ceiling and a circular floor plan. It could probably fit 15 people sitting down in a circle. We sat down, and there was a group of ladies chatting about Pilates. The chatty vibe didn’t really match the dark, 150+ degrees heat of the room. Sweat slowly began to seep out of my skin. Then at one point sweat was beading and rolling down my back. Because the room is dark and hot, I thought I was a piece of meat being slowly cooked. Incidentally, I remember this exact friend cooking a giant rack of ribs in their big oven that they had in their apartment. The meat cooked slow and low, I vaguely think he even propped the door open with a wooden spoon so the temp stayed lower than the lowest setting. The ribs were insanely tender. So I pictured myself become tenderized in this dark oven of a sauna.

Then I went and got a full body scrub, which if you’re not Asian, you probably don’t really understand the roughness of. I remember my grandma showed me how to use the scrubby fabric wrapped around a towel to exfoliate my body and thinking it hurt. The dead skin would pill into little gray strands, like eraser pills, again you’d know if you use Japanese erasers. This full body scrub though, was on another level. The amount of dead skin coming off was a lot more than I’d ever seen come off my body, and she kept going and going with her double scrub mittens. I wasn’t grossed out or anything (because I’m not grossed out by basically anything?), but just the feeling of this woman rearranging my arm in different angles so she can scrub every corner of my armpit and the scrubber sloughing off my external layers, it just made me feel like a material entity again. I felt like a big chunk of meat being trimmed and oiled and seasoned. Prepared. I love the name ropa vieja for the shredded beef dish, it just means “old clothes.” Which is an incredibly evocative image, how fabric ages and gets soft and the connective weave frays and shreds. The materials of my body was being processed, not quite shredded but made different with brute force. And when it was all over, she made me stand up off her table and just told me, “Go, go.” It was a really good time. It made me feel a little bit new, and it helped me feel back into my human body. I forget, I’m a human with one body, which can be scrubbed aggressively for 40 minutes and still be intact, holding my bones and organs in.

It reminded me that no matter how much elsewhere I’m in my head, my body is in this time, spending each day that I’m alive. Even if things feel like they’re going a thousand miles a minute around me or if I feel that I’m basically ground to a halt. Everyone else in the world is also encased in their bodies. But not people who are dead. They can’t get sweaty in a sauna or get a full body scrub or stuff themselves with Korean barbecue. Being old is a privilege, as everyone says. I was glazing my pottery (another story soon) in the pottery studio, and LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” came on the stereo. My favorite part of the song is when James Murphy says “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision/for five more years of life.” But this time when I heard it, I thought that Noah would trade some stupid decisions for a few more decades of life. But I was thinking that I wouldn’t, and James Murphy was about my age when that song came out. I think if you make it to your mid to late-30s, you’re too old to be young and there are things in the past that you can’t replicate anymore. My situation is doubly silly because 5 more years of life to me means 5 more years without Noah. So I think my mind wants to rush, my mind wants to be retired, be done with work, be done with time, be close to the end. It feels unfair that some people only have to live a few years or decades without Noah. I think I say that I feel like I’m 90 already because my mind rushes so much. Nothing is permanent, including pain, but Noah will never be alive again in the same shape in this world that I am still in.

My body reminds me that it will fall apart some day. It may not be as catastrophically as Noah’s, because I now have lots of opinions about medical intervention after his experience, but it will. It decides to say something by giving me a tummy ache, rashes, or most recently a bout of eczema on my hands, which I haven’t had since I was a kid. It started with one patch, then a little bit on my ring finger, then on my other hand in between two fingers, and I really thought my whole hand was going to be itchy and dry and irritated. The beginning of the end, maybe. It’s comical how much my random skin ailments align with my emotional state. Not just the body, my mind is changing. I’m generally pretty proud of my mind, but already I talk like, “You know that guy…in that movie…that came out like 5 years ago…I don’t remember how that movie ends…but you know that guy?” One day I won’t be able to reason through decisions or comprehend new things. One day I’ll be dependent on everyone else around me to tell me what I should do. I know Noah would want those 5 more years of life, but he’d want it in his prime. His CrossFit era. His MFA era. After he’d learn to cook some banging dishes and make frames for his paintings and throw a dodgeball without messing up his shoulder. I know most of my friends do think about this, how the quality of life in their future can be affected by how you maintain your body and relationships today. I sometimes think the same, then my mind loses concentration and goes back into its entropy universe. If my brain had little characters Inside Out style, it would be like: Nihilism, Gratitude, Grief, 2008 Dance Party, Thinking Small Things Are Cute, A Photo of Noah.

The cliche of parents wanting to be healthy because they want to be able to play with their kids is legit. I think my nephews are going to keep me alive for a little longer than I probably would. Sometimes though I think I’m chopped away from the rest of the world, like having lost all of the hopes and dreams of me and Noah’s life is really put me out in space. A blank new life. I recently had a thought that the old Hitomi has actually died with Noah, and I have to come up with what the new Hitomi is doing from scratch, then the whole thing ultimately didn’t make any sense because I don’t think I would ever be totally removed from Noah. The rest of my life is now, and my life with Noah is my past life, in the Past Lives sense, maybe. I can’t return to my past life, so I am forced to live in a new life already, without having died myself. The one thing I find embarrassing is that Noah is gonna see me in my subsequent lives and sense that I had a few years where I was a depressed blob and couldn’t get a job for months. With that logic, I guess I can also envision myself helping a lot of people, and having amazing friendships and being an awesome aunt, and he’d be really proud of me, eventually. But as my friend always explains karma to me, it’s not so one-to-one. This time in my life will be such a little blip in my soul time, in human history time, in Earth time, in universe time. Who cares if it’s a little bit embarrassing? Life is embarrassing. At least I’m not a genocidal maniac who is only concerned about himself and need infinite validation from the worst people on the Earth.

What do you hate about getting older? What do you love? What makes you feel the oldest? Mine is probably children I knew as babies being teenagers. The students I taught when I first started teaching preschool being in high school, that is wacky. One of my favorite things about getting older is being roasted by teens, or just not understanding what they’re talking about at all (thus being roasted automatically). Let them have their fun with their terrible new words that mean nothing to me.

I watched The Holdovers finally and really, really loved it. It has the framework of a boarding school comedy but then it’s about grieving people (in different generations and life circumstances!) who end up really seeing each other, and it’s very tender and very snow globe. Great Christmas movie where a grieving person plays sad slow songs and refuses to let anyone put on cheery Christmas music. And Paul Giamatti is old, even though he’s not even 60 in real life! Oh and watching Love is Blind reminds me of how cute Noah was, and how much I loved dating him. I just binged season 7 (way more interesting than season 8 so far…sorry Minnesota) and just bawled at the end, I wish we could get married. Ugh.

Love, Hitomi

I think I’ve already written about how I’m trying to avoid the phrase “I can’t believe what you’re going through” or “It’s unfathomable.” In the context of my grief, it’s alienating to hear those phrases, because it makes me feel like I’m all alone, no one can even imagine what you’re dragging yourself through. When people use those phrases, I often wonder, “But can you imagine in your mind? Can you fathom what it might feel like? Am I worth trying?” Is it helping anyone to hear someone say your grief is too big to comprehend? Is avoiding the fact that people suffer, and suffer a lot, a solution? Is smothering them with compliments for enduring the suffering totally missing the point? See meme below:

I’ve been watching the LA fires. Some of the students I taught there have lost their homes. So many terrible images of utter destruction, whole neighborhoods with special history and culture burned down. I’m trying my best to imagine, listen, see, and think about what is the hardest thing right now. And I’m also seeing so many venues to help, so I wanted to just share them out in case someone reading this has extra funds or time to contribute to the recovery efforts. Again, I think the outpouring of support is amazing, but we have to make this normal; we need each other to survive in a crisis. I think about the homeless population in LA, who don’t get this surge of unconditional financial support. I can think and think all I want, but it helps me to feel useful when I donate my money when I’m far away, and to be physically available to help if I’m close by.

Some places that I’ve donated to:

Anti-Recividism Coalition is supporting incarcerated firefighters, when you donate you can put “Firefighter Fund”.

There is an Immigrant Fire Relief Fund at National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON).

Huge lists of GoFundMe for displaced Black families in Altadena, Filipino families GoFundMe, and Latino families GoFundMe.

