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But what scares me more are her eyes. Later, I will try to convince myself that there was no sign of my sister in that wild stare. But my dreams will replay this moment with cruel clarity; trap me within it like a bug preserved in amber. I will want to believe I am being killed by a monster, but in the stare of my attacker I don’t see monstrosity. I see my Caroline. Lucid. Herself. So recognizable that my agony—even my shock—dissolves into relief.
Death isn’t the end of a life, but the division of it. When someone dies, their soul scatters into all the things they’ve ever given away. Love. Bruises. Gifts. You struggle to piece together what’s left—even the things that hurt—just to feel haunted.
My sister becomes a constellation of voids.
When someone dies, suddenly you’ve made an enemy of the past tense, but the past tense is all you’ve got now and it feels like it knows it. Well. Fuck the past tense, I guess.
Caroline wore detachment fashionably, like the slick skin of a seal, the grip of reality sliding off so that she always appeared cool and unbothered in the hot, frantic world. I’m not like her—I catch on everything. Every small want grows out of me like thorns, making me impossible to embrace.
Whatever it was, Caroline was scared. So scared that her fear occupied her fully by the spring. It walked around in her skin, a doom clothed as my sister. Some seed of dread planted long ago was now blooming in her body.
Officially, Caroline died from a tumor. Unofficially, she died in an act of violence brought on by that tumor. An accident. The grisly marriage of madness and gravity, and me, the heavy thing that crushed her.
I know people think being queer is, like, very fabulous and full of witty repartee and all that, but sometimes it’s also crying in the bathroom of an Applebee’s somewhere near Margaretville, New York, while Rihanna’s “S&M” plays on the speakers for the early-bird crowd.
It is up to you to demand people see you as you, or they will almost always decide you are someone else. Maybe someone weak, or vulnerable, or dismissible.
I clench my jaw as the camp locks into place around us. The heat of the forest was smothering, but this heat under the open sun is invasive. I feel the last particles of cool air—from the car, from the restaurant—burn from my lungs as summer swallows me from the inside out. I am claimed. The uncanny familiarity is within me now; there’s no going back.
There are a few explanations for my sudden, nauseating reverie—grief, I have learned, cracks us into pieces that make all sorts of strange, alarming shapes—but I decide upon heatstroke.
Maybe, in the end, they knew her just as well as I did. Or maybe none of us knew her, and we’re making her up now. A girl in the shape of our guilt.
The water should taste metallic or mineral, like the walls of the well it probably comes from, but it’s sweet. Filtered. Like all the forces of nature, this, too, has been refined by Aspen’s wealth.
It gives me chills, the way those girls looked at me. A single sight separated into many eyes.
I leave the lip gloss on. Bright things in nature are often poisonous. Let that be my defense, then. Let Aspen watch, and predators prowl, and all the waiting jaws yawn wider. I will be a ruin to consume.
“All anything in nature wants is to survive. Nothing evil about that.”
My mind fills with the vision of her now, lying inert in her coffin, unrecognizably still. Lying among flowers, lying in this field. So still the grasses curtain over her.
I start to understand what Caroline must have seen in them. The bees. They operate within such an urgent, simple logic. Unbothered but also determined. Like her. Their world feels pure, unbound from creativity or pride or rebellion. All those vices live within me, so maybe I couldn’t live within a hive after all. But what about grief? Do bees know loss? Humans have a hundred mythologies to dissect death. When a bee dies, I wonder if it anticipates the moment its curled body will be passed down through the sweetly scented darkness, toward the light that waits below.
I have never prayed until Caroline died, and now that she’s gone, I only have one prayer. Just one. Wherever you are, let it be bright. I hope it’s light that greets us, in the end, after everything. The alternative is unbearable.
No. There’s nothing after, neither bright nor dark. No disorganized energy or dissipated particles. That’s what I tell myself. Anything more than nothing leaves too many questions. Conditions and bargains I can’t deal with. There must be nothing. I need to know ...
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The time to tell the truth is ending. The sun will rise, and, just like Manhunt, the events of the night will cure with their own radiant lore. A glorious, glowing lie will replace the cold, dark truth. It disgusts me. I realize why: It’s a form of indulgent memorialization. It’s like my parents and the adults of Aspen telling me what Caroline would have wanted, what she stood for, what her death means. The eulogy replaces the person; the story told takes the place of the life lived. The secret of tonight will replace these silly nocturnal antics with a forbidden luster. The truth will lock up
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In the shining Aspen sun, all colors fade, and all doubt fades, too. But at night the doubts embolden, and without the sun making me squint I feel a clarity I can’t always find during the day. It’s that clarity that I need to hold on to, above all else.
“Is everything an act to you?” “Everything is an act to everybody.”
“Hives aren’t monarchies,” she says, taking the heavy frame from me. “The queen isn’t an authority. She’s just a priority. Like an organizing principle. The real authority is in the colony itself.”
