I was bored one day last week, so I got dressed, walked down Lansdowne to Bloor, got on the subway, read my book for six stops, alighted at St George, went upstairs to transfer to the University line, waited four minutes for the train to come, casually took a bow, and jumped right in front of it, to the horror of the most unfortunate strangers.

It was weird.

I thought I would be instantly smashed to pieces, but somehow the train went straight over me, and except for the noise, it didn’t hurt a bit. I was really just embarrassed. Everybody was screaming and freaking out and I didn’t know what to do, so to avoid the awkward situation, I decided I would just pretend to be dead. 

In the hospital, I was lying on a table and a couple of friends came in to ‘identify the body’, which was nice of them. They lifted the sheet up and  I opened my eyes and said, “Oh hi guys,” which scared them at first, but then they said, “Hey, what’s up?”

I made them promise not to tell anyone though, because I knew my insurance policy covered me for a flight home, if I was dead, and I really missed my family. It could be good for me, I thought, to indulge in some home comforts. 

I said I’d see my friends at the funeral, if they could afford to come. Then I was put into a box and taken on to a plane, where I was placed clumsily in the hold with the luggage and the cats in boxes. It wasn’t comfortable but I supposed that I was in no position to complain. It was free after all.

I arrived back in England without jet lag and was taken to my home town. The family was surprised to see me looking so well and wanted to cancel the funeral arrangements. I said it seemed like a waste of all that food, and of course I wanted to see who would show up and who would cry the loudest. I suspected it would be some wise guy who I never liked that much to begin with, but really I had no idea.

I chose an open casket because I wanted a good view of the mourners and I knew that some people would come just to see what I was wearing. I wanted a good view of them too. I was planning on resurrecting sometime between the service and the party.

However, when the day came, it turned out to be a sad affair, but it was for all the wrong reasons. Inexplicably, the thing took place in some village church that I’d never seen before. Some of the people who came, I didn’t recognize at all because they’d gotten bald or fat or both. All of the people who made speeches were the wrong people to make speeches. Someone read a passage from On The Road which implied I’d been a ‘mad one’ and a few of my college paintings were displayed around the church. Oh God, I thought. This really is going to be embarrassing. The whole thing was such a disappointing cliche.

But everyone was so sad by the end of it that I felt like an absolute douchebag. I decided maybe it would be better if I did just die. 

Then it got really awkward because my friend sung a song he’d written for the occasion and I wanted to cry too. That was pretty much the only sincere part of the event. I didn’t though. I just fell asleep because it had been such a busy week and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten so much attention. I was exhausted.

Next thing I knew, I was being carried back down the aisle towards the cemetery and my friend from the hospital was whispering in my ear, “Hey! When are you going to wake up?”

Strange situation.

I was just about to tell her to forget all about it and bury me, when a song started playing over the speakers. Of all things, “The Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani featuring Akon.

“What is happening!?” I whispered back.

She was dancing. “You loved this song!”

“I’m still alive!”

“Are you?”

I was about to tell her what a ridiculous question that was, but I thought better of it. 

“Why are they playing this song? This is my funeral!”

“Well, what song did you want? You don’t generally get to choose these things.”

“I don’t know! If it has to be a Gwen Stefani song, you could have at least chosen something by No Doubt. ‘End It On This,’ or something.”

“Oh, does anyone know you liked that one?”

“Stop talking about me in the past tense!”

“Sorry. This is your funeral. It’s confusing. What song did you want?”

“I always sort of thought I’d get ‘Some Fantastic Place’ by Squeeze.”

“We talked about that. We decided it was inappropriate.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, that’s about a woman dying from cancer.”

“So?”

“Well, you jumped in front of a train because you were bored, and you’re not actually even dead.”

“Nobody knows that though! Do they?”

“No, but still. It seemed disrespectful. Somebody suggested Taking Back Sunday, but I said that you’d grown out of that a long time ago.”

“What song was it? ‘Slowdance On The Inside?’ That could have been ok!”

“I think it was called, ‘What It Feels Like To Be A Ghost’?”

“Are you kidding me!?”

“No?”

“I never even liked that album! I was 19 when it was released. I was over them by then.”

“Oh.”

“And why didn’t anybody read out something that I’ve written? That would have been more appropriate, don’t you think?”

“Well, you’ve never published anything. Nobody really knows about any of it.”

“You do!”

“Well, I’ve been busy. I’ve got school and stuff… You don’t get to curate your own funeral. It’s just not how it works. You can do whatever you want when you’re alive, but this stuff is left up to everyone else. You don’t get to choose how you’re remembered.”

This was terrible news. I realized that if I was going to be buried there and then, I wasn’t going to be remembered at all. Sure, a few close friends would say things like,

“Remember that poem she wrote about doing things?” And for a while they would, but eventually it’d get lost in their computers and my blog would get taken off the internet and my clothes would go back to Value Village and nobody would really think about me at all, except people I went to school with who, when they were drunk, would say, “Remember that weirdo who jumped in front of a train?” and another one would reply, “Yeah, she was always a weirdo.”

But nobody else would realize I’d ever been alive in the first place! I had misjudged the situation very badly.

“Pssst”’ We were almost outside the church. I peeked out and saw the hole in the ground where I was supposed to be buried. “Pssst. I can’t do this. I can’t do this now! Can you do me a favor?”

My friend loved me but she was getting tired of all the drama.

“You jumped in front of a train. You wanted to die. Are you sure you don’t want to be buried now and be done with it?”

I started to panic.

