1.

Between and beneath Carroll and Bergen Streets, on the walls of the express tracks sandwiched between the F and G lines, someone wrote, using the preferred writing utensil of MTA workers — orange spray paint — “EXP,” seemingly denoting “express line.” Today those two tracks, which travel deep beneath two important Brooklyn routes, don’t see any trains. Standing at the Bergen stop, peering down at the well-lit and well-kept tracks, there is something wistful, almost magical about the pristine silence of empty tracks with so much unused potential. An express F train: imagine it.

I have spent several commutes using the stopwatch function on an iPhone to track the F line’s progressions and regressions in timeliness. Sometimes my journey has to finish with an A train, but then I stop the watch. Getting on the A is cheating. I am only interested in what the F can do. I am devoted to it, as if by studying it I, a powerless commuter, could somehow make it better. I’ve learned that the journey from Windsor Terrace to Jay Street Borough Hall takes almost exactly 15 minutes; the journey to Soho is another 10, but a long 10. But then there is the five-minute walk from front door to station entrance, and an average of five minutes waiting for the train to arrive. Any deviation — a faster walk, a freshly arrived train — is anomalous. Cynicism means survival.

2.

At a dinner party to which I’d never normally be invited — my partner and I were stand-ins for two real adults who’d cancelled at the last minute — the neighbors at our table, also real adults, politely asked us where we lived in “the city.” We lived in Brooklyn, we said, for the first time not proudly. What ensued was a discussion of the hows of getting to work, or rather my singular how. The husband, a lawyer with two young children enrolled at a top Upper East Side girls’ school, wracked his brain for what the F train “did,” eventually recalling its meticulous and slow accommodation of seemingly every neighborhood in three boroughs after we’d jogged his memory. The 6 train, at this point in time the second part of my daily commute, was more familiar to him. So it seemed this lawyer was remembering subway lines the way you might recall each of the Seven Dwarves. He hadn’t been on the subway in decades, but he didn’t dare crush us by saying so.

3.

There was a Greyhound-like quality to the ride today, on a newer F train that had a stench like developing gangrene. People appear less understanding of a wealth of human scenarios when confined in small spaces. One such scenario: a loud, sweaty child in a too-small stroller. I watched a woman near him try to look away at this spectacle: the boy had folded his mother’s ticket to citywide travel cleanly and irrevocably in half and the bent card was now lying under a distant seat, where he had thrown it. The mother hadn’t yet noticed, and nobody had helped her out yet. Shouts of “Ba!” pierced the humid, slightly conditioned air. The fresh air blew out of a vent and across the top of my head, nearly as effective as holding your face over a cooler at a Fourth of July picnic in Texas.

Two stops later and the entire picture had changed. The kid and his mother had gone, the train had emerged out of the tunnel and onto the bridge. There was a beautiful, blotchy pink sunset out one side of the train. A blaring, unintelligible announcement drowned out sighs of impatience and interfered with people’s daydreams about moving to Colorado. Many people who do leave New York must decide to do so while on the subway.

4.

A woman across from me is flossing her teeth.

5.

Get on the subway in running clothes: there are millions of avid runners in the city, and yet one feels special walking onto a train in running gear. Everyone stares. This has a lot to do with the uniform of the runner: the bright colors, the exposed, perhaps glowing, skin. The traveling for a purpose that is not work, but which still requires a particular kind of dress code, a uniform. The average commuter does not have a uniform. Anyone who is dressed in a uniform catches our attention, though it is supposed to make the person seem anonymous.

6.

MTA workers, who usually pile onto local trains like the F during late-night hours, get a mixture of respect and curiosity from us. They work in darkness, they are usually dirty or carrying something dirty, and they seem either drunk or very tired. We’ve decided that they aren’t the ones to blame for delayed trains, so they never get any kind of grief from us. We don’t know what they’re doing. We see them waving flashlights inside tunnels sometimes, walking down tracks, or resting casually on the top of the fatal third rail. But we don’t know what they do that gets done, and we don’t have any discernible evidence that they’ve done anything. Still, we like them.

In 2007, the New York Times wrote an article about the death of an MTA worker. It was something like the second death of a worker in sixth months. The explanation given for this, by some suit at the MTA, was that the employees who work on the tracks are part of a “lax organizational culture.” Sometime after this I was assigned by my boss to read a book about writing, Words Fail Me by Patricia T. O’Conner. I particularly appreciated the chapter on jargon, remembering the phrase “lax organizational culture.” Not only is this trio of words ugly — the short “lax,” the second mouthful of an adjective, the formal use of the word “culture” — but the phrase suggested this person was far removed from the tracks, and probably never even rides the subway.

7.

It is 7:04 in the evening and you don’t know where you are anymore. You’ve been evacuated from a 6 train because another 6 train a mile away isn’t working properly. Attendees of the 6 train at Union Square lean over to see if they can spot the next train first, even though the track is curved and visibility of the tunnel is very limited. Somehow, none of these people ever falls onto the track. Evidently, these commuters, with places to be and cocktails to be had, are not the type to cause “earlier incidents,” nor should they have to be inconvenienced by any. They seem particularly exasperated, as if they are new to this, as if this was the day they impulsively decided to take the subway instead of a cab, and what a mistake that was.

When trains are slow and people have forgotten or don’t like their books and their smartphones don’t have service, I imagine they can more readily convince themselves of their own capacity for evil. I have never seen this play out, but faces show deeper, darker crevices on commutes, particularly commutes home. Our disenchantment with commuting leaves a permafrown that can be adjusted slightly to accommodate related feelings, of being inconvenienced, insulted, stepped on, or watched too closely by a stranger.

Sometimes the expressions are less grave, perhaps when the train is spacious enough to honor us the requisite foot radius of personal space. Their look is detached but not forlorn, unhappy but not suicidal. These are people who are so bored, so tired of life, or life as it is depicted right now, by the subway, that Abilify “could be right for” them. But faces can look sad when all they are is relaxed. How does everyone feel once off the train? I would like to walk with these people to their front doors, to watch their faces lift from malaise to anticipation — and what of?

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Something is going to happen. It has to, because so far, there’s just empty potential. I can feel it. It’s the way the air seems thick and yellow now, like it just has to burst soon. The city’s streets are darker, warmer, full of possibility, full of ‘Yes.’ When you’re newly alone, people suddenly seem like atoms, like bumper cars, like balls of kinetic energy waiting to collide with each other. You’re looking outward now. Seeking.

Suddenly, you’re something to me. Suddenly, you’re in my universe. Suddenly, you’re in my story and I’m in yours.

