Guns

 

This crossroad. 

I am waiting at the stop sign to turn left. A truck to my left waits to turn too. The car across the street slows, stops. We sit there in our cars and wait, adults manning tons of heavy metal machinery, as two  little girls, probably about 11, pause on the sidewalk and hesitate before running across. 

I think about seatbelts as I wait. And airbags, which my seven year old asked me about in the car that afternoon. They're here to keep you safe when bad things happen, I said. I told her about how a layer of fabric and air can save a life. 

Stripes on the road to keep children safe as they cross the street. Flashing stop signs on school buses. The tiny holes punched into plastic bags, so no one suffocates. Choking hazard warnings on babies' toys. 

The many ways we can act, when we want, to create a world that keeps our children safe. 

An answer year

 

We started off as a question year: Surely there had to be an end to this much pain? Surely there was something more to be done? And then we switched to a different sort of questions: Did he know, when he said no ventilators and we laughed, even the oncologist, because surely there was no question of a ventilator when all he had was a pain in his shoulders? What was it he wanted to say when he asked my brother to sit by his side? Did he hold on a few hours longer just so our anniversary would remain untouched by death? Yes life ends, but why so much pain for a person so gentle? The questions rolled in one after the next, questions about what now and what next and how to re-imagine our lives and roots in the wake of the wave that carried us this far. 

Earlier this year, I wrote that grief was love untethered. Not an original idea, probably, as I've seen many quotes since then that voice that idea. The question that remained, though, is where does the grief/ love go, and why does it flood the spaces in everything, and where does this end?

Last week or so, I came across a quote about an enduring idea of death, this from The Good Place: 

And then, of course, there was a poem, this one by W.S. Merwin: 

When love is untethered, it turns out, it goes everywhere. It is impossible to look at the world and not see the memory of the wave in the water all around. It sparkles sometimes bright enough to make you tear up, and sometimes the memory of the wave wells up so strong you could drown. This is where the love goes. 

Clash

 

It has been a month and ten days since our divide began. A little context: I was 18 when I first felt cracks in the walls leave echoes in my gut, my memory, my worldview of human transience on this planet we call home. I still ache from the loss of a single life. Buildings razed, thousands dead, these are things unfathomable to me. As they are to you, I know. The cartoon pink and red hearts we exchange each day a reminder of how aligned we've been, mind and heart, in so many disagreements. 

But now we're split. To you the existence of one country is...existential, as you put it. It must survive even if a thousand die, even if a city is reduced to rubble. I don't say the word peace to you anymore, as I rarely did to anyone anyway. Because -- 

My vision of peace is a terrifying one. To lay down your arms, violence, life itself, but to strive always for less harm, greater harmony. A continual melting of conflict in every way. This summer I lay by a smoke-covered lake and recognized that my anger at the flawed vacation was only a reflection of a deeper anger, one rising from the earth under my feet at the violence reflected in that smoke. My tears turned to lake water and those few hours lost to annoyance melted into recognition of a greater wound, one that consumed annoyance and turned it into grief, which is love. Growing harmony. We sailed hours later than planned, caught equally between smoke and water. 

To execute this peace, over and over, with no guarantee that the other side will do the same, a continual melting away of self and strife into a whole that is still bigger, still flawed, but still here, requires more strength than war. To know that you can find your feet/identity/self even when you lose yourself in something beyond fear and religion and political boundaries.

I don't know if there is a cause or faith or country I feel so strongly about that I could condone a single death in its name. Perhaps it's out there, or so deep in my heart, that it will take something even more terrible than this for it to emerge. For me to say end this now, whatever it takes, in order to preserve whatever it is I hold so dear. 

I wonder where this will end, both in the world and for us. I wonder where you will shift, how our echo chamber might shrink. And I feel for its edges and let life lap back at its edges, hearts fewer but flowing, trusting that this clash will wash away in life itself. 

No comment

 

Fold up the poems, draw back the light. There is no purchase for other grieving fingers here. I can be rock, seamless. I can be quiet. Ask if you must, but I choose to say no. My heart is whole within, holding grief and joy equally. Ask if you must, but my essay is not ready for your eyes. 

Because your questions ask, did I feel grief in my physical body? And to answer that I must tell you how my veins throb, and how many days/ months/ years I have lived suspended between dreams more vivid than the waking world. Ask me about the tsunamis. Ask me, if you knew to do so, about how I know that just because something's in your head doesn't mean it's not real. 

Because your questions say, how did you smile at your daughter's birthday, only a month after your father died? I would never have guessed, you say, and this is why I choose not to answer. Because you did not know enough to guess, and if you did your guesses would be wrong.