“There’s a difference between wanting to die and wanting to be dead!” I said, a little too loudly. The song was still playing though and Akon was in full cry. Nobody noticed.

“I know that,” she said. “That’s why people get drunk.”

She had a point. Sometimes people do just need a break from the mundane notions of every day life. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop living.

“Listen!” I told her. “I need you to do me a favor. If you can distract everyone, I’ll get out of this coffin, go hide in the bathroom and you can bury the box without me in it. Then I’ll just move away, start a new life, delete my Facebook and everything… Nobody will have to know.”

“It doesn’t work like that, love!” 

She wasn’t exactly thrilled by my escape plan but I didn’t know if I could face revealing myself anymore. I felt like a prize idiot. 

“Do you think Gwen Stefani will make another solo record?” I asked.

“What?”

“Do you think she’ll make another solo album? I mean, I really liked the first one, had lots of good times with it. There were some really great tracks. ‘What You Waiting For’ is one of the best pop songs of the 21st century, in my opinion… but the second album, this was just about the only good song. Well, and ‘Early Winter.’ And ‘4 In The Morning’…” 

“What are you talking about?”

“And now No Doubt has gotten back together and I haven’t heard any of their new stuff, assuming they’ve got some, and she’s got at least one kid, and a fashion line, so I don’t know if she’ll ever do another one, she’s pretty old now too… What do you think?”

She was very stressed, and probably tired from carrying my coffin around too.  

“I have no idea. Shouldn’t you be thinking about whether or not you want to die?”
We were in the cemetery by this point.

“I’m thinking about whether or not I want to live.”

“Then why are you talking about Gwen Stefani?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about the possibilities.”

“What?”

“Well, I mean, if Gwen Stefani makes another solo record and I’m dead, I won’t get to hear it.”

“Is that it? Is that all you care about? You’re not even that much of a Gwen Stefani fan.”

“They’re playing her song at my funeral.”

“You just said you didn’t want them to!”

She was right. I wasn’t making any sense. I tried to think about why I’d tried to kill myself in the first place. Boredom didn’t seem like much of a reason. I could have just gotten a hobby or something instead. And besides, since all this had happened, I hadn’t been bored once. It had actually been quite exciting. 

I realized that more than anything, I was just tired. I was tired of getting up every day and brushing my teeth and putting on clothes and going about my business, filling up the hours of the day until it got dark, when I’d start to unwind and maybe drink a glass of wine or a can of beer and write something to make somebody think about something and get into bed and lie there feeling dissatisfied for a while until I fell asleep, woke up and did it all again. It was all pretty tiring stuff.

“Time to make up your mind,” she told me.

A crowd had gathered around the burial plot. I could see that we were at the top of a hill and the views of the countryside surrounding the churchyard were pretty fantastic. This wouldn’t be such a bad place to spend eternity, I thought. Maybe this is the right decision for me. Maybe I’m just causing these people more harm than good.

Maybe they’ll be better off without me. Maybe it doesn’t matter if Gwen Stefani makes another record. 

I really wasn’t sure.

They started to lower me into the ground and I caught a moment of eye contact with my friend. She gave me a ‘last look’ and I realized I felt ok with it. It was time to go. 

I’d heard that there is a great sense of peace just before a person dies and it seemed like it was true. I felt nothing except weightlessness, acceptance and forgiveness. I took a deep, last breath and prepared for my fate. I was drifting off into the realms of semi-consciousness when I heard my friend speak again.

“I’d like to read something, if that’s ok… something of hers. Something that she wrote. I think she would have liked me to do that for her.”

She’s come good, I thought. She understands how important this is to me. I was so happy. She was going to take care of my legacy. I would be remembered. I would make a difference.

What a chore to be unforgettable
too forgivable for any one’s own good
Non, je ne regrette rien — huh?
Well, hey, maybe…

“Oh my God,” I screamed, bolting upright. “What are you doing? That’s not finished! What the hell are you doing!?” She was reading from a poem I’d been writing about my broken heart. It wasn’t ready. She knew it wasn’t ready. 

I felt wild. I stood up in the grave and roared at her. I don’t even know what I said or where she was. I was so angry, I just howled and threw my arms in the air and kicked the side of my own coffin. 

Collectively, the crowd gasped. Then they stared at me in a stunned silence. All of them standing up around the grave, and me in the wooden box, six feet below them. I felt minuscule. It was outrageous. I was back from the dead. I was ridiculous. I searched her out in fury and rage. I couldn’t believe she had done this to me. She had meant what she had said about not being able to choose how you’re remembered. I was going to choose. I still had the chance to choose. 

Our eyes met. I could have killed her. 

None of this made sense to me anymore. We held the gaze for almost a minute. My blood boiled and boiled. My fists were clenched. I wondered if maybe I had been killed by the train after all. Surely this wasn’t real. Surely none of this could have been reality.

Then for a while, nothing happened except the passing of time. My anger peaked and slowly I started to make some order out of the chaos. I felt the blood flow out of my face, and around my body and I started breathing again. Suddenly I understood that she had saved me. She’d pulled me back. 

I looked around at everything and I started laughing. 

Her face broke into a smile, then she winked. We were both laughing.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand why anybody was there. What were they thinking? What was I doing? I tried to control my laughter. I smiled politely and hoisted myself out of the ground. The moment dragged on forever. It was so stupid. Nobody else moved. I was cackling like a witch. The whole thing was ludicrous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so alive.

