In Print!

Click here to view this photo book larger

I abuse my photos. I print them out and stuff them in albums, and then come back two days later to pry them out for use in some sort of crafty thing. But the crafts never- ever- get completed, and the photos are never seen again. So I decided to make a book out of my Chile photos from the past year, and have them professionally printed. Shutterfly was having a 50% off sale on their hardcover, 12" by 12" photo books, so for four spastic days I did nothing but re-touch photos and arrange pages on Photoshop. I hit 'order' at midnight, about 4 minutes before the offer was up. And then, the waiting commenced.

Well, it finally arrived at the post office! I ripped it out of the cardboard and paged through the whole thing: it was glossy, pristine, and perfect. For a whole 20 minutes. As I was bringing it in from the car, the two corgis attacked each other in the yard. Hitting them with the chuck-it stick was not effective, so I had to put the book down in the grass and pull them apart with my hands, which was sort of terrifying. When I picked up the book again, the cover was stained with dog blood and had a few deep scratches in it. Sadly, I'm not lying.

The book has 50 pages, each one 100% photo- there is not one bit of white. I included lines from Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet I taught in my World Literature class- and one Avett brother lyric at the end. There are no other words besides those.

And, why yes, it is called "Chile: The Wild Coast". I may have only ever had one idea- but hey, at least I'm consistent. Enjoy!

(My favorite part, the back cover:)

Lately

Days of rain...




...and things that go nicely with them.

Alone

I thought it would hurt more than this, the restructuring. The way life bends to reform itself after its very frame has been altered. I thought the simple things I do for my own contentedness and comfort would begin to feel thin and transparent, as they stretch tight to cover the hole left by a sudden absence. I lost a good man from my life, and with him all my sketches for that particular future I had- briefly, but fiercely- set my heart on.

But it hasn't been that way, not even after the dust settled. Instead, all the different pieces of the day feel as if they had been shaped by a master craftsman, each serving its purpose and locking into the next, holding the season together.

I've been alone these last few days on the hill. Alone in the country, which is to say that, should I want, I could sit out in the field and watch the sun whirl above me up for a week straight without seeing another soul. (For anyone who is keeping record, I don't choose to do it this way.)

Sometime last night, the temperature dropped way, way beneath prediction, and I had to climb out of bed, shivering, and pull all the windows shut. All day long, the air held a trace of autumn's snap. It was a fluke which held no promise of lasting, but I could sense the plants were startled.

The cold was a welcome respite for me. I spent the day pleasantly alone, busy each moment with things that needed to get done. I felt not a whisper of the bitter side of solitude, but in the evening, I made a point to escape the big old house, should sadness seep in along with the cold drafts that appear like ghosts from the doors and window and out from between the wood slats of the floor.

I drove to a place in town that has a big open fire inside, and pint glasses of beer, and the sounds of people eating and drinking and talking.

The gray clouds that gathered thick overhead were tinged on their underbellies with a shade of magenta of unseasonable boldness, but they blew past or dissolved before the last bit of light had disappeared, leaving the sky a clean, electric blue. I ate a warm bowl of warm tomato and cheddar cheese soup, and in the circle of lamplight on my small table, read from a hardcover book of humor writing from The New Yorker.

If there is one hour has the potential to strike me with nostalgia and sadness, it is the time when evening melts into night, a time I've always considered designed for a person to come home to find the lights on, and dinner being cooked, and someone waiting for them. But at that moment, alone with the warmth of the flames from the big iron fireplace, I felt lucky. Lucky, and fed, and nothing else.

The Land

I'm pretty caught up with it.

little Italian men and my first taste of obsession

It's a strange and funny thing to spend time with the people who knew you before you had fully mastered yourself. Back when you were in high school, or younger, just bits and pieces of a self waiting to be colored and trimmed and sewn together. I remember that time with vividness, when I swapped out one identity for the next with the regularity of movie stars changing their hair, or their husbands.

Many of my old friends have come home for good, and we sit now at the cafe in town town and look back on ourselves in those younger days. We talk about the things we struggled over, the things we fought for and failed at, the things we admit now might not be worth repeating. We reflect not with remorse or embarrassment, but with humor, and fondness, as if our younger selves were merely little dolls who did outlandish things for the purpose of causing ourselves laughter and disbelief in later years.

I had dinner the other night with two of those friends Cass and Elissa- both writers- we closed the restaurant, drank a bucket's worth of two dollar margaritas, scribbled on the table and arrived at the conclusion that these stories we were sharing screamed out to be written down. Small stories, and at first glance insignificant, yet we've come to realize that what separated us in our adolescence are, like it or not, the very things that define who we've come to be.Growing up in someplace like rural Vermont, our stories revolved around the elaborate schemes we came up with to entertain ourselves. I lived (and live currently) in the middle of a land trust, miles away from anyone or anything except the three summer houses of any aunts and uncles, all vacant the majority of the year. Whenever my parents agreed to drive me and my sister into Quechee to get a candy bar at the Jiffy Mart, I would fall into fits of nearly epileptic glee.

I was not often lonely in the negative sense of the word, it's just that I was fully aware of the community that we were lacking- community in the classic, neat squares of front lawn where neighbor children play sense of the word. We're so far out that no one will actually claim us. Half of our dirt road is in West Harford, our mailing address is White River Junction, the closest town is Quechee, we went to school in Woodstock, and we're technically in North Pomfret. When it came time to plow our roads, they all dismissed us as belonging to somebody else.

From all of my unusual and creative endeavors, my arsenal against the many slow hours of childhood, this very small, admittedly peculiar detail stands out: my obsession with Nintendo. And my desperate attempt at compensation for there being no Nintendo.

We've never had television in my house in Vermont (movies, yes) and we certainly did not have any video games. The no TV I was at peace with, and had in fact already developed an attitude of slight superiority with regards to it. But as a ten year old, I was ready to mutiny on account of the video games. I fantasized about throwing myself on the stoop of any house that I knew had a Nintendo system, and begging for them to take me! Just take me in! Make me yours!

I was rabid for any device that could allow me to wile away in the hour in a gaming induced stupor: game boy, game gear, duck hunt, even Tetris would have been better than nothing. I blame my cousin Christopher, whose vast collection of electronic games was constantly replenished as new models came out. He exposed me to the stuff and then withheld: allowing me brief access during holidays at his summer house, and then bringing it all home with him when he left. I met Yoshi the green dino on their big screen TV one Christmas, and fell instantly in love. I dreamed about Yoshi. I dreamed about all of them: the Italians, the hedgehog, the ducks, the mismatched pieces of brick.

On a few occasions, I came close. So, so very close. Christopher promised me one summer to let me borrow his older version of Nintendo, but every time he visited, he had neglected to bring it. Such was my disappointment that that summer, I believe it permanently whittled away at my girlhood spirit.

Then there was that shining moment- one of the most ecstatic in remembrance- when the daughter of my mother's friend left her Game Gear at my house. They had just hit the road back to Boston after a long weekend, I walked into my bedroom, and there it was, lying alone on my bed. Feeling religious in my joy and gratitude, I lay down next to it, took it in my two hands, and turned the ON switch.