It’s certainly sudden. It’s certainly something.

_____

Sometimes if I’m walking with someone I don’t know very well I think about how pieces of a building could collapse on us in a freak accident and then we’d forever be tied by some thing that happened to us that neither of us could control. I think about how embarrassing it would be to watch a stranger bleed out.

Or when a car crashes and the newspaper lists the dead and their ages — 17, 21, 22, 24, 31 — and I wonder, were they friends? Or were they just getting a ride with someone they hardly knew and now they died together — this intimate, intimate thing: death — and it ties these maybe-strangers together forever.

Then I think: How awkward.

_____

“I did LSD once and now I always see things with wavy lines around them,” a man who is becoming a friend tells me late at night outside a bar, pointing to a lit street lamp. “You see those lines around the light?” I nod. “I see them around people now.”

“How long has it been that way?” I ask, chewing on my cuticles like I do when I’m drunk or nervous or both. Another friend is next to us but he is not listening. I wonder if the man — my friend — if he sees different lights around different people, like a medium sensing an aura, if he likes certain lights better than others, if he likes my light, if he uses that as a way to make friends, to decide how to spend the time when he is not alone.

“Little over a decade,” he replies.

I lean back against the stone wall and look up at the light.

_____

I have been alone a lot lately and when I am, I hear (in my head) him calling me a nickname he used to call me and I haven’t really cried, but I also haven’t really been thinking about it. That’s how you know someone you miss was really there — because you can physically feel their absence.

Usually having a house guest makes me anxious but on Saturday, JE locks herself out of her apartment and texts me asking if she can sleep over. I am relieved to have someone with me, to be talking out loud.

She comes over and we sit on my bed, side-by-side, writing. I tell her I am lonely. I tell her I am drinking a lot. I tell her I am writing. I end every sentence with, “But it’s fine. It’s amicable. It’s no one’s fault. Everybody’s friends.” She jokes that I’ve said it so much it’s going to be the title of my autobiography. “Everybody’s Friends And Other Tales of Self-Hatred And Denial.”

“Let’s play a game,” JE says, to lighten the mood. “I’ll give you five words and you have to include them in the next piece you write, no matter what.”

I laugh, “I’m not playing a game with my writing career.”

“Why not?” she says. She’s writing her Master’s thesis on Moby Dick. She is way behind on it. It is due in two weeks. She has nine pages completed. She has kind of given up. “You can do it for me too. Pick any five.”

“Cacophony,” I say.

“Arcana,” she says.

I feel relaxed.

_____

I am drunk again.

“Don’t be jealous, don’t be jealous,” he says.

“I am though. I am.”

“I don’t even know who you’re jealous of,” he says.

I shake my head. “I’m not 100 percent sure I really have a handle on that either.”

It’s a weeknight.

_____

Men in their thirties, I think. That’s the ticket. Find someone in their thirties. Someone divorced maybe, with experience, with cynicism, with darkness. Most of the men in their thirties I know right now — and for some reason I’m clinging to them lately like they know something I don’t — anyway, most of them have motorcycles.

So, okay. Find someone with a motorcycle. Someone who isn’t these little boys with their uncertainties and their wants and their angry blood rushing under their shallow skin and their anxieties and their idiocy and their futures. Find a man in his thirties who has some time and who wants nothing, with no urgency, and who knows how to move your body in a way that wakes you up when you didn’t even know you were sleeping. Find someone who will say, “Let me just pay for a cab.”

That will solve everything.

_____

“I think I use sex as a way to not think,” I tell my therapist. “To quiet all the noise in my head. To leave myself.”

“Is that bad?” he asks. He is young. My age maybe. In a collared shirt. His name is Mitch and he is from California and sometimes he uses “gay” to mean “bad” but I don’t think he means it because he always cringes and apologizes after like he’s breaking a habit. He runs a workshop on polyamory and seems very open-minded. I have been going to him for a few months. One time he compared my feeling like two different people to “Miley and Hannah.”

“Well, should I be using it that way I mean? Isn’t sex supposed to be…something, I guess?”

“Is it always something?” he asks.

“Not to me,” I say. I love some people I have never touched. I hate some people I have.

“You need to stop associating sex with guilt,” Mitch says. “What do you feel guilty about?”

_____

A crush in the summertime never feels real and people are starting to feel like summer people. Instead of working on Sunday, I go to see a horror movie with ten new friends. We sit in a long row and pass down beers and Baby Bell cheeses and chocolate bars. We laugh when someone opens their can of Miller too loudly. We squeal at the gore. We ask questions like, “Oh no! Is she going to die?!”

In this moment, I have a crush on everyone. I want to keep them, to wrap myself in them and to not think. I could turn my pulsing, carousing, over-active brain off with any of them. It could be like summer all the time.

I think this is friendship or affection and I am confusing two different kinds of love, which is something I do sometimes. I think, either way, this is love though.

So that’s something.

_____

I don’t want to do LSD because one time I was on mushrooms and the only revelation I had was, “No one will ever know me. I will always be alone.”

“That is so dark,” she says, but she is laughing so then, I laugh.

_____

“I don’t know,” I tell him as we’re lying in bed. “I never noticed you before. You were just…a guy I knew. You didn’t make any impact at all. And then suddenly, the other night when I saw you, something clicked. You had something. Suddenly I thought, ‘Oh yeah! You! You! How could I have missed this?’”

“I know you never noticed me,” he says. “I don’t know what changed.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Something changed. You became something.”

He kisses me and later, disappears.

_____

I spill my guts about the break up to a virtual stranger over dim sum. I’m talking a lot lately to fill a void — to myself, to friends, to people I don’t even know. I’m over-sharing. I call my best friend but he is away and might be annoyed at me and it’s starting to feel like neither of us are saying what we want to say, just mashing words together to make sure we don’t say what we’re thinking, corking our throats, ignoring the pauses.

It’s depressing the sh-t out of me.

_____

Sometimes I think: Who really knows each other?

I think: All you can do is just be something to some people for some time. You can’t hold on to anything; Someone is so important and then they are nothing.

I think: How could someone mean something and then they’re — poof — gone?

I think: I would never have sex with Mitch.

I think: Where do the summer people go in the winter?

I think: How do you keep friends?

I think: Something is going to happen. I can feel it. I am thrilled. I am alone. I am terrified.

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There are certain things people never tell you about grief. About the way you’ll feel and act and think and live after you lose someone (someone, for me, was my mother).

They don’t tell you that the “Grief” section at your local Barnes & Noble is only half a shelf long, and located in the “Self-Help” section. This location will you make you angry, but you won’t know why.