Because your questions say, did I support you enough? And to answer that I must tell you no, you did not, and I'd have to tell you support comes from leaning into each other, and you and I haven't found that balance yet, despite years of going on walks together.  

Yes, these are question years. But no, you cannot have my questions. Your grief is a black hole, one where only contrast is possible, where your sorrow can only be explained, justified, made real, by explaining my life as nothing but privilege and joy. I refuse to be swallowed whole. And so my essay, my attempts at balance and forward motion, remain shielded. 

Signed, Durga

 

Jo, you wonder how these pieces fit together. 

Phone calls that bleed one into the next, questioning 

the meaning of each blip on a monitor, each spasm, each fluttering breath that catches. 

There it is, the next one, and the sighs that merge. A father sleeps, a daughter wakes, love slips across continents.

Slice cucumbers for the lunchbox. Don’t forget the cotton candy grapes, Mama.

Can I have my moon and stars dress, the one with the pockets for my treasures?

Sorry it’s in the wash, the laundry I haven’t done in a week 

Piled high in your bin covered in pink elephants

A stack so insurmountable, relentless, 

The paint-stained shirt, mud-splattered pants, flour-covered apron. Each on its own, all together the being of a child

So crushing you’ve named it Mt. Laundry. The impossibility of lining those edges up neatly.

I know how that feels, that weight of expectation. 

The need to keep these pieces together, daughter, mother, wife, sister. 

Each takes separate shards of strength. You are just one person. 

Remember, I too am mosaic. Pieced together when the gods found it all too much.

They glued bits together and called me goddess. 

Broken things, held together, can slay.

(Written Feb. 8, 2023, for a workshop on epistolary poems. The prompt for this assignment was to write a letter to yourself from a mythological figure.)

Writing grief

 

A friend tells me to journal my thoughts, and I don't say there is no ink the color of grief. What paper could hold absence, what words hold its shape? The answer is all of them. 

Grief trickles through  this draft where I cannot use the phrasing "X lost their child". Because losing my father sounds like the sort of stupid thing a child might do at a mall, letting go of their parent's hand. A silly mistake, easily fixed. Death is anything but transient. Grief breaks through when a friend talks about how sentience is defined by pain, and her voice is drowned out by the ICU doctor's, clear as this moment. Grief leaps out in the sunshine, sits by my pillow in the dark, hugs me in my dreams. Maybe one day there will be words to wrap around this. For now, there is only the living of it.   

Moving

 

She was physically forgotten/ Then she slipped into my pocket/ With my car keys (from Diamonds on the soles of her shoes, Paul Simon)

Can't help thinking how true this is of grief, the way my father slips into the car with me almost every time I drive. And yes, I think everyone would know exactly what I'm talking about. There's something about movement in any form that shakes emotion loose.

Falling

When you feel like you're falling, 

Like hitting the ground would kill you. Try this -- 

Spread yourself thin. Catch every wisp of air. 

Each hand that reaches out: what can I do to help?

Every well-meaning text that pings

Grab them all.

Take the signature your neighbor the notary offers at 9 pm, no charge.

Say yes to the friend who makes shadow puppets for your child

hand feeds her aloo-gobi and rotis during the strangest time of her five years of life.

Text the college roommate at 3 am. Let her show up and sit with your mother in law

As you wait in the cold sunshine of February in San Francisco for the man who will give you permission to travel to your dying father. 

He stumbles in late. He could've not answered the phone, but he did. And you can go.

Hold your friend's sunglasses in your palm, the ones warm from her head when you fumble to find yours.

Here, take mine, she says. Inhale each act of grace

May his memory be a blessing, they tell you.

Tell yourself this: this is how they show up in your life. 

Awkward, unexpected, afloat on an ocean of grief.

This is how blessings wash ashore, like buoys. Hold them close. 

This is how you breathe. This is how you float. 

(began this on Feb. 11, 2023) 

Grief, part 2.

 

The thing about crying in public -- and I don't mean writing-workshop-this-is-a-safe-space sort of crying--but unexpected emotion in a place it doesn't belong, is that it is easier the second time around. 

The first time: I was in a Milpitas movie theater with a friend, watching a Bollywood film about a girl whose fiancé dumps her and she chooses to go on her honeymoon alone. What was the line her mother said that made me bawl over the possibility that I'd never have a child? I don't remember anymore. Last week, in the theater, I cried in the dark as my daughter bopped along to the song a pig sang to an elephant: "we'll still be friends, even after it ends." 

