When I say Beauty, I’m not talking about glamour.

Not the fleeting, fragile cultural standards of physical appearance.

I’m talking about what lights, lifts, and buttresses the soul.

What lights, lifts, and scaffolded my soul.

The moments that took my breath away

somehow returned it -

somehow breathed life back into me -

sustaining me through the most awful and terror-filled nights.

Beauty is not universal in form.

But it is universal in function.

What each of us finds beautiful is as singular as our own breath -

a private language spoken directly to the heart.

How it softens us all.

How it reminds me of my connection to the Divine, to the sublime.

***

In the mystical map of the Tree of Life, there is a sphere at the center called Tiphareth -

the sphere of Beauty, of harmony, of the heart.

The sixth sphere.

Where opposites reconcile.

Where light and shadow meet,

and neither cancels the other.

It is the radiance that emerges when everything false has fallen away.

It is Truth made luminous.

When the self has been emptied enough

to let the true light radiate.

Here, the Sun that is our soul lives.

This is the kind of Beauty that does not deny suffering -

but includes it.

And in the including,

alchemizes it.

The radiance of all that is true.

On either side above: the pure forces of Mercy and Severity.

Below: the restless kingdoms of form, desire, and emotion.

In this center they become one living pulse -

inside a heart that can feel everything.

Melancholy. Rage. Grief. Ecstasy.

And still not be destroyed by any of it.

The shamans say this is a world of beauty and terror.

And if you have descended -

if you have walked through the darkness

and felt its full weight -

then you know this is not metaphor

nor hyperbole.

I was told: never sit down in the dark.

But tell me -

how can you go on

when everything you loved

has slipped through your fingers like sand?

As above, so below.

When grief strips me bare,

when I am stretched thin across the edges of myself,

when I feel I might disappear into the vast chasms of heartbreak -

in my inner sky,

there still lies a heart that turns to Beauty as a lifeline.

For Beauty is truth.

And Beauty is light.

“Beauty is not caused. It is.”

- Emily Dickinson

***

Forces rise to meet each other.

As terror rends its way through our psyche and the world,

so too does Beauty -

not in opposition,

but in response.

Nature’s immune response.

Nature’s way of healing itself.

The darker the descent,

the more luminous the light that waits to be seen.

And this is the threshold

where I have stood countless times:

Will I let the darkness overtake me?

Will I remember to let Beauty in?

Will I remember to lift my eyes?

In your center,

where light and dark touch inside you,

Beauty is already there.

No matter what you did.

Or what was done to you.

Without reaching for Beauty, how can we live?

We aren’t meant to escape the world.

Tiphareth - the Sun - lives in all of our inner skies.

To suffer fully.

To descend into the darkness.

To lift your eyes -

to remember,

to see,

to reach for Beauty

so that we can bring the Light back.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

If you have suffered -

if you are suffering still -

remember that survival asks for balance.

You must bring in more Beauty.

In a time when beauty and horror are amplified

to almost unbearable intensity,

it is no longer a luxury.

It is the only consciousness strong enough

to bear the tension

and still radiate light.

It can hold you

long enough

to take the next step.

This is the only path left to take.

This is how we redeem the world

through us.

she was not man enough
because she could not keep a roof over their heads.
not man enough
because the grocery money always ran out before the month did.
not woman enough
because grief sometimes swallowed the children’s needs whole.
not woman enough
because frozen waffles became dinner
more nights than she wants to remember.

the rules of that world
had been handed to her without consent.
she was measured by them and found wanting.
her confidence held together
by duct tape and already-chewed gum

.

but the new world I was building
could not be built by the version of me
who stayed small enough to fit those rules.
that is when you stepped forward.

gypsy,
you were the one who refused to let the grief become a cage.
you kept the road open when the house was collapsing.
you taught me how to pack light,
how to make a temporary fire feel like home,
how to keep singing even when every breath hurt.
unbowed by shame,
you culled small, wild graces from the ruins -
a midnight dancer beneath the moon’s pale fire,
plucking wildflowers from the roadside
to keep the children’s spirits bright.
master weaver of myth and story,
you softened shadows to soothe young hearts.
thank you for keeping my eyes toward the stars,
toward story and song,
so I could keep tending the hearth.

