I am teaching eighth grade English to four students at a local summer school. They are all boys. Every day I come in with my books and my attendance sheet and my red pen and tell them to sit down, to be quiet, to hand in their homework.

They make fun of each other often. A lot of their jokes center around the bathroom, their respective mothers. At first I worried they’d make fun of me too. So I tried to be cool, to win them over.

We went around the room on the first day and introduced ourselves. We said our names, our grades and something we liked. When it was my turn I said I liked horses and that I was in graduate school. One of the boys said, What do you do in graduate school? And I told him, Learn to write books.

He has, each day since then, asked me what my book will be about.

I have, each day since then, successfully avoided the question.

***

Mondays are vocabulary days and on this one the boys sit down and pull out their workbooks and open them up to lesson four, An Apple a Day, which is all about medical words. Do these pages on your own, I say, and then we’ll review them together. They all look down. Pick up their pencils. Drop them. Pick them up again. Settle.

It is quiet for two minutes. What is tumor? Someone asks. It’s cancer, someone answers. What is malignancy? It means you’re going to die, the same boy says. What is consolation? It’s what people say to you when they feel sorry for you but can’t do anything to help.

A little while later the boy with all the questions raises his hand and tells me he is finished. Why don’t you start to read tonight’s homework? I say and he says Ok then asks me if the section from Huck Finn he has opened to is a short story and I tell him no, it is an excerpt. Like from a book? He asks and I nod yes. Like your book? He asks and I tell him, longer, better. What’s your book about, anyways, he asks . I ignore him as I always do, but this time without the pretense of listening to another student, or reprimanding him for speaking when he should be reading, or asking him to focus on the work at hand.

So what’s it about? He asks again. Consolation, I say.

***

In between classes I go to Starbucks for a green tea and a pee break. I am standing in line for the lu. The woman ahead of me walks with a cane and one hand on her lower back and lurches slowly into the single stall bathroom. I sigh, prepare myself for a wait, and turn to a nearby bulletin board, covered with colored flyers. Bake sales, babysitting, real estate and such. 

Emily’s Take, A Texas Hold’em and Bingo Tournament Event catches my eye because the shottily drawn pair of dice and playing cards that line its edges contrasts considerably with a small photograph of a bald girl wearing glasses and a tentative smile. I lean in closer.

Emily was a typical college student, it says, before the pain started. Doctors were at a loss and a laparoscopic surgery was scheduled for late summer. But by May the pain was excruciating and immediate surgery was performed. When Emily awoke from that surgery she was given the diagnosis of PNET or Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare cancer. With an overwhelming chemotherapy regimen every three weeks, Emily and her family are doing everything they can to fight and get her life back. Please help us help them during this unimaginable, difficult time.

The door to the bathroom opens. The woman hobbles out and I enter, thinking about Emily, about who she might be behind the flyer.

An hour later, climbing the stairs to my yoga studio, I see the flyer again. And at the end of practice, the teacher makes an announcement. There are raffle tickets for sale at the front desk, she says, To  benefit one of the staff member’s sisters who is sick with cancer.

***

Emily’s sister is blonde and tan and always behind the Yogaworks desk. She checks people in. She smiles. She says, Enjoy your practice and Namaste. She is seventeen at the most. When I approach the front desk after class she is talking to a woman who has come to candle flow every Monday night for six months. When this woman started, in December, she was bald and wore a patterned scarf knotted over her head. She sometimes wears it now, but over dull patches of short brown hair. Emily’s sister is nodding to what this woman says about having cancer and getting chemo and how hard it is and how strong her sister is and I am standing behind them with my wallet out, ready to buy a ticket and thinking I might pipe in and say Yes it is so hard and this is how I know, but decide against it, slip a ten dollar bill in the donation box and leave.

***

For weeks after that I will think about walking up to Emily’s sister, placing a hand on her arm and conveying, with a sort of holy delicacy, the depth of my understanding.

I will build up this saintly act of esprit de corps in my mind, oscillating between thinking it self indulgent – the symptom of some cancer victim closeness complex – and supportive. I will wander out of class and eye Emily’s sister and then leave, over and again until I finally find the courage to approach the front desk and linger after class. When I do, I will feel awkward. Everyone else will have left and I will be standing there, pretending to read a flyer on intensive teacher training before breaking the silence and saying, how is your sister doing? She will look up like she didn’t know I was there. She will tell me that Emily is good, thanks for asking. That she came down with a slight cold after her last chemo treatment. I will nod and say, that sometimes happens and I will then ask, how are you doing? And she will look surprised because maybe nobody asks her that. But she will recover quickly and rattle off a series of well rehearsed lines about how supportive her family has been and the community of course and I will nod along with a compassionate look on my face. I will say I understand and I’ll place a hand on her arm and add, if you ever need anything. I will do this despite the fact that in so doing I am making Emily’s sister different somehow. Turning a spotlight on her suffering. Still, and maybe because I need to for some egocentric reason, I will offer consolation.

I finally got my porch light fixed. It took ten minutes, if that. A man named Max came over and twisted off one of the screws that held the burnt out bulb in place, pulled a fresh one from a cardboard sleeve and bing!

Illumination.

I have been talking about getting maintenance over here to do this very simple thing for months now. For over six months. During those six months, I stumbled around after dark on the porch, watering plants, collecting laundry, and thinking how nice it would be to set out here at my card table with a cup of tea and my laptop and do some writing.

This is what I am doing right now. I am sitting here, sipping tea and blissfully typing away in a garden irradiated by soft globe lighting. My plants are sprouting around me. My little dog is staring up at me, bringing me his tennis ball, and settling in beside the basil for a snooze. And I am watching him, the basil, the tendrils of the nocturnally blooming jasmine plant that climbs the plaster beside this writing table. I am watching life as it stretches into being all around me and I am thinking how grateful I am and then, how nice it feels to be grateful.

Tonight, after I tucked Ham in and turned off all the barn lights, I looked into the sky and saw the moon again. She’s just a sliver in the darkness. A waxing crescent. But close to us, so close that I can trace lines around the shadow of her fullness, the roundness she’ll grow into. The stars are out too, farther away and spaced at a distance, making this moon appear singular in the sky.

It’s been over a week since she last showed her face. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when the moon disappears, things get weird. I never know exactly how, all I can say is that I settle into a subtle funk. Begin to sense, like a sneaking suspicion, an obscuration of an otherwise balanced bond with myself. It’s like, without the moon to hold me down, to light my way, I’m perpetually fumbling around at eleven p.m. on a lightless porch, looking for my laundry without any real clue as to where it’s hanging or what I’m dropping when I try to gather it up.

And yet, for all the funkiness the moon affects, she never looks uncomfortable up there, in her solitude, in the darkness. She is perpetually poised, never in need, ever self suspended.

I’m partial to this sort of space myself. At times, I’ve opted for it entirely. In doing so I have sometimes forgotten that I am not the moon. I have sometimes passed whole years trying to hold myself up without help. I have flailed, floundered, fallen down and found myself. And it’s been good that way. It’s been nice and navy blue. I must say, though, a little light, a little moonshine, never hurt anybody.