They don’t tell you that one day you will break down and cry, not just cry, but really and truly red-face runny-nose sob in the middle of the Nordstrom shoe department because you saw someone her height, with her hair color, wearing her Hermes perfume and when you realized it wasn’t her, after having that flash of “oh there she is!,” it was just too much. Try to be nice and thank the salesman when he guides you into the storeroom and gives you a box of tissues.

They don’t tell you that no matter how many sheets of tissue paper and plastic baggies and boxes you use to wrap her clothes so you can keep her scent on them, so you can, at especially hard times, pull them out and cover your face and scream and cry and laugh into them, no matter how much wrapping you use and how carefully you try not to over-indulge, not to open the baggies and boxes and peel back the tissue too often for fear of her scent dispersing and leeching out into your room, no matter what you do, one day you will pull out her favorite sweater and all you will smell is your own scent, faintly, and stale plastic. (Later you will try to recreate her scent; that blend of fresh laundry and eye cream and makeup and perfume, and you will fail. That will be a hard day for you.)

They don’t tell you that you will sometimes think of her and just be so happy, just so incredibly, overwhelmingly happy that you, oddly enough, want to call her to tell her you feel so well, and things are getting better, and when you can’t you instead sit on your bed and imagine what you would tell her and end the conversation either laughing, or crying, or worrying that this behavior maybe does mean you should still be seeing that Hospice grief counselor.

They don’t tell you how to respond to the saleswoman at the dress shop when she asks you “What occasion is this dress for?” and glances down at the black clothes you have draped over your arm. Respond with a garbled ‘yes’ when she follows-up by asking if this dress is for a cocktail party or date. Decide not to explain why you turn around when she starts to lead you to dresses with, as she calls it, ‘a bit more color.’

They don’t tell you that you will experience a moment of sheer terror when your cat gets sick, and that you will only be able to think: ‘This is the last pet I’ll have that she met.’

They don’t tell you how to react when your father creates profiles on OkCupid and Match.com. More than just that, they don’t tell you how you should feel when the women he starts seeing are so different, so completely dissimilar to your mother-is this a good thing, a sign he’s not trying to replace her? Or does this mean there was always something ‘missing’ from your mother that he wanted? Don’t talk to your high-strung sister about this, it will only make her wildly anxious and nervous and you will spend twenty minutes using your ‘calming the skittish horse’ voice to try and talk her down.

They don’t tell you that when you go to the funeral parlor to see her, one last time, before she’s cremated, that upon first looking down at her you will immediately and fully understand the description of skin as ‘waxen.’

They don’t tell you that you will feel an urge to laugh when you see that her hair has been set on rollers and finished with a light application of hairspray. This look, on a woman who once told her stylist she wanted ‘David Bowie’s haircut from when he was on his Reality tour’, will seem so wrong and dated on her that you can’t help but want to laugh. This desire to laugh will quickly turn into a fierce, overwhelming anger and hatred that these people, these people who never knew her until now, had the gall to touch her body, to style her hair, to think that they had the right to see her so intimately. They don’t tell you that her mouth will be glued shut, and you will see a small dab of this glue near the left corner of her lips. (Later, you will learn that what they used isn’t superglue like you thought it was, but instead is something called ‘stay cream’.)

Go home and cry to your boyfriend and hate that the only way you could think to describe her appearance is mummy-like, like those rubbery pirate Halloween decorations that you see on people’s lawns. Know that this description is morbid, but accurate.

And all of these things, these experiences of grief, they don’t tell you about them. They don’t tell you that, at the end of the day, all you can think is that grief isn’t a wall that comes crashing down on you all at once like you expected. Instead, it’s a wall whose bricks fall (bit by bit, piece by piece) and bruise you and break you and beat you down, slowly.

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In news fit to ruin your day/week/life, The Beastie Boys’ MCA (Adam Yauch) who had struggled with cancer in his parotid gland and lymph nodes since 2009, was found dead today at 47 years old.

It is currently unclear if Yauch, who cofounded the New York City hip hop group The Beastie Boys in 1979 with Mike D (Michael Diamond) and Adrock (Adam Horovitz), died of complications with his cancer. He leaves behind a wife and a daughter.

The band hadn’t performed live since MCA announced his battle with cancer in 2009, (even cancelling a tour and shows at Lollapalooza and All Points West that year) but it was always the hope that they’d one day do so again.

What a huge, sh-tty bummer.

Let’s all have a nice Beastie Boys lovefest. Leave your awesome MCA memories in the comments. We need some cheering up right now. This is the worst.

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From a very young age I gathered that people die the way most children do: by watching Disney classics. If you are a woodland creature, and Walt gets a hold of you, best of luck because one of your parents is going to die.

I imagine that at that age death seemed like something fictional, something to put into a story to give it meaning. With this in mind, the stories I told with my Barbies had more death than a Greek tragedy, and at recess so many of friends were lost to dragons and rivers of lava. It was how we made things matter, the highest stake.

When I saw a dying person for the first time I was six. My mother, father, sister and I were staying at my uncle’s lake house. My aunt was at the end of a battle with cancer. I didn’t know what that meant, but I could see her frailness, how something I couldn’t name was slowly diminishing, draining from her withered features.

I chose to stay behind with her in the cool sunroom, watching Family Matters on a floral couch while my parents and sister puttered around on the sun-flecked lake. Her frail arms were covered in freckles from better days, and they shook when they reached out for a glass of lemonade or to pull the string of her Steve Urkel doll she was letting me play with. “Did I do thaaaat?” both screen Urkel and doll Urkel trilled. She had found the sitcom during her illness, she told me it made her laugh when things got bad.

It’s not that I felt I was being brave sitting so close to a dying person, someone my mother would later say looked like death itself. That’s not why I stayed with this distant relative I barely knew. It was that I was curious and couldn’t help myself. It was then that I understood the permanence of death. Though I was afraid of death, I still wanted to curl up beside it. That’s the thing about obsessing over what we fear, we are both repelled and attracted to it. I was like one of those nursing home cats that can sense who is the next to die, and then makes a warm vigil in their lap. I was Wednesday Addams, sans black dress.

Around this time, I would wake up many mornings with a sinking feeling in my stomach, a bitter queasiness, and would climb into my parents’ bed. I imagined I was small enough to fit on the piped edging of their mattress, not taking up nearly enough room to wake them. It’s a good thing I never did: can you imagine if your second grader came into your bed at dawn and when you asked if they had a nightmare, they replied, “No, mummy. I was only thinking about death until I made my stomach hurt”?