pirate,
you raised the black flag
in the middle of the sea that bloomed red with your own blood.
you turned survival into the greatest adventure of her life.
you reminded me that a single mother with nothing left to lose
is a dangerous and beautiful thing.
you assembled makeshift crews,
knew when to take risk and when to raid,
and lived by a code written in salt and nerve.
you taught me that some seasons require swagger and cunning,
that treasure isn’t about money at all,
and that the truest map lies inside the soul.
thank you for stepping boldly into the endless horizon
that broke me free from the narrow shores of my own fear.

gangster,
you barricaded the doorway
when the world tried to decide
what a grieving woman and her children were worth -
when former allies left her for dead.
you understood power, loyalty,
the necessary ruthlessness of using every resource within reach
when everything polite had already failed us.

you cleared my accused name,
you protected the circle.
you made sure the kids ate,
even if it was frozen waffles.
you held the line when softness would have cost us
the last of what we were.
i thank you for the steel
and for the refusal to let another hand write the end of our story.

trickster,
you were the one who laughed when the walls closed in.
what great fun! you thought.
like the coyote run over from the left while crossing the road,
it never stopped you from crossing again -
only to be hit from the right.
c’est la vie! you would say.
like the Fool in Tarot,
you stepped off the cliff with open arms and an empty pouch,
knowing Great-Auntie Wind would catch us.
you brought the cleverness, the good humor,
the lightness that made the impossible feel possible again.
You turned frozen-waffle nights into wondrous playtimes,
where we stepped outside our lives for laughter and relief,
and reminded me that even in the hardest seasons
there is still room for mischief and merry-making.
thank you for the spark that kept the darkness from winning.

mystic,
you prayed in the shadows while the others dealt with the material world;
you operated in the unseen.
you spoke daily with God
with the power animals, angels, ancestors, nature beings
and invisible allies who walked beside us,

who lent us their strength and their sight.

when the battles felt too heavy for one body to carry,
you opened the door to something larger.
you gave me powers no bank account,
no roof, no perfect dinner could provide.
you held the golden thread
between the ruined and the sacred.
thank you for the daily communion
that kept my spirit from breaking
when everything else already had.

i used to think I had to choose:
wanderer or warrior.
romantic outlaw or street-smart survivor.
fool or prayerful one.

but you, we, weren’t separate from each other.
you, we, were the same wild current
wearing different clothes for different weather, different seasons.

today I stop trying to exile any of you.
i keep the gypsy’s open hands,
the pirate’s hunger for the horizon,
the gangster’s unshakable loyalty to what matters,
the trickster’s lightness and sense of possibility,
and the mystic’s daily communion with Heaven.

i love you for every version of freedom you fought for
when I could not yet fight for myself, let alone for the children.

i love you for the mess and the magic
and the sharp elbows when sweet words got me nowhere.
i love you for keeping us alive
and keeping life interesting,
and for the wild stories I’ll one day tell the grandchildren.

this is the next-to-last letter in the series.
it isn’t because the conversation is over,
but because the exile finally is.

all of you are home now, all of you are welcome here.

- me

My love,

I’m writing to you across the sea of time. I’m writing with a vow I should’ve made sooner.

I see how carefully you have been living as if real life, the one where you’re finally going to kick off your heels and pronounce, “I’m here!”, is still ahead of you. You put nearly every dollar into investments, telling yourself the pleasure of fanciness, of luxury, of ease, will be sweeter later. After you’ve gotten the downtown apartment. After you’ve paid for your brother’s braces. After Apple hits $100 per share. After… after…

You fought for kids’ needs, so easily placing yourself in their shoes. So easily feeling their pain. Often putting yourself in danger. But did anyone fight for you? You place other people’s needs ahead of your own so consistently that your own hunger barely registers as legitimate. You dream of the future with such intensity that the present becomes simply a hallway you’re walking through on the way to another room. You treat joy as something that must be earned, postponed, or carefully rationed until conditions are more perfect.

I understand why. You learned early that safety requires restraint, that love is proven by sacrifice, that your desires were always too big for your family’s wallet, that the future is the only place where things might finally feel enough.

Those lessons kept you functioning. They also trained you to live slightly outside your own life.

This time, this time right now, with its ordinary light and ordinary mom duties, with its own particular limitations and unfinished quality, is the only time we have.