It is Saturday night in Valencia California.

Al green is on in Starbucks, singing about how She Used to Be My Girl.

I am writing this on an outdoor patio, typing to his words and the hum of female voices at the table behind me.

Teenagers wander out of the Starbs holding whipping topped pink drinks and talking over each other through braces and straws. Plates and forks collide at the hollow form restaurant next door. A gauche water fountain in the shape of a little girl and a puppy, gurgles. The women behind me talk about their hair, other women’s hair, the Bible.

I came here to write. To work on my book. Because I haven’t worked on my book for weeks. Because when I do, I find some sort of calm that’s been missing lately.

Lately, I have been all ahumm with a sense of loss, of foreboding I’ve not felt in a while.

Driving home from Los Angeles earlier, hung over and in the kind of dulled and nasty mood that gin and tonic and too little sleep affect upon a pillowy mind, I listened a while to a podcast on peace from samsara through mindfulness and meditation. The teacher, an ordained Buddhist nun to whom I oftentimes listen, lectured on the nature of suffering, and the importance of RAIN – Recognize, Allow, Investigate and Name – to alleviating anxiety. Cessation of suffering comes from accepting your feelings, she said, From turning towards your fears, not running from them.

Sometimes I get this frightened feeling, this humm, and forget that there’s nothing to tack it to. Nothing in my life has gone missing, of late. I’ve looked around. Searched under stacks of paper. The space between the couch cushions. The drawers into which I sometimes shove unpaid bills, unpalatable mail. There’s nothing there. Everything’s in order. So why now? Why this familiar sense of fear, of mourning? Perhaps it’s only ever the potential for things to be lost that sends us into sadness.

The Buddhist nun I listen to talks about the importance of presence. Of compassion. For oneself and others. Place the fearful mind, she says, In the cradle of loving kindness. Sometimes she says this and I think, Oh yea, and breathe deep and feel myself again.

I remember buying a box of fluorescent washable markers that winter I lived on Water Street. I remember dancing with Richa and drawing all over the wall length window panes that looked out on an endless mess of office buildings and their rows of darkened rooms. TRUST TRUST I wrote. TRUST LOVE she wrote. And we danced and laughed and the wind blew off the seaport and up against our windows.

The sun went down by five each night that year. Maybe it did every winter in the city but it all seems darker on Fulton street, where the lights of Chinatown wane and businesses are sparse. I remember never being warm enough there. I remember never wearing the kind of jacket that might keep me warm enough there.

Instead, and looking for some heat, I curled into the cradle of an insistence upon positivity. Held myself, shivering, inside a hull of heart hardened numbness in the name of it. I wrote TRUST all over the place and refused to allow myself a single doubtful thought. Still, thinking back on my little self, floundering so earnestly in the cold, fighting so sincerely to keep her fear at bay, I cannot help but love her for her effort, however misguided. And so this evening I pause and pull out my pen and write TRUST in black ink on the thin strip of skin between my thumb and pointer finger.

When I go into Starbucks for a refill on my tea, the server touches my tattoo when he reaches for my money and asks me what I have planned for tonight. Work, I say and he raises his eyebrows and asks if I’d like my tea extra sweet. I can’t tell if he is making fun of me for being the nerd with the Macbook on a Saturday night, or hitting on me so I say No thank you and smile but refuse to meet his eyes when he says, Have a beautiful night.

And later, once I’ve sat back down by the fountain and started to stare blankly at pages of my writing illuminated by the laptop screen, a waiter from Wolf Creek Grill will approach, sit down and say What’s up, and ask me what I have going on tonight and I will tell him Work also and he will say Really? Are you sure? And I’ll nod yes, adding, Work and recovery, but thank you for asking and he’ll say Alright and walk away, leaving me wondering if I look lost or sick or have This One’s Off Her Game plastered on my forehead, a beacon of vulnerability blinking there for all the hungry boys.

Their hunger is the sort of stuff I used to take something from. The kind I used to use to keep me company on those nights I walked into an empty apartment and thought isn’t it better this way and took off my eyeliner and pulled on my sweatpants and ate ramen in front of this month’s Vogue or a flashing TV screen. It’s the kind that used to warm the beds of boys whose whispers and words I took in and took for true after two shots and four flutes of champagne with their drink tickets at the bar. It is the sort of attention that used to make me feel special and now only makes me feel all the more disposable, all the more alone.

I haven’t yet decided what to do about this.

Sometimes I think the pain of actual loss – breakup, divorce, death – is significantly less biting than the anticipation of it.  Sometimes I wonder when I became so damaged as to expect it at every turn. To walk around with walls up, battements raised in anticipation of disappointment and loss. I have learned to create the very outcome I am in constant fear of.

I haven’t yet discovered how to turn this trend around. I am learning. It is a poky process.

After that winter on Water Street, with the wind and the snow storms and the rows of lightless buildings, Richa and I moved. Replaced the darkness of the Seaport with the unending movement of Union Square. It’s so much easier to go out here, I remember saying, twirling around in our new apartment, which was roughly a sixth of the size of our previous, palatial place. Everything will be lighter here, I said and strapped on my heels and strode out and into darkness again. Into strangers and strands of pulsating color. Into white lines and the way we waved vodka cranberries at each other across the haze of it all.

I do not do that anymore. It was not easy to stop.

And I am proud of myself. For the unshakable sense of self I found when I slipped off the stilettos and stopped pretending to be somebody I knew I never was. There remains, however, some body of fear that slides itself inside me and turns itself on beneath my skin. It is at once a shell of the past - old stories, patterns, repetitions, I cannot forget – and the figure I fought against years ago. That vulnerable body I blocked out with white lights and lines and strangers and skin, then forced myself to see, to surrender to.

And I have, for the most part, surrendered. Have learned to love her, my vulnerable self. To tolerate her imperfections. To fold arms around them, to hold her little body, in silence, for however long it takes her to become still. To become the words that fold, curiously, into these questions.

As a means of distracting myself from the loneliness wrought by the semester’s end and a current state of unemployment, I have begun to shop.

I don’t buy much, but I do while away the hours trolling aisles and pillaging clearance racks. I check tags, feel fabrics and pick up items I do not need just to fondle their curves, set them back down and move on.

Tonight I wandered around the Wal-Mart supercenter with several vague projects in mind.

My apartment is a mess. The stacks of books and manuscript submissions have grown to towering heights. I haven’t seen my end tables, or kitchen counter in months. So I need cheap bookcases, filing cabinets or drawers. And also, I need finger paints and paper so I can sit at my newly cleared kitchen table and get my creative juices flowing.

I check out the bookcases but don’t see a color I like. I flirt briefly with a set of teal blue throw pillows for 12.99 before coming to my senses and walking away, having learned long ago that there are some things you’ll regret foregoing and others you’ll not remember in five minute’s time.

