July 13, 2022

♦

did you know there’s a word in portuguese that resembles your name? 

i’ve forgotten, but it means mementos or memories, like remembering to send greetings to someone, to send a memo. i would remember it if only i could pet the cat, just as i would remember to take out the trash on friday and to close the refrigerator door
          the door of my tears, 
          and all the windows before leaving the house.
there’s so much silence here. have you noticed that? that when you keep quiet, the house gets dirtier so much faster? you’re such a persistent dust. you pass through the doorways and come to rest in the corners kept under lock and key. perhaps that’s why lola can’t stand this place
          the room still sweats with warm hypocrisy from when it was a law office
and lola’s right. if we keep going on like this, we could rent it out as a funeral parlor soon. it’s profitable business. people will never stop dying
          or growing quiet 
          or thinking today must be friday.
come here. touch the wall. it’s covered in dark bubbles. so humid! the wood is swelling. i am swelling up, and sometimes i feel myself rolling, floating, rolling—like those days when we’d go to the park, and roll downhill until we were tired, until we landed at the foot of the hill where the grass was peaceful and green. do you remember? we spent so many weekends there at that park! we would arrive with our childish excitement, believing everything was going to be fine; we ate sandwiches and sipped fruit juice while the clowns inflated balloons shaped like dogs
          the dogs walking past were shaped like balloons that would later burst—
once blown up to full size and left to expand at the side of the road, the cars never stopping.
but in those days, bubbles were still clear, and everything was fine. we should return to that city again, leave behind this flat landscape for a while.
have you ever noticed how tiresias looks at me? i’ve always wondered what he’s thinking when his little green eyes grow huge as he stares into mine. it reminds me of that movie
          what was it called? 
the one where they ask whether, instead of us being the ones who make our animals more human, it isn’t actually the opposite way around, and the creatures in our lives are the ones turning us into animals. and later lola brought up that song again, the one about the professor who taught those puppies how to write 
          he was an animal lover for sure; a regular zoophile, lola said 
what a silly song! it makes me laugh, 
          though my excitement lasts only an instant
as i think about those animals 
          those bubbles
and how they drift through life with their broken fragments of memory.
only a short time has passed, really, and yet i’ve started mixing things up; things are erasing themselves from my mind. sometimes it occurs to me that the past is a faded beach house, condemned to endure the sand’s relentless daily caresses and the sting of salt swept up by the wind. lola insists i take vitamins, fish juice, capsules filled with algae. she says i should sleep more
          have peaceful dreams, and sleep without needles pounding in my temples
          for eight, ten hours
          a thousand hours . . .
          to sleep forever 
          but a wicked sun keeps visiting my dreams, drawing black holes in front of me 
          it wakes me up—feeling agitated—every forty minutes.
i saw it on tv. the blonde girl with the small mouth was talking about it: how there is a very dark spot in the middle of a solar flare. you have to see it