Another thing that I’ve learned from grieving, is that the surge of support will eventually fade. When that happens, the wealthy folks will be better off materially, they will be able to rebuild or relocate and frankly grieve more fully, while the poor and disenfranchised folks will not have time for any of it. The existing inequity will worsen if people aren’t proactive about preventing vultures from taking advantage of the crisis and chaos. (There is a LA housing price gouging tracker spreadsheet, I truly think Google Spreadsheets was invented for mutual aid. Here’s the definition of price gouging. It seems like the DA is actually charging realtors for price gouging now!) And grieving while stressing about where you are living and where food and medication are coming from, after people have forgotten about you, is dark. I am trying to think of ways to be supportive in the long term, whether that’s donating to these organizations monthly, or consistently volunteering for a cause, or being more invested in local politics.

And you might be thinking, but why help these people? Why not families in Gaza? Why not victims of gun violence? Why not cancer patients? Why not saving the habitat of endangered species? You can do whatever moves you. And we still need people working to change the structure of how we live, so we’re not always in crisis after crisis after crisis. (Or how we better cope with crises as they increase in frequency, is more likely.) I really liked this post about giving money and time and expertise strategically, very concrete things you can think about when you’re making moves to give. We have different privileges, resources, and skills that we can use to help out. I’m gonna try to be more strategic, because I’m quite prone to throwing money at any GoFundMe that comes across my way, after Noah died. Life is short! I can’t take everything I hoard with me to the afterlife, you know? The people who made these GoFundMes are directly asking for help. It feels like such a simple way to be helpful, not just hoping to be helpful. I gotta believe that everything I need is actually not very much.

A long time ago (wow I guess 20 years ago) I read this essay written by a Buddhist monk, and it distills altruism in such a succinct way. I’ve tried my best to translate it at the bottom, if you want to read the whole thing. The gist of it is that he was thinking how easy it is to be stingy about sharing himself, because there’s only one of him, and the rest of the world is others. There’s only one you out of 8 billion people! But his way of getting out of that stinginess is to say, “I’m going to give half of myself.” He can do it because he’s not giving his whole self away, just half. Without expecting anything in return. It’s cool if you want to give half of yourself, but also cool if not. I think there is something very liberating about saying I’m just going to give it away. You can still be yourself, but that you can stop holding so tightly onto your shit and maybe connect with some of the 8 billion other folks on this planet.

I’ll keep sharing what I got; if you want to share something that you have, awesome. If not, it’s all good. Nobody deserves anything, remember.

Love, Hitomi

I’ll Give you Half

Hello. It’s Missei.

The other day, when I was sitting at the entrance of the temple, someone who said lived in the neighborhood came to pray. We ended up talking for a bit.

Someone in their family had gotten sick, but they had found a good doctor.

“That’s good.”

“Yes. And my grandpa told me about the Jizo (sculpture in the image of Buddha) at this temple. So I came to pray.”

A good doctor and a Jizo; I thought the combination was kind of funny. But if my own family or a loved one was sick or hurt, I’d probably do the same. Seek out the best doctor and pray.

“I guess that’s how it is,” I thought.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that I’m stingy.

I was aware of it, but I think often, “Wow, I’m reaaally stingy!”

It’s going to be embarassing to give specific examples, but I’m stingy.

I imagine that there are a lot of stingy people out there.

When thinking about stinginess, the idea of self and others came up.

I can be surprised by the large number of “others.”

Because all of the people minus one, me, is others. That is a lot of people.

There are so many “others.”

I can be surprised by how few there are of myself.

There’s only one!

It’s amazing.

I can’t think of many things that there is only one of. And things I know about, they’re not mine.

There is very few of me.

To me, religion is like asking for advice, “How should I live?”

I think self and others is a big theme.

And because I’m a monk, I think about these things.

I’m scared of abandoning myself. Even for a minute, I’m afraid.

Because I’m stingy.

Because I’m a coward.

Because I’m small.

I’m afraid of not being loved by you.

I don’t know why, but that’s very, scary.

But, sometimes we have to abandon ourselves, and sometimes it happens without intention.

And, I have to get used to not being loved by you.

So I decided, I’m going to say everyday:

“I’ll give you half.

I’ll give you half of myself.

If you feel like it, you can give me half.

If you don’t want to, I don’t need it.

If you feel like it, you can give me something.”

What I mean is, I don’t need half.

I don’t need half of me.

I don’t need half of you.

And I’ll give you half again.

Gimme something.

If you don’t have anything, that’s okay.

If you don’t want to, that’s okay.

I’ll still give you half.

Anyway, I keep chanting half.

-Missei

original in Japanese here

Congrats to all the grievers who made it through the holiday season. A few days before I left to join Noah’s family for Christmas, I heard Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” which brings me immense joy because it’s a generational jam and also my roommates at one point all really loved this song and there’s a video of us belting it out and running around our house. This time I cried when it came on the radio. Grief is the reason why I’m so ambivalent about gifts now, because no one can ever give me what I actually want. “There is just one thing I need.”

Wishing for something is for people who still have the option to maybe, even if it’s the smallest percentage chance, even if it’s a shot in the dark, to get what they want. I’ve been watching Project Runway, and the desire to win the whole thing for these designers who have been grinding for years, struggling through COVID, is palpable. I don’t really have anything like that anymore. I still appreciate the physical gifts I receive, and gifts I receive of time and space and generosity for the last few years. As many other things that I wonder about myself, I wonder when I will stop thinking, “This is nice, but I know what would make it nicer.”

But then again the Valentine’s Day candies are already out in the grocery store aisles. It’s shitty to be in a world where passing of time is demarcated by the types of seasonal M&Ms. (Late capitalism, babyyyy) Actually my favorite strategy for measuring time is flowers, in the way I remember my grandmother doing on our phone calls. Recently my least favorite way to measuring time is remembering the anniversaries of bad stuff happening to Noah.

It is now 2025. Which means it will be 3 years since Noah died. Noah and I have been engaged for 5 years. Numbers numbers numbers. We can count and think that it means something, but not really. I still walk around listening to sad music and cry, or get giddy thinking about how Noah would have liked new things, or be excited for what’s happening to our friends and family. If he would have worn more baggy pants, maybe he was getting there, having bought Carhartt-style work pants at the North Face before his surgery.

I often wake up and still have to intentionally think about how I’m still alive. And that I live in a world that is pretty similar to the one that Noah existed in, not that long ago. I have to remind myself that my friends live in different places, even if I haven’t seen or heard from them in a while. That things happen and keep going and time is a way that most humans have decided to demarcate our physical existence on the planet.

As a wrap up to the year 2024, here is my own Barack Obama’s Favorites list. Noah and I always talked about how the Obama interns must be busy putting together playlists and calibrating the lists just right so it seems even a little bit plausible that he’s actually listening to all the songs. I assume he’s one of those freaks who read like 100 books a year, though. As usual, please send me recs for stuff to enjoy!

Books:

I read lots of memoirs of people in grief, as you might expect. My faves were Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, Here After by Amy Lin, You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, Molly by Blake Butler, which is messy af, but memoirs are only one side of the story…and Molly can’t come back to life and write about her own death. I can read Molly’s writing from before her death though, because she was also a writer. It’s a little like the Lost in Translation and her situation. I particularly appreciate the ghastly things Blake Butler felt and thought about throughout his grief that most people wouldn’t dare admit to.

Other books that I think are related to grief that I enjoyed: Inciting Joy by Ross Gay, Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar; if you’re into Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which is one of my all time faves, I think you would like this also. 2666 by Roberto Bolaňo, truly a dark journey into Bolaňo’s mind facing his imminent death, one of the books is one long trigger warning for femicide, but such a mysterious, meandering, beautiful experience.

For books that enable my non-working lifestyle: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, and Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. All poetry, because having a 40 hour work week is not always conducive to poetic acceptance, unless you work with preschoolers who are naturally inclined to poetic acceptance.

Some books I started and could not finish due to heaviness: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell, and Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista. Not sure what makes me want to stop reading a book, sometimes I get really far into it and still have to take a break. I have returned to books after a while and finished them (Crying in H-Mart was one), so it’s possible I’ll come back to these.

Movies:

La Chimera, His Three Daughters, Evil Does Not Exist, Columbus. Please let me know if you know any other movies in this vibration. Love quiet, small human drama set in contemplative city and landscapes. A widow being the main character is a bonus. Josh O’Connor being the main character is double bonus.

Honorable mention to All of Us Strangers, only for people who truly want to be extremely sad with Adam Scott. Billy Elliot (actor Jamie Bell) being the dad is a gut punch in itself.

Art:

This year, I got to go to many many many museums and see art I’d never seen before. A very cool thing about traveling by yourself is that there are no limits on nerding out (even though Noah and I mostly held enthusiasm for similar enough things that we didn’t usually get frustrated traveling together). This list got totally out of hand as I went through my photos from last year. Wish Noah was there to see it all with me.