I kept my burgeoning obsession with death and my fear of dying a secret from my parents. I asked them to enroll me in acting classes. I decided that I would become a famous actress so that I would never really die. I’d be a silver screen ghost, as alive as Audrey Hepburn in her lithograph portraits, condemned to hang on freshman girls’ dorm room walls. Thing was, I was a terrible actress. The theater director told my parents for years that I was always in my own world, only waking from it to recite my lines. I stayed in that acting program for five years, until I was twelve, even though I hated it. I was so afraid of dying. I was so afraid of slipping away into a space I couldn’t imagine, or worse, into nothingness, without leaving behind something in this world.

By puberty I was no longer hit by the fear of not existing in the mornings, but at night. I’d be drifting off to sleep when all of a sudden my subconscious would send me some sort of a memento mori. I’d toss my limbs akimbo as if falling and suck in a lungful of air. If I could — sometimes it felt like my lungs were contracting. I am going to die and not be able to think anymore. I still do this. I’ve met people who do this.

This was also the time I would make a point to be home at 10 PM on Friday nights during middle school (rushing back from Teen Night at the Y or pizza parties in finished basements) to watch 20/20 with my mother. She was fascinated with JonBenet Ramsey’s murder, and I was preoccupied with becoming Barbara Walter’s successor. My mother had told me Barbara had been doing this for decades and was now quite old. “Television journalism must be some sort of life elixir!” I thought. This would be the way to live forever — to come into people’s living rooms every Friday night, glowing in that thick honey light ABC drenched Barbara in.

Now, in my very early twenties, I am less obsessed with death than I was as a child. Not because I have seen more of it, or because I mistakenly believe that the people I love are not perishable. My father was born in 1934. My mother once had a habit of polishing off a few glasses of wine before driving home from work. I am no stranger to worry. The difference now is that I make the conscious choice not to think about the day when I will no longer be conscious. It is kinder to myself, and to the bed partner I’d wake up to remind them that we’re going to die.

I do not feel that my childhood obsession with death kept me from life. What an extreme fear of death really is, conversely, is an acute, painful reverence for life. Perhaps it is unusual to think about death so much as a child only because, typically, the young are so far from old age and the death that comes with it. And yet it was never lack of time I was afraid of — life has always seemed long enough to me. Parents say they blink and their child is grown, but as a child I remember days stretching out into sunsets at 9 PM in the summertime, how long it took to wait for a salamander to emerge from its dirt tunnel, how the town-sponsored fireworks boomed your eardrums long after you went home. Children have such a beautiful sense of time because everything is new and so much has not happened yet. What panicked me then, and sometimes does now, was not the lack of time, but how time will go on without me to see it.

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When I was young, I thought that I would be able to breathe underwater. Water was, to me, just a thin film that covered an area of air, until I decided to fill my bathroom sink with water. In the end, I ended up inhaling water and figured out that water takes up space and is not just a thin film that sat above air. When I was a bit older living in California, I held on to the side of a swimming pool and took a lap around the pool until my hands slipped and I fell into the deep end and when I woke up, I was on the floor
beside the pool coughing up water. I am scared of swimming. I joke sometimes about death.

I am not afraid of eating alone. I don’t like to drink alone. I prefer reading Hemingway to Stein. I pretend to speak French and Italian. My first language is Korean but I am a native English speaker. I’ve only loved in English. I’ve loved less than a handful of women in my life. Love is a painful process. Opening up is a difficult process to me. Friends have commented on my mysterious past. I’ve thought about moving to countries across the ocean where I can’t speak their language, from where I can’t come back home. The sound of trains reminds me of old times back in the city, by the 7-train station. I have read more books in Buffalo than I have in Westchester. I know more about Hemingway than I do about my brother. I have read more Bolaño than I have Poe. I am more American (North, Central, and South) than I am Asian. I feel more connected to the United States than I do with Korea. A body of water separates me from my past and my present.

I have been in fights. I have been mugged. Death is something that I accept and have accepted ever since my friend jumped off the library of NYU. I am afraid of dying with my glasses on. I am afraid of sleeping with my contacts on. I am afraid of drowning. The “S” on my keyboard is the most worn out on my laptop. Swimming is something I do not enjoy. I have never owned a swimming pool. I have never lived in a house. I have had sex in public. I have never had sex in front of other people. I have had sex while on drugs. I have smoked marijuana, opium, crack, snorted coke, popped ecstasy, and tabs of acid, but not all at once. I have never ridden a horse while high. I rode a horse, my first and last time, bareback in California and saw a snake inside of a rusty tractor. I was almost swallowed up by the Pacific Ocean during high tide. I have injured more people in my life than I have hurt myself. I have tried to make one thousand cranes for a wish but never got beyond folding twenty.

Writing is a way for me to forget that I exist even if I write about myself. I am not who I am. I am who you think I am. I tend to over-exaggerate things, for example, in my fourth grade class, I told my class I held a fish out of water for over a minute and my teacher asked me if the fish died and I changed my story multiple times until I settled on twenty seconds because I did not understand time until I got a watch in sixth grade. I worry about my parents, my mother especially. I worry about women, especially women who I’ve slept with. I have the tendency to develop feelings of intense jealousy and possessiveness. I never thought that my friend would be the one to be murdered by his mother’s boyfriend. I could smell the bodies from the apartment. I can’t go to fish markets to this day.

I know more about Chinese history than I do about Korean history. I am incensed by the atrocity committed by the Japanese in Nanking. I am disgusted by the atomic bomb. I am disgusted by genocide. Racism makes me feel sick to my stomach. I feel lost in this world. I have dreamt about flying to the moon. I have dreamt of watching the world from a distant planet. The world is killing me. Death is something that we can look forward to. It’s something that we all experience; it’s something that while sad is welcoming. It is a reminder that we are alive. Death and love go hand in hand. While I can say I love you a million times, the best time for me to say it is before I die.

I love you.

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i.

My mother hadn’t known she’d been pregnant for very long. She had bought the test on a whim. It was normal for her to miss a period, but two was a bit excessive. Two was a shotgun blast. Mom watched the slim white stick play with fate as my father drove home from another day spent at the University of Warwick. My sisters and I played in the backyard the size of a postage stamp. There was a twain of ivy that dabbled in pale blossoms up the side of the flat, and a rosebush. Melissa pricked her thumbs picking Daddy a bouquet. Before my mother’s eyes, a blue plus-sign appeared upon a small band of white.

ii.