we should talk more. a little more. things that happen to us every day stick better when we talk about them, didn’t you know? that’s why names are so important
          that handful of letters from the alphabet that stays bound to the heart all our lives. 
mamá panchita used to repeat this until she was exhausted
          she said names are extremely dangerous; they trace lines leading to our destinies.
i remember the last time, so sad, though it barely lasted a few seconds. we had tied mamá panchita’s hands with a rope, and attached it to the beams in the ceiling, so she would stop
          she was only hurting herself; scratching open her own skin in an effort to remember. 
          her hands restless as kites, 
          but without the colors
and i felt deeply moved by her dark skin. seeing it touched me in a way that no one else’s skin had ever moved me before. it had a very old scent, the smell of many years, with doubt leaving a deep line between her eyebrows. in a corner of the room, right in front of her, the small altar to our lady of charity was laughing along with five freshly cut sunflowers and the sparkle of a few fake coins. her eyes half-closed, mamá panchita was squinting suspiciously as she looked at the saint; in her pupils she was mustering up the hatred of a thousand questions answered only with whispers. and just as i walked into the room, an unspeakable anger seized me
          she was scratching open her skin 
          who knows what she was looking for under the surface
          that’s why she had all those sores on her arms, 
          that large scar on her face
and her terrifying screams, filled with outrage, made me tremble with anger and then grow quiet because, being there at her side for the last time, i felt incapable of speaking to her 
        come now, mamá, everything’s going to be fine. when i look into your eyes, there you are—so very much yourself, mother, always you, taking with you the little thread of your name that’s about to break.
nothing. silence. in that quiet corner of the room, i didn’t so much as dare to light the white candles around our lady of charity; we remained still, with our mouths sealed 
          with our dark hands. 
even tiresias is more expressive than that when it comes to giving me looks. that must be why he’s so determined when he scratches me. don’t you see? it’s the same thing backwards. relentless caresses and reverberating silences—and this house hasn’t even had the misfortune of being built by the ocean, and has survived for years even in mamá panchita’s absence 
          in the absence of your sisters, your father, you, and me 
only the bubbles and drops remain
          drip, drop
of a rather thick liquid, as if flooded by disappointment, muddied by a sadness that makes everything slippery. no matter how hard i try, it’s impossible to stop walking around between these same drops of music, these same notes, and always this the same smell that comes in the month of may
          it’s may again
that comes to fasten itself to the walls of memory, climbing up the walls like a vine, into the memories that are hidden away in every corner, embroidered with the threads of mamá panchita’s name. she was fascinated by fancy paper napkins, by the little drawings on disposable cups, the tiny flowers on plastic cutlery—so many treasures. do you remember? she ate with her hands instead of touching the plastic forks, cleaned her mouth using her sleeves instead of napkins, discretely wiping her fingertips on the edge of the tablecloth—all as a way to keep the beauty of disposable things intact.  
you see, i’m still finding her fortune of plastic and paper at the most unexpected moments, in the most unexpected places, and it’s hard for me, because i never know what to do with these disposable objects of hers that have gone untouched and will be thrown out later without anyone even giving them another thought.
do you know how many things die without anyone even so much as thinking of them? i try to do it, to think about every single thing, about every person. . . but there are far too many and i am
          it seems to me
much too small. perhaps when you start thinking about things, the things themselves become truly quite sad, too. like the melon this morning. lola brought it over, and it was a really large one, and i had to cut through the rind myself, then scoop out all the seeds from each little square—the hulls of those seeds felt rough to the touch as I removed them; each was unique and alive, and they kept covering my hands as if they were blood from a murder. plus there was no running water in the house 
          not a single drip or drop
and that meant getting coated in the melon’s round and sweet death, its juice running onto the floor until I ended up crying—holding the knife in my hand—about all the times i hadn’t known how to relish the thought of death.