Finally, I stood up at ground level and still nobody spoke, they just stared at me as though they’d seen a ghost. I think that was my favorite part. I nodded to them and smiled again. I realized it was all sort of perfect. “Thank you for coming,” I told them before I turned away, and ran off into the fields.

She came running with me, down the hill. It wasn’t finished. I wasn’t finished. I definitely wasn’t finished. “SWEET ESCAPE!” I yelled out, running faster than I’d ever run before in my whole life. 

Sweet escape.

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You have always found yourself fascinated by home videos of you as a child, the carefree curiosity you seemed to so easily carry as a chubby, dimpled toddler who did not think of Milestones or of Matter but simply of Moments upon Moments. You want to write and you want to create but you find yourself dejected, fearful that you will never be able to recapture the imagination you had as a five year old.

There is a psychological theory that says that time appears to move faster as we age because life is all about ratios. One year to a four year old may make up a quarter of her life, but a year to a middle-aged mother is but a 40th of the life she’s lived overall. Moments become more and more fleeting. You can’t stop time from lurching forward and you grow older and realize that your mind is just as foreign to you as anything else, but maybe that strangeness is something to embrace.

We talk about the wisdom of age and maybe no one wants to watch the lines etch into their own skin but sometimes we wish we could skip ahead and understand what it all meant without needing to deal with the frustrations of the clichéd ‘journey.’

With just shy of two decades under your belt, you somehow are already weary. You find yourself so easily frustrated by experience, by your naiveté, understanding that you will never truly understand until years later, and now you must simply hold tight and ride out the pleasure and pain because it is all about making important mistakes and it is also about Experience with a capital “E.”

The future is distorted by expectation, the past by the fallacies of our own memories, and the present simply by our simple struggle not to trip, to stay standing. Big events are never how we expect them to be. We tack an arbitrary significance to moments and milestones, not understanding at the time how they may or may not stay with us, shape us.

Like how your father dies and the mourning doesn’t feel so bad until months later, when you understand that the initial weeks were infused by a kind of anesthesia to cover the shock.

Or how when you lose the loft you grew up in, your childhood home you think you will think about it and miss it more than you do. You think the same thing about Berkeley when you leave, that changing schools may be the Right Thing, but that it will also be hard. It isn’t hard. You find yourself sliding in and out of places much more easily than those around you.

Or how you were always an anxious child but never expected it to build up and hit you as hard as it did that summer; how you never could fathom being someone entirely unable to pull yourself from bed in the morning, an existential depression pressing down on you from all sides. How you never believed that 5 mg daily of a serotonin reuptake inhibitor could pull you out of it, alive and stronger.

Or in the way your virginity seems inconvenient and identifying until you stand, without it, under the florescent lights of a dorm room bathroom in an over-sized t-shirt, feeling utterly unchanged.

Or how you have your heart broken for the first time and it is just as destabilizing and humiliating and cliché as you always expected it to be. But how you find yourself somewhat relieved though, if only slightly, to know you can feel and hurt in a way you didn’t know you could. That people don’t seem to be as ephemeral to you as places.

All these things happen to you the year you are eighteen and it isn’t until 2012 rolls in, until you still find yourself writing “11″ at the ends of your dates still, that the only steady thing you know is your own heartbeat. You lose your baby teeth, your father, your childhood home and your innocence; you gain inches. You gain humility and you gain perspective. The world does not end beyond your peripheral vision, the way it did so simply when you were a child. Life doesn’t march in time to a metronome, and maybe sometimes the milestones come at you all at once. Growing up is hardly a linear function.

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It starts with Shel, who died of AIDS. I was the newborn baby at his funeral, the birth to his death. To a silent room, surrounded by the D.C. gay community, I was day-old pink and sound asleep.

My first real death though, I was just a kid. He was my maternal grandfather, and he died of lung cancer from smoking too many dark cigars. My mom still smokes a pack and a half of American Spirits a day and every so often I get panic attacks about her lungs and my impending adulthood. The day of his funeral — spotted with sun and startlingly warm — could be my earliest memory. I don’t remember much except that I was playing on the tombstones, trying to jump over them or trace the inscribed words with my finger, my aunt telling me to get under the tarp because it might rain. The sky was clear; I was rightfully confused, but I did what she said. We never got it together to pay for a tombstone, but I don’t think my mom cares too much. It never rained.

A few years later Shel’s partner — my cousin — got a brain tumor. I was eleven. He went into surgery and never comes out. He was 50 that year. I learned for the first time that the world doesn’t wait for you to stop crying. We went to a dinner party where all his friends wept over dessert because his favorite song came on. They told me that he loved me very much and I think they were surprised when it made me cry. Every time that Hawaiian ukulele starts unexpectedly — at the end of a movie, on the radio, from my friend’s unlearned plucking — my whole family has to cover our mouths with our hands and bite down hard. I still don’t know about God, or what happens after we die but the song feels like his ghost; he’s still here somewhere. That was the first time I prayed.

My best friend went away from home for the first time when he was thirteen. Imagine, if you will, coming back to your six-room bungalow and your life is inconceivably altered. Suddenly your week on a class trip to China transitions to a week in a hospital waiting room. She died six years ago now and he doesn’t act different in the slightest. One time I asked him how he was doing and he said “stuck in agreeable denial.” You don’t think about tuberculosis as a disease that kills people anymore, but it does. And for years after everyone who loved them has these annual bubbles on their inner arms as reminders of that shattering medical misalignment. I sometimes wonder if he will ever leave home again. I wonder if, eventually, the rains will come and he will see her strength and intelligence as his son reads out loud to him for the first time. I wonder if he will remember how he wore his mom’s beret and trench coat on the first day of high school and we all were worried and sad and wondered if he needed to talk.