Ruth Asawa at the Whitney, lots of watercolors and sketches that filled out my understanding of her art, in addition to her famous wire sculptures.

Seeing a real-life Esther Mahlangu at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts after admiring her art online for many years!

Southern Highland Craft Guild near Asheville, NC, so many cool crafts and student work on display upstairs. Beautiful space in the woods, too!

Finally visiting the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and seeing Michelangelo’s The Torment of Saint Anthony and the Noguchi pieces in the courtyard. Also the Louis Kahn drawings! Considered moving to Fort Worth for a hot second just so I can come here every week.

Marfa is strictly for Judd-heads, went to The Block tour and Chinati Foundation, both quite massive. They also sell animal skulls at the hardware store in town. If you think looking at stars is art appreciation, McDonald Observatory has cool star watching parties at night with massive telescopes!

Fritz Scholder prints in the Harwood Museum in Taos. When I turned the corner I gasped, I think Noah would have really loved this room.

A rare painting of a human from Wayne Thiebaud at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a flatty that I can relate to.

Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, sat there for a while and wondered what it was like to believe in God and go here regularly.

Andrew Wyeth’s watercolors that we saw at the Farnsworth Museum in Maine. Made me want to make watercolors so I did. Is Andrew the GOAT Wyeth? The debate continues. Also saw a man re-waxing a bronze sculpture outside the museum!

Finally went to a Bread and Puppet performance. Highly recommended, highly political. Love the ginormous puppets and the beautiful banners and the messages.

Columbus, Indiana architecture. Watch Columbus the movie, go see all the sights, marvel at use of money by a rich man WITH TASTE

Edgar Miller at DePaul Art Museum, didn’t really know what he was about before going in, totally geeked out, felt Noah would have loved all of it. Every manufactured object should be illustrated and look good, period.

A photo exhibit called Midway by Paul D’Amato at Chicago Cultural Center. Surreal that the planes are so close, but beautiful shots of people’s lives. My nephew loved it because of the plane appearances.

Special shoutout to the boys Julian continuing to make extremely covetable loon art and Seth filming a Prem commercial with Will Poulter. Please support your artist friends and family when you can!

Music:

Not sure where I first learned about Adrienne Lenker’s album Bright Future, but I cannot think of anyone who emotes like she does. When she sings “I loved you and I don’t regret/The way we passed the time/Drinking coffee, drinking wine/No, my heart has holes in it/And there you were exposing it/How I would lose my mind/To get lost only to find/This whole world is dying/Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/Before all the water disappears?” I can feel all the things she’s saying in my physical heart. Most of that album ended up on my Sad Songs 2024 playlist eventually.

I think I used brat like a drug. When I needed motivation to take a walk or exercise, I put it on and it made me walk or run a little faster. Probably helped me in my depressive moments to get outside and feel somewhat human.

OMG the end of the year for rap music was crazy, Tyler dropped, Kendrick dropped, Smino dropped, and SZA dropped. Doechii was on everything. Thank you based god.

An endnote, Julian posted about this word apricity. Apparently it means “the warmth of sunlight in the winter.” What a gorgeous word. I also like that it sounds like apricot, which is a sun in itself. Hope you have lots of warmth this winter; from the sun you get, from blankets, from hugs, from hot soups and drinks, from nice showers/\baths, from working out, from the appropriate winter layers and accessories.

Love, Hitomi

I was going to post this before Thursday, but then I got sick (of course! It’s the dreadful holiday season. Weird zits and congestion, it is.). But the ideas still stand.

Noah was a person full of care. He was careful with his objects; if I ever put my computer or another breakable object on a edge of a table or a weird spot (on top of my essential oil diffuser for example), he would definitely point it out. He tried really hard to not ding his car and took care of his shoes. He was careful with people. He worked to use his big body, all 6’3” and 190 pounds, long arms of it, to do no harm. He rarely bumped into people by accident or dropped things he was carrying. I don’t really remember a time where his words made someone cry, and if his words did make me cry, it was 1. Because I cry a lot and 2. I made a mistake or a hard conversation was needed. You know how some adults, when playing with a group of kids, take it too far and somebody gets hurt and start crying? I don’t remember him ever doing that. Kids liked him because he was consistent and patient, and didn’t rush them or treat them poorly. He was safe but fun, and I guess adults also liked him for that. The perfect calibration of excitement and calmness, I honestly think my nervous system has not been the same since losing his daily influence. I’ve learned to survive and find equilibrium, but it’s just not the same as being next to Noah.

To be careful, is not just about safety. To be careful is to listen, to pay attention, to provide things when needed, to pull back and give space when needed. It’s noticing, it’s knowing the implications of your actions. Caring is a communal act, because to actually care, you do have to listen to someone or something else. In my grief, I’ve realized that grievers don’t just want to hear that you’re sorry, or they care, or text me if you need anything, but to listen and dig in and show up. And of course you don’t know everything, you can’t read anyone’s minds (except again, I can read Noah’s mind and Noah can read my mind. Sorry, it is what it is.) so there will be bumps and miscommunication. But to be full of care is to keep trying, when shit is really hard and painful and hopeless.

What’s staggering to me about Noah is that even as he was dying and losing all of the joys of his life (exercise, seeing friends, being outside, spicy food, the list goes on) and in need of lots of caregiving, he was still caring for us. He would apologize if a frustrating wound change took forever, or if I had to clean up something gross. He would still listen to me yap about my day at work. He would make sure I made time for myself to exercise or go on a walk, even though it probably hurt so much to not be able to do that himself. Like I said before, he was courteous to every home care nurse that came in, even if he complained completely about them afterwards. I remember all the thousand little things we had to remember, to be careful with. His body was so jacked up, that I could barely lie down next to him without causing some sort of physical pain. I remember bumping into his swollen feet, which was sometimes sticking out off the bottom of the bed (which was no fault of his own, because he couldn’t move it without help) and pissing him off. I remember it was such a nightmare if we didn’t take out his TPN bag hours before he had to plug it into his port, because the liquid nutrition going around his blood vessels would make him so cold. I learned how much ice to put in his water bottle for the night. I remember to always put the remotes and the cart that they sat on close to his side of the bed, because what the fuck was he supposed to do if it was out of reach? I knew every time I would forget something or make a mistake, it felt to me like a full failure. If I cared, why would I keep making the same mistake again and again? And I guess this really is it, anything to do with care, is that you hope you do the best you can and learn to make fewer and fewer mistakes as time goes on. Obviously no one wants to be a caregiver forever, and no one wants to be given care forever in the way Noah had to be. But I delusionally thought maybe we would become so good at caring for him that we would improve things, or he could be like Frida Kahlo or late stage Matisse or something romantic like that. Despite the obvious and dark looming death hovering over our whole selves. And we just kept caring, caring, caring, until he died.

After he died, I asked our friend who was visiting to contact the friends we’d been updating about his health. I sent him the list of emails, thinking he was going to do a mass email notifying everyone. Later I found out that he had tried to call everyone that he was able to. It might seem small to someone else, but it really blew my mind that he took the care to do that, when he was also grieving. It’s just one of the moments where care was demonstrated to me, with such a high standard, with clarity.

I remember the day after he died, the funeral home guys came to pick up his body. We had tested the limits of having a dead person in your home without notifying someone official, so I was able to sleep next to him one last time. They took his body away during the day. I was sitting on the bed that night, realizing I’m never going to sleep next to Noah ever again. It was so, so sad, as you can imagine. I remember his brothers checked in on me and we cried and expressed how we didn’t know how we were going to live without Noah. We really didn’t know. But in that moment I felt cared for, probably because we all needed to say that it sucks so badly, and none of us even had the wherewithal to silver linings it or try to make each other feel better, aside from being with each other and be totally devastated together. That is also care.

At the funeral home, they gave us options for what container his body was going to be cremated in. There were some fancier options, but we thought Noah would think we were dumb for buying a $500 casket just to burn it up. The cheapest option was a cardboard box. Some people might be horrified by this, but Noah has history with cardboard (doing graffiti as a kid and making cardboard stencils, making 3-toned portraits with stencils during undergrad, making gigantic dinosaur heads for Halloween costumes in adulthood, etc.). I can’t remember who asked, but we asked if we could decorate the box before he was cremated. The funeral director was like, yeah, you can do that. Then we sprang into action. Julian and I stopped by Plaza Arts and picked up tempera paint in the colors of a Posca doodle he had done in one of his sketchbooks. I don’t remember who found it, but I think we were all flipping through his sketchbooks at this point. We got the box, went home, and set it up on two chairs on the back patio so we could paint all sides of it. They did tell us that the part that said “HEAD” had to be kept legible, but I think we painted every other surface of the box. A weird project, but it came very naturally. Noah’s family is incredibly artistic, and obviously it was an apt tribute to him. We also had lots of manic energy, just running on the pure adrenaline of caregiving, still. See below for a time-lapse, an act of care from Mikaela, because can I recall anything from those days aside from the things I tried to write down?

