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January 5 - January 11, 2025
on the top floor of a Gothic-style dorm, crested with turrets and grimacing gargoyles.
It was the summer of 2010 and a heat wave had sucked the oxygen out of the city. As I emerged from the subway, the stench of festering garbage smacked me in the face.
Commuters and hordes of tourists shopping for knockoff designer bags jostled each other on the sidewalks.
Imagining my future—expansive yet empty—filled me with terror.
I HADN’T BEEN single for longer than a month or two since the age of seventeen. I wasn’t proud of this, and I didn’t think it was healthy, but that was how it had been.
He got mean when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of the time.
With each passing day, I felt weaker, less vibrant. It was as if someone were taking an eraser to my core. The silhouette of my old self was still perceptible, but my insides were muting into a ghostly palimpsest.
After I left home, after I graduated and moved to a different time zone, the phone became our umbilical cord. We spoke every day, often multiple times.
His eyes, dark and thick-lashed like a dairy cow’s, scanned the room, searching for someone who resembled his daughter.
My fatigue was not evidence of partying too hard or an inability to cut it in the real world, but something concrete, something utterable that I could wrap my tongue around.
when people don’t know what to say, they often say nothing at all.
Everywhere I went, my bass came with me. It attracted stares—and sometimes unwanted offers of help from strange men. Lugging it around the subways and buses and sidewalks of Manhattan was a chore—especially for a teenage girl who insisted on wearing impractical shoes—but it was worth it.
I felt suspended—for the first time in my life, no one expected anything of me. I had the liberty to pass the time as I wanted. I wrote in my journal and signed up for an arts and crafts class.
The world is moving forward and I am stuck, I wrote.
When you are facing the possibility of imminent death, people treat you differently: Their gaze lingers, recording each mole, tracing the shape of your lips, noting the exact shade of your eyes, as if they are painting a portrait of you to hang in memory’s gallery.
I hadn’t been able to sleep on the eve of my departure, so I got up at five o’clock and wandered the house. I took a last look at my childhood bedroom, bidding goodbye to those pink walls, bookshelves, and old favorite posters. Running a hand over the wooden nape of my bass, I said goodbye to it, too. I said goodbye to the dining room table, where we’d shared countless meals as a family through the years, and to the frozen flower beds of my mother’s garden.
For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.
I heard from a teenage girl in Florida named Unique, who was undergoing treatment for liver cancer and sent me a message composed largely of emojis.
Our shared experience was brutal, but between us existed a weird sort of beauty: There we were, two complete strangers, arms extending from our screens, wrapping each other in an intimate embrace.
I didn’t want their charity or their pity. I didn’t want to be anyone’s good deed of the week.
We are born needing care and we die needing care, but it was hard for me to accept how helpless I’d become.
waiting out the tension that had slowly infiltrated our relationship like mold.
Later that night, back at the hotel, we ordered champagne and a couple of pizzas, and curled up like cats on the white couches in the living room.
The truth of what was happening with Will—the tension and the growing distance, the frustration and resentment—was something I couldn’t fully admit to myself. So instead of sharing all this with these women, to whom I could talk about almost anything, I simply shrugged.
mistook my cries for pleasure and I didn’t correct him. I wanted to act the part of a girlfriend; to give him this, when I had so little else left to give.
On the rare occasions when we were intimate, I turned into the kind of woman who focuses her eyes on a crack in the ceiling and vacates her body, waiting for it to be over.
“How are you feeling today?” she asked. She had pink-glossed lips, a blond messy bun, and a face like a sugar cookie—pale, round, sweet.
her mind traveling to the watery space between the living and that other place;
Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.
But our togetherness, what was left of it, felt hollow.
If I wanted a shot at finding my place among the living, I would need to stop fighting for a relationship that had flatlined long ago. I would need to start fighting for myself.
Cancer no longer lives in my blood, but it lives on in other ways, dominating my identity, my relationships, my work, and my thoughts.
he’s handsome enough to startle me.
It’s the first time I’ve had to explain any of this out loud. I make it sound as if it’s all firmly in the past, as if it needs no untangling. I
I’m stunned by how quickly we’ve transitioned from being a pair, utterly enmeshed and in love, to two strangers siloed in private grief and anger.
moving on is a myth—a lie you sell yourself on when your life has become unendurable. It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past—that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding—and that all this, when it catches up to you, won’t come for blood.
I have moments of laughter and lightness when I go out dancing with friends, but they are brief—gone as quickly as they appear.
He wants me to open up. But the gap between us only widens the more he asks.
wearing the gaunt, zombie look of someone who splits her time between Earth and some other, darker place.
it becomes clear: I cannot continue on like this. Something—or maybe everything—must change.
As I wander through the ornamental gardens, I think of how the Taj embodies both love and grief. So did my friendship with Melissa. In life, I’m realizing, you don’t get one without the other.
Taking Melissa’s ashes to the place she loved most doesn’t lessen the pain of losing her, but it has shown me a way that I might begin to engage with my grief. It has introduced me to the role of ritual in mourning—the ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings and confront loss; that make room for the seemingly paradoxical act of acknowledging the past as a path toward the future. It gets me thinking about the other ways we mark the crossing of thresholds: birthdays and weddings and baby showers, baptisms and bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras. These rites of passage allow us to
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I decide to trust that what feels unknown and frightening will soon feel familiar and safe.
One day, a black bear lumbers onto the property and Oscar leaps up from the porch, roaring at it with the ferocity of a lion. The bear is so startled that it stumbles and trips, then breaks into a sprint and disappears behind the tree line. “The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence,” Annie Dillard once wrote. “We let our bodies go the way of our fears.”
It isn’t so much that I’ve stopped being afraid but that my fear is slowly being supplanted by a yearning for freedom.
Driving is not a physical sport per se, but it feels that way. My wrists ache from gripping the wheel. The tendons in my neck throb. The task of sitting upright and focusing on the shifting variables of traffic requires a level of endurance my body still lacks,
I can feel the heat rising to my cheeks and my chest turning splotchy the way it does whenever the spotlight is on me.
As I take in the room, I begin to think that there’s no audience more intimidating than an online pen pal and a group of teenage girls.
Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.
A crescent moon hangs above and all I can think is that it looks like a milky fingernail clipping.