Four years ago there were two boys. The first was this Baltimore white kid who went to a rich-kid summer camp. The flames in the sky rose higher and higher, forcing heat on the faces of his neighbors three blocks away. First the stairs, then the second floor caught; his sister was pushed out the window by her dad. The kid was a high school sophomore, a new fifteen, and he was lying in the hospital in critical condition. I didn’t know him, but some friends did, plus two girls from my trigonometry class. I remember them going to visit him. His death was peripheral to me, a surreal happening in the context of the pythagorean theorem and my own self-hatred.

The second was our newest neighbor — the sullen teen of a black family that had just moved into the corner house, the one with the all wood porch and brass furnishings. He heads out of his house to the blue car on the street, we hear a shot. Does that even happen in real life? Stumbling, I think that it must have been the loneliest time in his life, his mouth tasting of lemons and rust. He was going to the police station but didn’t make it, even though it was only a block away. The pool of blood in front of my childhood park, the sad and dirty stuffed animals, balloons and rosaries arranged on the signpost. Another periphery, another tragedy.

But it all got so close, following a scraggly line graph that suddenly gets straight and narrow, with a slope of 1. My grandmother died in her sleep. Immediately after my first college information session, my dad, characteristically, tells me he got a phone call and that she “might be dead.” I did not want to tell anyone that she died. I did not want to broadcast to the earth that my insides hurt, that I was smaller than usual and more vacant. I did not want the trees to hear me, to know and to still sway, like they always did, like they always will. The morning we found her she looked so little and so old in the indent of her mattress. My mom made me touch her hand to “say goodbye.” I did it, but I didn’t want to. It was rubbery and yellow, and yes, cold.

That summer we went to Maine as a family for the first time without her, and my mom goes around trying to do things right, using little butter dishes and cooking full-on lobster dinners the way she used to. I even made the blueberry pudding the way gran taught me a few summers ago, only she always called it Blueberry Gush. My mom tried to tell me that she was up there, looking down at us while my dad opened the closet door and saw the Vermeer poster she always thought looked like me and began to cry. Two years later her surviving dog forgot how to walk. The Shih Tzu passed quietly and appropriately without much pain or grief at my parents’ house.

Mr. Bronson died early this morning. Strangely to my sleeping grief, I want to shout it at the top of my lungs off the roof of my building. I want to stop people in the street and tell them about this old man. He was an ex-barber in Washington D.C. He lived through the Jim Crow era and died last night. I want them all to know that he lived in this world alongside them. He couldn’t feed himself that well but it is important that he liked to sing and talk about himself, that he came to my family holidays and lived with my best friend for a while. They should all know that he knew what the city looked like the nights it was on fire, when it was rioting. And they ought to know about the way he said goodbye. “Stay Beautiful” with a wave, and a smile, as though you’d see each other again just around the corner, or maybe never at all.

People leave a lot of stuff when they die. They leave the world to you along with all the things you never wanted. You inherit photographs, pets, furniture. You inherit their hope for you, and grown-up things like bills, even if you paid them for years now. Your siblings aren’t kids anymore and you don’t have to help host Christmas if you don’t want to. They leave you bullsh-t and questions and lots of other uncontrollably hostile feelings. Sometimes they leave you with a pool of blood or a f-cked up childhood, or the kind of despair that comes with knowing that some of your friends don’t really want to exist right here, right now. I’ve traded stories before: who do we know who got lost along the way, who do we think will lose themselves in the next year? Who is going to give up because it is too rough? There are some people who feel persistence hunted by death, and some people who just run out of power. I tell my dad, we really can’t know everyone else’s life stories: it’s too sad and it’s too secret, and most of them take it to the grave. Their absence is felt like the pressure of air in an empty room. Grandmother, number on the news — they leave you things: Objects. Stories. Something to be afraid of.

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Realize that your ex-boyfriend is about to turn 40. Think about what it would be like to still be together, in a purely “Wow, I would be a 25-year-old dating someone who’s forty” kind of way. Briefly recall always feeling so protective of him, so much older but not in a condescending way, despite being 15 years younger. For a minute, get tangled in the complications of that dynamic but quickly move on. You stopped feeling the compulsion to untangle your collective neuroticism — get sidetracked by trying to come up with a word hybrid for “erotic” and “neurotic,” both because you love combining words and because it seems like the two sound alike and are alike and that can’t be a coincidence. Kick yourself that you didn’t stay in college long enough to immediately know the Latin roots or whatever that could explain how the two words are, in fact, connected. Think about how people never really kick themselves.

Get back to business. You have to select a gift to send to this aging ex-lover. How boring and impossible. Although he’s long since moved to another city, and you rarely speak, and even more rarely see each other, you are unbreakably connected. And not just in the usual “We loved once. Sigh.” way.  It’s the kind of connection that can only come from years of deep emotional manipulation, great hope and good sex, punctuated by abortion, physical violence, restraining orders, several deaths, and eventually an understanding that it was all so silly and somehow so serious that you’ll never be able to fully escape each other, even if you never speak again. You live more inside each other as slightly altered versions of your real selves, and you each have a precarious relationship with the versions of each other that you carry around. It’s tenuous and tender. It has very little to do with the actual versions of your present selves, people who don’t know each other very well at all. But at least if you speak, you have someone else in your life who understands that. And so you’re not really friends, but you are war buddies, and he’s entering a new decade and that must mean something.