I was a fool to think I could find her here. What I’ve found instead is just another girl-shaped void with the silhouette of my sister.
I don’t want to move on just yet. I just want to sit here a little while longer beside her ghost, and try to hold her hand.
“Better to drown as myself than to breathe the air of someone else’s life and drown all the same.”
“Sometimes I think the way people react to me has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with them.”
I know what I’ve always known: The monsters worth fearing are the ones that are dangerous enough to hide in daylight.
The more I watch them and the more I hear them, the brighter the vibration is within my own chest. I can feel it right between my lungs. A bell, bright and happy, begging to ring with them.
We play the game. It’s less a game and more the choreography of survival. It just feels like a game in all its mysterious rules and mundane choreography. You sit, your legs together. You laugh, but not too loud. You speak, but only in answers. You reveal all things through subtext. You’re the closed flower, the lidded jar, the blanketed birdcage. Someday, usually as it’s happening, you realize that all along the thing you’ve been flirting with is your own destruction.
We don’t complicate it with ego. What creature congratulates itself for eating? That’s a human habit, and one you’ll learn to leave behind. What matters in nature is hunger and the instincts that satisfy it. But he deserved it, didn’t he?
We seek nothing greater than the connections to one another. Alone we are outnumbered and temporary, but together we are infinite. Each of us has access to all of us. And what a blessing this is. Don’t you see? Our means to survive has always hinged upon our ability to outsmart predators who seek to isolate us, consume us, annihilate us. Our service to nature is as a net, swollen with the weight of the world, rocking above the maw of a void that will never stop hungering for our sweetness.
I try to walk backward through my memory. Back up the path, through the apiary, into the cabin, up the stairs, to the vanity, but after that my memory becomes a rope unraveling. The timeline frays into dozens of strands, then hundreds. Hundreds of other lives, simultaneously playing in the eye of my memory, impossible to parse coherently.
Lace = hive mind.
The memories are a swarm that I cannot comprehend. Not anymore, now that the intoxicating sensitivity of the umbral honey is fading. But I remember the feeling of being spread through that brilliant network. The lace. It was like there was nothing to me at all, no body, no weight. I danced with the fluidity of thought, arcing like light between the small windows of other worlds. I felt all of them with the rich, casual certainty that they were mine.
And there was no Mars. No I. Just a thunderous us. A voice made out of all the voices, speaking in words made of pressure. A willpower that called itself we
What was it that Mars said about the group being smarter than the individual, crowdsourced intelligence bests individual intelligence.
I realize I’m no better than anyone else who chose to romanticize Caroline’s tragedy. I’m worse. I’m making her save me once again, because I can’t for the life of me accept the obviousness of oblivion. Sometimes people just die, and it will never, ever make sense.
I love the way this book talks about grief.
In the infinite eyes of everything, the present is nothing more than an intersection made out of space and time and—most important of all—intention. The present is a seam that doesn’t exist between what was and what will be. The then, the now, the later? They are colorful shadows cast from a single light, split through the prism of experience. Just reflections and rainbows. Just math, to the eyes of the infinite.
The weave of the lace complicates inward, layering into a design so dense it becomes invisible. Unknowable. You must be small as a bee to trace it, yet as vast as the hive to comprehend it.
Caroline used to tell me Earth to Mars. Well, the earth has finally come to me, and now I am vast enough to return its embrace.
Mars, elevated.
“It’s a net; it’s a map; it’s the lace. We don’t really know. It’s the dimension of consciousness between all things, which the honey allows us to comprehend. Think of it like all the world’s memory, but going backward and forward.”
A giant honeycomb of consciousness.
But I missed you, Mars. There were a million moments I wanted you there. I’m sorry if my protection looked like exclusion. It was. And it was almost worth it.”
“Death isn’t the end,” she says. “It’s just when we become everything else.” “But I don’t want everything else, Caroline. I can’t apologize to everything else, or hug everything else. Or watch a movie. Or talk. Or see you. I don’t know who I am if I’m not your twin.”
All I have suffered flows backward from this moment, from this thing that wears my father’s skin. Greed. The ravenous hunger that sees all things as consumable. People, lives, love. All of it just honey, all of it for the taking.
I never wanted to write this book. I had to. I had to find a way to pin my own nightmares down and study them after I lost my sister, Julia, very suddenly in 2018. And while my sister’s death was certainly foundational to much of this book, it wouldn’t be right to simply “acknowledge” her here. For that, of all things. Her death was not a contribution. She did not choose it, want it, or deserve it. She was so much more, and I refuse to acknowledge her through the lens of tragedy. Instead, I’ll say this:
To my parents, for cultivating a childhood love not just for big adventures across big mountains, but also for the quiet study of plants and flowers and the small things that squirmed under the bricks in the backyard. I promise I only write about wicked parents because you raised me with love enough to prove queer kids can have so much better.
This was sweet. <3