One of my most despondent moments was when, ten minutes later, they drove back to retrieve it. "Close one!" her dad said to my mom, jauntily. "Five more minutes, and we would have been too far to turn back!"

Crushing.

Fortunately, I was a do it yourself kind of kid. I could always be counted on to take matters into my own hands, even when it yielded pathetic results. One summer day when I was eleven I was woken by my own brilliant idea- of course! Why hadn't I thought of this before! I ran downstairs in my shortie pajamas, rolled out some butcher paper, and with colored pencils and intent focus, drew out the entire first level of Mario brothers. Green mushroom trees, puffy clouds, neat rows of brick boxes and question marks. Then I sketched a little Mario, cut him out, and bopped him along the drawn out landscape. I repeated this a few times, before it finally dawned on me how sad I was.

Still, A for effort.

Looking back on it, my not so super Mario world was the beginning of a long and illustrious career of faking it till I made it. Which is just another way of saying "make it work with what you got". Still others might call it "lying". I myself consider it a tool of immeasurable value, a combination of improv and resourcefulness. It's what makes one scrappy.

When I was sixteen, 8 months and one terrifying driver's ed class held in the vacant building next to the strip club away from getting my license, I hijacked the family Subaru. I drove it at twenty miles an hour towards the rope swing, a popular warm weather hang out that, at only six miles from my house, was practically in my backyard. (We live a long, long way from anywhere.) My hands sweating and my heart banging at the thrill of my own daring, I inched past the roadside swing. Thank you God, I remember thinking, because there on the riverbank stood John Maguire and some other popular boys, taking turns doing back flips off the rope. I put my elbow out the window, put the car in neutral as I had practiced, and said all casual, "Oh, heeey." Look at me, just driving past. Just driving, alone. No parents. Just driving. And they said "Oh, heeey," and nodded in appreciation. I drove past them. Then I drove home, mission completed.

I was also the girl who, for a few months in 10th grade, kept Visine and a lighter in her jacket pocket. Even though I had no need for them, as I never smoked pot. Ever. But I figured, hey, who has to know that? By then I knew that a suggestion of coolness was as valuable as coolness itself. And it worked. A friend of mine eventually put my jacket on, put his hand in the pockets and drew out my two props. "Heeeey!" he said knowingly, "I wonder what these are for!" I just shrugged and said, "Well, you know." Later that day I threw them in the trash, no longer needing their services.

I blame the success of these foils on any and all incidents of exaggeration or misrepresentation that have occurred since.

The truth is, I figured everyone had a little of this in them. A little resourceful A little scrappiness. A little do what you gotta do.

And then I moved out to Seattle, and my total and complete misjudgment became evident.

The day we ate everything

I'm recording these days not because they are particularly thrilling, but because they are blissful in their normalcy. In a week or two, I'll be starting another job, this time at a camp in New England leading girls on an adventure trip. A solid month of climbing, backpacking, and white water with no electricity, and no showers except the ones we find ourselves- under waterfalls, in creeks, in the Atlantic. So many things draw me to this job, including, oh....it's girls. ALL GIRLS. It's only me and another woman leading the trip, and it includes a 50 mile sea kayak voyage through Acadia national park in Maine out to some island where, last year, there was an epic thunderstorm that had everyone scrambling for their hides. (Oh please oh please oh please....let's have a repeat....) Besides which, it culminates in a rock star paycheck. (Rock star being a very relative term, but I'm happy with it. Very happy with it.)

And after that, I haven't quite decided. Maybe I'll be packing for Chile again, and then Africa with the school, or maybe tracing a red line on an atlas from my doorstep back to the Emerald city, where I feel like life may not quite have been over for me. Either way, the days and nights and mornings and evenings in our sublime state are so fleeting I can almost see them melting away in front of me.



What this means is, while these things may be ordinary, they are not to be taken for granted, and so I will record them with the same fastidiousness and gratitude that I would my highest adventure.

It started with pancakes that Cass and I cooked from scratch, the morning after the storm, the atmosphere polished and the birds still timid from the previous night's violence.







And after all that was finished, it was (way) past noon, and sunlight bounced straight down to earth like a plumb line. Pablo Neruda wrote of the Chilean Coast: "Among so many blues, sunken blues, heavenly blues, our eyes are a little confused." If only he had seen Vermont during this season. What the beaches of Pichilemu have in blues, we have in greens. The endless shades of sea foam and lime and grass and leaf and mint, stripes of bright green on the horizon darkening and fading into blue....it would have put him into a tailspin.





Even the water is green right now....and that's where we spent the majority of the day. Sumner's Falls in Hartland, Vermont, is like a piece of the Ottawa River- one side an enormous eddy, the other a set of rapids with different play waves, rapids, and even little creek lines. It's like someone designed a whitewater park and carved it into the Connecticut river, just down the road from me.




(Thanks Austin Huck for this picture!)



When the sunlight deepened from translucent into rich and tangible, we stripped off our wet gear and had bread and cheddar and ginger beer in the back of the car. Then we drove into Woodstock, through Hartland and Quechee, farms and fields drenched in amber light, music blaring, and capped it off with onion rings and fried chicken and grilled cheese at The White Cottage. Which we capped off with ice cream- my peppermint stick hot fudge sunday beating the crap out of Cassie's cookies and cream. (I've been ordering those at The Cottage for about 17 years now.)

Out of nowhere, a horde of little girls appeared by our side and threw the ball for my dog for an hour straight into the White River, ecstatic over the fact that she could swim. (And I was ecstatic to discover she has a perfect ferry angle to swim upstream....although later Austin told me that humans are the only species who do not have a naturally perfect ferry angle...)







And then, yeah, we capped all that off with jack and gingers at the one bar in town with our friend Adriane. And then some wine at home, animated conversation at the kicthen table until 2:00am, and then we passed out on the cold sheets, falling backwards into dreams.





That's right...it was The Day We Ate Everything. And we'll do it again just as soon as we get the chance.

storm

I wasn't back in New England but two days when Cassie, my best friend from middle school, came up to visit. We took it upon ourselves to partake in all that is wild and lovely about our state, and what unfolded was a string of the most heavenly early summer days that ever were. We threw ourselves headlong into the liquid, lime green days and never for a moment sat to rest, except for at night, when we shared a bottle of white wine on the screened in porch and told stories with increasingly volume and gesturing.

On her first evening, we took the dogs down to the big iron bridge that crosses the white river
in the town of West Hartford. The evening was sweltering, and we went swimming in the deep green water, swam up to the little ledge hole and rode the white current down to the bottom of the eddy. We wore our PFDs so that we could exude the least amount of effort possible, just lean back in the water and float. A group of white water kayakers showed up at one point, and an older man and his little boy offered to let the two of us go surfing with his tandem boat. They waited on the rocks, the little boy throwing the ball into the water for my dog and calling her back with an amazingly endearing lisp, as we leaned too far into the current and toppled over, swimming in a mass of arms and legs and paddles into the rocks lining the shallow hole.