where are you going? did you know there’s a greek word . . . ? 
but i took out the trash on friday and closed all the doors 
          all of them
although later i opened them all back up again because i needed to let the daylight in and to breathe in the outside world. sometimes when the sun
          a spot black as night
starts to draw on the walls and furniture of my room, i force myself to wake up: but it’s no use. my eyes keep me anchored in my sleep. my eyelids stay closed, inwardly, looking for a long time at a universe that lacks the contours daylight draws for us. that’s why i must open the windows and doors, i have to expand this space so the colors don’t stay hidden and so that i, too, may draw myself for one more day. it’s strange: suddenly i find i’m imagining my own funeral among the dark bubbles, in the middle of this ridiculous heat. and i’m afraid 
          of closed doors and windows 
very afraid. i must be lost in the maze of the energy shake and the cereal box. every morning the same routine; it’s so easy to follow that i wind up getting lost. it’s easy to get lost when you go about the day pretending to be free
          to have no blood at all.
and you knew that. do you remember when we’d get lost and promise each other we would never go back home? never again return,
          to the smoothies or the fish oil or the algae
even though the way home was a straight shot, without any turns. we wanted to escape to the parks with their hills and lakes
          do you remember?
to sail as far away from home as one of those balloons that rises in the air until it touches the sky. we were happy runaways watching out of the corner of our eyes, feeling above it all and looking down at those small lives beneath us . . . exactly the way life used to look from the picture window of the italian restaurant. do you remember that place? with its crystal clear windows under the shade of a ceiba tree, where i was waiting for you, hidden away in the restaurant, and imagining the moment when you would arrive? the ceilings of that space were also as high as our sky. sometimes when you arrived, i would imagine you were someone else, a different fellow coming to see me. then we’d escape, filled with foolish fantasies that I cherish to this day 
          you are so silly, small woman!
you ramble on and on, without holding your tongue; with a warm, sweet venom in your saliva
          i am quite small for being such a silly woman
with the eagerness of a schoolgirl and a trembling desire to see you again, i loved waiting for you. and when you triumphantly entered the restaurant, you grinned, confirmed what you suspected, and then kept our game going by hiding a rose behind your back
          a forbidden caress
          fixing your gaze on my body
later putting the flower in my hands, without saying a word
          what a lovely couple
          yes, mamá, we do make such a lovely couple, though tiresias may condemn us
with his intensely green gaze and his claws on our skin.
yes, it sounds so pretty, but neither of us had the calling to become martyrs, nor would our deaths be foreshadowed by the ripping open of our awareness that happened, little by little, each day, in an italian restaurant
          or by having someone read of a very long will and testament:
                    the one who dies first, dies best
we didn’t think about death back then, though even in those days we already knew that neither words nor names would ever be on our side. do you remember the letters we wrote each other, the tongue twisters, all the wordplay?
          paradise   bird       white   angel       cloud  heaven       dream  blood 
          and what does blood have in common with dreams?
      they are connected in the same way that paradise is filled with birds and angels: you must fly to reach paradise, just as there must be blood for a dream to end 
and i was laughing then, though i never understood a thing. because to me, you were as bright as the look of hope in a street dog’s eyes.
wait! you would have loved it in the city center yesterday, everyone was there. i walked and walked, past all the shops, among the people and pigeons. it was fascinating. it was strange to get lost in a crowd again. a thousand overlapping colors, the dust in the air, the excited sounds of people in a hurry, with their purchases and their sniveling kids who held ice creams that were melting, sad from the heat. and a man looked at me like no man has looked at me for many years. i felt paralyzed and dry, a scarecrow of a woman. except that i can’t scare anything, not even the pigeons. i couldn’t return his look, because I could tell he was someone who refused to be intimidated. i felt trapped like the queen in a game of chess, alone and vulnerable at the point of defeat. i would like to learn to play chess
          to figure my way out of mazes
          to fill myself with the power that lives in knives
but no one will tell me how it’s done. i never learned to return a look. i know nothing about revenge. that must be why everything around me ends up dying or getting killed. you know, tiresias spent the night in the carport again. i’m afraid i will forget him, and that he’ll forget about me. i am very afraid that one day we will both forget about each other—that i’ll back out of the carport, but he won’t move; and after that, he’ll never back away or come toward me again; that later i’ll have to wipe up his blood when he’s dead, and gently remove his little red collar from around his neck, and place the drop that was his body
          dark as a bubble
into a trash bag that i won’t forget to take out on friday. perhaps after that i will close the doors forever.
go on then. you can leave if you want. there is nothing here anymore. that’s why we are so backwards and rustic, so broken down—at a standstill. we lack the words to communicate, even words that are conspiring against us, and not on our side. sometimes, i sense that a man is watching us, all the time, with a lewd and hateful expression on his face, and that what no one realizes is that, in reality, we are all very much alone in this world, and that no one is capable of forming the shapes of our eyes
          of our skin, of our memories
as if there is not a single beautiful thing remaining, and only a little of the bad
          that is becoming a little less small everyday
is embedding itself in our hands and feet, with the exact height and width as the shapes of our hearts. 
did i tell you? tiresias killed a hummingbird
          angel  bird     heaven  paradise 
and is tearing it apart now, licking it, bringing it to rest by my feet as an offering of sacrifice. he’s a hunter because he is capable of killing, because that swift flutter of wings makes no difference to him, nor does he care about the pangs of pain that stab the heart as his little muzzle shreds the warm body and throbbing heartbeats of a bird on the verge of taking flight. i also know how to heal wounds just like those, death wounds.  
tiresias has killed another hummingbird. nothing ever changes! it would seem he fills his mouth with death so as not to growl at us, when confronted with our vices. we should play again
          another paradise another crow another angel another cat another set of 
          wings
but without the terror of these days that now keep us apart. if we stay quiet, if we talk very quietly, telling each other new secrets, things could be like they were before. look closely . . . if you can just ignore my slurred speech and the way i drag the s’s in every phrase i say—forming them takes such effort—everything will remain exactly the same as it always has been. you only need to make me keep repeating it again and again
          she sells seashells she sells seashells she sells seashells
and everything 
          everything
will be the same as always again.