My parents had uprooted us an ocean away from a familiar hand or shore, to the small town of Kenilworth, situated in the heart of England. It was fifteen kilometers away from the university my father had taken up a chair position, some sort of research detail I was never quite clear about. I was ten. They had whisked us away with vague explanations and two respective philosophies in mind. Dad had seen it as a fair trade; he had come to the States roughly fifteen years previous, a poor boy from North London on an academic scholarship. And now it was my mother’s turn to make a forfeit for once, a Jewish princess from Miami who, it was safe to say, had no real conceptualization of sacrifice. My mother saw it as exactly that — a sacrifice — and wasn’t it a testament to true love, as unadulterated and pure as a rare strain of platinum? She would follow my father to the ends of the earth, she would birth his children along the way, she would one day live up to his ideal, bathe us all in time for dinner, make that very same dinner with the proper ratios of spice and salt, she would have a night wherein everything worked perfectly, there would be no kinks or cogs in the flawlessly machinated wheel, her husband would not scream and she would not need to make excuses (he’s tired, he’s adjusting at work, he just wants things to be nice) and everything would sail smoothly, as if a sailboat gliding atop a waveless sea.

iii.

There was an hour between when my mother knew and when the news first rolled itself around the curve of my father’s ear, like a penny in a pie dish. Within that time, she made sure the goulash, Dad’s favorite meal, was simmering thickly in the crock-pot, and that the dumplings weren’t too heavy (they looked like cumulus clouds floating in the large pan). She kept an eye on Melissa as she in turn bathed Amanda, who was five and still liked it when people doted upon her, the youngest of our clan (but not for long, thought my mother). Lastly, Mom made sure that I set the table, forks on the left, spoons on the right, not like last time.

She told him as we three girls sat with our backs straight in the other room, waiting, ears pricked. We were all suckers for family secrets, for the faint notion that things went on behind our backs, after bedtime, like mice behind the walls and under the floorboards. We heard nothing. She told him in the garden — I could see them out of the kitchen window — next to the twined pale flowers that peaked tepidly towards the pane, as if looking inside at us. They came back in after a minute or five, sat down, and my father gave us permission to eat.

I cannot recall any extraordinary pleasantries, though I am sure my mother was glowing with her secret; I’m sure she was thinking of how many weeks in would it be appropriate to explain to us that we were to have a small new addition, as she would pat her newly-rotund stomach, budding with life.

iv.

Dad refuses to answer any questions I have about my mother. Their acrimonious divorce makes it hard to believe that for a time, they were in love, and that for a time there were the two of them, Linda and Simon, and the rest of the world. A defined partition. But there are a few facts I have collected over the years that can give me a rough idea. My father had realized that he had wanted to leave my mother at least a few years after Amanda was born. Her high-strung histrionics and constant questioning of my father’s loyalty incited his petty outbursts, which only served to distract from the bigger picture. He had, in fact, cheated on her years before; it was an act that could not be forgotten, something that could never be repaired, something that, despite its mend, still left a faint crack. Mom stressed the taut thin tightrope. Despite her perfectionism and persistence, her husband would never be happy with her. So it is safe to say that this was another constraint, something to make his ultimate decision harder (and it was coming, a year later, boy, was it coming). It was the reason that, unbeknownst to my mother, Dad would turn down the position at the University of Warwick; that in three months, we would be back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I would be starting my fifth grade year a month or so late. But could she see this, through the blinders of her happiness, the pregnancy that would explicably set everything right? For those two days, did she lose all peripheral vision? Did she have a feeling, harder than the knotted ball in her womb, a dark, dark child of an inkling?

Two days after my mother had cradled a small piece of happiness in her hand, her body performed its most treacherous act and unraveled that knotted ball of chromosomes. Mitosis taught her an important lesson: to become whole, you must at first be broken.

v.

My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Peter lived an hour and a half away from Kenilworth, with its clock tower in the village green and a ruined castle the color of sandstone. Ruth was my father’s sister, and we would drive to Milton Keynes every weekend to spend it with them, for raucous dinner parties and boxes of wine. There was a weekend, however, only one, wherein my mother did not accompany us. She said she needed rest. And she did, after the hospital visit, after she awoke in the middle of the night, the back of the long T-shirt she wore, probably one of my father’s throwaways, colored in a dangerous thick blood. She didn’t need the hospital visit. It was a very early miscarriage. The bleeding, despite the color, was relatively light. It was only a matter of protocol, really. My mother didn’t scream or do anything my father would have expected (he was prone to her hysterics), but was instead gently roused by her calm but urgent shaking, whispering Simon, Simon. It was early enough in the night that my father could go over to the neighbors’ side of the house — we shared a duplex — and ask Edna, the lovely fifty-something housewife who smelled of lavender and enjoyed macramé, if she would please watch over the children, there’s been a bit of an emergency, Linda has had an accident, and if you don’t mind, please, if it won’t trouble you too terribly. The British are never the kind of people to impose.

And so they performed this switch, between Mom and Edna, and my father drove on the wrong side of the road with my mother in the backseat, arms around her empty belly, so quiet and patient. Melissa, Amanda, and I woke up the next morning, none the wiser, and were told that Mom would have a weekend all to herself, a couple of days without her wouldn’t be so bad.  Everyone needs time to themselves, once in awhile.

vi.

 It happens more often than you think, you know. A lot of women just don’t talk about it. My mother told me all of this one gray evening during a winter break from college. Once, twice, even. When you’re older…

She trailed off, unsure of how to continue. And maybe I conjured it up, maybe it was a fitting contrivance of my imagination, but I could have sworn that my mother touched her stomach, lightly, and in her eyes, I could see that for only a moment she was back in that faraway place of excited, bright happiness, when everything was hopeful and every day was new, in a country miles away in distance and time.

There are certain things that my mother has told me are my legacies and my obligations. And what she imparted to me — the story of her loss — was an attempt to convey these sentiments. The gifts she took for granted are what I take for granted as well. I throw my birthrights away. I had told her I would never have children, that I would one day adopt instead, and she told me her secret. A story I was a part of and never knew.

And then she was with me again, her eyes resting on my face, her mouth twitched, because she knows I will never know what it’s like to miscarry; because it disappoints her gravely that I will never love a man and that I will never carry a child, that the price for my living and loving honestly are the cost of her greatest hopes and happiness; that her grandchildren will not have the almond eyes she gave me, nor her cheekbones, nor her olive-undertoned skin; that she would have gladly had her miscarriage if it meant I would never have one, how she should have worded her wishes more carefully, because life is funny and above all things fair; because the only way we can survive from day into the long night is through children, children, children; because the greatest conduit of past to present to future are the bloodlines that connect and bind; because things and chromosomes unwind and fall apart, because we can’t always trust the promises that we make (even with ourselves); because I hold my mother’s hand and, for a moment, promise to not let go.