Grief, I am learning, doesn't get easier, but more familiar. The ways it can sneak up on you and refuse to go unacknowledged. The little ways you learn to release it into the world. First it was huge, too big for any words to encompass, and each time I tried it spilled past the confines of sentences into rambles, a river I could not tame. Now my words are measured. I smile and say thank you when someone acknowledges this loss. I know it will take my voice, my breath sometimes, and yes it is uncomfortable, and sometimes I stop in strange places to sit with it, like in the parking lot while my daughter plays in the park, or in the last row at the children's theater. 

Love, untethered

 

I send the text message knowing my father will never see it. I know my mother checks his cellphone now. And still I wait for those two blue checkmarks telling me it was seen from his phone. Incomplete closure. She knows I send them for him. I know it is her on the other end. But we never talk about this on our daily calls, my mother and I. The many ways we hold peace, sorrow. 

I've been thinking a lot about people as repositories for the emotions we place in them. Grief, in a way, is love untethered. Emotion as refugee, uprooted and wandering. The times I want to call, the conversations in my head. Knowing that the next story that publishes is one he will never read. The little things you don't know matter until they cease to exist. Whether it is this profound awareness of the small sorrows or just an overwhelm of feelings in need of anchor, I'm deeply moved by small acts of generosity. 

The friend who picked my child up the night we packed, fed and entertained her in a space removed from sorrow, at least temporarily. The one who showed up at the airport and handed me the sunglasses off her head because I forgot mine, along with medicines and a car seat, the other things I forgot. The one who sends an email helping me source a story, because work must happen even when it feels impossible. The space people hold for me, a small measure of the space left by his absence. 

 

Stick your head in

 

On the drive to the pool, I remind my daughter of her love for the water; of how the ocean holds Moana up and it will hold her too; of her strength; of her brain that remembers how her muscles should move. Still, week after week, I watch the same exchange with her instructor: 

"Focus, you've got this!" 

She spins in place, her face above the surface, squeal-shouting. 

"Believe in yourself."

She spins in place, her face above the surface, squeal-shouting.

"Pick a stroke and come get me!"

She spins in place, flails her arms the wrong way, going nowhere.

Week after week, I watch and wonder at her struggle. Why is it so hard, this simple thing? 

I've spent the last four days flailing in words on an assignment that was given to me because it's something I've written about before, and I'm one of only a handful who have. And yet. I didn't know the material. I should've done more reporting. What was even there to say about this that people didn't know already? I asked for an extension. I flailed some more. Took some naps. Complained to a friend. Pored over my notes. This afternoon, something shifted. The words were in me. I didn't need more reporting or other examples. My story was right here, where I'd been spinning in place for four days. All I had to do was take a deep breath and dive in. 

Why is it so hard, this simple thing? 

It's been a rough few days -- nothing terrible, but I've been struggling to find balance and beauty, which seem to go hand in hand for me. The latter is easy to find when I'm calm, and it's a lot easier to be grace-full in the presence of beauty. For today, this snippet on my walk, a translation of a line from a song: 

"when the sunray landed, it wrote on the dewdrop these stories of the clouds." 

Color this beautiful

My daughter stood on her tiptoes and reached into the fridge for a snack, then brought it over for help opening it. She poured herself a cup of water. When we moved into this house, her curly head barely reached the bottom of the refrigerator door. The water dispenser was way out of reach. I no longer have to interrupt my workout when she needs a snack. Little things, big milestones. Every day I am awestruck by how she unfurls into the world. 

When I learn things myself (writing, riding a bike, learning to be patient, whatever), I feel pride and growth. When she learns, I feel mostly wonder. Pride, as all parents feel, I suppose, but mostly awe. Things I didn't know before becoming a parent: that it is possible to look at another human being and see them at all their ages at once, a continuum of being from past to future. Her five-year-old body, no longer covered in baby fat, holds floppy, fuzzy newborn heft and the promise of long muscle. This growth is an eventuality both mundane and mind-blowing. 

There is obvious wonder in expansion and possibility. Can I approach the other end of life with the same sense of awe? Human brains shrink with age. The change is as irreversible as my daughter outgrowing her onesies. Each day she grows is a day of babyhood that will never return. We shed memories old and new all the time. The mystery of forgetting: How this person who does not remember talking to me five minutes ago still knows my dislike of cooked carrots when she stirs them into lunch. This is mundane miracle too, when a mind sheds the world that is too much. 

Can I learn to be amazed instead of afraid? Can I learn to love the colors instead of regretting the end of summer? Fall was always my favorite season. 

[Post title: "Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!” -- Andre Gide]

Don't talk about guns.