it’s funny   because the world is
burning   this day is another

i wake up at 630   now south somewhere
you wake up   the day is itself

metro become evening standard
become sleep   but today it’s autumn

and it’s been a court-mandated 12 months
and you’re driving again   the world

is burning   i don’t care   you say
you’re going to buy a tesla and 

you won’t   we won’t make
a difference will we   easy listening 

on repeat   ‘til it’s smoke
in the car   smoke in the streets

One of those classic Romeo and Juliet stories. This happened to a girl I knew, Alice, who was from a really Republican family, and this guy Liam, whose parents literally voted for Ralph Nader. Alice can still remember the first time she ever saw Liam, back at a high school party on the lake. He wasn’t wearing anything special: blue jeans and a sweater, but on boys like him everything was tilted to the left. Slanted, like a poem. And yeah, sure, maybe part of what made him so magnetic was also the story she’d heard from her friends about how he’d once tried to kill himself in a barn somewhere. Sure, a story like that was pretty exciting to her at the time. Alice was like most sixteen-year-olds from where we were from and felt like real life was something that only happened to other people. She was thirsty for it.

Later, in college Alice was one of those girls who wore UGGs. She wanted a job in a glass office where she made lots of money to go on trips to Europe and the beach. She liked nice things, like purses and cruises and charcuterie. Sometimes just thinking about sausage laid out on a wooden board with a raw edge got her wet. We are all entitled to our sexualities. To this day I can hardly come without picturing the guy that used to date my older sister Chantelle.

Then, at the beginning of Alice’s second year of college a friend told her that guy Liam was transferring to their school on academic scholarship. You know, the one who tried to kill himself in high school. The next thing she knew he was in all her electives. He sat up front and dominated the group discussion. Sometimes guys have something to the tenor of their voices. This isn’t science, but you feel the vibrations down to your pussy. Alice thought, how? He’s so radical! I’m from such a conservative family.

One night she dared herself to bum a cigarette from Liam at a party, wondering if he’d recognize her from high school, though he didn’t. She was like most of us were, literally invisible.

“You don’t really smoke, do you?” he said after a while, when the rest of the doorway had cleared. “You’re not doing it right.” He took the cigarette out of her mouth and sucked on it for her with his eyes closed. “See, like this?”

Alice wanted to die. She thought she’d crumble right there onto the pavement. She had a boyfriend in Rhode Island who wanted to marry her, but it wasn’t her real life. Her real life began now.

Maybe they kissed on the bus. What if they touched in the closet? One day they pointed out all the dogs in the park. When I was seventeen, the boy I liked carved my initials into his leg but there is no way for me to describe exactly how this made me feel 100% accurately.

Alice watched Liam sleeping beside her and thought, you are so beautiful, why would you try to kill yourself in high school? Don’t you know that on you everything is slanted like a poem? Thousands of girls would kill to be beautiful the way you are.

Sometimes I’m sure they didn’t even have sex. They told jokes and shared memories from childhood. Liam was studying library sciences and wanted to make thirty grand a year, he loved books and foreign films. It was one of those classic Romeo and Juliet stories. He asked Alice to close her eyes and describe what the inside of her brain was like.

“Uh, just darkness?”

He said, “No, behind the darkness. Look past it.”

“Fire,” she said.

“I see fire too. I see people dancing. They’re all on fire.” 