So I make this vow on both of our behalf.

I will no longer defer every pleasure as if enjoyment itself is a luxury that must wait for a more deserving version of me. I will stop treating care for others as the only form of virtue. I will practice receiving. I will notice when I am depleted and choose, at least sometimes, to put myself first without apology or elaborate justification. To get pizza with the toppings I like instead of simply pepperoni.

I will interrupt the habit of living primarily in the future tense. When I catch myself drifting into the next milestone, the next improved self, the next safer season, I will return to what is actually in front of me: the temperature of the room, how the light shines through the kitchen window, the taste of jasmine tea in my cup, the body that is carrying me today.

I will let this version of my life be enough to love without requiring it to justify itself against earlier peaks or later possibilities.

There may have been more beautiful times. I don’t deny them. I even honor the longing and yearning they still stir in you. But I will no longer use them as evidence that this time is no less. This time is ours. I finally claim it. I will keep claiming it, imperfectly, day after day, until the habit of deferral loosens its grip on me.

You do not have to wait any longer to be allowed inside your own life.

I love you in the middle of the unfinished thing you are always up to.

I love you here. Now.

- Me

Look at you. Curls still wild, glasses sliding down the bridge of your nose, spine straight as a blade against the black of the grand piano. That dark dress with the soft ruffle at the sleeve, the thin black ribbon resting against your shoulder like a gift waiting to be opened. Your hands - already so certain on the keys - moving through the music with a seriousness most adults could never manage. The same hands that rearranged cans of preserved fruit on the shelves of Keyfood the day before. You didn’t perform for the room. You enter the music the way nuns enter prayer.

Do you know how weird you are?
How utterly and magnificently strange?

You play video games for two hours straight, then rise without complaint and sit at this same piano for two more because the school performance is just a month away and something in you already understands that excellence is a private conversation with yourself.

No one taught you that. It simply lived in you.

Those long afternoons when your father set advanced math problems in front of you and your little brother solved them in an hour while you sat there, heart beating too fast, brain twisting this way and that, trying to force understanding. You thought it meant something was wrong with you.

It did not.

It was only the particular shape of your mind - already more interested in the starving children of the world than in the clean logic of equations, already carrying a tenderness that sometimes made living in this mad, mad world bewildering and incomprehensible. You were impeccable.

You never understood the cliques.
You watched the way girls arranged themselves into groups and felt a bland confusion, as if someone had explained a language you had no desire to speak. Your lack of hunger to fit in looked like rebellion but it was simply the truth of you. A mystery to almost everyone who perceived you, including your own blood. Perfection.

The concentration on your face in this photograph is already the concentration of a woman who will one day rebuild an entire life from ash. More than once.

The same girl who could lose herself for hours in a book and then turn that same unbroken attention toward Bach or Chopin. The same girl who worried about distant suffering while still learning how to inhabit her own changing body. The same girl who tried to teach herself ESP and investing from books at the library.

I’m sorry that I wanted you to change.

I’m sorry that I berated you for not being smart enough.

I’m sorry I got mad at you for constantly misplacing the library books.

I’m sorry that I blamed you for feeling too much.

You were never lovelier than you are in this moment:
back straight, hands on the keys, completely alone inside the music even though the auditorium is full.

We will never be here again.

And I love you, I love all of you.

Even in the gray of a New York winter. Even when the snow turns the color of dishwater within the hour and the wind comes down College Point Boulevard like something with menacing intent. Even when the only green things are the plastic plants in the windows of the apartments in government housing and the small reminders of hope that lives inside a pink Hello Kitty wallet.

Little T walked those streets with cold hands and a budding hunger. She did not yet know the word “artist,” but she already knew the feeling. She copied Monet onto borrowed typing paper. She studied the way light broke across dresses and grass. She believed, with the fierceness of a girl who had already survived too much, that if she could only learn to see correctly, the world might open for her the way a garden does after a long freeze.

The pastels were her first real tools. The croissant on the first Monday of the month was her small sacrament. The bruises on her arm were the price of lessons she never asked for. And still she kept looking.

Somewhere beneath the exhaust and the early dark, she could already sense it: a hidden garden, waiting for the one who knew how to see.