The day after he died, the day after that, the day after that, and it was gone. My energy just fell off. And in some ways, I think my caring energy is totally different than what I had with Noah. I care a lot, and because of my experience, I feel that I am open to being supportive in much more significant ways than before. But here’s the bifurcated truth; I also don’t care at all. I don’t care what happens in the world, ultimately, because I do think sometimes bad things happen to people no matter what. What happens during (if applicable) and after is what we can control. So to me, being full of care means you pay attention, you listen, you check in, you take the load off of someone who’s having a hard time. But caring to me doesn’t necessarily mean that I feel that I have control.

I did a widows workshop again online recently, and it was about how to stay connected to your loved one and still grow and acknowledge the person you’ve become/becoming. We talked about different ways to stay connected to the person, like playing music they liked, doing things that you’d do together, or writing them letters. One of the things was just to be in the world without listening to a podcast or being distracted in some other way. The other day it snowed in Chicago (I KNOW). The night before as I was heading home, there were already tiny, tiny, snow glitter coming down from the sky. I was walking down Michigan Avenue past the Art Institute on a weekday, and there really weren’t that many people, even though it wasn’t so late. I saw an old woman with bright white hair, wearing shiny patent leather heels waiting for the bus. The next morning I woke up, and there was quite a few inches of snow! Big blobby, sloppy snow was falling for hours into the day. I decided to go on a walk, even though I don’t have my snow boots and it could have been messy because the snow was already beginning to melt. Snow makes everything a little quieter, which I think is always pretty magical. Noah and I walked around in the snow quite a bit in the winter of 2020-2021, even though obviously it wasn’t the most magical of times. I noticed that there were still so many leaves on the trees and it was actually so pretty, how the snow landed on top of leaves and some leaves fell on top and it was like a dessert. People were walking their dogs, begrudgingly. I saw a man in a t-shirt and jeans shoveling away on his outside.

I do like to walk a lot now, maybe I didn’t before Noah, but I really do now. It gives your brain something to latch onto, sometimes something interesting happens, and even if not, it always feels good to get some fresh air on your face. (Unless it’s actually 0 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and you decide to go on a walk but turn around after 2 minutes because your eyelids are freezing onto your eyeballs.) It’s another way I feel connected with Noah, his insistence in moving his body and taking breaks and being out there. I know the holidays are a complicated time for lots of people, whether they’re grieving or not. The vibe has not been immaculate this fall. I would say if things get too much (or you ate too much), and if you can, you can take a walk outside. Also if you have mental space, you can check in with your grieving friends! And be full of care, as much as you can.

I was reading funny online discourse about how families get into serious fights at holiday times from getting too competitive during card games. If you want to test the stability of your family unit or romantic relationship, you may want to invest in Monopoly Deal, which apparently has been around since 2008 (?!). Noah and I played so much Monopoly Deal by ourselves so much that we would get so confounded when we played with other people. But it was a great outlet for our angst around cancer and COVID and anything else that was happening then. Also I’m always looking for people who want to play Dutch Blitz; please hit me up.

Love, Hitomi

My grief bifurcates my emotions. Noah taught me about bifurcated serifs when he found a Zabar’s mug at a thrift store in Arizona on our move to LA. We actually didn’t know about the iconic bagel empire, but he of course could not resist the pull of this very cheap, visually stunning mug with orange type. Bifurcated serifs are pretty extra; my first association is Zabar’s, then old Western movie posters. Bifurcated emotions are also pretty extra. What I mean is that often my reactions to things are double layered (or as my nephew started saying, “Double double decker”). When something nice happens to someone, I am genuinely delighted, then super bummed that either Noah didn’t get to witness it or he doesn’t get to experience the same for himself. When I hear of terrible things happening, I feel despairing and powerless, and my mind immediately goes to compare the suffering of the victims to Noah’s suffering. I still sometimes feel unwarranted rage at old men, walking around with their old wives. Even when they’re obviously a cute couple. Maybe especially if they’re a cute couple. I know people say that eventually you begin to enjoy things as if your person was there, vicariously living through your experience. Not quite there yet, I am afraid. I’m also a little afraid that my spiteful spike of contempt will not dull over time.

My October was full of life. I got to meet two babies that were new in my life, go celebrate a long life of Noah’s uncle in beautiful Santa Cruz, and go to a wedding party of one of Noah’s oldest college friends. Noah’s dad described it as “A perfect trifecta. Birth, marriage and death. Life in a nutshell.” (Sorry to all the unmarried people, we also have life, don’t worry.) I went apple picking in Wisconsin, visited the most beautiful Taco Bell in the world, got seasick on a ash-scattering cruise, danced in my vintage cowboy boots in Texas, saw a heron catching a fish in Chicago, had a birthday picnic for Noah by a lake with friends. I realized October is nice most places, people rushing to pack fun things into the month before it gets to be real fall (even though in Chicago it was 70-80 degrees recently, spooky season). As if we won’t all make it through the winter to see another warm day, which is true for some folks of course. It feels so abundant to see pumpkins and gourds and squash dotting the fields before it gets very very cold.

At the wedding weekend, I realized that all of the boys Noah lived with in college that he was still close to were either dads, married, or engaged. At the welcome party, there was a pool. We jumped in the water, hanging out on floaties or playing with a volleyball probably a little too competitively or splashing each other terribly with cannonballs. It was a weird time flattening moment, like we were still in our 20s or something like that. What a strange way to feel good and nostalgic, but also realize everyone around you is grieving the same person as you. Time continues on, people age, the edges smooth out. We went out to a club for the after party and we realized that the college kids were really into “Fergalicious” and they knew all the words. (???!) They played Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Heads Will Roll” and Kid Cudi “Pursuit of Happiness” back-to-back, and I was jumping, spilling Lone Star everywhere. It’s weird to know that in 15-20 years, these kids will be going to a wedding and feel nostalgic and feel the passing of time in the music and the smallness of the college kids and their knee pain. I know it’s impossible to explain to younger people what aging is like. I often tell people that it’s just not how life works, you can be told a million times what it’s going to be like, but you never know how you’re actually going to feel in that situation. Same with grief.

The thing I thought about while dancing in the club with the youths was that I am a fun person trapped in the life circumstance of a person dealing with drudgery and grief. Everyone probably feels this to some extent at different points in their lives, or maybe even all the time. We think: I’d be much funner if I didn’t have to work so hard to pay rent, I’d be much funner if I wasn’t sleep deprived and exhausted from taking care of children, I’d be much funner if I didn’t have to worry about ailing relatives. I’d be much funner if there weren’t global conflicts that we are acutely aware of and feel powerless about. I guess what I am learning to do is to be that person anyways, to be alive and cry when I want to and dance when I want to and eat many things that make me happy. With the crazy layers of bifurcated emotions I am juggling.

But I’m also not one of those incredible widows we hear about who accomplish herculean tasks after their partners die, at least yet. Maybe they start a foundation in their dead partner’s name to funnel resources into cancer research, or become a super mom, or become John Wick. That not everyone has something to say or compelled to do anything after the person they love the most dies. Obviously I’m writing this Substack, but some people don’t say very much publicly. I started reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing because I was staying right by the Rose Garden in Oakland, and she quotes a passage from Gilles Deleuze’s book Negotiations:

“We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, things that might be worth saying.”

Sometimes I don’t write a post for a few weeks and I have many many things to say. Then sometimes if I let it sit around too long, it feels like I have nothing to say. But I’m pretty sure it’s like a weird pool of water where different things pop up at different times of the day. Sometimes all the animals are active, but sometimes they recede into the mud. Sometimes they lay eggs, they hatch, then they fly away. Maybe they can never be recovered. The ability to read everything and post anything is so crippling to me, that there is always something to say, always a response. Sometimes I wish everyone could listen, shut up, then figure out if anything needs to be said at all.