It fell dark, and soon we were back on the screen porch, wrapped in sweatshirts and eating a plate of tomatoes and vinegar for dinner with pieces of bread our friend gives us free from his bakery. It grew late quickly as we talked and compared notes about the most recent chapters of our lives. We had planned on watching an episode of The Office before bed, but the world had some much different in store for the night's entertainment. I went downstairs to serve two bowls of peach ice cream, and when I came back up, lightning was flashing on the horizon. At first we attributed it to heat lightning, the atmosphere swelling with the humidity until it couldn't take it anymore and burst in flashes of white light, but soon enough enormous cracks of thunder split the sky and the air cooled and became heavy.

Cassie is a graphic designer, and photographer, and married to a professional photographer, and so she understood when my first impulse was to grab my camera and set up the tripod in the front yard, hoping to finally catch an elusive fork of lightning on film. She came with me outside and held an over sized sunhat above the camera to guard against the rain, which fell in big drops like marbles. The lightning came in two styles, in flashes and strikes, and when we caught a strike the two of went mad with excitement.



Somehow, the storm lasted more than two hours, and even when it became wild and wrapped around us, we stood in the eye of the storm and held the shutter down over and over again.
And it was just our first day.

The coat rack

Lorenzo is, to the best of my knowledge, the most handsome man in all of Chile. He was raised in the valley of San Alfonso del Maipo, in a home hung on a hillside above the river. He and his three brothers served as our unofficial guides to the area, navigating us through the hydraulics of the Yesough and the Maipo, leading us to high altitude waterfalls and the bones of Pinochet's death camps. This past semester, he became the full time Spanish teacher at New River Academy.

During graduation dinner, the teachers -Tino, Lorenzo, Callie, Andy, Matt and I- headed to the porch for a momentary escape from the swarm of parents and students. As we passed through the decorated hallway, Lorenzo spotted an antique coat rack nestled into the corner. It was black wrought iron made from four thin, flat bars that joined at the base to creat its trunk, and then separated at the top like petals opening in all four directions, curling into spirals.

"Wait a meenute-" said Lorenzo in his thick, stacado Chilean accent. He stood studying the coat rack for a minute, and then removed his suit jacket. We were all dressed up for the occasion,
I had straightened my hair and let the girls paint smokey circles around my eyes and layer mascara on my eyelashes so that my cheeks tickled each time I blinked. We all watched as Lorenzo held up his coat in front of his face, measuring the distance of some space evident in his mind, but not ours. "Eet iz on my check leest of thzings to do in my life, to do thzees-" he said, and he tossed the coat across the width of the hallway towards the rack. It hit one of the curved arms and stuck, and under the momentum of its weight the rack wobbled sideways for a moment, as if it were making to fall over. In a moment that seemed unreasonably full of suspense and importance, we drew a collective breath. But at the apex of its unbalance, the rack swung instead back towards us and rested again on all four iron feet. The coat pendulumed sideways for a minute, and then hung still.

Looking satisfied, Lorenzo moved forward to take it back, and as he did he opened his hand, gripped an imaginary pencil with the other, and moved it against his palm in a check motion. "Check!" He said, with obvious triumph. Then he took the coat off the rack, threw it over his shoulders, and proceeded outside.

Some time later, as dessert was served, I sat down next to Lorenzo and informed him that I, too, had a check list, and that mine oscillated between the lofty- a completely sustainable existence- and the trivial- biting a tube of lipstick completely in half (accomplished, age 19, totally worth repeating). I inquire as to the rest of his list, and he replied with such fluidity that I really believed that somewhere, maybe under his bed in the Maipo valley or buried in a box beneath his family's mountain horse pasture, there existed a detailed, hand written list that he had meticulously created, written out again and again until it was complete, and then committed to memory.

"I will have four cheeldren," he said, " and write a booook, and be on thze world champi-ohn rafting team, and work for a seazon in Alaska on a fishing boat."

He asked on the contest of my list, and I rattled them off in a similar fashion- "Restore a farmhouse, write a boooook" (it was hard not to pick up his heavy, beautiful accent) "drive across the country, have three children." He nodded in appreciation. We kept talking, he ate his dessert, and I tried not to throw up.

********************************************************************************

The first time I met Lorenzo, I was tanned and strong and we were riding in the back of a pick up truck near the Argentinian border. The day after, I ripped out a page from a book of Pablo Neruda love sonnets, rolled it up and threw it into his hand. Then I turned my back on him and ran as fast as I could back to the car as he called "thzank you, thzank you", and then I drove to the airport and flew home.


The second time I saw him, 6 months later, I had just awoken from my night's sleep. I was staying in the tower room at his parent's house, and I emerged from the small room at the top of the stair case just as Lorenzo was walking past on the floor below. Feeling self conscious but pretty in a relaxed, tousle-haired way, I said "good morning" in Spanish, and then fell down the entire staircase.

All the way down.

Badly.

In front of Lorenzo.

Only Lorenzo.

*********************************************************************************

It's funny that we bother to make life lists at all, for all its manic unpredictability.

Only a few more days to win

Hey- one more prompt in case you haven't already checked it out! Only a few more days left until the winner is chosen, so get your comment in!

Read my post about how I add flavor to my life on wild pages: good things, reviewed. Then leave a comment about how you add flavor to your life to be entered into the $100 give-away! The Visa gift card will be chosen ONLY from the comments on that post, so the odds are pretty good.

As well, you can win a 500$ gift card at Blogher: http://www.blogher.com/eo-coffeemate

I can't wait to read your comments!

ship-jumper

I'll tell you one thing: the past seven or so years have endowed me with the quality of acceptance- not fully, because complete acceptance can sometimes look a lot like giving up- but sometime recently I have learned to appreciate the elegance of just letting go.
It didn't hit me easily, or all at once, like a stone falling out of the sky into your waiting hand, but slowly and diligently, the way an ocean whittles at its shoreline.

I remember the one defining break up of my life- the one after college, a really nasty one- as being like major surgery. The dread and pain, the agonizing recovery and the feeling that you can't do the things you used to do, at least not in the same way.

In my last days in North Carolina, I felt none of that. I just felt tired, with no desire to try and make sense of anything. Maybe the sadness swam way down beneath language, maybe it wasn't there at all. I was overcome with the need to go, to push forward to whatever was next.

The morning after I stayed up all night with Sarah, wrapped in her blanket on the porch, I packed up everything I could still call my own, and I left. My goodbyes, the ones that found me, were quick and seamless affairs. If I had it my way, I wouldn't have said goodbye to anyone. In a world where everyone is constantly either coming or going, goodbyes seem superfluous, a drain on limited emotional resources.


I drove North towards West Virginia, through deep valleys of immense green and glory, and wretched stretches of highway with billboards admonishing me not to kill babies or I'd burn in hell, signed GOD, each letter as big as a man. A thunderstorm hit in the third hour with a barrage of rain and bursts of lightning, and by the time I pulled into Fayetteville around 7pm, I was consumed by a strange, unreasonable energy. I burst into Pies and Pints, the one palatable restaurant in the small town, and found each table occupied by my former students and their families, up for the weekend of graduation festivities. I scurried between each table, sitting briefly at each one as I said hello, my toe tapping frantically against the concrete floor. One of the mothers put her hand on my back and pressed on it. "Slow down," she said, "you're not in the car anymore. You can relax."