~excerpt from memoir below~

1992

Little T had a complicated love affair with New York winters. She carried the dream of white Christmases with twinkling lights and fireplaces that spoke in comfortable crackles and warmth. But in the city, the snow turned gray instantly, the exhaust from the Q44 bus and idling delivery trucks tarnishing the freshly fallen snow within the hour. The brief moments of the city blanketed in white mirrored a midnight cabaret: a fleeting glimpse of an elegant shoulder, a breathless pause, and then the heavy drape fell, swallowing the dancer entirely. November’s Beauty, a mistress that only promised to stay a short while and before long, winter was just another thing to endure on the way to school.

She walked a mile to school from their two bedroom apartment in the government housing of Flushing, Queens. The wind sliced sideways between the brick towers of the projects, and the sun gave up early, leaving everything in the bruised, early dark.

The buildings sat along College Point Blvd and Roosevelt Ave where auto body shops with purloined carburetors lined the alleyways. Someday, she told herself, she would sit in Shea Stadium and watch the Mets play.

Someday was a long walk away.

The first Monday of the month carried its own small ritual, a private extravagance. If the coins in her pink Hello Kitty wallet had accumulated enough over the previous weeks, she stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a croissant. She worked at Anthony and Nan’s shop, where they promised her fifty cents an hour for sorting and stocking assorted wares. The noteworthy word here was “promised”. She worked regularly but was paid only occasionally. T’s wallet was always thin, but Little T liked to save notes from friends and her favorite poems rewritten from anthologies borrowed from the library and carefully folded in the plastic sleeves next to the coins. She tried drinking coffee black like Anthony did, but it tasted hot and bitter. She loved the smell though, and feeling grown up. She bets the French do this. Isn’t that espresso?

It must’ve started snowing during the night, because there was already a crunchy layer underfoot. She walked with Jr. and they were talking about The Infinity Gauntlet, the new Marvel comic book series. By then they had graduated from amateur nerds to the serious kind. Their devotion to the genre was absolute. X-Men, Silver Surfer, the occasional Batman - those were fine, good even. But the Gauntlet felt different, it was like ultra pure blow, once you had it, you didn’t know how you lived without it. They spent what money they had at Chameleons on Main Street, stepping past the man who slept in the alcove as though he were part of the masonry itself. They shared the warm croissant with cheese.

I don’t think French people eat croissants with cheese like this., T remarked.

How would you know?

Uh well, I’m studying French so they tell us about how they live there. They like hard cheese like Parmesan.

Let them eat cheese! T would say each time in a French accent, mimicking the headless queen. She just couldn’t help herself. It was part of her sacred ritual, the pastry a far cry from her usual bologna and government cheese sandwich. She wanted to savor it, make this moment last as long as possible, but it was cold out and the cheese had already begun to harden.

Adam Warlock was the shit, right?

Yeah. Who do you think would win between him and Silver Surfer?

Adam Warlock. No contest, T snorted under her breath. A real comic-book fan wouldn’t even ask. She kept that thought to herself, feeling the small, private satisfaction of knowing something her brilliant little brother did not.

He could wear the gauntlet with every Infinity Stone. You had to be beast-mode to do that. Silver Surfer had only been given his power by Galactus. Duh.

What superpower would you pick? Jr. asked, the way he always did.

But he couldn’t hear her over the din of early morning rush hour.

Maybe I could be like the Green Lantern, creating out of thin air anything I want. Except I would be like an artistic version of him, T muses.

Maybe whatever I draw can come to life.

She liked to draw. She liked to paint. They had little money but Anthony and Nan had given T a set of pastels for her birthday and they were an elevation from the colored pencils and markers that wore themselves down to nothing. She was on her way to becoming a true artiste. She would copy Monet onto white typing paper filched from typewriting class. T would later sell these pieces to her classmates, sometimes netting twenty dollars a day. The Impressionists were really on to something she observed. The way they worked with light was extraordinary. One day I hope someone looks at my art the same way I look at Monet’s. Maybe my paintings can hang in museums too. The longing sat under her ribs like a second heartbeat.

The city Math tournament is this Friday. Jr. reminds her.

Do you know the triangles yet?

Little T rubbed the bruises on her arm, a consequence of last Saturday’s math lesson. She didn’t think that confusing an isosceles triangle from a scalene one was a matter of life or death, but Anthony begged to differ. The good news was she was unlikely to make the same mistake again.