I also long ago learned that my artistic sensibilities require little more than a child’s brush set, plastic palette and bowl of water, so I make next for the toy department. I wheel my cart down each aisle, past dart guns and video games, action figures and Lego play sets but can’t find the Crayolas. When I ask Sherese, a Wal-Mart employee with heavily gelled bangs and fake eyelashes, where I can find the crayons and paint sets she tells me they no longer exist. “We used to stock them at the end of the Barbie aisle,” she says, “But the store stopped carrying art supplies about six months back.” She pauses, “nobody was buying them.” I do my best to look appalled and she tells me to check amongst the Barbie’s for stray materials so I u-turn and head for the neon pink glow.

There’s not much in the way of art supplies in Barbie’s world, but the opportunity to peruse her latest incarnations is never lost on this consumer. I used to love the girl. Perhaps I even need a new model to place on the mantle as a reminder of simpler times.  When I arrive in Barbara’s midst however, I find her markedly changed. She is automated, implanted with voice chips, or permanently affixed to zip drive sized plastic cell phones. Her body, if this can be fathomed, is now trimmer, less buxom but with hip and torso measurements as tiny as ever.

I pick up a pink box and press gently on the transparent plastic cover, just to hear it bend in upon it self and bounce back. It’s an unmistakable noise, this, impossible to miss even when obscured slightly by wrapping paper and bows. There was a time that I excitedly scampered to the foot of the Christmas tree checking for this noise, for Barbie’s presence in my yearly stash. Now she only depresses me. Cultural standards have shifted to make normative a female figure akin to that of this plastic doll. Boob jobs, ass jobs, tummy tucks and so on have made it possible to match her measurements and now that that’s happened, she’s changing again.

Perhaps ironically, the only item I leave Wal-Mart with this evening is a fifteen dollar full length mirror because, I reason, it’ll help widen the room and create illusions of space. And besides, despite Barbie’s patriarchal plot to dampen my self-image and by extension, my empowerment, I like looking at myself. In other words, I am completely narcissistic.

I suppose the fact that the sight of my own reflection is pleasing to me belies a childhood spent brushing Barbie’s hair and picking out risqué outfits for her to wear. Or maybe not. Maybe, despite what many mothers might say, playing with Barbie dolls is an empowering practice for girls growing up in an increasingly materialistic, image driven environment. Or was. Or is despite the impossibility of her plastic body. Or maybe we can’t say just yet. Maybe we’ve yet to see the full results of generations of girls who grew up with the doll.

True, Barb was always tiny wasted and pointy toed, but it wasn’t until the 70s that she expanded her wardrobe, moving away from poodle skirts and sweater sets and towards disco pants and bikinis. This was the era in which Malibu beach Barbie replaced the “Fashion Luncheon” and “Saturday Matinee” models of years past, thus catapulting the doll’s coolness factor and markedly expanding her popularity.

In 2006 the U.S. census reported that the average age of patients receiving invasive and non invasive plastic surgery is 42.6 years old. The girls coming of age in the 70s then, are the same girls who are now turning forty, prime plastic surgery age. So maybe there’s a correlation between Barbara’s budding popularity in the disco days and the onslaught of image based body modification that’s subsumed our culture over the last ten years. And if this is so, and if Barbie’s waist and cup sizes have only shifted more in the direction of impossible since then, what can we expect from generations to come? In many parts of the country, breast augmentation has become a standard gift to young women graduating from high school. An ABC news article I recently perused titled, “Why Are Parents Buying Their Girls the Gift of Surgery?” follows Lulu Diaz, an eighteen year old who receives a Jaguar upon graduation eve but wanted breast implants instead. Her parents dutifully swapped Jag for boobs. “This is a gift of love from us,” Lulu’s mother tells the interviewer, “And we see a difference in her.”

Just as cultural norms have shifted to allow Barbie a cell phone and an even smaller waist, the gifting of silicone implants upon a young woman’s eighteenth birthday or high school graduation has apparently become a standard rite of passage, replacing the tired new car or trip to Europe tropes. Indeed, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, where the number of breast enlargements among all age groups has increased by 300% in the past decade, the number of breast enlargements within the eighteen and under age group has risen nearly 500%. 

When I get home I prop my new mirror up against the door and set about hanging it up. I place it first where I think it most needed, facing the sofa, up against the front door. The effect is a living room that seems nearly twice its actual size. Later though, when I settle onto the sofa with a container of takeout and the book I’m reading, I find I can’t focus. My own reflection is so relentlessly there and it’s not that she’s displeasing per sea, but I get up and take the mirror down anyways.

Later, after I’ve hung it in the bathroom instead, I strip down and stand butt naked in front of it, surveying my body. I rarely see myself in one piece, the only mirror I frequent being the one above my sink which cuts me off at the waist. I look at this new streamlined reflection, the one I paid fifteen dollars to gaze at regularly, and am surprised by the chorus of critical voices that start subtly to hum in the back of my mind.

Knobby knees.

Scrawny arms.

Scraggly.

Boyish.

Boobless.

I squint, trying to transition from the segmenting perspective gifted to me by the media, by the “male gaze,” to seeing myself as a whole, my body as a unique and precious gift. The disconnection persists.

One year ago today, I woke up at five a.m. pulled on sweatpants and tied back my hair and walked into the kitchen of my mom’s house. It was dark outside. The lights were on and she was there. So were Judy and Unkie, he at the coffee maker, she at the counter, reading over admission instructions. The tea water was on. Judy’s patterned purse was set up on the counter, overflowing with books and bills, papers and eyeglass cases, and the mason jars of iced tea she’d made the night before. Next to it was a duffle bag with Mom’s stuff in it.

 Judy drove. We checked in at six. Unkie sat outside the pink curtain of a partitioned room while Judy and I watched mom peel her clothes off and don the blue paper Johnny in what was to be her last independent act of dressing and redressing for months to come. We waited then. I rifled through the magazine rack and found there, to my amazement, a children’s story she’d read to me over and again when I was a little girl. Ms. Nelson and the Mysterious Case of Viola Swamp. In it, mild mannered Ms. Nelson cannot handle her unruly class and devises a plan. She disappears, pretending to be off sick and returns disguised as her own replacement, one Viola Swamp, an ugly, putrid and stentorian substitute teacher who is so vile that the class learns to appreciate Ms. Nelson who returns in two weeks time as herself. The uncanny parallel between this story and the painkiller induced transformation my mother would make in the months that followed her surgery was, of course, unknowable to us then, so I handed the book to her where she lay, stretched out lengthwise on the gurney, awaiting anesthesia and operation, and she read it aloud to all of us.

Two hours later, they took her off. It was just me and her and the white walls and fluorescent lights and we’d been there before but this time, we cried and I remember that so clearly, watching her be wheeled away with tears rolling down her cheeks.

Judy, Unkie and I went to the cafeteria. Nobody ate. Later, while they walked around, I tried to sleep on a sofa near the oversized fountain that ornaments the Yale lobby but a security guard came and told me to sit up. After seven hours of waiting and wandering, Judy went home to walk the dogs. Four hours after that, after mom had been under anesthesia and lamplight and knife for eleven hours the phone rang in the empty waiting room where Unkie and I sat and they said that she had made it through.