You think about the gifts you bought him in years past. You can only remember that ink drawing on the wood fiber scroll and how you drove over to his house late on a Wednesday after working on it all night, stuck it in his mailbox, hid in your car around the corner and called him, told him to look, watched him find it and then look for you under the street light. You remember that one, and the one where you bought him a suit for the funeral when his mother died and was buried on his birthday. You mostly remember the suit because you can’t forget; you mostly force yourself to remember the scroll thing because it was sweet and light and that beginning time was the best, like it always is. You were there the minute that birthdays changed forever for him. You will never be the person screaming “Happy birthday, old chap!” into the phone, or at the surprise party, because you know better.

So you think about this year’s gift. What kind of gift says, “You were born today! You are worth celebrating! Don’t be sad about your dead mother!” while simultaneously acknowledging that he is, undoubtedly, thinking about his dead mother. And thinking about what a crap mother she was, but how much he loved her anyway, even when she abandoned him. And thinking about how this set the tone for all of his future relationships with women, and all the Psych 101, totally transparent, easy-to-see-but-not-easy-to-fix problems and fixations. Definitely do not think about how you were the second mother to fail him in a heart-changing way by not wanting to be a mother. (Writer’s note: do not realize as you’re writing this that you are pregnant again, 5 years later, and that you will decide to keep it this time. Later, absolutely don’t think about the possible meaning behind the timing of writing this.)

Think about being alone, and turning 40, and everything he is proud of and everything he hates about his life. Feel stupid for thinking you know anything about his present life. Wonder if he will ever feel whole, healthy, happy. Wonder what kind of gift gives credence to these things, to make him know that at least one other person knows at least partially what he is feeling today, knows that a birthday will never be a simple and happy thing, yet knows that he is trying to be a simple and happy thing, and at least one person loves him enough to help that goal by being a simple and happy presence in his life? You laugh when you think about the notion that you could ever be a simple thing in his life. You remind yourself to readjust your goals back in the realm of reality. What gift does all that and is also kinda funny and not too expensive and not too fragile to send through the mail and maybe you can buy it at Target?

You try to remember things you experienced together. Smoking a joint and watching two episodes of Malcolm in the Middle at midnight, on weeknights, on network TV, in his attic bedroom, before sleeping. You think about ordering the DVD box set of all the seasons and sending that to him, but then you realize that perhaps that memory isn’t as clear and dear to him as it is to you, and in the absence of the that particular level of sentimental attachment, all you’re left with is a cold and impersonal gift of a show that you aren’t even sure he liked that much. You can’t be sure of the hierarchy of his memories anymore. It’s been a long time, and people’s brains evolve in fickle ways. For a minute, this thought makes you realize that you’ve drifted quite far apart and you pause to wonder why you’re sending a gift at all.

You realize that the DVD set might be perfect. Maybe the best thing you can be is the half-removed, hazy recollection of some monotonous, unobtrusively pleasant memory. Everything else, every other gift that could mean more is a filter through which you can become clearer and nearer, and in most ways, you think it would be more burden than gift to become that to him again. You want to send easy, nice birthday wishes, not a bulldozer of reminder. He was there. You were there. Absolutely anything you send is going to say, “I remember and I know you do too.” The message cannot be lost; the transmission could come across any wire. So you might as well pick a gift that is funny and light, and yeah, that mom from Malcolm in the Middle was also so goddamn weird and funny, right?

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As I’m writing you it’s almost midnight, my birthday girl. Just ten more minutes and it’s time to blow out the candles. I’ve lit you some, do you know that? I do it every year. I should have lit you twenty-three candles, but I’m two short. Sorry. Let’s just make those two up, shall we? I know you won’t mind.

The last letter I wrote you didn’t reach you in time, but I’ve never been one to give up, so here I am. Writing you anew. Writing you still. Knowing full well you won’t read this. So much has changed since you’re gone, but I’d rather not get into that right now. In a way I’m glad you never got to see some of it. As far as you’re concerned, home is still home and everyone’s still here. You’re the one that got away.

How long will I grieve on these set moments? There are the bursts of tears on random moments, but it’s gotten down to these two times a year when I grieve for real. On D-day, or Death Day as I call it, and on your birthday. You were always a year ahead of me, but I’m now older than you’ll ever be.

No one ever told me that grief was such a mixed-up thing. No one told me that it’s not just sadness, although for a large part it is. The kind of sad that makes you want to clasp your fists and press them against your belly as a counterweight to the heaviness inside there. The kind  of sad that makes you wonder if you were ever really sad before, ‘cause if that was sad, then what is this? Sadder. The saddest kind of sad there is.

But it’s more than that. The other half of grief is composed of several emotions that seem too contradictory to be felt alongside each other. And yet. There’s always guilt. Because there’s always something you could have, should have, because it just might have – knowing that it never would have changed anything doesn’t matter a jot. There’s anger, because it was not your time, and it’s just not fair ‘cause it was not your fault. Or because it was, so why didn’t you see that sign? Why didn’t you see a doctor? Why didn’t you have your car checked? Why didn’t you hold on just a little longer?

I expected all of that. I had braced myself for the darkest things I would ever feel, I was as ready for that as anyone can ever really be. And then there was the last part, the light part that in the end weighed me down the most. ‘I’m so glad it’s you, not me. I’m so glad I’m still alive. I’m so glad I get to do this, see this, be here. I’m so happy I’m still breathing, steadily in and out and am not going to stop for a long, long time.’