This might not be real, Alice kept telling herself. Imagine how he’d fare with her dad at Thanksgiving. Or maybe she was on her period. She was always on her period. Even when Liam said he loved her for the first time, one night drunk out of his mind, did she think about what fathers like ours are always telling girls like us about yielding power any chance we get? Did she clench her jaw, swallow her whole heart and laugh, “Ha ha, you’re sweet”?

Alice cradled his face and his darkness was palpable to her, a dimension that proved he had known things. When you tried to kill yourself, she wanted to ask. Did you see a light?

I picture Alice watching Fox News one day when a friend calls. “I’m doing really well,” she says. “I think I’m in love with Liam. You know, the guy from our high school who tried to kill himself.”

Her friend clears her throat. “Liam Crastor?”

“Yeah, you remember him?”

I was like, oh my god, the friend writes later in a personal essay online, sweetie you’ve got it twisted. 

“He tried to kill his girlfriend. Chantelle, the slutty one. He strangled her in a shed at her family’s cottage. Everyone knew! I mean, we knew but no one believed her at the time. Like Santa Claus kind of?”

Does Alice’s spine start to burn?

Has Liam really never mentioned my sister Chantelle?

His defense is that every poor boy wants to date a rich girl at least once in his life, even if said rich girl disrespected every cell of his being, i.e. his hygiene, love of old novels, how his parents voted for Ralph Nader. Chantelle changed the way he dressed entirely and made him get an eighty-dollar haircut. But my sister is just so beautiful, she has hair like an Afghan dog. You can’t buy that. There’s no product or vitamin. How the two of us share DNA is an advanced math equation. Girls like my sister Chantelle convince poor boys they too deserve nice things.

I of all people understand the way Liam looks, how on him everything is slanted like a poem. All week I would wait for him to come over on Fridays and watch movies with my sister. They draped the flag blanket over their laps on the couch. “Oh my God, Lilly you perv!” she’d say when she caught me staring. “Mom! Lilly’s bothering us!”

Once Liam gave me a Tootsie Roll from deep inside his pocket, it had been squished along his thigh like a fossil. It’s probably still in my room. I’m sure I could find it somewhere. I’d eat it slowly, chew for the rest of my life.

I was thirteen and they were seventeen, three months away from high school graduation when Chantelle begged our parents to let Liam come to the Cape with us. She said he’d never seen the ocean before and it was our responsibility to share our privilege. “God Mom, do you even watch the news?” She lowered her voice, “His family doesn’t even use Q-tips.”

The morning it happened started with breakfast. I was downstairs with my parents, Liam and Chantelle were upstairs. We heard the bed creak and mom turned up the bacon. It was hot, too hot for the beach. Mom was always worried about the sun, dad liked to disappear on his boat with other men. When they were ready, Liam and Chantelle came downstairs and the three of us sat on the veranda. I was reading a book about whales and he was teaching her how to play chess, but she wasn’t listening.

“No,” Liam said. “That’s the rook.”

All Chantelle did was make jokes about putting them inside of her. That was her en passant, making everything about sex and there was no way anyone could challenge her. She’d been doing it since she was fourteen.

Liam threw a knight and it landed by my feet.

“Are you a fucking psycho?” said Chantelle.

“I’m sorry, Lilly.” It was the first and only time he ever said my name.

He stood up to leave and Chantelle ran after him. “Tell mom and dad we’re fine,” she said to me.

The next thing I knew the neighbors were on the phone, they’d heard Chantelle with a strange boy in the dunes and called the police. My parents picked her up from the station and she was still crying. Mom put on You’ve Got Mail and nobody said a word. Nobody ever told me anything actually, I wasn’t old enough. Chantelle had bruises for a week.

Later, Liam wrote a long letter that only my parents were allowed to read. As a child he’d never been breastfed, his parents were divorced, the last one in class to lose a tooth, his dad passed out on the lawn, the dog died, only wore hand-me-downs, had a learning disability, was afraid of the dark. Please, try to forgive me. 

I cobbled together what I could from eavesdropping on the stairs. Chantelle was in the bath. She took a lot of baths during this time. She got really into barre fusion, then moved away for college and had alcohol poisoning three times her first semester.