And I am grateful for that. I am grateful for everything, truly I am.

I am grateful for the surgeon who came to see us after that and said I did the best I could and then, They will come back. I am grateful that when we were finally let into the ICU to see her she smiled through her haze and mouthed the words I love you. I am grateful that, weeks later, when her stitched up stomach split with the pressure of hematoma and blood spurted out onto Judy and I and infection was feared and drains were implanted and fistulas were forecasted and food was forbidden, she fought on. I am grateful, truly I am.

But she is 3,000 miles away from me now, standing here in front of a mirror so separate and segmented. And it was six months ago that she drove me to the airport- even though I was supposed to drive myself - because we couldn’t bear to lose the hours together before I boarded a plane and was gone again.

 She’s shrunk since then though I can barely imagine her being any smaller.

 She tells me she is one hundred and three pounds to my one hundred and twenty something and still skinny body. Her doctor’s say that she is so thin that her body is eating away at the delicate musculature that lines the space between her skull and her skin. So she is plugged in every night to a machine that channels, through a silver dollar sized hole above her left breast, nutritional supplements straight into her heart. This is different from the TPN we hooked her into last summer night after night at eight p.m, sharp, which fed milky food up through a blue capped line in her arm that dangled there unused during the daytime, clicking against its red capped twin every time she moved.

 She tells me, It’s tricky, this body stuff and I press the phone hard against my ear because she sounds so far away and ask her, How so?

Well, you know, she says, It’s hard to believe it’s a big deal. I’m just being vain, I suppose, but when I was your age and biking with JR or jogging every day, I could eat anything I wanted and never gain a pound and who wouldn’t want that body back again?

That is not, I say, the body you have now. I say this and maybe I am looking in the mirror when I do.

A week ago, I turned twenty-four. I went to Disneyland with a friend and laughed and pointed and jumped up and down in anticipation of Buzz Lightyear and felt like a child, though perhaps I always do.  Perhaps this is my saving grace, perpetual childishness. If so it will serve me, I am told by a girlfriend who jokingly reminds me that where men only grow increasingly attractive with age, women begin to lose their looks after twenty seven. You’re in your peak years, she tells me, It’s all down hill from here. At least I’ll still have my superior wit and cunning, I say and she agrees halfheartedly.

At first, my mother’s doctors tried all sorts of rag tag experiments to figure out why she can’t gain weight. She ate butter by the stick to see what would happen. Sundaes and splits and whatever else might pack on pounds. None of it worked. They then suggested TPN, the same permanent intravenous nutrition she had last summer, albeit through a different type of port. A Hickman port.

Using the Hickman, she has learned to hook herself up, which means that she will be able to carry on this way, feed herself this way, for however long she needs to. My priority now is the hip, she tells me, Got to get my strength up for that.

She is referring to the hip surgery she wants to have this July and I cannot fathom the idea of it. Perhaps because it seems a physical impossibility, her little body sent out and sliced open once again. Perhaps because the idea of this scares me so much that for a moment my breath catches in that sweet spot between my sternum and my heart and whispers there, of possible problems, posing all the questions she can’t afford to.

Because Wal Mart did not carry the Crayolas I wanted, I go to a special crafts store instead. There I buy a plastic palette, a pad of watercolor paper and three rows of brightly colored paint. I then sit at the kitchen table with these items for hours, dabbling and dabbing and using up reams, producing only images of winding roads and women’s bodies. I return to the mirror and stand there, holding up my paintings and comparing the bodies I’ve rendered to my own reflection. Everything is curvy in my work, soft where the angles of my own anatomy are not.

Clear and concentric and comforting in ways that real life cannot be.

It’s Wednesday evening at six pm and still light out. The time has changed here in California and evenings dawn long before the sun goes down and this, I love. I wish I could see it now, falling on far off mountains, melting onto my balcony like so much buttery light.

Instead I am in this black box theater, trying to take notes on contemporary film theory but checking my email instead and finding, amongst throngs of enthusiastic Facebook comments and class related notes, an email from my mother. She tells me she has read my writing. Since you can be so honest, she says, Perhaps I can be too. 

The truth is I long not to leave you. Cathy asked me last Monday if I was crying because I didn’t want to lose you and at first I said, No.  It is that I can’t bear that you would be alone without me.

To hear she was crying surprises me. Relieves me. In the weeks that have followed her oncologist’s latest terse assertion of malignancy and metastasis she has seemed remarkably nonplussed. She has carried on with all her plans, journeyed to Egypt, and set about scheduling, despite potential participation in a new chemotherapy study at Columbia, the hip operation she has hoped for since last year. I have raised a quizzical brow at her sturdiness and then, I have understood it. Recognized it even. Because for all the emotive outpourings I allow in my writing, I’m never so transparent off the page.

Cathy reminded me that I’m projecting onto you all the loneliness I felt after my Mom died. So now I wonder if my sadness is, as Cathy suggested, about losing you — not just leaving you. I suppose if I allowed myself to think about it, the idea of someday not seeing you ever again or not knowing how your life and work developed would just break my heart. 

The professor is lecturing about Lacan and Mulvey and Metz and I need to listen but can’t because I am blinking back hot tears which feels ill timed and inappropriate but also, like relief.

I want to fall apart a little. I think I might need to.

I watch myself grapple with this. With emoting and feeling excessive, and with self-protecting the way I learned to in the years I lived with him. I watch myself read her letter and build up walls one sentence at a time. I wish I could undo this armor. Could unzip from self-holding inside a husk too small for wholeness.

Still, for now I need it. Need to buttress myself around the reality of her words. To fold myself into silence and cups of tea.

I have always been good in silence, I have always been good with cups of tea.

There is already a kind of lovely trajectory of the path your life is taking which I can see -  even if you can’t yet. So, I mustn’t worry about you.

She’s right. I write that I am surprised at her cheerfulness in the face of so much fear but omit that I myself forget her in the course of my everyday. In the course of my everyday I think nothing of tumors. I look at the sky. At my animals, my friends. And I laugh. And I love them. And this doesn’t feel wrong. 

But in a way, in this moment anyways, I want her to worry. It’s selfish, really. But maybe if she worries, she won’t leave.

I am trying not to jump ahead and feel a sorrow before I even know what is happening.  Really sweetie, we have no idea what is ahead for me — or for you.  At first this latest information from Saif made me tired – like, I’m  tired of fighting.  I think you felt something similar.  But in the long run, what has helped me over the past week or so is the idea of settling things. The depression only comes when I have nothing I can do. As soon as I think about what I can do, the dynamic changes.

In the months since I’ve moved to California, I’ve watched the path she writes of stretch out before me, lucid and straightforward in a way it’s never been before. Maybe this is just the confidence that comes with facing fear. Or accepting its inevitability, a skill I’ve assumed in no way due to enlightenment, but because my worst fears were realized the day she left. Because years passed in the darkness of her going and waned when I realized I could always call her back. Because last year I walked through hell by her side and came out and found sunlight again.