As I was riding my bike alongside the river, the wind blowing through my hair, my favorite song playing, I was so happy. Happier than I ever was before I was the saddest I had ever been. The moment that hit me, guilt crept back in. So I was happier because you died? You’re in ashes lying somewhere on a field in the pouring rain right now, how dare I even think such thoughts? And with the guilt came the sadness in which I comfortably let myself sink for some time, because that’s the way it’s supposed to be, right? Someone dies, and you cry for ten months straight.

It’s just I found that I can’t cry forever. Apparently no one can, but if so, they were able to make it look that way. They were all winners in the Big Grief Show, while I was standing on the sidelines, wondering. Wasn’t I supposed to be like that? Wasn’t I supposed to let it all out like them? Shouldn’t there be some guidebook on how to grieve? They all say there’s no wrong way to grieve. They forget to mention there’s no right way either.

I always stood there, quietly admiring life while they were still so sad.

Yet when they went back to work, back to school, back to life, I was still standing there. With my grief, or whatever you want to call it, ‘the emotions I felt that arose from your death’, with my ball of mixed emotions hurled up in my body. Marveling at butterflies, and feeling guilty for not being sad enough. Refusing to play your songs. Crying on the floor until I got cold, then got hungry. Still enjoying food. Writing you angry letters, composed of one syllable words. Why. Why. Why. Why. How could you. Why. Why. I love you. So much. I miss you. Why did you. I am sad. I am so, so, so sad.

I know it now. All the while I was grateful for being alive, I never stopped being sad. I never stopped loving you, I just never stopped loving life either. Being so incredibly lost is a feeling only living humans feel, so I guess I was the most alive I ever was, and there’s no greater feeling than being alive. Not even the saddest kind of sad there is.

So here’s to you, my birthday girl. Here’s to you and the life you had. Here’s to the life that left you long ago, that was never yours to have. Here’s to darkness and the choice you made. Here’s to the sadness and here’s to happiness as well. I’m so happy you were here once, I’m so glad I still am. Here’s to you and your birthday. I’ll be here next year, I’ll bring the candles.

Blow them out now, before they fade away.

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We dragged our bikes up the hill, peaked over the top, and as if we had been twirled upside-down, saw the city below us like it was the galaxy our telescopes could never find.

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It has to be the best feeling in the world when you fall in love with someone when they’re in front of a wide-open space, like a skyline or vast ocean or a mossy green forest. When you’re on the beach their naked feet are sunken into the millions of grains of sand shifting through their toes. They’re just one grain of sand, and your whole world sits in the crook of their smile. The beauty that surrounds them gets tangled up in the salty wind of their hair and nothing else exists except for that moment and that frame of existence, a raw negative exposed positive. There are so many places to travel but your country and your language is spoken in the rhythm of their body against the sea waves. 

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It was the most complicated simplicity. You.

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The first wide-open space I ever saw you stand in front of was our 2^nd grade chalkboard. The white chalk puffed dust in front of your face, and you would occasionally make a swish movement with your hand to push it away. Sometimes though when you did that you accidentally touched your nose and got a little chalk residue on the tip of the illuminated peach fuzz. You were drawing a picture of a character from the book Mrs. J had just read aloud to us. You drew a little girl with big shoes and pin-straight hair with bangs. You seemed to turn around in slow motion when you finally finished the details, and I watched as your hair swung slowly around your shoulders and you looked pleased with yourself as you walked gracefully back to your seat. That was the first time. The whole rest of the classroom disappeared and the teacher’s comments didn’t exist, the only sound was my little boy heartbeat matching up with the scrawling beat of your chalk scratching the surface of the tall green board.

The second wide-open space I ever saw you stand in front of was your backyard tree house. We were in 5^th grade and you invited me over to play. Our mom’s exchanged hellos for the first time and nice to meet yous too. By the time my mom walked out of the front door you had already moved toward your back window and your silhouette was black against the bright exposure of the outside light. Your tree house stood tall and majestic, representing my feelings at the time of seeing you stand there. I couldn’t see your face from the distance, only the way your hair was lit up from beyond the window frame and the way the sunlight hit the few stray frizzy pieces at the top. I knew then and there that day that I should have kissed you up in that tree house. There was nothing more romantic then the way the ladder swung beneath us creaking against the old bark of the Oak tree and the way you looked at me when you asked me if you should go get your radio so it wasn’t so quiet.

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I continued to fall in love with you in front of wide-open spaces as the years passed and we grew from 8-year-olds to 18-year-olds. Getting up the courage to ask you to prom was just as much courage as it took to ask you to marry me. I planned to ask you in a song I had written for you on the guitar, but one day when we were standing on the marina’s pier and I saw you with your feet dangling above the ocean I didn’t have my guitar, and couldn’t stop myself from asking you right then and there to the dance I was so terrified of going to. As you said yes a Seagull yelled as it flew overhead, applauding me on my approval and the goofy smile that spread from shore to shore. I think I felt a pat on the back from whatever sort of fate had allowed the word yes to escape from your mouth.

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I remember how we saw a rerun of Roman Holiday at midnight in the theater down the street. I remember the way the red velvet seat bounced slightly as I pretended to yawn just to lift my arm around your shoulder.