Jr. was 2 years younger but his IQ hovered steadily above 150 so he was doing the same course work as T, which irked her to no end. Even though the Math tournament was optional, it was expected that each child would do their best to win.

Anthony and Nan said Jr. was the smart one, so T “had to work much harder to succeed”. Plus, she was a girl, naturally inferior.

I just want it to be Saturday already. I know what I’m going to draw for the contest at Flushing Meadows Park.

T had chosen one of Monet’s lunch scenes on the grass. She memorized each dappled ray of sun that danced across the ladies’ dresses, each shadow that refused to stay still.

She was going to use the pastels, this was going to give her an edge. She had real artists’ tools now.

Turns out she was right.

T took home first prize that day.

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Hearken ye, dear friends,

draw nigh as I unfurl this dolorous chronicle of art collection - torn fragment by fragment by the yellowed leaves of my memoir. It shall unfold in 3 sombre movements, for the full force of the grief would crush the spirit if poured forth in a single torrent. Each part murmurs with with the insistence of regret and irretrievable loss. Let my catalogue of errors stand as stern admonition, that you may turn aside when standing at the same precipice.

The tale opens with a deceptive innocence: a frenzied and almost fevered pursuit of beauty, that luminous phantom which lures many an unwary soul into chambers of exquisite peril. And so it begins over 20 years ago, as many sad tales do and steel yourselves, for we must descend - step by faltering step - into the lightless abyss of such a passion.

There awaits the hollow despair of a most pitiable woman, who at last perceived the supreme folly of silencing her own intuitive cry, and who assumed in its stead, the pallid mask of the dutiful, the compliant, the “good girl”.

That masquerade, as we shall see, unfortunately yielded no fruits or rewards, save for those brief moments when she gazed into the fractured mirror of her soul and witnessing the dissolution of her bank account, vowed what would be an empty vow (a story for another time), “this will never happen to me again”.

~ excerpt in progress ~

2004

Hey Chris, neat place. How’s it going?

T was meeting with Chris, a satellite member of The Bomb Squad on a Saturday in May. An Investment Banker by trade, he bore the weight of unfulfilled promise, his Ivy League diploma a laughable talisman of worth. Cum laude, yet somehow all of that advanced math didn’t exactly translate to a stellar career in the world of M&A1. That’s all to say that Chris was not particularly a standout in any way. His salary remained stubbornly fixed in the high six figure range, an unyielding shackle no matter how many hours he worked, never breaking that million-dollar ceiling that loomed above him like a specter in the night. This bounty did not bring recognition; for he was relegated to the same honor of being one of many in this city, and known to none. He bore that shame like a modern day financier’s scarlet letter - conspicuous and heavy. No one even remembered the name of his firm.

He had aspirations of becoming a distinguished industrialist with $100B AUM2 and the B school3 from which he graduated named after him. The Bomb Squad gave him the respect of an old friend but they never lent credence to his business ideas. What Chris lacked in checking account size however, he made up for in colossal ambition, the kind that takes a man past sense. They were meeting for brunch because he was researching art, a sealed-off asset class that both represented the long shadow of monetary value and the bright prestige of the elect. Chris knew the social capital that came from talking of gallery walls; after all, only the ultra-high-net-worth got to lay claim to original Banksys, Basquiats, Warhols - names spoken like scripture behind doors that stayed shut. And he meant to force them open. He knew T carried a real passion for the stuff in her blood, and he was ready to comb every last corner of her mind for investable ideas.

They walked around Soho, discussing possibilities.

In hushed tones over mimosas and savory dishes made of eggs from chicken and sturgeon, Chris relentlessly bombarded T with questions.

The day was a fleeting gift, a springtime respite from the on and off rain they’d had all week. They rounded the corner of Mercer and Bleecker and approached a small park with benches where T considered stopping. Chris, ever the opportunist, offers her a bump from his 8-ball.

T declines.

No thanks, I got wasted last night, T lies.

She sniffed the air.

Someone’s smoking crack.

How do you know what crack smells like?

Ah, it’s a really unique smell.

She stopped herself, instantly regretting her last words. She would have rather shown off her expertise at spotting differences between a Bvlgari and Cartier bracelet than discerning illicit drug odors on the street. Some things you pick up from living and working in the ghettos.