So it’s impractical, unrealistic, to think I can’t survive without her. To want her to stay for my sake alone. Still, I do.

It is regret. I regret the idea of leaving too soon.  (And  soon is still twenty something years later than my own mother had.)  But it is too soon because I never want to leave you.  If I could I’d make you something that you could take out — like an old comfortable shirt, and wear as if it were a big hug from me.  I’ll have to think about that.  Maybe together we’ll have to think about that.

How can I think of anything else? Tonight at least, I will think of her blouses. About wearing all of them at once. Or one by one, over and again, each night of my life. And sleeping that way, each night of my life. Paint smeared and smelling of Jean Nate bath splash.

Feeling scared is about facing the unknown.  But I’ve been put under anathesia so much I know the blankness of the mind/ body when it is deeply asleep and I know I won’t feel anything - or know anything. It is just quiet nothingness without time. So I don’t really worry about me. Death is not scary.

I want to sit in silence. In cups of tea.

If I could I would fold myself into claw footed tub full of chamomile and soak there through the night. Through the last hours of darkness.

And next week when Dr. Saif says it was all a mistake and there is no sign of new tumors, we will have to laugh at all this and send each other ten thousand kisses. 

If I could I would fold myself into claw footed tub full of chamomile and soak there through the night. Through the last hours of darkness. And in the morning I might wrap myself in towels and slide back the screen door and step into the light.

My mother is boarding a plane tonight and flying to Egypt.

I am sitting here, after telling her I love you and hanging up the phone, imagining some terrorist hijacking, some catastrophic loss.

I am then picking up the Annie Dillard book I began to read last night and finishing a chapter on lunar eclipses.

My yoga teacher says the lunar phases effect everything. I buy this completely.

Sometimes, when the sky is empty, I begin to worry irrationally about unrelated things. I do this before I realize it’s been days since I last saw the moon. The wait for her return is an anxious one; her reappearance is like a sigh.

The other day, driving in the rain and talking to my mom on the phone after she chided me for multitasking but listened anyways while I complained about my father and worried about my dog, I saw a rainbow.

The rainbow was one arc of six colors stretched in a fluid stroke across the sky. I was heading south on a road that parallels the Six Flags amusement park and pulled off and up a hilly side street to get a better look, still talking on the phone. The rainbow’s colors clashed with the skeletal shapes that two monstrous coasters cast before it. As I watched, clouds shifted and the colors seemed to brighten, then fade.

In the months since my mother’s surgery, since her recovery, I have moved. I have settled myself, one dog, one horse, one carful of stuff, into a whitewashed apartment now draped in pink curtains and white Christmas lights. I have missed her and then, I have watched with amazement my own reintegration into life. I have done this with balance. I have not stayed out all night and done drugs and thrown hands to the air in an effort to forget. I have not chosen unpleasant or unkind company to keep.

And sometimes, because of this, I can almost forget.

Forget that when the surgeon closed and came to find me, the last one waiting in an empty white room, he said, They will come back and I nodded and thought, Accept this, Allie and thought, Except…

Forget that I did everything I could for her that summer, passed each day with balled up fists, ready to fight.

And still she says to me Metastasis this morning on the phone. Says so after so many months, so many unfair fights.

So we hang up and I go to workshop where I admonish my friend for bad grammar and press my forefingers into my sternum because there’s all this buzzing there, just beneath the skin.

And for some reason I start thinking about last summer, when she wanted to see the Grand Canyon and I wanted to press ahead; so I whined about the tourist trap motel, the lines, the ticket prices, and she relented and we pressed on and I’m sorry for it.

There’s a Hawiaan meditation called Ho O Pono Pono in which you close your eyes and imagine someone, anyone, and say to them I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you.

I do this most nights during yoga: picture her in bed with her glasses on and the dog beside her and her bony knees propped up beneath a book.

I leave my teaching practicum early tonight to make it to restorative yoga where I lie on my belly across a bolster pillow and cry when the teacher puts her hands on my back to deepen the stretch.

I try to envision purple healing light, I try to Ho O Pono Pono, but the words don’t stick.

*

The library at this school isn’t quiet. Having traveled here from a University with twenty floors of reference books and endless stacks, silent as Spanish catacombs, as snow swept fields, I am unsettled by this fact. All I can hear is the twittering of some dancer’s laugh, the recitation of some actor’s lines and all I want is silence. Space to sit with the words she left spread across my mind.

It’s in these moments I worry that I’m growing old in hyper drive. I am twenty three and can go years without lovers. I can balance my books and care for my animals and buy health insurance and plan ahead. I can nurse my dying mother.

I can stay the hands that move to delete that last sentence and think perhaps my youth is evidenced only by the preservation of eternal hope that it’s not true.

*

In Egypt my mother will see pyramids and temples. She will limp - because she does not walk well -down side streets and through bazaars in one hundred degree heat. She will, she told me tonight before her flight, take her tumors on a boat ride down the Nile. I laugh and then say for the fifteenth time, Are you sure you should be doing this?

I need to, she replies.

I was thinking about her body yesterday. About the way its shrunken down to a series of toothpicks pieced together. To look that way feels absolutely the same as wholeness does but appears oppositional to everybody else.

To me she seems perched on the verge of evaporation. I cannot imagine losing her because my body cannot hold that kind of hurt. I feel its shadow though. It’s that buzzing, that sternum ache.

*

Tonight after yoga, after library, after her plane has taken off, I cross the empty parking lot. It’s uncharacteristically cold and I see my breath in faint puffs before my face. I walk faster, press my keys and the car beeps at me from its spot across the pavement. I see her then, the moon strung up wide and yellow in the sky like a dirt stained softball. The clouds shift and her light seems to brighten, then fade.

1.
I flew from California to Connecticut on Christmas day.
Met my father at a diner on route one.
We sat in a booth by the counter where short brown men cupped palms around short mugs of brown coffee.
It sounds like little Lebanon in here, Dad said.

2.
I order vegan, he orders cheese.
The waitress removes plates.
Brings my tea.

I didn’t plan to but begin anyways, talking about my feelings, the past.
Dad looks like he wants to run. Zips his jacket. Stays seated.
I keep talking and, eventually, he settles. Speaks with clarity about his childhood. about constant travel between parents and the meaning of home. About my mother.

She is wasting away, I say, and then, I don’t want to lose her.
I don’t want you to either, he says. I never wanted that.

3.
I write of her often. Put down the unutterables of illness, knowing they may sound fragile, might make me seem so as well.

But I feel them aired. Feel the lightness muscularly, in strength and straightforwardness. Because I’d never have written the past before now. Never have sat with my father and smiled and accepted without tethering my heart to his hurt.

4.
I am in school in California.
I want to be a writer.
I have wanted to write in California since freshman year of high school when you gave me Joni Mitchell.

I was so in love with this woman, you said, handing over a copy of Blue.
I looked at her photograph on the album cover. Traced the shadows of her face through the plastic sleeve.