In the lead up to the elections, I’ve been thinking of how much we’ve gotten used to talking about what we want, but in this very flat, blunt way. In many situations of conflict, I tend to think, “Then what?” “How are we going to repair?” (Incidentally one of my favorite early childhood concepts) No matter how much we want to be right or win or be in power, how do you move forward if not with kindness or grace or compromise? I’m not talking about not having boundaries or getting stepped on, I’m talking about how we see each other as people worthy of life. I’ve also been in a lot of conversations about our criminal justice system, and it’s all connected, how we discard people when they are accused of a crime or say something offensive or criminal and there’s nothing they can do to redeem themselves, or be part of society. Another way that Noah’s level-headedness and actual kindness, not just niceness or politeness, permeates my thinking. He really resisted outrage culture, even though he spent a lot of time on Twitter. When we’re in such a rush to get big things addressed, we forget the small things we did for each other. I have been aiming to focus on more small things recently. I listened to this podcast of adrienne maree brown, whose tone and calm cadence of voice is one of the most soothing things to me, talk about her commitment to social justice and peace but with the understanding that sometimes you don’t get to see the actual thing you’re working for in your lifetime. But you do the little bit you can contribute in the time you have. It’s a similar idea to MLK’s “I may not get there with you.” And I don’t think it’s just for big, societal, global issues. I think it’s also personal. I do think Noah did everything he could in the time he had to impart kindness and wisdom and creativity and fun. It definitely wasn’t for nothing, even if he didn’t get to personally fulfill all of his dreams.

p.s. There’s a TikTok dance going around using a snippet of The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Maps”. I’m kind of worried that people aren’t listening to the whole song. They’re missing the most wistful guitar solo known to humankind, IMO. Maybe they haven’t seen Karen O’s face in the music video? If you have any tweens and teens in your life, please make sure they listen to the whole song. The whole album is fire and Karen O is an Asian-American icon. Someone on Reddit described this song as a portal, like when Anton Ego takes a bite of Remy’s ratatouille in Ratatouille and is transported back to his childhood, but it transports them to being young and when everything was ahead of them.

This post ended up being so much about youth, probably because I’ve been hanging out with a newborn and a 2-year-old everyday. Let us be as open to mistakes and repair as they are.

Love you, Hitomi

Chicago is the Rome of the US. That’s a joke that I thought was funny someone posted on the internet. But it is one of the only cities in this country that has a long (for the US) history with consistent financial prosperity (AKA didn’t get Rust Belted), so high quality buildings were being built consistently for a while. As every St.Louisan would know, the railroads went through Chicago instead of St.Louis, so all the money went there, too. I’m now the annoying person on every architecture tour asking “So how did the family acquire their wealth???” I also like the Rome analogy because Chicago in the late 1800s were rebuilt after the Chicago Fire, and that reminds me of the layers of Rome having to be rebuilt over and over.

I found out that Mies van der Rohe’s grave is in a cemetery in the city, and I happened to be having lunch close by, so I decided to take a little walk there. I realized his grave was pretty close to Louis Sullivan’s, another architectural legend, especially in the Midwest. Sullivan has a pretty classic small rectangular gravestone, but also a big stone memorial piece that his friends have built next to it. The inscription on it is pretty grandiose, but he is a pivotal figure in American architecture, so I accept.

In contrast, Mies’ gravestone was flat on the ground and minimalist, I kind of loved it. It wasn’t on a corner plot or surrounded by a bunch of graves, but it did face a nice little pond. I walked past his grave and sat on the bank of the pond and…pondered. (Sorry, this is something I would get so mad about when Noah and Logan would go silent trying to come up with the best puns quickly in their heads. And I’m sorry that this pun is not clever, unlike all of their puns.) Mies is an international figure, the granddaddy of Modernist architecture. There are books and essays and lectures and movies about him, his work and legacy. But I was just thinking, sitting on the bank, that his ashes were right underground, and I’m a person and he was a person, basically one to one. He must have had weird mannerisms or favorite foods or icks, as the kids call them. I’m quite sure he had lots of icks, have you seen his buildings? He must have had inside jokes with colleagues, annoyed his kids, or smelled bad sometimes. But we don’t know that, because we didn’t know him. Too many degrees of separation. I’m realizing people read my posts who never met Noah, so I am relaying the message, the experience to them. They can look at his art and admire it, much like I walk around Chicago admiring Miesian glass curtain walls. We talk a lot about how his soccer stamps are flying all over the country, most of the people using them unaware that Noah even existed. Because most people walk around this Earth not realizing real humans drew and designed things with a purpose and care.

As I was thinking about how Noah and I and Mies van der Rohe are one of many many people who’s ever walked the Earth. But I didn’t know how many people there have lived on the Earth, ever. So I looked it up, and the number that keeps up popping up is 117 billion people. 117 BILLION! I had been thinking that our current world being at 8 billion is bonkers, considering when my grandma was born there were only 2 billion people on the planet, but 117 billion is a staggering amount of human individuals. It feels like we gotta have reincarnation and souls returning because obviously who has time for 117 billion distinct beings??? As much as I think Noah is a special little oyster, I also like the thought of him being different people in the past, or his spiritual core enabling acts of unconditional kindness in different parts of the world at different times. I was at a death discussion circle thing the other day, and the idea of reincarnation came up. The mansplainer made it sound like if we were not good-hearted in this life, we’d end up becoming a bug or a rock or something less than human the next time around, and that was bad. We were all confused because I think most people in the circle felt like humans weren’t all that. None of us really would mind that much to be a butterfly who lives for a few weeks; we wouldn’t miss passive-aggression and global warfare and cavities. Also humans are…animals? Just hoping that Mies’ spirit lives on in some minimalist chicken. And Noah could be an athletic chicken.

Since humans have been making things that last longer than their bodies for a while (Arrowheads, pottery, farmers market buses), we have to think about the things they leave behind in conjunction with the non-physical things they leave behind. But that’s not all there is to a person, is there? Sometimes I do think that I’m just yelling into empty space, trying to remember all the things Noah was to me with all the details that my feeble brain can recall. As time passes, my memory becomes more fuzzy, or concentrated in a way that feels maybe fake. It feels like the person Noah was as a live human being is becoming flatter and flatter like one of his pieces of art to admire.

A few weeks ago, I watched the movie His Three Daughters on a whim, definitely knowing it was about three daughters coming home to take care of their dying dad, as I am magnetically attracted to grief content. I hadn’t cried this hard in a while, but my tear ducts were reacting to watching the process of seeing someone dying, thinking is this it, is this it. At one point, the older sisters begin trying to write an obituary for the dad. She writes quite a dry list of life events and accomplishments. She ends up asking the middle sister what she would say, and she says, “Vincent loves the Jets, he loves laughing at stupid shit, he likes old movies, listens to records. He calls on news radio sometimes and gets into it with them. He gets crazy mad, starts yelling about things, then forgets about what. He doesn’t give a fuck about a lot of things you shouldn’t give a fuck about.” The older sister says that’s more interesting than what she wrote, but in the end it’s another list.

I think writing an obituary is kind of futile. No way that you’re going to assemble words together that describe someone’s life, or someone at all. I loved reading people writing about Noah on social media right after he died, the little stories and moments and feelings. I don’t think anyone writing those posts were thinking, “I gotta distill Noah’s life into a paragraph!” They were just little concentrated moments of a life, not necessarily to fit into a narrative arc. So when I read obituaries now I look for the personal, the specific. Things that make them seem like real people, not just all the compliments and accomplishments you could think of to put them on a pedestal after death. I often think about writing another obituary for Noah, but with all inside jokes and silliness and particular-ness. I wish that was all that mattered when we’re alive, instead of what college we went to or skills we’ve honed. (Can you tell I’m cleaning up my resume?) Shen and I were talking the other day about how he tells people at work when they’re getting stressed out that to put it in perspective, that these are just resume bullet points, and ultimately your eulogy bullet points are the more important thing. But bullet points just make another list, and it’s not a person. Recently I’m struggling to see how Noah fits into my life, fits into this world we’re living in. I’m actually struggling to figure out how I fit into this world, too. Noah used to be aghast at my reading serious non-fiction books. I specifically remember excitedly telling him that I was reading The Deepest Well by Nadine Burke Harris about ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), and him jokingly saying something like “Why do you always read depressing books?” Which I thought was funny considering him watching the darkest bleakest murder TV shows. But anyways, currently reading Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista about Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency in the Philippines and just read this article by Clint Smith about how Rwandans are living today, 30 years after the genocide. All this to say, life is precarious, and it can feel silly to be alive amongst 8 billion people, many of whom are suffering greatly at this very moment. It’s easy to get lost.

Anyways, for folks in the Northern hemisphere in areas where it gets cold; it’s shacket season! If you don’t know, shackets are thicker shirts that work like jackets, like this or this (Noah has a 100% wool version). Noah had a great selection of fall jackets, shackets, sweatshirts, the white Uniqlo one that he refused to let me wear because he knew I’d splash pasta sauce on it inevitably. Every time I see a good quality wool shacket, I think I should just get it for him. I do often check the size of a cool men’s sneaker at thrift stores. What clothing item do you associate with Noah?