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The first time we held hands was when we went to see that concert your friend gave us tickets to. I kept that ticket in my pocket for so long their band name wore off from the many times it rubbed against the inside pocket of my jeans. I thought it was my good luck charm, I could feel it inside the cotton lining just as I could feel your hand bumping mine until your pinky rested against the crevice of my finger, then turned slightly so your small perfection fit into my big mess. It was a wide open space in a small closed space, but I could only feel your hand and that consumed every emotion I had and I didn’t even care that the band was bad because you made them sing the most beautiful harmony. We stayed like that for a while, awkward and quiet, until a slow song came on and they sang about falling in love and you moved your hand around in mine a little bit and that was my most favorite memory of all.

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You told me you had been in love with me ever since you saw me swinging alone on the swings during recess one day in 3^rd grade. You said you remembered me watching you from my seat in the 2^nd grade, but you always thought I was kind of weird and there was a possibility of cooties, or so your friends told you. But now we were in a wide-open space in a giant field with golden grass and you were wearing a dress with wildflowers and your hand was only touching mine enough to make it tickle whenever you flinched. You laughed at my stupid jokes and looked down blushing into the grass as you twiddled it nervously between your right-hand fingers. Looking at you while you were looking at something abstract made me love you even more. We could feel the same because I was looking at something beautiful and so were you. I told you I had been in love with you since the 2^nd grade and you learned addition. I said I learned that our two hearts made one whole.

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We rode our bikes down the hill, putting our feet forward and our hands gripping the breaks as we smiled and laughed that same smile and laugh that you get when you fall in love with a person in front of a wide-open space.

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Remember that summer we didn’t eat? We felt absurdly large in our size four swimsuits and cutoff shorts, so we starved ourselves. We climbed over rocks and over backseats. We let the summer sun touch our new skin and the summer boys feel our new bodies. We felt the highest highs and the lowest lows, but we had each other to keep us strong so we would run out into the streets, take the back roads to a field, strip to our souls and scream to the sky.

Remember the fall we didn’t eat? We kept a firm diet of Adderall, cigarettes, and coffee. Our parents’ might have said something, but we were playing it too well. Grades didn’t falter, social lives thrived, friendships strengthened. Ours strengthened, even as our bodies wasted into clouds of dust and our vibrant personalities faded with the leaves.

Remember the winter we didn’t eat? We had to get creative, too many family dinners. We took those volunteer jobs at the daycare center hoping we would catch colds, a flu just in time for the holidays. When that didn’t work, we declared that it was the season for giving and spent our Thanksgiving and Christmas working at the food bank, feeding homeless people who most certainly had more to eat than either of us.

Remember the spring people caught on? Me 5’10” you 5’7”, we both weighed in at under 100 pounds, we were sent to facilities, separately, we were told we could no longer be each other’s best friend. When we heard that we promised to not eat until we could see each other, but that didn’t happen. We got better, codependency stripped from us.

Remember the next year, sitting in a diner when we finally talked about it? You were so much better than I was, but we were both trying, getting our lives on track. You said that cigarettes would kill me, a clinger-on from our past lives. We looked at our meals and said that we were strong enough to eat them; we realized that our love for each other didn’t depend on an eating disorder. We entered back into each other’s lives and this time we took up more physical space than emotional space. It felt liberating and warm. We laughed when we thought about how unreal that year had been, then two girls walked in and ordered hot cups of tea and complained that they had eaten too much the day before, one girl announcing that her diet of an apple and a coffee had left her bloated. We stopped laughing then. Looking at a mirror of our past didn’t seem so funny anymore.

Remember how you told me that even if someone recovers from an eating disorder and continues to live a healthy life they’re still 30% more likely to have a heart attack later in life? I told you that something else would get to us first. I watched you shrink, then I watched you grow back. I watched you run a marathon, and watched you eat a huge meal of pasta and bread that night at a celebration dinner. I watched you walk down the aisle from the vantage point of Maid of Honor. And I watched you collapse on your kitchen floor, as I ran for a telephone, frantically dialing 911. But today I will not watch you get lowered into the ground, because I can’t face you. I can’t face your family or your husband. Because I am selfish and I am weak, and I can’t forgive myself.

Remember all those years ago when I unintentionally embarked on a journey that would kill you? Because I do, and I am so sorry.

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When Dostoevsky was a twenty-something, he stood on freezing Serbian tundra to face down the barrels of a firing squad. At the last second though, he and the rest of his liberal, intellectual insurgent group were pardoned; the sentence commuted to four years of hard labor. Having almost faced death, Dostoevsky would later attempt to describe what he felt as a result of his sentence being overturned through his writing. In The Brothers Karamazov, he introduces us to a manipulative, boisterous young lad who rescues his friend’s dog only to hide it for a week before returning it to make himself more the hero. Dostoevsky explains the same boastful boy’s behavior in a subsequent event, where he lies on a train track to prove his manliness. But when the train passes over him, and the boy gets up, he is changed: white-as-a-ghost, and someone entirely new.

Death is a figure so deeply transfixed in our existence that it’s a miracle that it does not readily consume us day in and day out. It should. We should be afraid of death, see it creeping around every corner, hear it creaking up the stairs at night. Instead, for the most part, we (luckily) can ignore it. We watch it on TV and feel desensitized. We drive in cars at high speeds and we say it’s fun. We smoke cigarettes, eat unhealthy food and sky dive and brush it off, saying, “We’re all going to die someday.”

Except, every so often, death does its deathly dance around our lives and we are thrown into its shadow. We’ve ignored it for too long, let our guards down, and now it has us by the neck, and we’re sobbing and bartering and cursing it for sneaking up on us so stealthily and unfairly. In an instant everything clicks back and we see death for what it really is: everywhere, all the time.