5.
California I’m coming home

6.
We did an exercise in class one day.
Closed our eyes, looked at our palms and imagined our history.
When I did this I saw my Dad, age five in knee socks and a newsboy cap, standing by a suitcase. I saw his whitewashed expression when his stepfather spoke over him at Christmas dinner. I saw him thinking about being somewhere else.


And I feel like I’ve spent the last ten years looking for the home that slipped away the day she left. The home I had and then lost in an instant.
I have come to Connecticut this Christmas as part of an attempt to reclaim that past.

7.
Will you take me as I am?

8.
Countdown to midnight on new years eve. Watching the ball drop on tv. Heating up soup while the crowd explodes and Carson Daly flashes his white teeth.
I’ve been shuffling around, packing my bags and preparing to fly to California in the morning, but for thirty seven seconds before twelve I stop and  sit on the arm of the sofa.

This time last year I was sitting in Rays Pizza on Astor Place in Manhattan. I was wearing a new dress, new patent leather pumps. I was getting dumped by the too-young younger guy I was loving at the time.

Last year, when the ball dropped I was listening to this guy and didn’t realize the new year had rung until after the fact.

So it feels important that right now, I watch it happen.
Watch change take place.


The ball descends. Confetti flutters out and over the crowd.
Cameras pan to couples kissing. To streamers and plastic green hats that say 2010 on them in glitter. To Carson Daily’s white teeth.


I watch this and feel something lift slightly; feel happier for a moment.
Then I get up and change the channel, flipping until I find black and white - some old movie where the actors are American but sound accented somehow.

9.
Will you take me as I am? Strung out on another man?


10.
Last year on New Years, when Jacob sat across from me at Rays and said he couldn’t stop thinking about his ex-girlfriend then took a bite of pizza and answered his phone, I turned around, looked at the tv hung up in the corner of the room and realized the ball had dropped.

11.
Earlier this evening, I went to the movies with Mom and Judy. We saw It’s Complicated in which Meryl Streep sips Pino with her girlfriends who describe how going a year without sex means one’s vagina might “grow over.”
I am twenty three. It has been a year since I’ve had sex.

12.
Oh it gets so lonely, when you’re walking..

13.
In old movies when people kiss it’s for so short a time that their contact seems more a momentary hit of skin than a mutual exploration of it.

I turn off the tv. I go to bed. I wake up the next day and drive to the airport.

14.
At airports, people fling We like New Years confetti.
We love you says the man standing solo by the window, talking into his cell phone while he watches planes take off.

Thank you for calling us, my dad often says when he picks up the phone.
We appreciate you thinking of us, he says before hanging up.

My dad has lived alone for ten years. I am assuming, therefore, he is factoring in the dog to create a We.

15.
Will you take me as I am? California…

16.
The girl sitting across from me in the waiting area of gate A10 has chemotherapy hair.
She is folding paper cranes.
I want to ask her if she is trying for one thousand.
I cannot decide is this is inappropraite or not and so, say nothing.


When Mom was in the chemo ward, preparing for her first treatment, the nurse showed us around. This is where the snacks are, she said. Here are the magazines.
Then she held out a pillow and showed me how to inject a needle into it.
Pretend this is your Mother’s thigh, she said.

17.
We are making our final descent. The stewardess is on the PA asking us to please be sure.
Outside, L.A. is laid out underneath us like a motherboard; some deep blue computer chip.

18.
California I’m coming home.

19.
Language is permenent in ways life seldom can be.

I remember with such clarity things you said years ago:
Your mother’s illnesses.
When she left us.
You have no idea.
How hard I tried.

20.
But my heart cried out for you, California.

21.
It’s been two weeks since we sat face to face in the diner on route one.
And I miss you.
And I am glad to be so far away from you.

Tonight when I opened my mailbox I found a package from you. I wasn’t expecting anything and tore the envelope open, careful not to get excited, sure I’d left something mundane in your passenger seat when last we met. Instead there was a note and two weatherbeaten casette tapes just visible beneath layers of bubble wrap.
Just so you know I am paying attention too, your hand writting reads, not just asking others to do it. I am glad that you are ecstatic about being home in California. Thanks for your time.

I unravel the bubble wrap and look at the casette tapes. One is black and unmarked. One is encased in a clear sleeve. Curly Lasagna’s Terrific Present, it reads. I remember playing this tape over and again in your car on the way to school eighteen years ago. I remember losing it when we moved. I remember mentioning it in your car when I saw you two weeks ago, saying how I loved that silly kids music and had looked for it on the internet to no avail.

Tomorrow I will buy a casette player. I will listen to Curly Lasagna’s Terrific Present. Probably, I will cry. Then I’ll listen to the black tape and discover its contents. Probably, they will make me cry as well.

22.
Music is permenent in ways life seldom can be.

23.
Sitting in a park in Paris, France / Reading the news and it sure looks bad/  They won’t give peace a chance / That was just a dream some of us had / Still a lot of lands to see / But I wouldn’t want to stay here / It’s too old and cold and settled in its ways here / Oh, but California/California I’m coming home / I’m going to see the folks I dig / I’ll even kiss a Sunset pig / California I’m coming home

I met a redneck on a Grecian isle / Who did the goat dance very well / He gave me back my smile
But he kept my camera to sell / Oh the rogue, the red red rogue/He cooked good omelettes and stews
And I might have stayed on with him there/But my heart cried out for you, California / Oh California I’m coming home / Oh make me feel good rock’n roll band / I’m your biggest fan/California, I’m coming home

Oh it gets so lonely
When you’re walking
And the streets are full of strangers
All the news of home you read
Just gives you the blues
Just gives you the blues

So I bought me a ticket / I caught a plane to Spain / Went to a party down a red dirt road / There were lots of pretty people there / Reading Rolling Stone, reading Vogue / They said, “How long can you hang around?”I said “a week, maybe two,/ Just until my skin turns brown / Then I’m going home to California / California I’m coming home / Oh will you take me as I am/Strung out on another man / California I’m coming home

I’m thinking I might be obsessive compulsive because every night when I get home, I clean. I do this in steps, quitting only once I’ve made vacuum patterns on the carpet and doused my apartment in Lysol disinfectant spray.

Achieving this sterile end is a satisfying process. First I vacuum, making sure to scrub each couch cushion as well as the spots on the rug stuck with bits of fluff from dismembered dog toys. After all that, I grab a roll of bounty and a spray bottle of Clorox and spritz and wipe every surface I touch or eat off of. In order of most  contaminated, these are: the coffee table, the kitchen countertops, the kitchen table, the bathroom sink, my bedside table. Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll wipe down the linoleum and tile floors as well. This is usually a spur of the moment type thing, wiping the floors. Like tonight, I wasn’t planning on scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen, I just sort of ended up on my hands and knees, edging along the baseboard and bathtub, paper toweling up dust and detritus. I felt bad, using paper towels, what with the environment and all, but they work real well so I kept on, especially because normally, like if I’d planned to clean the floors, I’d of gotten a mop. But I didn’t plan it and wound up hunched over wads of dirty paper towel thinking about Dave.