 

It is okay to take the time to breathe. To think of the ones who never will again. To ride these waves of air, each one bearing me closer to the ones who struggle to catch their breath today. This sea of grief we share. I couldn't sleep last night thinking of shoes in the hallway or the garage. Toys on the floor, the notes to selves in the morning that they'd make their kids clean up when they got home. In years when I hurt too much for my own words, I'd grab others' descriptions and fling them into my own sorrow, hoping to plug the hole, block the pain, soothe the wound, repair that gaping mouth with things that belonged to other people. Today I see those words and they slip past before I can grab on. Instead I hold this imagined mess: shoes. toys. two days' worth of laundry. mud from the park. crayons. endless art. 

Parallel

 

Two projects on my plate: 

One involves working with a class of preschoolers to create a piece of art. Every child will contribute. I keep the thing on track and on budget. I can give them colors and paper and brushes, but can't control what they will do with them. Still, it's up to me to make the final product beautiful, cohesive. 

The other involves working with 9 other highly-qualified professionals in my line of work. Each of us will contribute. I have a deadline and a word count. The higher ups have provided themes and ideas. Our job is to make the final product beautiful, cohesive, and delivered on time. 

The vagueness of each weighs on my mind. Ten days from deadline, I wish the outlines were more apparent. But I sometimes use paints and paper to muddle my way through story structure, and there is an odd comfort now to the instability of both pieces. To parallel a favorite poet: If the ground held still, we'd have no need for balance. You only seek your footing when the ground is unstable. 

Tomorrow is a drowning girl

 

There is a girl who weighs many tons in a river in Spain. She's supposed to be art. She floats, drowns, submerges and resurfaces as the water shifts. She's made of fiberglass, apparently. I don't know if water erodes fiberglass. If she were rock or earth, wood or flesh, her surface would wear down and crack, and each time she reappeared she would be less herself and more water. One day she might be water itself. 

This I know because about twenty years ago I wrote what it feels like to be the person trying to avoid slipping into the dark. I hold on to stuff, and each day is a little harder. Each time I slip, it is harder to shake the water off. Even on days the river runs dry and joy is blinding sunshine the water claims a little more. I can cling to rock or shore, but the contours of the river, the weight of its water, these are as much part of me as the things I hold close. I think the river has a name. I think there are ways to tame the water. Some day I will be strong enough to reach for them. Tomorrow, perhaps this will all be art. Today, I  drown. 

Unfeathered

 

Hope is not a pretty tune. It is not an air-filled bone you can snap with the fingers of one hand. 

Hope is the lumbering beast that sits heavy on your chest in the dark. It is the sore body that drags itself out of bed today and tomorrow and the day after, over, over again. 

Hope is not golden sunshine. It is the screaming purple that appears when you stretch bruise-blackened flesh. It is the hand that drives blade and needle into that ache to draw blood. To try one more time to restore life, not knowing what that life might be, knowing only that life is better than necrosis.  

Hope is no sweet song in a storm. It is the parched-throat cry that screams Enough when it would much rather get a drink of water and look away. Because it trusts that there is a better away worth looking to, worth screaming for. 

Hope is the darkness that lights itself on fire anew each day. Because it knows that something must burn to bring the light. 

Hope is the arms that roll up sleeves and get to work after the party. 

Hope, my dear Emily, is not a songbird that won't shut up. 

Book impressions

 

Realizing that what I write after a book is not so much a review as an impression of its lingering shadows, the way its footprints have contoured my consciousness. That these new dips and curves, corners of toes will remain in the way my mind interfaces with the world around me. 

And having said that, this book is a bestseller recommended by dear friends years ago. It failed to hold my attention, though I've tried several times to pick it up over the last five-ish years. This fall, something clicked. And it's been oddly comforting to read of a blind girl and white-haired boy traversing the insane uncertainty of a world war. Part of that comfort stems from the writer's voice. When you read, does the book sound a certain way in your head? Some books have no sound, others are just my own voice. Some sound like the writer. This one--I don't know what the writer sounds like--but this one is old and young, history and fantasy, and certainly not mine. 

This is a voice of wonder and innocence, sustained and uplifted through every page. Childlike in how pure its emotions are. Fear, all-encompassing. This moment amongst the snails, absolute. This hunger, complete. Each line, each paragraph sucks you in until there is nothing beyond it, nothing before or after.  Meditative and inexorable in its intensity. And each moment in the story spirals upward, from sea to sky to the nature of love and light. Light cleared by wind, the voice says, and I smell a washed sky.  