What is this divide, or barrier, between tearing funeral pamphlets in our hands and buying motorcycles on a sunny Saturday afternoon? We need this divide, we crave it when it falls, yet, when it’s up, and we’re happy and safe and at home, we put on Donnie Darko and try to see if we can peak back over the wall. We read Dostoevsky and listen to Bob Mould, and we do our best to appear deep and emotional, with sorrowful diamonds hidden behind our eyes. Why not just say it? Admit it?

We’re as much obsessed with death as we are cognitively repressed against it. And it creates terribly awkward if not impossible situations to deal with. How do you comfort the twelve-year-old kid who lost his father in a freak accident at a Texas Rangers’ baseball game? Do you tell him the door will close one day and it will be like before? Do you tell him that now that it’s open it will never close again and he might as well start working on an epic Russian novel of his own? Or do you simply give him half-smiles and shoulder rubs and recite empty clichés until you feel so depressed yourself that you have to leave the room?

Somehow, in my life, I’ve been to maybe ten to twelve funerals, and exactly one wedding. I figure the odds will even out eventually, but I’m not sure if I can count on it. I’m paranoid that I think about death too much, or that I think about it more than is normal, more than is healthy, more than other people do. But that can’t be true. I know death is around me as much as you do. We all see it, and we all react to it, and we all feel the need to keep it in its place. Otherwise we’d all be catatonic zombies living in pods with vitamin-tubes and safety scissors.

My only wish is that I could come to terms with death. Better terms than the current ones, which were pre-arranged before I had a fair say.

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If those insane divas the Mayans are right, the world is totes gonna end in 2012, which is really… annoying. I don’t know about you guys but I was looking forward to getting a dog and a boyfriend and buying an expensive leather jacket or something. But now I can’t because the Mayans said so. Cool!

Believe it or not though, there is a silver lining to dying in less than a year. You know that super cheesy saying “LiVe EvEryDay LIKE It’s YoUr LaSt”? Well, we can actually apply that to this upcoming year without coming off like a freak who reads The Secret in their closet. That’s right. 2012 is the year to let your freak flag fly. 2012 is the year to throw caution to the wind and just do you (and anyone else you would like along the way.)

2012 is the year we don’t hold back. 2012 is the year we text people “TEXT ME BACK MOTHERF@#$ER. I know you’re there. You just tweeted something!” If the person texts back accusing you of being an insane person, just say “ Whatever hoe. We’re all gonna die in 32 daze anyway. I’m just being real!” Because, hello, we are going to die, so we might as well stop living in fear.

2012 is the year we destroy our bodies with burritos, fast food, and whatever else our tummy desires. Every time we take a calorie-filled bite of something, we’ll be able to hear our body scream, “Can you just not right now? I’m still recovering from that red velvet cupcake situation.” In this case, we need to just show our body who’s the boss and respond with something like, “Deal with it. You’re going to be vapor soon anyway.” When your body becomes startled and asks, “Um, what?!”, just stuff your mouth to dull the noise of its complaints.

2012 is the year we become super creepy to our crushes. Go up to someone you find attractive in the bar and just be like, “Hi babe! So it’s 2012, which means you and I will be dead soon. So… your place or mine? LOL. No, but seriously. I NEED TO FEEL ALIVE TONIGHT.”

2012 is the year we buy everything we want. “Just charge it! Oh, I’m in debt. Have fun trying to get me to pay it back when we’re all dead!” On second thought, if you go to hell, you might just be haunted by credit card bill collector phone calls forever.

2012 is the year we all try every drug imaginable. Even heroin! JK, you guys. Bad joke? No, the only way I would try it is if I saw the Armageddon coming right at me. Aerosmith would have to be playing “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” in the background and Liv Tyler would be required to cry somewhere looking at a screenshot of Bruce Willis’ face. Only then!

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After you died I opened every window of the Advent calendar you insisted we savor day by day, just like your Nana taught you, and ate every single chocolate under each flap in one go. It was the best way I could think to tell you to screw yourself for leaving me here alone.

For leaving me alone with my mother and your mother and their crying and her creepy photos from when you still had red hair and these f-cking casseroles from all the neighbors who yelled at us for playing our music too loud and my boss who it’s still not that funny that he keeps hitting on me but we used to laugh it off because we needed the money and the friends who are equally as afraid to be around me as they are to leave me alone and everything else that is crappy and isn’t you.

With you gone, I never remember to record Jon Stewart so we can watch them all one Saturday. I forget to rinse the dishes before loading them into the dishwasher, so they always come out crusty and still dirty just like you said they would.

Now that you’re gone, people keep asking me what I’m going to do with your clothes and all your things — if I need help boxing them up. I keep telling them that I was thinking of putting them in display cases and turning the living room into a museum in your honor, but they always look creeped out and I feel sick because that was the kind of thing that would have made you laugh.

I should probably mention that I’m so sorry, but I broke your ugly debate trophy from high school that you were so proud of, I smashed it against the floor, so it probably wouldn’t look very good on display even if I was serious about that idea. I was just so mad — I was wearing the sweater I wore the night you told me that you were sure you had spent your entire life looking for me and I knew I was safe forever — I was so mad because I know now that wasn’t true.

I was so mad because now you’re gone and not here and all I have are your shirts which are losing the smell of you and your damn dog who still sleeps on our bed, and the ring I found in your drawer that you never got to give me.

All I can do it lay here and hold this damn ring and imagine all the things I want to say to you but can’t, and how they all boil down to: F-ck you, I miss you, and I love you — oh, how I love you.

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