But it wasn't the long drive that was jolting me, it was something else loose inside of me, creating this intense desire to move and talk. Maybe it was being shot out of my quiet life in Boone and cannonballed backwards to this previous life as a member of the school, or the fact that I could just as soon pretend I'd been with them the entire time and never have even moved to North Carolina, for all I had to show for my previous few months. It was unsettling, best not to think about too deeply, and it made me want to remain in motion, as if I were a tightly wound, mechanical thing, ready to spring.

I sat with the staff and a handful of kids, the latter completely involving themselves in a conversation regarding whether or not a dollar had been stolen between them two months ago. The staff looked worn out as always and didn't say much. They fixed their eyes on a television set mounted television set above the bar and made a handful of comments about the peculiar snow sport being broadcasted. I thought about myself a year ago, at the same table in the same restaurant. I hadn't wanted to speak to anyone. I had wanted to sleep, or run away, or somehow disappear entirely. Of course, that had been under very different circumstances.

I went back to the school house for a little while after dinner, watched part of a movie and swung on the hammock with the girls. I went into the little attic room where Tino and Lorenzo slept, the whole place littered with twenty different boxes of Tevas. "Sent to my by my sponsors," Tino said, picking up a box and casually removing a shoe. "What could anyone do with 20 pairs of Tevas?" I asked, and he shrugged, put the box to the side of the mattress and picked up his guitar. We sang Sweet Baby James and The Fox and "Dragon Wheel", Lorenzo's Chilean-pronounced version of Wagon Wheel.

Then I stood up, said goodnight, drove to a friend's house to sleep, and threw up.

And that is how I spent the entirety of the weekend. I threw up all over Fayetteville, in many different locations, wearing many different sun dresses. The daylight hours of Saturday were spent on Lower New; all the kids and staff kayaked and the parents rafted down through the big water and sizable rapids of the gorge. Even though I'd been looking forward to it for weeks, I wisely stayed behind. I had once before been in a vomit studded river run situation and found it undesirable at best and unwarranting of repetition.

Lying on the damp cushions of an outside couch, alone at the house of a friend who in reality is 99% a stranger, knowing everyone else was enjoying themselves out on the river in the ridiculous heat, I felt like the world's most pathetic human. At one point it crossed my mind to walk down to the gas station and buy a ginger ale, until I remembered with a sudden stab through my haze that the last time I had visited that gas station, I had driven away with the gas pump still in my car. The woman behind the counter - who, judging from her appearance, was about three years post mortem, - was livid, and upon her insistence I gave her my name and phone number. Whether or not she called regarding the damage I will never know, because both name and number were invented on the spot, with the one downfall of the plan being I could never set foot into the Little General again. No big shakes.

Until now, when I needed it badly, with its wealth of packaged crackers and refrigerated soda pops.

I did manage to attend the graduation banquet, and the graduation itself, knowing I'd be able to jump ship during both engagements if the need arose. And did it ever. I stood in front of the crowded dining room at Fayetteville's historic White Horse Inn, presented Taylor with the photography award, accepted her long, tight hug, then quietly back stepped out of the room, ran to the bathroom and threw up in an antique toilet. Twenty minutes later, I accepted my own recognition as being a great and dedicated teacher who mysteriously quit, accepted my brand new NRA sweatshirt and shorts and a long, tight hug from my boss, then ran to the bathroom and threw up. And that was only in the first hour of a marathon evening.


Towards the middle of the evening, I began to wilt, perking up momentarily when a parent announced he was splitting his bonus check amongst the teachers. Other than that lofty moment, I couldn't summon the will to remove my head from the table where it lay heavy on my folded arms. I could feel the roaming eyes of parents, who in the scant hours they had with us teachers- we who led their children to third world countries on a slalom course through earth quakes and volcanoes- always considered us with an eye of extreme scrutiny. Understandably so. Those parents who compared my jittery, manic temperament at dinner the night before and juxtapositioned it against tonight's slump and misery may have drawn the conclusion that I was coming down off some spree of drug use and other outlandish behavior. May they always wonder.

By the time of the actual graduation on Sunday morning, the worst of my flu had worked its course and I was feeling a bit more on solid ground. Regardless, I missed that wonderful moment where the seniors throw their caps and then hug each teacher in turn, because my dog was misbehaving. I had spent the majority of David's speech hissing bad dog! bad dog!! across the balcony to no avail, and I had to run across the stage, grab the dog from her tied up perch, throw in her the car where I whispered that I hope she rotted, and returned just in time to see everyone filing out, full of energy and excitement, the ceremony over.

All in all, graduation did not go as I had anticipated.

Zoe sobbed for two days straight because it was ending. I adore her.

**************************************************************************

It took a full day for me to recover to the point where I could face a day's worth of driving. Tuesday morning I again tied down the boats to the car and headed North. During the 16 hour drive I could eat nothing but milkshakes, which is not as good as it sounds.


Picture me, 11 o'clock at night, finally shoring up in the verdant, lilac covered hill of my home in New England, staggering out of the car and hitting the long overgrown weeds of my lawn in a heap. I looked up at the hot, white stars and almost couldn't bring myself to feel the relief that poured through me, so precious and powerful did it feel. At that moment, all the events in past week felt so pale, and distant, as if they were fiction, stars shooting randomly through the sky with very little relevance to me at all. Here I was, back at home, where I always ended up no matter what transpired previously. My life felt like an ellipse, always ending up here, the point where I had begun. I'm here, I'll always be here, I've always been here.

sweetness

My last night in Boone I couldn't sleep, and I was tired of laying awake inside the four walls of my room, now empty. I sat up and looked around, one open window, one open door. Sheets gathered like a tide pool around my legs.

So I got up and drove through dark, tree tunneled roads to the way-off house of my friend Sarah. I stumbled into her living room and she knew what to do, because she is the mother of a three year old.

She wrapped me in a bright blanket and gave me fruit juice. Not wine, not whiskey, not coffee, but juice. As if I were her little girl.

I hugged the blanket around my shoulders and wound my fingers through its thick weave. On the outside porch, we could hear the scream of coyotes unwinding through the atmosphere. From growing up in the country, I recognized the warbled, unnatural cries as the sounds dogs make after they've killed.

Sarah drank red wine, her long fingers wrapped around the stem and the bottle. I listened as she told me stories; I felt too worn out to talk much myself. When I left, around 2 in the morning, she told me to take the blanket with me. She gave me a book to read, said it always helped to be involved in a book. Then she hugged me and I went away.

I'm now about 800 miles away from Sarah with only a meager chance that I'll see her again. I haven't slept very well since that night, but the blanket she gave me is at the foot of my bed, and I have this image of myself carrying a little kid around in it someday. A little kid who is mine, a little kid who looks just like me.

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adventures of the paper heart

The night after he told me he wasn't in love with me anymore, I went to Walgreens. It seemed like a good place to go for someone who is back at square one. I picked up some over the counter sleeping pills and also a two dollar dog toy and a hair brush. I wondered why I hadn't bothered to brush my hair in the last four months, and if I had, would I be in this situation?

***

I've decided that my face could use some cosmetic enhancement, but it's taken me this long to decide that.

***

The girl who checked me out had white blond hair, dyed, and skinny Angelina Jolie arms. She pulled my things against the scanner and said, "I'm so bored, I want to die."