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It is often thought that atheists have no spirituality. That all atheists care about is making religious people feel stupid, and that there is no more to life than understanding complex interactions between matter. That feeling connected or involved in the universe is solely the privilege of the faithful. I disagree with this.

Though I dislike the word spirituality itself, mainly due to all its religious connotations, I understand the word’s significance. Spirituality is simply an adjective that is used to describe the search for one’s place in the universe.

No one wants to feel alone in life, and even if you are alone, being spiritual makes you feel connected to the world and other people in it. Atheists get that, and it is important, maybe even essential, to our species’ psychological makeup to feel this way. There are ways to feel involved with the world that do not involve mystic mumbo-jumbo however.

1. Understanding Life

Science as a whole is a woefully-neglected subject in public schools, and it is a shame, because of all disciplines, it can be the most spiritual, especially the study of biology.

All species on earth were at one time connected, we all share certain common characteristics passed on through eons in our DNA strands, and we are just one link in a chain whose future is uncertain. Think of how mind boggling it is that for about 150,000 years human beings, no different than you and me, walked the Earth with other human-like species. Or how incredible it is that we share a common ancestor with both a dragonfly and a grapefruit.

To know evolution is to know the story of life on earth, and to know the scientific story of life is to feel connected to the world as you never have before.

2. Understanding the Stars

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. That is a stupefying number of stars. The size and scale of the universe are unfathomable, and the age is beyond comprehension. There are stars in the universe whose size is a million times bigger than our sun, which is the size of about a million earths. If the study of biology makes us feel connected to the world, the universe reminds us of our place in it, and our past in the stars.

Everything that exists was forged in the furnace of a star, which is the only place hot enough for atoms to merge and combine to form new elements. All the elements that make up your body came from a supernova, which means you, and everyone you love, and everything you see is connected not only with each other, but with the entire universe as well.

3. Death

Most people live their entire lives trying to deny that they will die. Some people don’t really live their entire lives trying to avoid their ultimate fate. Death is the great equalizer, and it will come to us all one day. There is no escaping it, and really, very little that can be done to postpone it.

When you die, your body decomposes back into various elements which are consumed and used and put back into the earth, which will be blown up eventually by the sun, and scattered across the universe. Embracing the idea that you will die also becomes liberating. Once someone accepts that their death is inevitable, they begin to lose tolerance for doing something they hate doing.

Frederick Douglass wrote in his memoirs that when he was a slave he was terrified of being whipped, until one day he struck a white man. Knowing the penalty for hitting a white person was death, Douglass spent a few days living in terror of what would happen next. While he wasn’t killed, his brush with death changed him forever. He realized that as a slave his days were numbered anyway, and that one day soon, he would probably die a violent death. Once he accepted this his condition became intolerable. He lost the fear of dying in pursuit of living.

Accepting that one day you will die is a key factor in deciding to really live. To grab your life, and decide, this is what I am going to do, is the key to happiness.

4. Embracing Freedom

Once one acknowledges that death is inevitable, there are only two choices. Live life as you want to, or just wait it out. I think the most spiritual way someone can spend their life is embracing all the challenges of pursuing your dreams, not kneeling in front of some altar. The freedom to use the brief time you have to exist is a freedom that no one can deny you.

Whether you want to be a chef, a doctor, or a pornographic film maker, the choices you make are entirely yours, and you have all the power to create make your life into a work of art, unique and totally yours.

5. Lack of Control

Paradoxically, the more control one gains over one’s life, the more one realizes the less control one has over events. True spirituality with the universe recognizes that randomness plays a large part in our day to day lives.

Being spiritual means not fighting these changes that cannot be fought, such as a relative dying in a freak accident, losing one’s job because of the economy, having your face ripped off by an angry chimp.

Change is the only constant in life, and it is embedded in the laws of physics. To be a part of change is to be a part of the world, being changed is existing. Struggling against change is struggling against the will of the universe.

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To whom I’m certain, this will concern someday:

I have some tendencies that could be perceived in a negative fashion. Instead of contributing to the growing divorce rate, I’d rather you see these potential deal breakers in advance, far before we tie the knot. Here is a smorgasbord of my flaws:

I scare easily. E.g. As a 20-something man, when Paranormal Activity 3 previews would come on television at night, I would lunge for the remote and change the channel. I’m not ashamed.

I have THE WORST MEMORY EVER. That’s actually an understatement, but there are no words in the English language to explain just how forgetful I can be. It’s probably going to seem like I’m an awful listener, but I assure you that’s not the case. I’m fantastic at hearing all of your comments, concerns, requests, etc. — I’m just not capable of retaining more than two percent of what you’ve said for any longer than five minutes. The phrase, “Can you remind me to _______?” should never be directed toward me, ever. Simply put: I don’t remember ANYTHING.

I hate bugs. All of them. Here’s fair warning, if we see a cockroach in the bathroom, I’m not even going to attempt to kill it[1]. It’s important that we take preventative measures in advance to make certain that critters are kept to a minimum. We’ll spray outside to secure the perimeter, leave those poisoned roach baits in select spots and keep crumbs and spills to a minimum. On the plus side, I am willing to kill select insects, including but not limited to: ants, tiny spiders, moths, houseflies and in some rare cases, crickets.

I tend to be cheesy. I mean reeeally cheesy. Sorry, but I’ve seen a ton of rom-coms[2] and they’ve had a lasting effect on me. Just know that occasionally the cheese oozes out and it’s beyond my control.

I break more stuff than I’m capable of fixing. At times I can be a smidgen clumsy, which often results in random objects being broken. Whether it’s a dish, the lever on the recliner chair, the car, or the sink; you spend enough time around me and you will most definitely deal with an abnormal amount of “out of order” signs. The plus side, however, is that I will attempt to fix anything and everything. Sure, it often goes awry because I have the repairing abilities of Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, but what I lack in skill, I make up for in effort. Google and persistence are often enough to fix any damage without calling a pricey repairman. Another positive: The one thing that I’ll never break is your heart. Oops, there’s that cheesiness I warned you about, forgive me.

I cry on some occasions. Three occasions, specifically:

1. When someone close to me passes away.
2. When I see others struggling due to circumstances beyond their control.
3. When that Sarah McLachlan Animal Cruelty commercial comes on.

