Lily and the Octopus

by Steven Rowley

I have to be better about living in the not knowing.

Los Angeles feels like only a half-formed dream. Like perhaps the city was founded as a strip mall in the early 1970s and has no real reason to exist. An afterthought from the designer of some other, better city. A playground made only for attractive people to eat expensive salads.

I purse my lips with indecision. They feel dry.

We had decent email chemistry, this new guy and I. But that happens sometimes in online dating. A few zippy emails, some decent back-and-forth, and then in person? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I should be better at detecting when that’s going to happen by now, but I’m not. It’s still a roll of the dice.

Lily was asleep when I left, and I felt like one of those new parents who wanted to wake their sleeping baby to see if it was still alive.

Even on my best days, I always wished life excited me as much as it excited her.

It was not in her nature to put her feet up,

“It’s natural, as our loved ones age, to start grieving their loss. Even before we lose them.”

“Grief is a pathological condition. It’s just that so many of us go through it in life that we never think to treat it as such. We just expect people to go through it, endure it, and come out the other side.”

It wasn’t until checking out at the grocery store and the looks I got from the cashier that I realized that cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner in June was in fact its own form of derangement.

Still, it’s important for us to get out more, I think, while looking out at the expanse.

I felt too alive to die.