***

Sometimes you hurt so badly, you want to fall apart. You dream about yourself in pieces all over the house but when you wake up, you're still one whole, terrible, thing.

It's infuriating. All that talk about break downs and break ups and heart breaks, as if your heart was a crystal paperweight that could take a good smash against a marble floor every now and then.

As if.

My glossy, twenty five year old heart isn't going to break. It's a muscle and it goes squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Its double chambers rush with blood and empty again and again.

***

"Can't you read a magazine?" I asked the cashier, thinking I'm being helpful. I like to help solve other people's problems.

The skinny armed girl flicks her eyes left and right, then leans in. "We're not allowed to. We're not even allowed to have drinks back here."

"Not even water?" This sounded vaguely illegal to me.

She said, "Not. even. water. Although it depends sometimes on the manager."

Then I thought about telling her how I had it rough too. That I was going home to experiment with generic sleep medications because I loved someone who doesn't love me.

Talk about an age old story.

I don't say anything, because why one up the poor girl. She was stuck in a Wallgreens, not just all night, but night after night. I got to go home and pack up my car and begin forgetting, and she'd still be standing there surrounded by magazines she couldn't touch, eyes glued to the glacial sweep of the second hand.

I really think she may have had it worse than me.

And she shall be named Arlo

During my last summer in Seattle, I worked for a kayak shop. I loved the place, despite the enormous dept we had sunk into, and the terrible business ideals we practiced, and the constant phone calls from angry reps demanding we pay at least a portion of the money we owed. I loved the place because they payed me to write long blog posts about the grand canyon that nobody read, and when it was slow (it was always slow) we held flat water rodeos on the lake outside our doorstep.
But one thing stood between me and total employment bliss: I worked weekends. And oh, how I hated working weekends. I had myself convinced that I would have to work weekends for the rest of my life, and therefore never assimilate into that perfect group of weekend-warrior friends, or be able to maintain a meaningful relationship. I would float forever in that sad pool of people who have random week days off and never get to go on any adventures.

Unfortunately, throughout that summer, that sentiment was proved correct many times over.

The worst day that season had to be the time that everyone went rafting. Everyone but me, of course. Someone had to hold down the fort, even though we had stopped getting any customers weeks before. I had a very handsome coworker named Ryan, who had a wispy, Title 9 cover model of a girlfriend. I do not mean that she could have been a cover model, I mean that her cheekily cap and scarved face adorned the cover of three separate waterlogged catalogs next to my toilet, which is where I read them.

Between the two of them, they had a handful of friends who were either handsome or pretty, all young and enthusiastic, all fresh from the beach or the cliff or the campfire. And all of them were so very close to becoming my friends, all I needed to cement them into place was one solid, mutual adventure.

The day they went rafting was a Saturday. They showed up as I was opening the shop, a whole truck load of fresh faced, glossy haired 20-something holding reusable mugs full of shade grown coffee. Ryan and the other boys shoved an inflatable raft into a truck already loaded down with cartons of New Belgium beer while the girls stood around and informed me in voices full of easy laughter that they were heading for an overnighter on the Skykomish. The Skykomish, my favorite river. And they were overnighting it, complete with campfire. And stories. And many many occurrences that would later surface obnoxiously in dinner conversations in the form of "remember that time, when we overnighted the Skykomish......oh wait, that's right, you weren't there!"

As they drove off in a cloud of dust and indie music, I sat miserably on the cement stairs in front of the store, feeling the inadequacy of my life bloom around my feet. I would have given an eyeball to go with them.

I never did assimilate into that group of friends, the kayak shop fell apart at the hinges, and eventually I left Seattle in search of greener pastures which, much to my surprise, I found.

******************************************************************

Just last weekend, I woke up and trundled outside to see the most luscious, technicolor sky I had ever seen. I wanted to lick it. I said to myself, "This is going to be one hell of a good day, I can feel it!" Gung ho was I!

My friend Cat lured me over to her place with the promise of a big breakfast. When I stopped by, just planning on a few pancakes and then off to work, I found our friend Cooper trying to coral everyone into going rafting. And everyone was saying no for one reason or another. And I say no, because I don't have any of my stuff I'm supposed to work I don't feel like driving blah blah blah. . . .

I collected my things and headed to the car, and as I turned the ignition, a memory floated back to me. I saw a younger me, a smoking college athlete body (RIP), cute little wardrobe (RIP), and the absolute rock-bottom sadness of being left behind. And I thought to myself, it's been two years since that day at the kayak shop, have I learned absolutely nothing? And with a sudden burst of energy like the kind tiny little mothers use to pull monster trucks off their babies, I leaped out of the car, hollered to Cooper to WAIT! I'M A-COMIN! and I drove home through the traffic and construction, grabbed my paddling gear, threw down an iced coffee in record time, and showed up just in time to drive to the river.

Cooper told us we would be back in time for dinner, and I knew this was a complete lie because of how late we were leaving, but I kept quiet. Poor Rachel had a few graduation dinners to attend, and it was her birthday, so there were a few parties behind held in honor as well. And since she was leaving for Africa the next day for the rest of her life, there might have been a bit of final packing she wanted to get done. Well, we didn't put on that river until 4:30, which is extraordinarily late time to put on a river, and the wind blew us upstream the entire time, and as David and Cooper grew increasingly drunk throughout the day, they became increasingly ineffective as guides. Needless to say, dark fell, the moon rose, and we were still paddling.

Needless to say, I loved every wild moment. Every time we were blown into an eddy and David would holler "Paddle forward. Change of plans. Paddle backward. Good. Change of plans. Paddle forward." Every time one of us would lose our footing during a rapid and flop like a fish on the inflatable floor (I'm killing it with alliteration!) Every luxurious mile with nothing but sun and rapids and pools and beer and hilarious laughter cause, when you're rafting, everything seems funny.

As the sun set, Cooper treated us to a long and impossibly accurate version of Alice's Restaurant by Alro Guthrie, and I decided to name my first child, boy or girl, Arlo.

Arlo, in honor of a life spend outside plowing through rapids with handsome friends. After all, that's how I met Will. A month of rapids in the Grand Canyon in deep winter. And it's worked out well for us.

After four hours or so, Rachel and I grew so cold we were about to chop our teeth in half with our shivering. Towards mile eleven, we came across a fire burning on the side of the river and a host of colorful tents and people strolling around playing bean bag toss (which, by the way, is called "corn hole" down in these parts. Yuuup.) I figured it was a church camp; we were in Tennessee, after all. But we pulled over anyway and tied up the rafts, and hoofed it over to the fire to warm up. You should have seen the looks we were given, us in our long underwear and blue fleece onesies and PFDs with the ropes and safety gear. We looked like strangers to the planet entirely.

It turns out, we were crashing not a church camp, but the end of the year celebration of a local medical school. Which means we were surrounded by swathes of young doctors in leisure mode. CHA CHING. There was even a three string bluegrass band singing Wagon Wheel (what else) to set the mood. "Cooper!" I hissed. "This here is the perfect place to find a potential life mate!"

So David and Cooper generously decided to leave Rachel and I by the fire as they paddled away to the take-out. "Go find yourself a doctor!" They shouted as they faded away into the darkness.