T muses the conversation with Chris, overturning his questions and research in her mind, herself puzzled by the enigma of modern art collecting. It was different from traditional stock market investing, which seeks to predict future profitability of businesses. But was it so different? In both cases, there were buyers and sellers. And the buyers drive the prices, based on perceived value. So what was the value? T allowed her mind to expand a little more, to recall her deep love of Art.

Who are the buyers for a Rothko? They were few, but their wealth was fathomless. What are they buying it for? What is the value of it?

Was it mere exclusivity, a means to flaunt their riches to peers, to elicit envy from those who could only gaze from afar? Of course, hasn’t man done that since the beginning of recorded history? Been a collector of rare and beautiful items? What beauty did they see in the huge swaths of paint? And how does one evaluate that as a potential investment?

T understood the aesthetic value of a Picasso or Van Gogh. The objective beauty of the subjects was undeniable, it was easier to enjoy, one could say. But a Rothko, Damien Hirst, or Jeff Koons? A man could argue the banality of those color fields and pickled sharks and shiny balloon dogs till the cows came home and the sun itself burned out, yet the monetary value of their bodies of work stood irrefutable and something she learned a long time ago was: the market is always right.

T loved Art. Had always loved it, from as early as she could recall, but one would be hard pressed to call it that, then. The walls of her grade school were plastered with squiggly chaos, thick crayon universes drawn by hands not yet tethered to rules. She’d stand before each one, solemn and small, reading meanings hidden in the strokes. What the artist sowed and what the observer saw, often two different things. One person’s sun was another’s cornfield.

She understood it early - that truth in art was not fixed. What it means when they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That it all bent to the perceiver’s eye. Recalling these memories became a sort of strange salvation. It slipped past her mind, and struck her, like a silver arrow from Artemis, whose aim was always true, directly into the heart, which she kept under perpetual lock and key. A peculiar cipher that refused to yield its secrets to her mind, however sharp it was, until she let it pass to her heart, and it was then they revealed itself in full, and that, T realized, was true seeing.

So it was that Art flowed through T’s veins, essential as water, an elemental necessity without which she could not survive. And she knew, as sure as the turning of the earth, that if the current of beauty ever stopped, she herself would wither where she stood.

After three straight weekends of partying, The Bomb Squad decided a quiet night might do a body good. Instead of drinking at the club, drink at dinner.

The dining room at Le Bernardin1 held its own weather. The air carried the elegance of sunset on the sea, made all the more intoxicating with the rich smell of slowly-churned butter and white wine reducing in a delectable, soon-to-be served sauce made somewhere beyond closed doors. Amber light from the candles danced upon heavy white tablecloths, and silver made delicate, soft clinks on porcelain plates. T had wanted to dine there for ages.

The Bomb Squad made most of the decisions for their group activities, because they did the paying. This was not something T understood clearly until she was more entrenched in the game, years later. They did it easily, the way men who had already decided money was no longer the point of the game sometimes do. T sat among them in a dress she hemmed herself, while they talked in the half-coded language of people who moved capital for a living.

The Bomb Squad filled the seats around her in their dark suits, laughing boisterously as one of them regaled them all with a tale of their colleague’s clumsy attempt to trade on inside information and then fail spectacularly at covering it up. Across from her two of the women were planning their vacation to Mustique. T turned toward them and nodded and answered when it was required, but the real current ran the other way. The men’s talk moved beneath the surface of the table like a deep hot river in her veins: deal sizes, bonuses, the unexpected violence of a hostile takeover, the way capital could be made to change the direction of a deal with the right pressure applied at the right hour. Her heart pounded with every word. T heard it all even as she smiled politely at the women, pretending that she too, understood the aggravation of silk wrinkling too easily. She felt the old split open inside her. One part stayed with the women, trying to stay present in their conversation. The other part leaned toward the newer waters of the men’s talk and she listened with a passion she did not yet know how to name.

The food arrived in precise architecture. Fish the color of pearl. Sauces that kept revealing layers of complexity upon her tongue. Her wine glass was never empty. The Bomb Squad liked to ask about her work. Trying to understand why she was a social worker was harder than trying to project future cash flow of a newly IPO’d business. The Bomb Squad teased her the way older brothers tease the one who still believes in something they had long outgrown.