I am attempting to be excited about fall. Recently ate a delicata squash so sweet it was like candy. Have been making apple baked goods. Trying to keep an eye on the trees before all the leaves go away. Currently honey locusts are going off here, and you know when the leaves start falling it’s like yellow confetti.

This post was quite all over the place, but I had to get it out there to keep it moving. Thanks always for reading!

Love, Hitomi

p.s. Noah and I listened to this song a lot after we heard it at the end of a Sopranos episode, good and moody. Also follows Noah’s theory that every song can benefit from an organ.

A big element of widowhood is being asked about how I’m moving forward, starting over. It’s so insane that we have to grieve, really feel the loss of our partner, AND have to figure out a new life without them. Do I sometimes feel like a toddler who refuses the option that is available in real life, demanding an unicorn for a birthday? Yes. Often I just wish for an adult who tells me the plan. Or give me two choices that are both convenient for them. I recently talked to a widow who was just becoming an empty-nester, dropping off all of her kids at college, the youngest one starting her freshman year. She said that the other parents of her kids’ friends were talking about becoming empty-nesters with lots of trepidation, and she was thinking, “At least you have your husband. All I’m going to have is my dog!” Again, not to undermine that dropping off your youngest at college and sitting in the quiet house, sending them off to become real adults on their own, is hard on its own. She said that her husband would have loved being there for move-in day, and she would have had more fun rushing around with him. Every hard thing is harder for widows. Things I’ve done, things I haven’t done, all across the board. I think I joked about intersectionality at some point, is it hard because I’m female, Asian-American, short, or a widow? Or is it just my personal failings and emotional temperament?

Whenever I visit someone’s house, I love it. It’s fun to see how everyone has a different way of living, tastes in decor, and how their priorities shape their homes. People who love plants and gardening may prioritize a patio in Brooklyn over a bigger kitchen, people who love hosting parties may have tons of space with lots of couches or an open kitchen, people who love cooking may have every obscure condiment in their fridge (you should have seen the chili crisp collection we had acquired before Noah died, it was an obsession). I worked at a school in LA that had so many beautiful textiles from all over the world to decorate our classrooms with. I started appreciating spaces that were intentionally created, but also spaces that became how they are through daily use. I was reading Interior Chinatown last winter (Noah had read it and liked it, too!), and this passage stuck out to me:

It reminds me of so many homes in Japan, cramped with stuff, little baggies of flours and seaweed and noodles tucked into reused boxes. My grandma’s kitchen was her room, because I don’t remember going in their very often or knowing where anything was. She knew where everything was, and it felt like she had complete control.

I feel a satisfaction when I learn a kitchen, when I know where the grater, the salad spinner, the big pot, the baby bowls, the honey is. My mind is inclined to remember where things are when I see them in a kitchen (or an art supply room, or a workshop, or a garage, or a library). When people ask me where the coffee filters are and I can point to the right cupboard, it’s the same satisfaction I have over giving clear and helpful directions on the streets. I think it’s a satisfaction of orderliness, a victory over entropy.

Being on the road, being without a home, is the opposite. Many a times in the last year, I’ve pulled out both of my suitcases (and various large bags of shoes or jackets) to totally repack them for the upcoming stretch. I have shuffled tank tops in DC, have friends babysit my goji berry bushes, shipped various things places. What I don’t have, even if I do own it, I can’t use. I have 2 sneakers, 2 sandals, a pair of leather mary janes, 2 heels (I was attending weddings?) and a pair of vintage cowboy boots. Somehow my big winter coat is still in my trunk. It makes you think you don’t need anything at all. And it also makes me feel that being homeless would be totally, utterly destabilizing and painful. I have learned to do with what I can in the last 4 years. When I flew out to New York for Noah to pick me up and drive up to Vermont, I had packed for 2, 3 weeks, tops. I had my big turtleneck sweater and boots. My friends shipped me my other clothes from LA as summer approached. Furniture and plants got dispersed. Things that Noah and I collected and grew together. Our blue LeCreuset got put in storage. I’ve been limbo-ing even before Noah died.

In the last year, I’ve been able to think a lot about what a home is. And it is about objects and spaces, but it’s also so much about who lives there. I get why empty-nesters would be freaked out. Maybe you cook too much for the new number of people, or certain areas of the home stop being used. Many of my friends own homes and do improvements to make their homes theirs, adjusting to whatever new situations are arising in their family. In order for me to have a home, I have to know what I want. I have to decide what’s needed for me in this moment. I’ve been adding to a note with checkboxes of things. Some select items from the list:

◯All my pillows in its right place

◯A niche/altar

◯Coffeemaker (maaaaybe Mochamaster)

◯Power tools

◯Table for work

Some of the things are strictly practical and material. Some of the things are wistful, Pinterest-fueled, and magical. When my friends and I were looking for an apartment right after college, we had a giant list of wishes, that were maybe internally contradictory. But we did find an amazing, run down house with a huge empty lot and a mulberry tree and a porch facing South, so maybe these lists are powerful.

The last week or so, I’ve been walking around Chicago neighborhoods trying to decide where my life could fit in. Yes! I’m moving to Chicago. It doesn’t really feel real yet because I don’t have a place to live, I don’t have a clue what job I’m going to do, and most of my kitchen stuff is far away in boxes still. But I am here right now and have my trusty Civic to drive around, too. I’ve been really enjoying seeing the city from the L, the elevated part. People on their bikes when the weather cooled down a bit. Crossing the Chicago river once in a while. Seeing the Hancock or Sears Tower from afar. Remembering how people are tall here!

I started playing a game where I meditate on things I see. Instead of seeing things, categorizing it, and dismissing it, I keep looking. I’ve been trying to make more art (sketching, watercoloring, etc.), and it’s for the same reason. My brain hurts a little bit after making a painting or drawing, because it’s a lot of work to look hard. The other day, I saw a bag on the train tracks while I was waiting for a train. At first I couldn’t figure out what was going on—it was almost rectangular, poufy. I thought maybe it had filled up with air. But then at a certain point I realized it had a 2 liter bottle inside. How did a bag with a whole 2 liter bottle end up on the train tracks on the L? A mystery. I went on a walk with India a few weeks ago in Boston, and she knows a lot about plants. She showed me jewelweed, which I had never noticed before. First she told me to press the seed pod for an exciting surprise. Then we went and put the leaf under a creek to see another surprise. We joked that we should just be running a nature preschool. I found this video on YouTube about jewelweed, if you like old men explaining plants to you and seeing his weathered, dirty fingernails close up.

I actually don’t like to think of my move to Chicago as a new start or starting over. I like to think of it as my life continuing on this Earth. There are things I’m excited about, and there are things I’m scared about. Mostly not knowing if I can find, start, and hold down a job again. As you can see, I am meditating on trash and watercoloring, so I seem not ready to be back in the work force. But please let me know if you know anyone in Chicago who 1. want to be my friend 2. want to sublet a room or apartment and 3. want to hire me for some reason. It’s quite hard to keep all the things I’ve learned in the last year intact. It’s just like schlepping all of my stuff in the trunk of the Civic. I am disorganized, kind of random, but also I have all the things I need. I’m grateful for the generosity of my friends and family, who have stable careers and homes and possessions.

Also have been reading We Were Once a Family about the foster care system in Texas and the US generally and how difficult it is for families to be reunited, sometimes in a tragic way. Life is sometimes cruel already, I don’t know why we add to the cruelty. But the stories in the book make me feel that connections between people make a home. People aren’t interchangeable, and homes aren’t interchangeable. My home I know has to include Noah, in some way. Let me know what you think home is all about, let’s get into it (so I can procrastinate getting a job, haha).

Love, Hitomi

Over the last two years, I’ve thought a lot about Noah’s character, how he interacted with people, how he cared and loved for them, how he saw the world. But that leaves out an important part of his life. I’ve been trying to write about Noah’s art for a while now. It actually feels harder than writing about my grief or describing how he was as a person generally. It calls for more precision. That there are clear intentions in his work that I might be misinterpreting or bending out of shape. But I go back to a conversation I had a while ago, that we really, really don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s mind, despite Noah’s ability to communicate through drawing. I also acknowledge that once art is out there, it’s not all for you anymore. People interpret and relate to it however they want, and that’s beyond your control, despite all of your trying.

His career in illustration apparently was in the making as soon as he started to draw. The lore is that he loved drawing since he could hold a pencil, basically. His mom said that he actually was not good at writing—his hand would clench up and his handwriting was messy. But when he was drawing, it was smooth, intuitive, infinite. Julian said that he thought Noah was so good at drawing because he knew he loved drawing so early in his life. It’s almost like he decided when he was 3 years old that he was going to draw for the rest of his life, and he never lost interest or changed course. You can see that in his life in other ways, the focus, the presence, the perseverance. But drawing is the one thing I think that came fluently for him (after decades of work), and I think probably the place where he expressed himself the most clearly. I always think about how I wish he had written more or recorded more about how he felt during his illness. But then I find his art from that time and feel that sometimes it can be a peek into his mind.