So we sat there and waited for the doctors to rain down upon us, propose marriage and make us trophy wives. It was obvious we were healthy and active and of child bearing age, what else could they ask for? Sure enough, after just a few minutes, a young man in an Arcteryx jacked approached us, studied us with his head sideways and and then said, "huh....you guys.....look like you....float good. huh."

I was prepared to overlook this, this worst pickup line ever delivered, because he was a doctor. "Look," I whispered to Rachel, "he's wearing Arcteryx, definitely a doctor." (In case you weren't aware, Arcteryx is a brand so pricey it makes Patagonia look like the stuff of the church garmet sale.)

Well, it turns out, he wasn't a doctor, or a nurse, or even an orderly. He was a raft guide for the NOC base on the Nolichucky. In fact, every boy who talked to us that night was a raft guide. I wanted to say, "Gentlemen, I don't mean to be impolite, but we can have conversations with raft guides any old time. We're here for the Meds." But unfortunately for us and our futures, the doctors took no heed to two waterlogged adventuresses. Not even Rachel, and she's gorgeous. Perhaps it was the fleece onesies with the drop seats, but the doctors stood with their backs to us the whole night with the pretty brunette girls who, at age 26, were already accomplished pediatric oncologists.
When Dennis, our scraggly kayaker who had long ago ditched us for the warmth of the car finally appeared by the fire to usher us away, we were happy to take our leave. And truth be told, Dennis is five times more handsome than any MD I've ever seen.

On the two hours of stomach twisting roads back to Boone, I sat tired and content in the front seat. I thought again of that morning in Seattle, and I was so proud of myself for transforming my life into what it had become.

Looking back on it, I suppose it was the last time I was ever really that happy in North Carolina.

Just one last ride

This is what it feels like to surf. You are in the middle of a river and water is rushing past. Of course the water is heading downstream. If it meets an obstacle, like a stone or a branch, it will find its way around it. If it crashes over a waterfall, it might pause for a moment to collect itself, and then it will keep going downstream.

It goes like this until it gets where it's going, which is I don't know where.

When you are surfing you, are smack in the middle of all this- only like a miraculous little hover craft, you stay in the same spot. The water is splashing both backwards and forwards, and you can sit right up on it, with only a little knowledge of how the whole thing works. You carve back and forth, or spin or do a somersault, but the whole point is not what you can do while you're in there, but that the whole world is rushing by and you aren't going with it.


This is my world right now. Everything is as good as I could ask for- reasonably ask for, anyhow. So here I am, carving through each day on a small green wave and the rest of life is flying by without bothering me.

I want to record this time, when things are suspended with style and precision and evanescence above my head. In a few short weeks I will have left it all behind, or it will have left me behind, and I'll be standing on a hill somewhere in New England missing what will then be called 'those days.'

It's a much better habit to write about good things while they happen, while I'm still surfing, than wait for a dreary moment somewhere down the line and look back with sadness that it's over. So here it is, good moments, caught in the air, alive and kicking.


I wake up whenever I want, which is enough to make me choose this life over any other life I might have. (Unless I can have that big farm house in Vermont or Maine with the bouncy toddlers and the Pulitzer prize and Hollywood calling for the the movie rights, I'd get up early for that life.) I drive in my car- my car, I have a car- so many years I had no car- into town and listen to WNCW play a program called Pickin on the porch, or Paul Simon sing the boy in the bubble or the baby with the baboon heart, and I go to the same cafe every day and order the same double shot drink, splash of cream and a straw.

And then I open up the computer and start to work. Whatever I can do. Whatever I can get my hands on. Because I am so rabidly, so ferociously determined to support myself- and support myself in my way, doing what I like to do. I've been a waitress with the psycho Moldovan workmates and I've been a 50-hours-a-week nanny for the Japanese family who collected glass objects and left them at toddler height all over the condo. And the whipping girl for the going out of business store which specialized in taking people's money and forgetting to put their order through. And I am going to figure out how to support myself on my terms, even if takes my whole life. No more pretending I smoke cigarettes so I can take the 5 minute smoker break during my shift, or curling up on the polka dotted baby blanket and crying along with the kid because his Couture onesie cost more than my week's paycheck.

So here I am. Scraping by for now, and it's enough, and I sometimes get so excited about taking a new idea from concept to creation that even my dreams are giddy.

And the girls- ah, the girls. Like mist, they drift in and out of my presence throughout the day. They whip me off in different directions- wing night at Char on Monday and taco Tuesday at the Boone Saloon, (and when you can eat a big meal out for three dollars and fifty cents, twice a week, you really start to believe big things are possible.) Not to mention the music festivals, cheesecakes, front porch evenings and other things that girls are good for.

I love that my friends don't call. I love that they know where to find me, so they find me. They appears suddenly and with no sound; it's as if they fall out of the shelf or pop out from the cupcake. I look up- there they are- come to relieve me of my work day. I love the days off that begin with lawn chairs and lazy plans, followed by old stores full of bottles of honey and cherry turnovers, and kayaking at the pollen thick waters of the Watauga dam. After we're tired and waterlogged, we shop for groceries together and make dinner with the windows open, engulfed in the constant spin of laughter and conversation.

I love an entire afternoon on the Nolichucky with Will, in the slender margins between his workdays. Pushing through the soft, polished surface of the river all the way down to Jaws, the play spot where we surf for hours. I even love the random little beat downs that hole occasionally doles out that leaves my helmet twisted and me gasping. I love drinking beer on the rocks between sessions and racing the trains across the railroad bridge, and drawing shut the evening by slicing tomatoes for fajitas while wearing pajamas, listening to archives of This American Life.

I have health insurance, a modicum of savings and a working car. I have a library card, things to occupy my time, and health. I have a daily routine that I look forward to each night.

It hasn't always been this way.


The radio croons the NPR blues, singing economy, economy, economy- people my age will consider this a forbidden word when we're older and we make the rules, I just know it. After the summer, my calendar lies empty and white, an incessant question. At night I dream of my own children whom I can't feed, and I wake up tangled in love and panic.

It all combines to create the sound of a river roaring past, and I wonder just how long I can balance here, protected on this fragile wave. Three weeks? Four? And then Boone spits me out, and I head North again.

What are you doing, where have you been?

I have been working a lot lately- ten, eleven hours a day. Learning how to create graphics and edit photos, editing other people's mistakes and trying to smooth out words that I didn't write.

I really like it. I go to bed each night excited to wake up the next morning and do it all over again. But I hate watching my own writing slide to the side and become an afterthought, and I wonder how many ironic, prolific sentences and stories float through my head and just keep floating through, since I can't pause long enough to catch them.

I wonder about the balance of work and life, or if my eyes will eventually dry up after all this computer screen staring, or how quickly I can develop carpal tunnel syndrome. When I'm really focusing, I hit the mouse and the keyboard so hard and fast that someone asked the other day what video I was playing.

I think of my dog tied up outside, who deserves a life of endless fields and balls thrown at thirty second intervals into deep rivers. If I go too long without taking her on a real adventure, or...um...a walk....I'll compensate by buying her a new toy. Which she ignores in favor of the ball which I won't throw. And then I think, JE-ZUS what the hell kind of mother will I be??