Now it’s been almost four years and she’s really into HIIT Tabata. She stays upstairs in her room all Christmas doing jumping jacks. It rattles the whole house, but no one says anything. Mom is making cookies out of flax; dad has men in the parlor.

One night Chantelle has friends over and they scroll on their phones. “Can’t believe he actually has a girlfriend,” they say. Without using his name, everyone knows who they’re talking about, as if there’s only one “he” in the universe, though of course there are many. Men, I see them almost every day. They have their own television shows.

“How could you fuck a guy like that and still respect yourself?” 

“Yeah but I heard her dad voted for Trump.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know.”

“How could she not? Everyone knows!”

“Look at this picture, she totally has a moustache!”

“My brother had sex with her, he said she has a big vagina.”

“Yeah, that girl went to my summer camp. She was always on her period.”

“Oh my God Lilly, stop spying! Get your own life!”

But maybe it was sexy to be with a guy everyone talked about. I don’t know how other people think. Most of the time I can barely translate myself.

For a little while, it felt like things would really change. Everyone I knew was talking about all these evil men. Time was up and our culture would never be the same. Did Liam and Alice feel like lovers on the run? Like Bonnie and Clyde cast out from a world that no longer had any use for men like him? Alice must’ve looked at his lovely face and took pity on him, the only face he’d ever had. Liam was a baby and an old man, all trapped inside those bones.

But in the end, Alice and Liam are still on Instagram, posting brunches and summer reading lists. I think they’re living together now, friends come over for dinner parties and in the spring, many weddings. People comment, love you, totally adorable. She’s working at Bloomberg; he’s applying to PhDs.

I’m a freshman at Syracuse. Not learning a lot, but I love the community and one of my TAs from last semester has a car. He takes me out for Chinese food once a week, then we go back to his place to fuck and watch Criterion movies (another one of those classic Romeo and Juliet stories). 

“Choke me,” I said to him last night. “Tighter.” I wanted to feel as small as a girl on the internet who doesn’t matter.

“Wow,” he said after we’d finished. “You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before.” 

“Ha ha, you’re sweet.”

All of this happened to a girl I knew. Alice, who I saw once at a party. I heard she had chlamydia. I heard she got crabs from a lifeguard. She’s the girl whose dad voted for Trump. I’ve heard all kinds of things; I’ll tell you anything you want.

I took your blue extension cord. That thing must reach fifty feet. It came in handy the other day when I needed to charge the lawnmower and couldn’t find our orange one. I took your step ladder and those many packages of plastic razors. Did you even shave? Your skin was like that of a Sphynx – so thin and soft. I took six boxes of Band-Aids; it seemed like a shame to throw them. And there were the yellowed divorce papers I grabbed, which document my wife’s childhood through the eyes of the courts. You were her unbound side: no bedtime, pizza for dinner, freedom; her father her orderly side: beds are to be made, all things have a place. I hear you both daily in whispers accenting our lives. 

I took a gaudy Styrofoam Christmas wreath wrapped in ruby-red ribbon and adorned with tinsel and metallic stars. The wreath isn’t your daughter’s taste, I realize, but it brings to mind the larger-than-life way you navigated the world with your wigs, printed tights, wide-brimmed hats, and glittering make-up.  

Months later, after the bank had foreclosed on your home, I snuck into the garage. Well, by that time, perhaps it is more accurate to say that I broke in. I rifled through the storage containers stacked there. Your children had left them out of sheer exhaustion, along with your piano and most of your furniture, clothing, books. One bin contained items you had kept for your daughter: trinkets stamped with her school mascot, toothless pictures, newspaper clippings, and trophies. I gathered those layers of her life, curated by you, and took them with me, figuring that she’d later regret leaving them behind. 

I also took the bin that contained your planners, scribbled with decades’ worth of appointments. Seeing your familiar handwriting, the same loops and bends in the apple pie recipe that hangs on our refrigerator, made you feel present. In those pages, you had plotted your life in a scattered patchwork of work meetings, to-do lists, bill reminders, and doctors’ appointments alongside spiritual affirmations and inspirational quotes. 