The last birthday gift he got me was a print. He had met this guy in the neighborhood who had a letterpress machine. He figured out a way to make one of his more recent drawings “Sleep City” into a print. (You can still buy the print from his Society6 store if you like it! Sadly not the letterpress version, but still gorg.) They went back and forth a few times about how to get a cool gradient effect under the black and white drawing. Early in COVID lockdown time, Noah was having back pain that got worse and worse, giving him insomnia. He was trying to sleep in all different positions, on the floor, on couches, on yoga mats. I think he knew it meant something bad. He was going on walks in the early morning before anyone else was up, listening to the birds chirping in the dark. When he was able to finally see a doctor, the bad feeling was confirmed in his cancer re-diagnosis.

There is a sleeping lady in the middle of this print. I think it’s me, sleeping through it all. He would comment (even before this bout of insomnia) that it was amazing to watch me sleep. He would be tossing and turning in bed as I turned off my lamp and fell asleep within minutes, sometimes seconds. He’d wake up in the middle of the night. I’d be fast asleep. He’d wake up too early but not be able to go back to sleep. I’d sleep until the last minute, running around late for work every morning. He’d try to nap unsuccessfully. He’d see me fall asleep for 15 minutes, fully rested after a power nap. The other day, I was asked what my superpower was, and my answer was that I can sleep anywhere.

I’ve always been a pretty good sleeper, and Noah has always been a poor sleeper. I honestly think Noah’s presence made me feel so safe that my body and mind could shut off right away when we were together. I didn’t worry about intruders or earthquakes or any other terrible fate that might befall my sleeping body, because Noah was going to be right next to me. Noah’s presence just solidified my already excellent sleep skills. I remember though, when he became bedridden, I did think about what I would do if an intruder came in. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to protect both of us. I imagined myself begging said intruder to leave us alone, can’t you see that it’s already so bad for us?

The last week of his life, I think he was having hallucinations and feeling extremely disoriented. I wasn’t sure if it was his body slowing down, the cancer spread to areas where it was affecting his vestibular system, or what. But a few nights in a row, when I would turn off the light to go to bed, he got really dizzy, and he would say that he felt like he was falling. At this point, it had been months of him only in bed, only able to turn if someone helped him turn. I think at first I just told him something like, “You’re in bed. You’re not falling. You’re safe.” but he just kept saying that he didn’t feel right. When I turned on the lamp at the desk, he felt better, so we kept that on. I fell asleep holding his hand tight, so he felt connected to something other than his side of the bed. We slept. I know I slept that week. But it was disrupted, choppy, scary. I felt tired when I woke up. He lived with all kinds of discomfort through his illness. And I slept right through a lot of it.

Obviously he didn’t know what was going to happen in the last week of his life. This piece of art precedes his big surgery. He had done chemo and was taking nerve meds that helped with the back pain, allowing him to sleep. Maybe the drawing represented the feeling of relief that this phase of insomnia was behind him. The shapes make me think of his organs, the dull and sharp pain of his illness. There are some sketches leading up to the final drawing. I really love all of the iterations that I can find. He was working on a graphic novel about the secret caves of St.Louis. It was going to be fiction, but based on the really wacky things people have found in the caves under the city, like speakeasies with genuine ancient Egyptian artifacts. He said that he wanted to add a supernatural element to it, and it was going to be the Mississippi River, basically the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Mississippi River meander map. We always found the images from this map so beautiful, the many ways that the Mississippi has moved over so many years, how it leaves richness behind but also can be a source of destruction. I don’t think the man who made these maps, Harold Fisk, really thought, “A bunch of architecture and art students will get obsessed with these in half a century. They’ll print them out and frame them as art in their homes.” It’s a strange thing, what remains. But his people can be proud that his maps are being viewed with appreciation, even after the practical usage of the map has passed.

The Women’s Soccer USPS stamp is the last piece of art he made that was published. He was actually commissioned to draw it in 2020, knowing it won’t be released until 2023. We found out that there are many levels of approval for a stamp to be finalized, but he was done with the design of the thing by fall of 2020. He made illustrations for lots of sports media, but he also kept chugging along making personal projects about soccer. There are drawings of Zidane, Mesut Özil, Messi in his sketchbooks. He loved his soccer illustration community online. Only a few people could understand the obsessiveness borne of being a fan of a Premier League team (and the misery, elation, hope, and misery again) and being an illustrator at the same time. Most illustrators don’t get to illustrate a stamp. Most illustrators don’t get to illustrate a stamp for a sport they love so much. It still blows my mind that all these folks I’ve never met were so excited about the stamp, gave it away as gifts, treasure them like I have treasured other limited edition stamps in the past. Now I only use “Noah stamps” to mail personal mail. When people send me mail and use Noah stamps, I know that they love me very much. (JK, it’s okay if you didn’t also buy 500 sheets, hypothetically speaking.)

Recently I said something about how if Noah was better at math, he could have been an engineer. I think he found the problem solving element of illustration fascinating and exciting. He’d brainstorm ideas, little sketchbooks full of word association lists and thumbnails of how he was going to convey the crux of the article or book or idea into a visual distillation. I found a tub of Noah’s stuff in the basement of the lake house, where we were staying in 2020-2021. There was a sketchbook with drawings from our trip to Japan in early 2019 and some of his early grad school drawings. We marveled at his craft. But I thought about how this was how his brain worked. He thought and documented in drawings. He left it and we can see them, in perpetuity. I am grateful for that. And at the same time, I wish so hard that he could have kept making more art. I am biased, but I am convinced that he would have gotten even better as an illustrator if he had more time. I know he thought so.

When he drew sketches before the final art, you can see his mind meandering. He liked to make 3 sketches for any client work, going in different directions so that the client can pick their favorite. Sometimes he’d have a clear favorite and hope that the client would choose that one (they usually did). But the sketches are a record of half-thoughts, unfinished ideas. Sometimes he’d say the sketches were the best version. I really, really miss watching him draw. What a cool thing, to watch his mind pour out onto the page. I am fortunate to have spent so much time with him when he was drawing. Drawing and living for Noah seemed so overlapped. Both required presence, care, and focus. Both required lots of practice, working through frustration, being clever, keeping the joy. There’s a thousand more thoughts I have about his art and his work. I will try to keep thinking about it and putting down incomplete meanders.

Also found the above workout list in the tub of art. I hope everyone is doing 75 burpees today.

Love, Hitomi

Tomorrow makes it 2 years since Noah died. I don’t really have much to say, except that my post from last year is still pretty accurate. Time is a flat circle, and we’re all trying to stay afloat. I’m going to make some corn risotto in his honor. Probably have a story time campfire. Running the 5K a few weeks from now. Everyday, I still think everything would be a little better if he was here. The house that is my life is just a big ole mess, but lots of friends and family have tried to help me find ways to make it beautiful, where we can laugh and cry and be human.

Just a few things that I miss about Noah, still:

Our collective sense of humor, our understanding of the internet (which has atrophied quite a bit, Logan had to teach me about the Vance couchgate), our brain meld. I recently called him “my other brain.” Don’t know if anyone has this feeling, like their partner has information that is accessible to you somehow and vice versa. Someone who knows you so well that he knows what you’re thinking before you even know what you’re thinking. It’s hard to get back to yourself, because half of yourself is gone from the physical world. But the question of where consciousness resides remains.

Noah teaching me new things, without making me feel disenchanted or annoyed. He taught me how to ski (kind of…if we had more time, I could have gotten better), took me mountain biking on a mountain for the first time, and I remember he was trying to teach me how to dive. Please don’t try to teach me these things, I will not listen to you. Not everyone has the magical touch.

How he and I were such machines in the kitchen, sous chef-ing for each other. When he was doing radiation, we binge watched The Final Kitchen and decided to try plating our food. We used measuring cups to make perfect mounds of risotto and drizzled sauce and arranged spears of asparagus carefully. Then we realized that this composed plate was not nearly enough food for either of us, so we got seconds and did not plate after that.

I’ve been seeing loons on the lake today. I’ve seen three (!) hanging out together. I choose to see it as a sign from Noah. Maybe he wants us to notice that loons still got it. Let me know if you see any signs from him, or think of a funny memory, or cook something delicious inspired by his insatiable hunger.