Still visiting the kids in the projects?

(Could she tell them she grew up in the projects as well?)

Still sleeping on that couch near the door?

( Danger was never far away.)

You know you don’t have to keep doing that, right?

( If she didn’t, who would? )

I could get you a job, you know. Whenever you’re ready, they’d state confidently.

Yea, she knew.

It was said lightly, almost affectionately, but the undercurrent was always the same: leave. Come over to this side. There is comfort here. There is power.

T laughed when they expected her to. She let them pay. Stayed late and joined them in their discovery and revelry of the city’s delights. And sometime during the evening of easy luxury, beneath the champagne and the perfectly seared scallops, a deep stirring welled up inside of her - fundamental and irreversible. A threshold had been crossed. She was no longer just visiting this world. Some part of her knew that it was time to claim it.

The looking-glass was sitting right there on the white tablecloth, reflecting a version of life she had never been invited to affirm as her own. She looked around the table then, really looked. She was not so different from them. They were all ambitious. They all worked long hours. They all carried private dreams and private fears. They all wanted more than the lives they’ve been handed. The difference was not in the quality of their minds or the depth of their drive. The difference was in how society had decided to value them, and that decision showed up, neatly and without apology, in their paychecks. Their work was treated as high-stakes and essential. Valuable. T’s was treated as noble but felt ultimately disposable. The looking-glass remained there, revealing two versions of the same human material priced at wildly different rates.

One of them lifted a hand without stopping the conversation, a semi-final gesture in the evening’s choreography. The check was taken away. The conversation never missed a beat. The evening folded, closed around the fact that T had once again been carried through a world whose prices she could not have paid as a social worker.

The door opened onto the cold street and the city moved around them as if nothing of consequence had just occurred. But something had. T had seen the true price of the life she was living - and the true cost of remaining on this side of the glass. She was no longer content to look. She was ready to step through.

Nuclear launch detected.

Phoenix, it’s over your command center!

DAMMIT, she’s going to lag out.

T threw her headset against the wall.

It was the 3rd game that she lagged out of today and left her teammates to fend for themselves. To compound the aggravation and humiliation, it was a ladder1 match. Her clan was going to be pissed at her. She built her own PC with what funds she had from working at the school cafeteria and it was fast enough for most things - 128 MB of RAM and a 733 MHz Pentium III processor - but the video card simply wasn’t up to snuff. She had been in the market for a proper one for a while, yet never had enough money for a discrete card, so she made do with the standard integrated graphics that came with her Dell. To think, she actually called herself a gamer.

It was 2v2 and when she saw one of the opponents choose Zerg, T chose Terran, to execute her most fearsome and favorite strategy, the tank push. The game was going to be over in 10 minutes, T smirked to herself. But it was a big map, unironically named Killing Fields. Scouting the other team’s location took at least 3 minutes. Why does this matter? Because with each passing minute, more units were being produced. The armies swelled - more hydralisks, more drones, more tanks, more marines, more everything. By the time the nuclear strike painted her command center red and the second Zerg wave crashed through her front entrance in a living tide of teeth and spines, her screen was already beginning to stutter.

nononono…NOT AGAIN.

The choppiness began. T’s units froze. Her teammate yelling at her in the headset. The beautiful, lethal chaos she needed to control turned into a sluggish agony seconds after the opponents entered her base, her computer’s frame rate too low to match the formidable army she had built.

Sorry dude.

Fix that graphics card, Phoenix.

Late 2000

A Nor’easter was blowing through town, dumping heavy wet snow and howling winds that rattled the windows and took out electric lines. T was getting ready for work at Smithfield Mall, where she had landed the job of her dreams - at a video game and comic book store. It was her first real stint in retail, and the experience felt eerily like Mallrats, one of her favorite movies. She didn’t mind. She loved waxing poetic with the would-be customers who milled in and out of the shop, even when they left empty-handed. It was a smorgasbord of a geek’s ultimate fantasy, and she still couldn’t believe her luck.