(The book: All the light we cannot see, by Anthony Doerr)

On being brown

I don't know where I stand. Not black, not white. This is what brown looks like: I have been followed around as I tried on clothing. Harassed by cab drivers, multiple times. Told my backpack wasn't allowed in the grocery store. Told to go home.

Today, in a virtual room with some of the white people I feel safest with, one person asked: Where do they get the message that they aren't welcome? The question was addressed to another immigrant, who mentioned that some other immigrants she knows feel unwelcome/ uncomfortable with the emotions in the air right now. My immigrant friend in the room can pass as white. I spoke up, only because these are the people I know they are. They are far more than just allies.

As is my child's white nanny, who told me earlier this week how sad she felt that all white people were being labeled racist. I stumbled over words to explain how it felt to be on a 6-hour boat ride with a man wearing a certain red hat and a giant, shiny hunting knife on his belt.

I don't remember what I said to the group today. Except that the world changed in November 2016. My grocery store, the one in liberal California, was a place I questioned. I don't exactly paint all white people the bad guys. But I will not let down my guard until they prove they're good.  Those stickers in store windows that proclaim everyone is welcome? They make me feel a tiny bit safer. Perhaps they're like anti-red hats. It took a massive amount of courage to say these things. I am still shaking and teary from it.

And now remember: I am not black. I have only seen a fraction of the injustices a black person in this country has, and faced them only as an adult. I am privileged, with my money and "model immigrant" status at banks and jobs and elsewhere. And remember: I, a not-black person, said this to five white people who I know beyond all doubt are allies.

Dear white ally, if you are still reading, know this: This is a sliver of what your black friends are feeling. Stand with them, but ask them how you make them feel. Ask what you--yes, you, dear white person at the protest--can do differently every day. Be prepared to hear they have nothing to say to you. To hear your friend was putting on a performance to fit in. To hear you're the bad guy until proven otherwise. If you find it difficult to sit with those things, think hard before you stand up to protest. Because when you stand a white shield protecting a black body, you need to know that your shield was forged in the same privilege that wields the guns and hate.

I don't know where I stand. I can protect myself, if not from casual racism, at least from the more egregious social injustices of being denied loans or employment or safe housing.

I don't need a shield. My skin makes a poor one. Would I have spoken up in that room today if I were black? Perhaps being brown and privileged is this. Having a voice in a safe space. If not a shield, perhaps what I can offer is a little light.

In this together

The thing I miss most is being able to go. Go to the store, to the airport, to a meeting, just away.
That lost time where I hold coffee and boarding pass in one hand while I reach for the wallet in my handbag to pay for the cereal bars I always stock at home and forget to pack. Will I remember the moves to this shuffle when I fly alone next? I miss browsing paperbacks with no intent to buy. The ability to touch new spines, new words, new spaces in the minutes before we lift weightless into blue sky.

This is what I miss, the time I stayed up all night answering emails and doing laundry before getting on a flight to see my parents. That time we took vacations on a whim. This going to the airport, dropping the rental car off, the hiss of the shuttle bus as the doors close and we go. Go toward home, anywhere. Go wash dishes, leave them to drip-dry on the black granite of my mother's counters. Go away from here.

And in lieu of that we are here. Here in this strange place of indeterminate time where people drop like flies. Where I worry that my parents must wash their own dishes and worry if the neighbors go in to help. Fear if you touch the wrong potato at the grocery store. Hope that me staying home, you staying put, this whole planet of us halted in a collective freeze dance to the tune of love will keep them safe, these places and people and hearts so far beyond where any flight will take us now.

This universal exercise in holding still. Learning to make like a tree, rooted where we are planted, we grow things. One friend's sourdough smells like old socks but will make beautiful bread, she says. Another sows cilantro for the first time. We notice sparrow song and where the cobblestones in the backyard dip to make a puddle where my daughter's rainboots fit. She hops and hops and lifts against the air until she is breathless.

We dig deep, into ourselves and earth and pantry and couch and all these places we hope will be safe. Strongholds where we can burrow, grow, emerge stronger collectively. Stay, we say. Stay home. Stay safe. Stay still. Stay strong. Stay well. Perhaps if we dig deep enough these illusions of home and wellness and strength will flourish within our planted, stationary selves. Perhaps this is how notions of home evolve from visions of cheery warmth into the jagged, frayed, sticky truth of family that never leaves no matter how far you go. Perhaps this is how love branches across the distant world, the way leaf tip never touches root and yet is always connected. Perhaps this is how we learn how we are all together, always. Even when I go, I stay. Even when I am here, I am there.

(Five months into the 2020 pandemic)