On Monday night she went offline. She told us it was only going to be a few hours. She told us she was going to be alright. She came back online three hours later. She said she was tired. She said she was going to tell us all about it.

In the early morning her girlfriend told us there were wounds on her wrists. She told us she hurt herself and was confused. We went into the city and surprised her. She had no intention of telling us anything. She looked completely normal. I confronted her: when are you going to tell us about your wrists?

She cried. We talked. I looked at her right wrist: cat scratches. But that’s with the left hand, the weaker one. I looked at the other. There, the first cut, or attempt. A little deeper. She was told to find a church. She was told she could save him if she prayed there. Alone all this time. Late evening. Dark streets. She made an offering with a found piece of glass. Or tried to.

She said she didn’t know what was real. She said she felt disillusioned. We took her home. She rested. She had to go back into the city the next day. On the surface, I couldn’t tell the difference. We talked. Her feelings, her realizations. I don’t know if her silence is disappointment or if she is still sorting it all out. If she is trying to reconnect. I joined a meeting through the phone, she did what she had to do, I was just around the corner. It was raining, we got some bagels. She was sweet and quiet like on all road trips. She was just as she ever was.

We return home, she focused on school work. She writes in her journal towards the end of the day. She rests her head and continues to write. Is this the cause, the sign I should looking for? Is my blessing her curse? The thing, this thing, that keeps me grounded, did it untether her? Did she make the mistake of trying to breach an impassible membrane when the beauty of this is that very barrier? That the point of writing is it’s inherent artifice and not the raw, unbearable truth?

The next day, Thursday, we go into the city together on the train, she has a midterm. I go into the office. Luckily we agreed we’ll come back home together. We keep in touch via text throughout the day. I worry but work, I pretend. I’m distracted, this is the last place I want to be. I put all this in a box. After a string of meetings and a presentation, I go outside, I peek, I hear the sound, the roar. I close the box before it breaks me.

Friday is the greatest challenge. She goes in alone and I can’t join her, I have to be there for him. I couldn’t choose, I have to believe she is strong, that this was a one time thing. I have to have faith in her. I have to show her I have faith in her. Waiting to leave she sees the tears on my face. She asks, why are you crying? I lie, am I? I leave her, I get home, I cannot bear it, I struggle to get into the rhythm of the work. We text throughout the morning. I go to him, we talk about his future. I am torn and have to forget, deny it all, deny the last three days. At some point she will need to cross Central Park for an appointment but tells me she dreads it. Thankfully, we got hit with a minor earthquake. It is all anyone talks about for the next hour. Her meeting goes hybrid. She says, Thank God. She comes home again.

After dinner she tells us she is still going to go on her trip to see the eclipse upstate. Measured, as if it was well thought out, definitive. Six hours away. I lose it. That right there, I tell her, tells me a lack of maturity in your thinking. She tells us she’ll be fine, she’ll be with friends, they’ll care for her, that this eclipse tha might never happen again, who knows if they’ll even know each other in the future. My mind reels, I push hard, but you’re ok with us being worried sick for eighteen hours, that’s worth it? She retorts, will you really be that worried all that time? I snap, when I came home today after I left you, I wept because for the first time in my life I had to choose between my two children, I couldn’t be in two places at once. I reminded her that she was not alone, we were always going to be there for her, but it also meant she had to consider the impact she has us, what her trip was going to do to us.

She relented. She went upstairs. I get scolded for being too rough but I don’t care. She and him are everything and if that means they leave this house hating me, but intact and strong and whole and safe, so be it. She comes back down, she hugs me. Everything is as it was.

Has she touched madness? Has she taken the first step down an easy staircase? Will it leave her alone, stop calling out to her? She was ready to not tell us anything, is she telling us everything now? When I look at her, what am I seeing? The beginning of something that will plague her life, hound her, keep her from living? Or is it a rite of passage that will be whispered about in the future and told to her children when it happens to them? I think of myself, the long road to get here, to some semblance of peace. And yet the days I feel the gristle of being alive and how there is never any rest. How everything vacillates between being unreal and surreal and I cannot be real. How it hinges on a piece of rust and the tension never, ever relents. How it’s all held together by sheer will.

I close my eyes and let the roar swallow me whole.

have to ruin things at the end…

do you not see how this ruins me? do you not see how this leaves me speechless and incapable? do you not see the corner you’ve backed me into? do you not see how cold the concrete of the floor is? do you not see how my face is pressed into the brick? do you not see how my arms are frayed and my tongue has turned to ash? do you not see how, each time you say this, i believe you? do you not see how each time you say this, i think of escape? do you not see, how each time you say this, i think to myself, he would’ve been better off if i was dead?

At your age, the nights were long and rash and jumbled, there were winters that were bitter and cold, quick and blindingly white. Summers that were sticky and sharp, airy and star filled. My friends were fleeting, mercurial, intense and complicated. I never knew where I stood with them and I was always a bit lost, looking for a lasting connection, a frequency I could never dial into.

 
 

At your age, I was locked in, tuned out, above it all but burdened. I was introspective and judgmental, angered but not yet enraged. I was past trying to impress anyone, but I knew I had a long way to go. I didn’t want to escape, I didn’t want to fit in, I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. I was embarrassed by what I was and couldn’t figure out who I could be.

 
 

At your age, I had nothing figured out but thought I knew it all.

 
 

And I look you at your age and I can see the contours of what I was, I can see the thinking and the yearning and where the edges fit. I see the alignment and feel a measure of pride anticipation of what’s next. I see where you have surpassed me, how you have stretched the boundaries and leapt forward, unknown territory that I was never capable of, a strength that would come to me only much later.

 
 

I look at you at this age and I am giddy and afraid. You’ve set the bar so high that it makes me dizzy, and where I should be worried and afraid, I find myself saying, there’s even higher she can go.