A funny Noah tweet to round out this second year of grieving him. May we never forget his cute silent laughing face or ever ever undermine how funny he was (or that he spent a lot of time crafting his funny tweets, bless him).

Love, Hitomi

In the time between my last post and this one, I went on antidepressants, drove from St.Louis to Chicago, saw a bunch of Beluga whales, ate homemade dumplings, learned about when radishes go to seed, the seed pods are actually very delicious mini-radishes, vaguely and more concretely started to think I was going to find a place to live, watched my little nephew zoom about like a speed demon on his scooter, saw a few thunderstorms, and obsessively listened to brat while speed walking, started running again (kudos to my Strava friends), read my old notebooks from around the time Noah died and sobbed, renewed my library card, had a birthday picnic and pizza party, saw humpback whales in the wild, and did not get a parking ticket anywhere, ever.

The summer is a special time for my grief because Noah died on July 31st, 2022. There must be weird brain-body signaling going on for grievers around their loved one’s death anniversary, because both beginnings of summers since he died, I’ve felt really very depressed. It’s a deep dread, it’s like a lighter version of the leaden heaviness I felt right after his death. Noah survived through his mom’s birthday, my birthday, and his dad’s birthday right before he died. He organized his brothers and I to pitch in to get his dad a cool pizza oven, and we had a pizza night. This makes July even more of a landmine, when I think back to two years ago. We had so many celebrations, and he was so, so sick. I have a picture of his gaunt hands putting pizza toppings on the Roberta’s pizza dough we like to make. He was so skinny, nothing he ate was sticking to his body, he was in pain and discomfort all the time. If I process every summer, would the trauma of summer 2022 ever feel tenable?

The beginning of this summer, I was actually having a few great moments, meeting my friends’ babies. It was also a great reminder that we don’t all need to be busy all the time, an unemployed person (me) and a new mom and baby can hang out for 5 hours straight, and not get bored. I think the more peers I see having babies, the more I understand ways to help out, or how it’s cool and interesting and tedious, too. It’s nice to think that these babies are just entering the world, another wave in the big ocean we all live in.

Then I got sidetracked, and I was in a funk. My sleep schedule got really wacky, and I was staying up late watching The Crown just to watch some Josh O’Connor. If you haven’t seen him in La Chimera, please please find it on streaming and watch it. When I watched it, I was simultaneously Arthur but also Beniamina. I wanted to hold onto the red thread and never give up and keep looking towards the past and be a glum foreigner in the real world and wear cream linen. That’s a tangent, but grief is the tug of having to live in the present and thinking about how the past is always a sparkling, sunny day in your mind that you want to be in again. But basically, I was depressed, and this time I ended up learning that I have “moderately severe depression.” And the feeling of unfeeling pushed me over the edge to go on antidepressants for the first time in my life.

I still cry at sad songs on antidepressants and now have my ability to cry at cute animals (the gnatcatcher! the ground squirrel!) back, so that feels okay. I’m trying to see it as an experiment, which this whole thing (life?) is anyways. I’ll try it, if it’s really not for me, I’ll taper off and stop. If it helps me feel my feelings and not be stuck in my depression pit, great! Please keep me accountable on this experiment—if I sound like I’m not myself, or being strange, call me out, so I can reflect and evaluate. It’s so trendy to self-diagnose, or use psychological/psychoanalytical terms to explain things that are maybe not that. I’m so used to working to figure out the motivation and causes of behaviors in children, that I’m inclined to do it to myself. But what’s the purpose of seeking mental health services and medication if not for feeling better about where your health is, whether you’re actually healthier or not? Even just acknowledging that I have depression is quite liberating, and gets me out of depression a bit, actually.

I decided that I am going to make arbitrary goals, like running 6 more times before I run the Tucker Mountain 5K in August. I said to myself, no speed or distance goals, just going on 6 more runs before the 5K. I’m coming to terms with the reality that sometimes my choices don’t mean anything. It’s not based on science, it’s not based on best options, it’s not based on anything, aside from the vague idea that I should probably go on some runs before I do a run. I said that I bought new running shoes impulsively and Julian said it doesn’t seem like it’s very impulsive because I said I wanted them for the 5K and to run by Lake Michigan (which I did!). My sense of agency is all out of wack, I am doing things, making decisions, choices, with some reasoning or direction. It’s doggy paddling in a circle, sometimes you get to rest on a nice rock outcropping, or see a fish jump, or hit a cold patch in the water. It’s maybe not like, mission-driven, but that’s most choices.

If I were to write a mission statement to my life, it would be something like, “My mission in life is to try my best to be kind and thoughtful. I strive to create nurturing, safe environments for the whole range of human experiences. I work towards meaningful interactions and actions, becoming less and less petty over time, unless it’s for a good cause. I will try to learn, to listen, to be present.” It’s like, a distillation of what Noah was very good at. It wasn’t just that he was talented in many ways that are measurable (he could run a marathon, he could get his illustrations in Communication Arts annual, he could drive without getting a moving violation-just that one time at a stop sign on Magnolia Ave. where a cop psyched him out), it was that he was the safe environment for so many people. I was talking with a friend about the feeling I miss of being with him, that bigness, the containment, the chill factor. I miss him in all settings, in silly and the serious, he could do it all. A complete person. I guess I’m also striving to be a complete person. Which is not to say, that there is a final form to me, but that I feel and experience the range of things that I’m capable of, the widest range of things. Hopefully the antidepressants don’t make that window smaller, that it makes the window open wider.

I was reading the 4000 weeks book and it made me think of patience, mostly. That and the lack of control we have. I guess I did feel like I needed to control something recently with depression but I’m also on the path of uncontrol and minimizing. These aren’t real words, but I remember a year ago when someone told me they were trying to maximize their time, I realized that I was trying to do the opposite, or minimizing my time, if that makes sense. I know routine and regularity helps with mental health, but it’s hard to do without the control being the ideal condition. Like you get sucked into the thought that as long as you have a routine, you have control. If you plan ahead, you feel a sense of control. Mortality, finitude, all of these words are interesting because the only way life has meaning is because it ends, sometimes unexpectedly! Some people are really good at articulating what it means to know that, or be close to that (my friend Case has a truly beautiful way of drawing and writing and making little movies, it’s about his MS, but also about life, his pet bunnies, soccer, all the important things), and some people know about mortality and live their life in a way that makes sense in that context. I want to be like Noah. I want to notice things, be present, not just to be present, but for the joy and sorrow and delights. As Bruce Lee said, “Don't think. Feel.”

We’re so trained to be good thinkers, to problem solve, to be critical, to plan ahead. So much of preschool best practices is teaching children how to self-regulate, communicate with each other for mutual benefit, and be able to plan. These are crucial skills, of course. But then we get stuck in the idea that as long as we have strong skills, we will have a rationally ordered life. If you exercise regularly, eat healthy, be a good friend, vote, nothing bad will happen to you. It’s such a privileged point of view. I have been in that boat. I have at times been able to coast through life. Randomly, nothing really terrible ever happened to me, except for Noah dying so young and in such a terrible way. Even now, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing if not for the insane generosity of many of my friends and family.

Nobody deserves anything, it’s what I mean, too. I mean that it’s okay to do kind things and work for things that you care about, not because you’ll make a difference or see concrete evidence of how it affected someone or something positively, but because it probably does make your present days feel better for you. I packed books for kids in juvenile detention the other day. That made me feel good to write a note to them that I hope they enjoy the books they got. It felt like a physical act that may or may not make a difference in this kid’s life, but it made a small difference in my life on that day. It’s so small. So incremental. Not everything has to be huge. Noah taught me that, I think. The way that he can draw everyday, small ways to see things everyday. Every taco as special as the next.

Every time I run, I feel him. I think moving the body is a classic get your mind out of thinking and into feeling strategy. I actually was huffing up a hill near his childhood home and apologized to Noah, because I felt like I hadn’t been present, listening to whatever he was trying to tell me at the moment. I always get flustered when people say he’s always with me, I can talk to him, he can talk to me. I skip right to the part where he’s not here and I can’t envision what he would say, aside from the basic things he would have said for sure. I think people might think that he would be giving me concrete directions or clear answers. But I don’t think he really did that too much when he was alive. He’d make you feel confident and competent, and then let you make your own mind up.

Jess asked me what I’m wanting for my next year. At first, I was a little confounded by the question (When I blow out birthday candles now my mind is completely blank—zero wishes), but then I came up with these 3 wants.

I want:

to eat good food

to hang out with my friends

to own a couch

That’s it!

Thank you for joining me for this rambler. Noah’s death anniversary is on July 31st. Please let me know what you’re doing to celebrate his life or to think about him. Send me a voice note with a Noah memory if you can.

Love, Hitomi