Most of the time Occasionally I’m really cheap smart at shopping. I take great pride in being a frugal grocery shopper. I’m capable of taking 50 bucks and turning it into a fully stocked refrigerator & pantry. The downside? I invest in a lot of off brand products. ‘Fruit Rings’ aren’t quite as delicious as ‘Fruit Loops’ but for $2 less and 4 oz. more, I’ll take ‘em! I understand if there are certain things that you prefer to purchase the name brand of. I’m a firm believer that Kraft cheese is top shelf quality and anything else is subpar. Aside from groceries, eating out is another situation I put my cheap-skates on for. Simple cutbacks can make a bill reasonable; ordering water instead of a soda saves moolah and calories, which is a no brainer.

My firm no farting rule. It isn’t cute or amusing at all. I’m not sure who created this notion that passing gas on or around each other signifies some type of milestone in a relationship’s strength, but they are wrong. I won’t fart near you, you don’t fart near me and we’ll both breathe in peace.

I can’t cook. Not even a little bit. I’m not one of those guys who expect dinner preparation to be handled strictly by the woman. Unfortunately, due to my zero cooking abilities, I can only contribute so much. If you need someone to boil water, preheat the oven, add a dash of salt or set the table — I’m your guy. Anything else and you’re playing with fire… Literally; I’ve started dozens of kitchen infernos making things as simple as grilled cheese sandwiches.

When my sports teams lose, so does everyone around me. I can’t help it, my passion as a fan gets the best of me from time to time and I radiate negativity after tough losses. DOUBLE WARNING: I’m a Chicago Cubs fan so be prepared for some serious pessimism every year during baseball season.

I don’t really believe in Valentine’s Day. Sorry, but it’s man made and the concept of being nice to your partner one random day out of the year is preposterous. Although, when I was a kid my siblings and I didn’t celebrate Halloween/go trick or treating, but my parents still provided us with boatloads of candy so we didn’t feel too left out. I may do something similar for you, potential wife.

If I ever happen to run into Rashida Jones or Alison Brie, all bets are off. Relax, I’m just kidding[3].

As bad as all those things may sound, I’d like to list a few positives as well, just to balance things out.

• I shower AT LEAST twice a day, everyday.
• #I #never #use #hashtags #on #Twitter. That’s got to count for something. #Right?
• I just love waiting for a girl, no matter how long it takes, while she does her shopping[4].
• I enjoy Bradley Cooper just as much as you do, but in a straight way.
• I’m one of the most accurate pissers ever; not a single drop on the seat since ’95. As a result of my precision, I never have to lift the seat up to urinate.

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I met J at the University of Nevada, outside the English Department on a winter day, the cottonwoods of the quad leafless, as J cupped his palms around his cigarette to light it and I bummed that light off him.

He took philosophy and literature classes. He wore glasses and a goatee. He was bookish and handsome. His voice was butter, silky and drawn out. He’d say all right, like “aaaalllll riiiiiiiight,” maybe like someone like The Fonz would say it, except J could say this better than The Fonz because there was no affect. He was J being J as J was.

On the steps of Frandsen Humanities — the English Department — there sat a giant concrete urn-like pot and J and I would smoke beside it between classes and we talked about Hegel and Nietzche and Lord of the Rings and Faulkner, all of which J loved.

He got me my job at the Pub n’ Sub, where I met many of my best friends, people who are still among my best friends today. I guess he didn’t get me the job, but when I asked he said that was where he worked, and the idea that I might work there, too, got into my head, for it seemed like a far more fun job than selling suits at the Men’s Wearhouse, which was what I was doing at the time. I’d have to finish classes, change from my t-shirt and jeans, shower, and dress in a suit or sport coat and slacks, with a shirt and tie, and tell people that our suits were the best bargain they could find anywhere in town, and I figured the Pub was an easier sell, convincing people to get another pitcher, or to order a large pizza, or to enjoy the turkey sandwich I made for them.

One time at the Pub J found a baggie full of pot in the backyard when he was taking out the trash and when he came back inside he held up the baggie, shaking it, and said, “Anyone want to get hiiiiiiiggghhhh?” in that way that he had, and Leadawn, the woman who was our manager and whom we knew was a druggie even if she tried to hide it from us (because both she and her brother were obvious tweekers, and meth had popped up and become a problem across the west at the time and sometimes we’d drive past Leadawn’s house on Ralston Street and the lights were on at 4 a.m. and we knew she wasn’t out drinking because that’s why we were driving by in the first place — because, you see, we were out drinking), and she was bent behind the bar storing glasses and she popped up and said, “I do,” and J, who hadn’t known that our manager was even back there, just started laughing as he packed the first bowl.

J had a girlfriend named Tiffany, a little brunette, cute, smart. Though things didn’t work out between them, they went out for two or three years, lived together, and I think Tiffany always loved him and always will.

And I could see why Tiffany loved J, because he was handsome and well-built, with broad shoulders, and a slender waist, sharp features, but soft, sad-looking eyes behind his glasses. He was mellow. He never got animated or excited. I only saw him yelling maybe when the Seahawks or the Mariners were losing a game on television — so I guess I saw him yell a lot. And J was a cook at the Pub n’ Sub, which, as a college hang-out, attracted all the girls, and Tiffany could claim J as her own, and she could also claim the free pizzas and beers that came with dating a guy who worked at the Pub n’ Sub, and also J was smart and caring, a genuinely a good guy, and he cared for Tiffany, and I know this because I saw it.

All this gentleness, and J was perhaps the best fighter I’ve ever known. I’ve seen many a good fight, bar brawls (no bullsh-t, serious, like fifty people all fighting in the Pub n’ Sub), but I’ve never seen anyone get pummeled the way J could pummel a fool. This one time at the Little Waldorf Saloon the guy J beat up was yoked, shaved head — turned out he was a marine. The fight started because this marine guy told our friend and coworker, Cara, f-ck you, after she refused his advances, and J heard him. All I know is that before the bouncers rushed in and separated us and them out, J was crouched like some fighter in a movie, and he worked jabs, left and right, kept his face and his glasses covered with his forearms when he wasn’t throwing a punch, which was for these brief flashes, because the punches kept coming. And that baldheaded marine, he was crouched there, too, trying to get in a shot, but failing, till he fell, and then the bouncers had us all in full nelsons and they dragged us out to the parking lot.

J didn’t always protect his glasses. One time, at Chewy and Jugs, he took his glasses off when the fight started, and after we got kicked out he had to go back for the glasses the next day and someone had taken a nail, or something, and etched “F-A-G-G-O-T” backwards on one of the lenses, so it would be like J would read “faggot” when he had the glasses on. J couldn’t afford new glasses and he wore those, with “faggot” written like that on them, for a few months, not that J cared, because he did not — not about the pejorative, nor about his mangled glasses.