It hits you all of a sudden after its planted its feet squarely in the back of your mind. You can’t say you didn’t see it coming because it was seething all along. Lying in wait. And you’re filled with regret, you miss them terribly. You miss them when they were two, when they were four, when you read to her and she didn’t understand the words or the pictures but she knew her father loved them. When you used to hold his tiny hand and you walked around the block and thought of important things to say that he would never remember. You push the thoughts away because right here right now you’re trying to sort out the back half of this life and it’s impossible. Because all of it is lost, the things you could’ve done more, the moment you turned away from them too quickly, the comfort you could’ve given. And although he’s turning into a better man than you ever were, although she’s more than you ever dreamt of, you miss them. Suddenly, deeply, harshly, just before passing out from the exhaustion of another day.

He has no time for poetry, or predilection for it

The nuance, the play, that silly obsession with the color or the shape

It’s all angles and concrete for him, a direct correlation between input and output

For there are grievances to be filed and mockeries to be offended by

Injustice upon injustice placed on the mantle, forefront and center, to be admired and derided and regarded just so

He’s not a bad man, just one who has been blind sided one time too many

To see things for what they are

Did I dream this?
The sand underneath the fingernail
The sound of a wave crushed by a lazy jetty
Seagulls in the distance race the sun
And the children were beside me
They were tumbling at play
They were suddenly grown walking at the bite of the sea
And you leaned against me
And you sought my hand
And you sighed
We were ready for rest
We were ready to start it all over again

Did I dream this?
Sunlight through a quiet room, it caught you by the kitchen, by the dining room, by the bay window
You were standing, you were reading, something with your hands
And I want to say it was quiet, I want to say I heard something that mattered
But I couldn’t stop looking, I was in the sun with you
The looking and the breath, the place where your hair fell
And I can’t say it was beautiful because of the sound
I didn’t want to interrupt the silence
And fill it up with something other than what it was

Did I dream this?
The terror of time and it’s relentless pace
The impeccable minute where nothing happens
And the unforgiving progress here on the skin
The ache of a body losing yet another degree of freedom
Night comes too soon but exhaustion is never fast enough
Barrel into sleep with the thought of a memory I do not want to have

Perhaps this is my life’s work, a smattering of thoughts tossed into what I should be forgetting

I struggle with who I am.
And it’s because there is no more ‘who will I be?’
Or ‘who can I be?’
All the possibility has worn itself out, a thread I forgot to hold on to.
It was all going too fast. I was going too fast.
Careening to avoid the headlights.
Dodging and weaving to a beat whose steps I was learning. Shadowboxing for the big fight.
Only to realize now the arena is empty.
And I am tired, oh so tired.

 
 

I have only a handful of memories of her, spread apart by decades. Always sunny, I could barely keep up when she spoke to me. I can see the resemblance, how she looked like this sister or this brother. I could hear the wit and the sharp tongue. I understood that much. But I can only count these memories in one hand, and to be honest with you that’s what breaks me. You all lived with her. You all saw her from time to time. This is not to say it was ever enough, it’s never enough, there’s never enough time. But at least those times were in the dozens. I have this one photograph where our aunt wasn’t really there at all. And now she’s gone. Time is a ruthless beast.

 my love,

where’s the snow my love? where’s the snow?

the last three months have been a whirlwind. the summer ended, you and the kids went back to school. for a brief time it was a little sad and empty, at least the rhythm and grind filled in that gap. suddenly we were scrambling for candy and before we even put away the pumpkin head from our porch, we were driving out for thanksgiving. not a week later, christmas.

how is this happening? can you make it stop? it’s too quick, too fast, I want to breathe. we were driving to the mall the other day, the kids and I, it was good, solid, slow. we weaved our way through the mall, teased each other, found a place to sit, sifted through stores, jammed up in traffic trying to escape. but there was a moment as we neared home, a song came on, and the kids began to sing. each with their own unique frequency of delight, and I said to myself, remember this, I want to stay right here, in this moment and the memory of it that will come later. I want to radiate between the living and the memory of living it. to pan out and capture it all, to hear the echo of it, to be the chamber that holds it and keeps it outside of time.

the scattered years where we couldn’t open the door to the backyard. where we went to sleep and could see the harsh line that separated the street from the curb only to awake in pure cotton from door to door. or the nights where each snowflake stripped the world of all sound and buried it in watchful silence. we would look out the window and gasp but it couldn’t be heard. we backed away with relief. It was going to be a good day. a full day. a day without end. In pajamas, didn’t they still wear pajamas? or perhaps we would make snow angels. it didn’t matter, it was quiet. we could rest easy. time had stopped. If only to be there again and in the memory of it again. it’s hard to explain, to be present but also remembering the present. that sublime moment where you realize this, this is worth living and living over again.

where’s the snow my love? where’s the snow?

love, always

me

my love,

 
 

How do you do it, enter a room and make it seem the sun has sighed? You enter a room and everything changes, you enter a room and everything comes into focus? You dash about, you pause, you fix this, add to it, remind yourself of the next step, move on again. And any direction you go, every place you arrive, you belong. It softens, it accepts you, yearns for you, it becomes home. Not “a home” but home. As if you were always already there. A parking lot at an airport, a horse carriage ride in central park, an apartment in Albany, a hotel in Paris, a casino in Atlantic City, a house that we could not buy. Anywhere, everywhere. It isn’t so much it accepts you, but it is healed. You heal the rough edges, the dings, the nicks, the pock marks. I cannot bear to live in a world where the sun does not find you. I cannot bear to be in a world without your grace. I cannot bear to be anywhere without you. I cannot bear to live a life without you breathing life into it

 
 

Love,

me