Manga lined the shelves next to X-Men and Batman. Video games were stocked behind the registers beside Boba Fett’s helmet and every kind of movie paraphernalia a nerd could want - the knockoffs and the real stuff too. An employee perk was being able to borrow the newest games. She just started on Diablo II. She couldn’t decide which she liked better - the Necromancer or Sorceress. She kind of had a thing for the dark fantasy theme.

T had a pretty sweet discount too, a full 20 percent off new or sale items, and most of the time her paycheck went straight back into Planet Comics.

Alex promised he’d drive her in because the buses had stopped running the night before under the weight of the snow. T never missed a day of work, because it never felt like work to her. She breathed video games and ate comic books, and this was her Shangri-La. Peter was already there. He usually opened; as the most senior employee he had first pick of the schedule.

I don’t think anyone’s coming to the mall today, T.

Yeah, I don’t think so either. It’s pretty crappy out there.

Let’s watch something, Peter suggested, and he slid The Goonies into the VCR. She must’ve seen it twenty times already. But today, while the storm was raging outside, and inside, with the Goonies scrambling and racing towards impossible riches, she felt a kinship to them. To leave the known map behind and head into uncharted waters for some adventure and hidden treasure.

T was a creature of habit. She only ever ate from two places at the food court - Cinnabon or Auntie Anne’s. Both were shuttered today, so when hunger hit she stuffed her face with the candy bars near the checkout registers and ate them standing up, watching the snow pile higher against the glass.

On days like this the mall felt like a secret bunker. The fluorescent lights hummed and flickered to the few workers that braved the weather. They all looked at each other like POWs from Vietnam. The shelves of comics and cartridges stood quiet, the worlds inside them sealed in stillness with no one there to turn their pages or load their games.

Between scenes of the Fratellis and One-Eyed Willy, her mind drifted back to the ladder games that had been weighing on her for months - the tank pushes that should have been clean victories turning into slow-moving disasters the second the armies got big. She always felt pressured to take out the opponents early in the game, so that her PC wouldn’t stand a chance of lagging, but that confined her to the same dozen strategies over and over again. Someone from a rival clan called her a one-trick pony. T was devastated. Talk about lame.

She still made do with the integrated graphics that had come standard in her Dell, the same machine with its 128 MB of RAM and 733 MHz Pentium III that was “fast enough” until it suddenly wasn’t. Every paycheck that used to disappear into new manga and limited-edition statues was starting to get split. A little less for the store. A little more into the jar marked for a real graphics card - one of those NVIDIA GeForce3 boards that everyone knew was the best. That she knew would take her gaming to the next level.

Video games weren’t just a frivolous pastime or an idle escape for T. Video games were the one place where she could raise entire worlds from her imagination and then walk among them, in the fashion of her choosing. As a warrior, a mage, a rogue, a hunter, never a healer though. Healers were the most boring class. Necessary? Absolutely. But T never picked them. She liked to do damage. She didn’t want to be supporting cast.

Video games were a far cry from the constriction and confinement of her “real life”, full of responsibilities, a life of hearing no, of being caged by the roles and duties her parents had fixed upon her like iron - a life without possibilities. It was a safe harbor where her creativity and will could run free. She was not safe at home. A story for another time.

She could summon armies out of the void, bend the map to her will, watch a strategy unfold across a living terrain of units made of stone, of metal and blood. In StarCraft she was not playing. She was conducting. In Diablo II she was not clicking. She was becoming something more powerful and more absolute than the self she carried through ordinary days. The demons she slayed onscreen paralleled what she imagined were demons in the outer world. She was a mystical Batman of sorts, for the time being.

The screen was a portal. When the frames held, that portal stayed open and she passed through it whole. When the frames dropped, the portal slammed shut and she was left stranded on the wrong side of the glass - headset in hand, voices shouting through static, the carefully constructed world reduced to frozen and fractured light.

She didn’t know yet that the company behind those cards would become something more than just the best GPU-maker on the block. That it would define the greatest technological revolution the world had ever witnessed. She didn’t know it would become the most valuable company in the world 20 years later. She only knew the sting of lagging out of a ladder match inches away from getting into Gold league and the fierce determination that followed. By the time the snow melted and 2002 arrived, that same hunger would push her past installing the graphics card itself and into her first shares of NVIDIA stock - because she had already lived the difference a better GPU could make, and she believed two things: 1: That more people would value a good GPU and 2: the people building them were only getting started.