Mom said Dave was the best cleaning person she’d ever had. “Even if he does burn through a fortune of paper towels every week.” We found him when we moved to New Hampshire the year I turned twelve. He cleaned the Post Office every morning and one day after dropping me at the bus stop, Mom walked in and asked if he was available to clean our place as well.

Dave was tall-over six feet-and real thin with a brown beard and a yellow baseball cap he never took off. He also always wore the same pair of shorts, even in the winter. I became quite convinced they were his only pair of bottoms, but I suppose he may have just designated that pair to Tuesday, which was the day he came to our place. So yea, maybe they were just Tuesday Shorts, maybe not, either way, they exposed his irregularly hairy legs which stuck out like furry stalks from in between the Tuesday shorts and an old pair of Nikes.

I was pretty scared of Dave. If, for some odd reason, I happened to be home on a Tuesday morning, I avoided him like the plague. I did this until my Dad made a point of asking, “Did you say hello to Dave?” to which I always answered yes while shirking eye contact which is obviously a tell and one my dad was well aware of. So he’d march me out and into whatever room Dave was paper toweling in to say, “Hi Dave, how are you?” which was inordinately embarrassing as I sensed Dave knew I avoided him and his freakish leg hair.

One particularly exciting Tuesday saw the intersection of Dave’s weekly visit with that of a vacuum cleaner salesman who arrived, poured little clots of dirt and hair out onto the rug and then vacuumed them up with the Electrolux Cyclone III. My mom was all engrossed in this demonstration when Dave walked in and became elated, giddy even. Apparently our previous vacuum was sub par and the prospect of wheeling the Electrolux around our oversized and often filthy foyer, just made his morning.

Later, Dad had to tell Dave that my mom was moving out and that’s why she was vacuum shopping.
Dave was confused, almost hurt it seemed.

He then tried to council my dad in relationship skills and got yelled at but good. Dad had a hot temper, especially those first few years after mom left. He also had some money trouble.

“Well why do we still have DAVE then?” I wanted to know when he told me he’d be borrowing cash from my trust fund and not to worry he’d pay it back in time.

“I can’t do EVERYTHING myself,” he bellowed and stomped upstairs and slammed the door.

Eventually, Dad did have to let Dave go. I think he put it off for as long as he could in part because he felt sorry for Dave who so earnestly went about his work and, with only one pair of pants, seemed to need the business.

That was ten years ago. Now my dad cleans the house by himself, using the same old vacuum and scrimping on bargain brand paper towels.

I wake up in a funk from a dream about my friend’s boyfriend. He’d shown up at my house asking me to help. He was crying. I don’t know what to do for her, he said. I was sitting across from him at a wooden table, discussing a plan of action when the dog jumped off the bed and woke me up.

I lie there mindless and shallow breathed for seven minutes before rolling out of bed, turning on the kettle and heading to the lu. I pee, brush my teeth, my hair, and pull a pair of jeans out of the half full laundry hamper. The tea water boils. I grab my travel mug, my car keys, and Calvin’s ratty leash from the hook beside the door.

Dunk rock road runs parallel to the interstate highway before branching off and making for the mountains. Follow it for fifteen minutes and you’ve connected up with a series of deserted roads to dried up oil wells and campsites. On the weekends, it’s busy - people with their dogs, mountain bikers taking central routes to makeshift paths and courses. On a Monday like this though, all but one parking place is empty and I can snap the leash off the dog and let him run ahead without fear of retribution.

The first ten minutes of a walk are the most revealing. In them my entire mental state is made clear. Sometimes, when shit’s really bad, I’ll call Calvin back, turn around and drive off - anything to avoid an hour plus of sandy footsteps and my mind. But today we’re ok. The sun’s out and I’m crunching along, not thinking about thinking, just putting one foot in front of the other.

We follow the flat for a while, Calvin trotting up ahead, lifting his leg on every other rock, tree trunk, bush, and me pushing up dips and inclines on the balls of my feet. The path starts out paved but peters out into gravel and dust somewhere you don’t notice until it’s behind you. Owl scat is everywhere. Little white bones mixed up with fuzz and what looks like seedy entrails. Calv pisses on each pile we pass. I think about that time about a month back when we were out walking after dark and an owl swooped down over us, trying to nab a doggie dinner. I’ve dreamed of teeth and talons since. The way Calvin lifts his leg so casually over the remains of his predator’s prey is like a little fuck you and I love him for it.

Tires roll over lose rock and sand. Voices follow and we’re passed on the left by two boys on dirt bikes, their helmets askew. They crunch by, standing on their pedals, their bikes flip flopping beneath their bony butts. I whistle Calvin closer.
The boys hear me and crane lanky necks over bony shoulders, thinking I might be signaling them but seeing Calv instead.
I like your dog, the tall one calls out.
Thanks, I say.
I do too, the other says.
Thanks.
They coast onwards before skidding off on a narrow path that dips down into a cavern, making their bobbing helmets buoy-like last traces of them.

I wonder what adventure they might be on. Wonder what they’ll find out here on their own. We found a tree house, Lara and I, the last summer we spent together before her family moved and my parents split. It was nestled in the woods behind her house, abandoned and rotting but a treasure if only because we’d not seen it before. If only because to find it we had to traverse a series of slippery logs strung together over swampy water and reeds. It seemed out of a story, that treehouse and we claimed it like some shining proof that magic did exist. It was in books that children struck out on rafts, found fortresses in the woods, hidden doorways through time. The treehouse was our first realization that fiction and life might be mirrors.

I moved to New York when I was eighteen. That first year - walking through the city on summer nights, listening to Tupac on my ipod, waitressing in Soho, living alone in a seedy studio on third avenue- that was the loneliest I’ve ever been. I don’t think I knew it then but I remember myself as small and uncontained; loving with a fiercesome resolve the city ‘s blurred yellow and blank stares, not yet knowing that it would never love me back. And I remember with a wincing clarity the a single bedroom where I’d sit after waitressing, waiting for a boy who never came; and the scraped up palmful of change I’d count out in the space market on University Place to buy some soup to take home to that single room. But sometimes on those nights, Saturdays usually, I’d shower and zip on my skintight Elizabeth Taylor sheath and strut around the city as if I had some place to be, like maybe I was a movie star, or a girl somebody loved.

Sometimes I could bask in the stares, the catcalls. Sometimes I could store it - the Liz Taylor afterglow - away and feed off it for a week or so. I could be wrong but I don’t think I need to be looked at anymore. Maybe that’s what made me ready to leave New York. Maybe I just figured out the difference between being seen and known. Maybe not, but I’m walking along with this crusty little dog, wearing these crusty old jeans and not imagining myself as I imagine someone else imagines me. I don’t picture myself in space the way I used to - like I was watching a mental movie of myself constantly and without compassion.  I’m sure it’s been like this before because I remember walking each New Hampshire night to the middle of the half mown field wearing muck boots and pajama bottoms. In it, hay bales spaced out from each other by feet looked like cattle ghosts and I’d lay on my back over a round one and watch six million stars reveal themselves, slowly at first, across the wide navy sky. I remember doing this and thinking how alive I was.