I think of the mountains surrounding this town that I still haven't explored, the houses on the hills in the evening that I still haven't photographed, my friends, freshly out of college exams, skittering off to the lake house and the swimming holes and the Nolichucky playspots.

I know I'm not the only one who works long hours, it's a universal complaint, and anyone who can voice that complaint is lucky, especially in these ridiculous economic times. It's bittersweet to work as a freelancer, with no guarantees about future work so you'd better get while the gettin's good. And no boss hovering over your shoulder, telling you how fast you're coming along, patting you on the back and hitting the stop watch at five o'clock, shouting "drinks on me!" (That's what it's like to work in an office, right?) Where are my witty, prank playing coworkers like the ones in the TV show? Where is my desk mate who plants my cell phone and computer chord in a bowl of jello?

But when you think about it, now is a good time to put in as many hours as possible. Later on, I'll have a beautiful wooden house to keep up, a huge garden to grow and a couple of toddlers bouncing around the house.

I will have those things, right? Those things that I want so ferociously....I mean, it's guaranteed- isn't it?

Can I have that in writing?

Debutant

Still the memories keep swirling. I wake up at night, climb out of bed and go into the quiet kitchen. I turn on the faucet, fill up a glass of water and stand there, leaning against the sink. It's no longer her birthday, or the anniversary of her death. There is no reason to think, well of course today is going to be hard. But yesterday I wrote about it, for the first time. That really did me in. I rapped on the glass of the aquarium tank inside of my head where all my sad memories swim around in darkness, and I caught their attention. Now they won't leave me alone.

***************************************************************************************
Mid January, and our friend Amy is celebrating her birthday at hip a bar in Fremont.
It's a modern place with blue lights and a salsa band playing on an all black stage. The girls are drinking greyhounds and sex on the beaches, the boys are drinking beer. Hall, the our friend who flirts with everyone, dances with each one of us in turn. At the end of each dance he'll give your lower back a squeeze and wink at you.

Amy is very tall, and sweet, with the bone structure of a super model. She and Sarah were the type of inseparable roommates who did everything together, they even got engaged within days of each other. At least that's how I remember it. They shared something, a bond both of them would have chosen to shed if they'd had the choice- they both had a sibling die young. From cancer.

When the second lease ended, Sarah moved into a house with her husband Doug and their two roommates, Chris and Heather Ann. Then Sarah hit her head, and the side effects of her concussion- they just wouldn't go away. And so they took a look inside her skull, and the doctor studied the grey images on the monitor screen and shook his head. He didn't need to squint, or look closer. There is was.

Sarah was twenty three and recently married. If she was going to look at any swirling patterns on a monitor screen, it should have been the fuzzy outline of a baby's curved, feathery spine. Not the imaging of her own death.

She didn't tell Amy. Somehow, she kept it from her. I suppose we all were very busy during that time and it can be easy to let a few weeks slip by without seeing your closest friends, even when they live in the same city. In this case, a few weeks was all that was needed to turn Sarah into some swollen, glassy eyed, raspy voiced impersonation of Sarah.

She kept it from Amy, because Amy, having already lost her little sister, would understand what the rest of us just didn't. We were stumbling our way through the dark, trying to feel around for objects that we recognized. It took a long time for our minds to gradually fuse to the concept of dying. Like, actually dying. It was her sudden and severe deterioration that baffled us the most. It was absurd. But Amy has been here before.

In fact, a lot of our friends didn't know how sick she had gotten. Some knew that it had been discovered, last fall, that that she carried around a little bomb inside of her brain, but they didn't know it had gone off.

She made her dying-of-cancer-debut at Amy's birthday party, at the blue lit bar in Fremont.

Sarah with some of our teammates at my house, after she got sick.

She walks slowly into the bar, wearing a knit hat to cover the slice in her head. She cannot really walk by herself, or stand upright without swaying. Doug is supporting her, her body slumped and heavy from steroids.

Not sure how to act, those of us who know just pretend that everything is okay. We hug Sarah and take pictures with her. "What is she doing here?" We ask her roommates, and they just shrug. "She wanted to come."

Of course we want to see her, and we want her with us. The blueish lights casting a sickly glow over the faces of strangers, the band up there playing the tango, the bang of an empty shot glass hitting the bar, and the looks on our friends faces who haven't seen Sarah since she started treatment- they are stunned completely into silence- it feels like a madhouse.

Doug has to go to the bathroom. He gently pushes Sarah over to me. "HOLD HER" he shouts. I am in awe of his intense focus which he has kept up since the diagnosis. Sarah sways from side to side and I steady her, leaning my full weight against hers. "Woah, there, girl!" I say, and laugh. People around us are trying not to stare. Some are smirking, thinking this is just another girl who got too drunk too early in the evening.

Mostly she just stands there, lolling back and forth. I hate to admit it, but I don't want to look at her. She looks so different, so shrouded in a fog of sickness and medicine and confusion. Her face is lopsided, with only half of her mouth able to move. If I was a good person I wouldn't even notice any of that. I'd just her face with one hand and think about how beautiful she is. But I can't even come close to that.

All of a sudden her eyes swim into focus. "Melina," she says, in her high raspy voice. "You're so beautiful. I love you." She says, "I love you so much." She says, "I miss you."

I want to tell her to shut up and stop talking that way. But I just say "Oh, well, I love you too!" Which is true, but the way I say it is fake. I said it like, "you silly goose, of course we love each other! Now drink up! Let's have a party!"

She drifts away again. I keep wondering what she could be thinking about. "Where's Doug?" She asks. I tell her he's in the bathroom. "Is he coming back?" Hers is the voice of someone who has just woken up, dream bleary.

"Of course he's coming back silly," I tell her, just making everything one big joke. "He's only in the bathroom."

She says, "I want him."

But when Doug comes back, his wedding rings falls off his finger. And all of our friends are down on their knees, searching through stranger's ankles on the slick floor. When the band finishes up their song, the bar tender flicks the lights and announces, "Ladies and gentlemen, a young man has lost his wedding ring, if we could all take a look..."

And all the strangers in the crowd roar a laugh, ha ha, he's lost his wedding ring, ha ha!

I'm still holding up Sarah, and not one of us breathes until someone finds it. The band starts to play again. The lights in the bar become strobe. I think, this will definitely kill her.

I go outside to get some fresh air and Heather Ann drives the car around to pick up Sarah. Amy, the birthday girl, is standing there sobbing. Saying I had no idea- how could this be- she's so sick- is she's dying?

It takes two people to shove Sarah into the passenger's seat. Where it the romance of wasting away? Not here. "Hup, hold on, gotta get your seat belt" says someone, reaching around and feeling around for the metal clasp. The door slams and car slides away into the night.

The whole street is quiet. A friend of mine who doesn't know Sarah is standing outside the bar. "What's wrong with your friend?" He asks. "Is she sick?"

"Yes," I answer. Then I add, "she has brain cancer." I say it just for the hell of it.

I haven't seen this place before

Yesterday was the birthday of my friend Sarah. She would have been 26 years old. I woke up alone under white sheets and decided that today would be a celebration. Every moment, a celebration of life. Because I'm still here. I'm so happy that I'm still here. I'm so happy that my heart still flutters inside of me.