The whole family was great, the Joyners. J’s older brother, Tom, lived in Reno and was a big soccer fan, Manchester United and all that. In fact, all the Joyners were soccer fans, as Tom and J had both excelled at the sport when they were in high school in Winnemucca, Nevada. Tom lived with his longtime girlfriend on Barker Circle, off of 7^th Street. J’s little brother, Bill, came into town from Winnemucca after high school (where their parents still lived) and soon he, too, worked at the Pub n’ Sub, cooking and delivering pizzas. I called Bill “Billy Boy” and he’d smile and say, “What you call me?”

And then J and I graduated from college, and we quit working at the Pub n’ Sub, because that’s the kind of thing you stop doing when you’re no longer at college at the University of Nevada. J went to graduate school in Portland because he and his brothers had all been born in Oregon before their dad got his job at the Naval Air Station in Nevada’s desert, and that’s why J loved the Seattle Mariners and Supersonics. J’s reverence for Ken Griffey Jr. knew no bounds. He’d clenched his fists over the ’98 season, as the Mariners slid in at third place in the AL West, back when Edgar Martinez and Alex Rodriguez swung bats for the M’s and Randy Johnson, ugly as sin, slung heaters from the mound. But the Mariners finished eleven games out. Still, better than the sh-tty Oakland A’s who fell in last place. And J loved big conifers, and he’d grown up in the 1990s and his bedrooms were decorated with posters of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. J could sport a sweater.

We always held parties at my family’s cabin in Squaw Valley, near Lake Tahoe, in California, and even after J moved to Portland he’d fly home and meet up with us and we’d all drive up there in the snow and sit around the fire or at the kitchen table drinking beer. Once my buddy from back home in Monterey was up there with us, too, and he couldn’t get over J, how he sat in front of the CD player replaying Alice in Chains’s Dirt over and over, rocking his head as beer after beer disappeared down his throat. J would look at Randy and say, “Right here,” pointing at the stereo, “this guitar right here,” when a thundering chord landed, and he’d bow his head in reverence. Randy said, “I’ve never heard so much Alice in Chains in my life.”

Once, J left a textbook he was teaching to his composition students up in Portland at the cabin and I found it but never returned it to him: The Shape of Ideas by Garrett Bauman. J was taking pedagogy courses as well, and he had a sample assignment from some other composition professor, an assignment that presumably J was learning from so that he might learn how to give assignments, and this assignment sheet was folded in half and stuck in the middle of this book. The assignment sheet was for #3, due 10/25/95. In it the professor talks about quilts that have been handed down from his great great grandmother to his grandmother, to his mother, and finally to him, because he came from a family of all men, and now this nameless professor is learning to quilt. I meant to mail the book and assignment back to J, because I assumed he needed them, but he never called to ask about it, and I never got around to mailing. I still have the book, and the assignment sheet is still folded and tucked in at the page number where J left it. I’m sentimental about such things. And now that’s kind of how I see J: as that book, as if he himself is the book, that J is the shape of ideas. I like to think of the words in the assignment as belonging to J, even though I know that they’re not. I like to think of J learning to quilt his history into permanence.

At his funeral the music matched his decade, except for the Beatles, which were his favorite band. First “Penny Lane” came on, then “Say Hello to Heaven.”

Funny, it wasn’t what you’d think: no drugs, no fight, no bartime mishap. No jealous lover stabbed him in his back. J came into town to visit from Portland and he and Billy Boy went out, had some beers, stopped by the Pub and saw Maggie, went to Jake and Shawna’s house for dinner, and when they left Jake said they were fine, that they’d chilled out without drinking for a long time before the drive back to Winnemucca. It was a pair of headlights that came out of the dark in the middle of the desert, on an expanse of U.S. Highway that’s so straight it could be a massive ruler. These teenagers were out joyriding, their car’s stereo blasting. On this road you can hit more than 150 mph if your car can reach it. These teens were passing a truck and so came into the lane of oncoming traffic. In the wreckage, of all the bodies of those living and dead the police would find whisky and methamphetamine. They say J died instantly and painlessly. Bill was driving.

They say Bill’s BAC was over the legal limit. They say the teen driver of the other car was the Sheriff’s daughter. I hear that those three kids all lived. So did Bill.

At J’s funeral Tiffany tried to talk and almost couldn’t, she was crying too hard. She and J had been broken up already for over a year, since he’d left for Portland. I was living in Atlanta when Bob called to tell me, and Bob, even, was crying — a man who gutted deer, who popped off bunnies as if life had never existed and never mattered — so I cried, too. I came home, and I stepped to the microphone, and I recounted the last conversation J and I had had, over the telephone, just two weeks earlier:

Me: What are you doing?

J: Weeeeelllll, I waaaaaassssss on my way to work. Buuuuuuuut, now I’m talking to you and opening a beeeeeer.

Everyone laughed, and cried. I saw J and Bill’s dad, and their mother, and Tom and his girlfriend, and Jake and Shawna and Mike and Chris and Timmy and Bob and Jasmine and Sharon and Derrick and Cara and Larry and everyone — almost all of my friends from Reno, Nevada, because J had directly or indirectly introduced me to all of them and I said so. I told the crowd how I owed J for everything and everyone I knew and I think that that was true and still is.

Bill was not there. He sat at his parents’ house with his broken leg and broken heart, and when I saw him at the wake he sobbed into my arms. After he cried he smiled. Then he broke down again. I thought of the Oakland A’s and New York Yankees game that Billy Boy and I had attended a few years earlier, the postseason, and how Billy Boy had smiled the whole time and talked to my dad about the game. Now he had two months to heal before his arraignment, and today he’s still in prison today somewhere in Nevada.

I’m sure some people will think that my writing this is insensitive to the Joyner family. It’s true that this ruined them. With J dead and Bill in prison, the parents divorced, as is often the case in families that face such devastating tragedy. Tom and his girlfriend had a baby and I think eventually married, but I have not spoken to them in almost ten years and I have no idea what’s happened to them or their daughter though I hope they are all alive and healthy and happy. But I’m not writing this to tell you a sad story, or to instruct you on the risks of drinking and driving. I don’t want to hurt my friends the Joyners any more than they’ve been hurt already. I just miss my friend, my friend whom I think if he’d have lived might be writing himself, for he was a writer and a lover of literature. I just wish so much that he was alive and Bill were here, too, and not in jail where I haven’t seen him. I wish we were listening to Alice in Chains. At least it’s baseball season.

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image – Lost Highway