The path is dipping now, sloping downward and up again. The dog traverses it first, trotting at an even pace, his ears flopping with the force of his descent. I’m easing my way down, arms stretched out by my sides, sneakers slipping slightly over patches of lose gravel. Once I make it to the basin of the hill, I push up the other side, still thinking about time before I defined myself inside it. About barn chores on Wednesday nights, trudging up Wentworth road at sundown with three horses behind me, jostling, shoving and glancing my heels with their steel toes. I am eleven years old. With the hay shaped imprints on the backs of my legs and the splifs of wet grass stuck to my sneakers.  I am a fraction of the size of the three beasts behind me and nervous they’ll bowl me over, though I’d never admit it.

I didn’t think about moving then. Didn’t consider my body in space. How much room it took up. How small a space it filled or how it looked in comparison to other spaces, other bodies. Those nights after riding and walking and hauling and throwing, we piled into the cab of truck. Four little girls, four sets of chubby arms and bony knee caps and one large woman, one dog. We were one atop another, wedged into place by the woman’s body, four times the size of one of ours.

In periods of limbo - of forced or uncontrollable stasis, there’s this drive to move forward through space. The winter I moved out of New York I spent in the attic apartment of mother’s empty house, stuck in the dark rhythm of sundown and sleeplessness. Stuck in patterns I perfected to help myself
out of dealing with the unknown. I went to the beach most days, running up and down the waterline until I couldn’t breathe then walking, rapidly at first, until I reached the tide break. I stood out on the rocks like a character from a book. I howled at the wind like a love lorn heroine. I wished to be seen. Or more likely, I wished to be known.

I used to wonder about my own strength. I’d imagine my heart
stopping, my brain shutting down. And sometimes I forgot to breathe. Once in a while I still do, mostly because Mom went and made me aware of how fragile we all are and how it could all be over with the quick slip of a sneaker on a gravel path, the thin screech of an owl overhead. But more and more my memories of her illness bring deep breaths, not short ones.

It’s hard work, climbing this hill. Even the dog has slowed to a walk now. I feel my breath squeezing from somewhere below my sternum. But I push on anyways. When we summit, it’s to a purple vista, overlooking ugly tract houses wedged like shoeboxes into the hillsides. But beyond them it’s all snowcapped mountains, clear and blue the way I didn’t think they came in California. And beyond them, it’s a sunset moving across the sky in waves of orange and pink the way I imagined it those afternoons I sat in the windows of New York Starbucks watching people pass by and hoping for a slowing down of time, a clearing of some space to breathe in.

I got what I wanted. Coming out here, the West with its dusty paths, it’s screech owls, it’s slowness so seperate from the movement of Manhattan, was a stripping away of perfected patterns. Patterns of perfection. Elizabeth Taylor dresses. Imagined men and their imagined gazes. And maybe I’m not yet known out here, but somehow I know myself better.

A few months ago, when I first arrived, I started practicing at a nearby yoga studio. I’ve been going almost every night. It’s a routine now, a dependable point in each day. It’s there I slow down, if only for an hour and fifteen minutes.
It’s all about the breath, my yoga teacher says, here is where we feel tangibly our bodies at work.
She also tells us that if you aren’t following your breath, you aren’t practicing yoga, you’re just mindlessly moving. The breath, the effortlessness of it, is what connects us to spirit.

You.
You are a child. Nine years old, standing on the edge of a dirt circle. Holding in one hand a bicycle helmet. On it are stickers of toothy sharks plastered over a blue plastic shell.
It is fall in New Hampshire. Cut cornfields make for barren strips of land. Brittle stalks stick up like broken teeth on a plastic comb and line the circle’s edge.
In the center, a rusty folding chair. A broad bodied woman. She wears blue sweatpants and laceless dirt stained sneakers. Carelessly holds in one hand,
A horse.
Mane and tail are matted where years of burs have tangled with coarse hair and dirt. No one will remove the mess. This one lives outside, wears down his hooves on rocky terrain and wanders the hill out back with three others. In the evenings the woman drives her truck through a space in the barbed wire fence and throws out from the back thick flakes of hay. It is rare that this horse be used but today he stands, saddled, a long line snapped to the bit of his bridle.
The woman calls you over. Tells you where to put your hands-left one on the pommel, right on the cantle. You don’t know your left from right. You begin to panic, flutter about with your hands. The woman grabs your wrists, your palms, and places them for you, one on the front of the saddle, one on the back. Bend this leg, she says, poking you behind your right kneecap. It gives. Fits like an apple in the palm of her hand. On the count of three, jump. One, two, three. You jump and the woman lifts, catapulting you in one, fluid motion up and over the horses back.

When you climb into the car after that initial lesson your mom will ask you what you think. All I want to do is trot, you’ll say and she will be surprised. She will have guessed the woman’s bluntness intimidating, off putting to you.  She will have thought you unresponsive to a harsh instructive voice. But in a year you’ll move from trot to canter. Bound out of bed for five a.m. mornings. Fall asleep with hayseed in your hair.


And the woman will yell at you. Smile. Praise you.
Seasons will pass. In the wintertime water buckets will freeze.
Kick through the icy crust with the heel of your sneaker. If your foot gets wet, ignore it.
Forty quart muck buckets filled with wet shavings and hay will need to be moved from the stacks she made to the bed of her truck. Dirt sopped lines of bailing twine will be tied to their handles.
Stretch the sleeves of your sweatshirt over your palms, grab the twine and drag. Never do this without a sweatshirt layer of protection.
Then, squeeze into the cab of her truck. You, the dog, three other girls and the woman. The windows will steam. The radio will play 103.7 KNEFM and the woman will sing along.
When summer comes she’ll gather great groups of girls in the yard, point to points on Spunky the pony and throw peanut butter cups at the head of whoever correctly names them.
You’ll get bucked off. Numerous times. This will scare you but not nearly as much as the woman does, so you keep riding the hard ones to prove your own bravery and in so doing, discover it.

Your favorite horse will die.
You’ll fall in love all over again.

And you, the child, will grow. Mark years with rows of brightly colored ribbons. Plastic 4-H trophies topped with golden cups that you tap with your finger nails and discover to be hollow.
And should discomfort come. Should father betray, should mother leave, you can linger after barn chores to sit in the stall of your favorite horse and draw to the rhythm of his chew. Find safety in the smell of alfalfa, sweet feed, sweat.


At home, should thoughts collide or angry words encroach, you can dive into the glossy pages of Show Horse magazine. Memorize bloodliies and barn names. Chart who won the world and build dreams of doing the same. Fall asleep to imagined echoes – the announcers voice calling your number. The weightlessness –the building propulsion of the park trot beneath you.
The chestnut sized eye you will look into and find in its reflection, a knowledge of yourself.