I picture my heart as made of paper, a red valentine that tick-tocks back and forth inside my chest cavity.

The day was shaping up to be a perfect joy. The sky was heavy with the promise of a good rain, but it never came. I went to Merlefest, the big bluegrass festival down the road, with my girlfriends. We all wore light, colorful sun dresses. The mercury crept up and up until it was sweltering hot, and the crowd of thousands pressed forward as the Avett Brothers, hometown North Carolina heroes, took the stage.

The heat was unbearable and the snow cones dripped into puddles on the grass. The music was loud, the smashing sounds of strings flying off a cello and an electric banjo and their weird, tight harmonies. Everyone mouthed along the words and danced like maniacs in tight spaces. I waited them to sing my favorite song, but they never did.

Nobody knows it but I am so sad, and that is the saddest of all, my friends. That is the saddest of all.

And every moment of that searing, sunburning day, I was haunted by these memories. How they cut her head open. How they burned her. How they tried to save her. How she died anyway.

It's been more than two years, and I'm not ready to take the approach your supposed to take when someone dies young. Live life to the fullest cause you never know when your a-gonna go! Let's live it up, that's what she would have wanted! hey ho! No, it's not that kind of greeting-card-inspiration situation. Is it ever that kind of situation?

Sarah's death was like someone throwing a diesel truck engine into the fragile spinning gears of my life. And I can't find joy in her birthday, because she's not here to turn 26. And I'm still haunted by the memories of those impossible weeks and months before she died.

I can't even think of memories of Sarah in any sense, at any point in her big, beautiful, boisterous life- before she got sick, all the trips we took and things we did -it's all overshadowed by the vivid memories of what she became at the end. That's no way to honor someone.

*************************************************************************************
It's towards the end. I'm driving through the university district of Seattle on a surprisingly bright day in late January. Sarah asked me to bring her a triple shot, extra hot latte from Fuel. Whatever she asks for, she gets. She doesn't ask for much, but when she does, it's specific.

Sarah is alone by the time I get to her house. I must be late- she's not ever supposed to be alone anymore.

She is sitting at the dining room table, wearing the same lose, button up sweater she was wearing the last time I was over. She doesn't turn her head when I walk in, and when I sit down next to her she doesn't acknowledge me. She is staring down at a picture of her husband, Doug, on her Iphone.

After a few moments, she looks up. Her motions are slow, and sort of loopy. Her face is swollen from steroids and her body has gotten big and heavy. The scar from where they cut her head open stretches across her scalp like a black, bloody caterpillar. It looks thick and glistening, as if covered in shellac.

"Look," she says. "Isn't he handsome?" She sticks the photo on the Iphone under my face.

I agree that he's handsome. He's incredibly handsome. I've known him for years, from before they were married, from before they were dating. We're friends, we're all friends.

***

To her wedding, she wore a long white dress that hugged her exotic curves, and a white feather in her hair. She looked like a goddess and a bride and a mermaid.

***

From somewhere in the house, an alarm goes off. Sarah reaches towards a shelf full of orange and white pill bottles. Hundreds of them. She chooses one, twists the cap but can't get her hands to work right. My reaction time is not immediate, I'm too busy staring at her, telling my stomach not to feel so sick, wondering if I am actually asleep and making all this up. When I finally reach out to help her, the cap comes flying off the bottle and scatter across the floor. From under the table, the dog rises and takes off after them.

I jump off my seat and drop to my knees, hands skittering across the floor like startled birds as I try and gather them off the floor before their eaten. Pills that will stop Sarah from feeling any more pain.

Sarah is trying to smile. Only half of her face is working, and barely. "You can keep those." She says. Her voice is so strange, high and raspy as if she is forming each word with her last breath.
"Sell them. Those will make you a lot of money."

She's completely serious. She looks at the army of rattling bottles and knows what the rest of us don't know yet, that she won't be around to finish them off. Since her diagnosis, she's smoked cigarettes like it's going out of style. She'll sit out on the porch with a bottle of liquor and a pack of cigarettes. She can't light the cigarette anymore, or even hold them, so we do it for her. We hold them burning between our two fingers, bring them up to her mouth and down.

What's the point.

I didn't take the pills, of course. I put them back in the bottle, brought her a glass of water, and returned the bottle to it's shelf, arranging it neatly against the others. If I had known just how quickly she would leave us, I may have had second thoughts. Maybe I would have kept them, sold them somewhere in North Carolina to get money to buy groceries.

It's not that I'm desperate. It's just that money's tight.

Maybe I would have just kept them, an hard, angry, rattling souvenir of a brutal time that felt remarkably like a dream.

I know they were just trying to save her. But I wish they had done it in a way that seemed less violent. Couldn't they have done some type of laser scan, instead of ripping into her skull? They trespassed into her brain, can you imagine? All the steroids, the spinal taps. Why couldn't we have all just gathered around her and put our hands on her body and make her all better? Why don't things work like that?

The radiation that left burns on her scalp, couldn't they have decided against that? Didn't they already know, by that point, that there was no stopping it?

I remember seeing her husband kick at the wall. "I want to punch those doctors in their faces," he said.

I wish they had done more. I wish they had done less.

All I can think about is how they split her head open and they burned her with radiation. But she died anyway.

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glamorous life

Tonight, Will and I made tom kah gai Soup. It's that deliciously tangy, pale red soup you get in Thai restaurants, made with coconut milk and chicken. Oh, it's heaven. And it was raining outside. And we were cooking lots of it to feed all of our friends we'd be visiting later on.

I was sauteeing shallots and cilantro in hot oil in a heavy black pot over the stove, and Will was cutting up raw chicken. We were having some sort of argument, but it was the type of argument had by two people who really like each other a lot. You know what I mean. To reinforce one of his points, Will threw a piece of raw chicken at me. I dodged it and it hit the kitchen floor.

Right on cue, Hometeam came skidding forward. I said, "Go ahead, Hometeam, eat the chicken!" and Will said, "Gah! No, don't let her eat that, it's raw!"

"Will" I said with that voice I use when I think it's a good time to educate someone, "she can eat raw chicken, she's a dog. Dogs are designed to eat raw things."

To which he replied something like, "Well....hmmm. I don't think so."

And I couldn't just let it go. I was thinking about my friends Angela and Ryan, whose first dog died of stomach cancer, so they did some research and they now feed their replacement dog only raw meat and bones, and as far as I know, that dog is still living forever. I told Will all about this dog.

I reminded him about dogs in the wild tearing up their prey under howling moons.

I was happy to edify him on this matter.

Just as I was wrapping up my lesson, we heard a terrible sound. There was Hometeam, spasming wretchedly on the carpet, her whole body writhing. She threw- up, once, twice, three times. She threw up endlessly.

After a final heave, Hometeam hung her head and limped to the door.

I sensed this would do little to support my argument.

I looked over at Will. He was watching the episode like a kid about to board a carnival ride made of candy: pure, unadulterated, uncontained joy. He was literally the happiest I've ever seen him.

"Well," he said calmly. "That was the highlight of my day."

The funny thing is, I'm still certain that I'm right.