When you jotted that number for a babysitter in 1986, you didn’t know how your life would end, but now we do. A hip fracture. Routine surgery. Cardiac arrest. Your heart stopped for nine minutes on the operating table, but they brought you back. And then, because you didn’t wake up, the doctors cooled your body – forced hypothermia. This, they said, may preserve your brain. This, they said, may keep you with us. Two days later, when you woke, we wept in celebration. You didn’t join us. Instead, you met us with an empty stare, your arms animated with jerky, unnatural motions as if you were directing an orchestra, as if, from an ancient time, you were calling men back in from the sea. We couldn’t stand to watch. 

Then the miracle. One morning you were present again. The jarring motion subsided. Still intubated, you smiled sweetly and blinked on command. 

After she looks through them, I suppose your daughter can recycle those planners one day. 

I took a spade and your weed trimmer. With that spade, I dug up what I could from your garden: Echinacea, lilies, phlox, and other plants I can’t name. I hauled them in the back of my car, mounds of earth and roots and green, and sunk them into the ground at our house.

Your daughter is not all that into plants. Even your memorial garden, which has bloomed for two summers now, doesn’t catch her eye though I feel a tug in my gut when everything wakes up and deepens with pigment. If you were here, we would shoot each other a mischievous look and roll our eyes at how our shared love – your daughter, my wife – can be so oblivious to the natural environment. 

I took two pairs of scissors; before I had them, I could never find one when I needed it. And I took ten cellophane-wrapped teeth whitening kits. You probably signed up for some Internet deal. The kits contain instructions on making a mouth mold; you did not yet have time to soften the plastic and bite. We will never unwrap these boxes, but I can’t let them go. 

Even though I don’t care for their stiff ink, I took your piles of Bic pens. Leaving them behind seemed like sacrilege for a writer. I did leave many other things, however, including your seasonal affective disorder lamp. I still kick myself when it gets dark and we can hardly make it through winter in this northern land without cracking. 

A week before you died, your daughter screamed in agony that you’d never meet the baby we wanted to have one day. I reminded her that you were still breathing, looking around, now responding. But she knew, as a daughter would, that we were near the end. This reminds me: We couldn’t figure out why you would have a child’s pillow shaped like a lamb, still wrapped in plastic. Nobody was pregnant. I thought we might stumble upon your intention for it, so I took that too. Maybe we can give it to our baby someday. 

You were brave to nod your head yes – did you mean it? – when the doctor said slowly, loudly, that you might die if they pull out your breathing tube. That there are risks. We all saw it though, the nod, your blink of awareness. Your other daughter sang sweetly in your ear, “You are my sunshine,” while our shared love squatted on the floor and held your hand. She couldn’t watch them work. I kept my eyes on your soft face, recounted how you liked your coffee, dark with thick cream pooled on the surface; how you’d sit at our cabin surrounded in a nest of mail that you brought to sort, tearing envelopes as you watched waves churn; how you’d lecture your daughter on my behalf not to pass gas like a teenager; how when asked if you wanted an English Muffin in the morning or a gin and tonic at night, you always paused before saying “yes” as if to allow for the pleasure born of anticipating life’s small rewards to swell. 

When the tube came out, you mouthed our names, airy and hoarse. I anticipated a calm celebration, a reunion. I anticipated the years ahead: our soon-to-be wedding and then, later, trips across the ocean where we would lend a hand to steady you on cobblestone streets. You did not give up when liberated from the ventilator. I watched you fight, willing your lungs to greedily accept the oxygen and pass it along to the rest of your body. I saw that you were not ready for it to all end as your vitals began to plummet. I soon knew that she was right: you would never meet our baby.

The abrupt separation of a daughter and mother leaves a deep ache in one’s bone; stirs a primal awareness that indiscriminate loss is around every corner. In those days that followed, I wanted to ease your daughter’s pain. But those who stand as witnesses to death eventually learn there is no remedy; no antidote; nothing we can offer to stop the agony. This is when the impulse to intervene becomes physical, embodied. And so when you died, I did all I knew to do. Like an archeologist saving relics for a future time, I collected you.