A Well Staring at the Sky

Over the past 16 days I have been publishing a series entitled ‘A Well Staring at the Sky’. This is the text in it’s entirety.

“Nós nunca nos realizamos. Somos dois abismos — um poço fitando o céu.”

“We will never know self realization. We are two abysses — a well staring at the sky.”

-Pessoa

A Preface:

I have lost the love of my life. Thanksgiving reminds me of this every year upon its midnight arrival. Yesterday marks four Thanksgivings; how many more thanks do I have left to give?

I have 7 pre-rolled cigarettes to get me through this endeavor. I think that I should have just bought a pack of cigarettes and called it good. I feel obliged to Berlin that it allows me to smoke indoors. That I can spend this evening warm inside with coffee and wine and ciggys — which I endearingly call them at the end of the evening while cherishing their last sweet puffs with the most recent person whose shadow I use to fill the void left by absence.

Shadows do not fill voids. They cover it with a representative darkness. For an instant you may believe that something solid covers the void allowing a lapse in judgment: that you can cross the abyss or shield it from consuming you. But a shadow is just a faint impression; it uses its darkness to obfuscate, but despite its solid appearance, it remains hollow. If you take the risk of crossing a shadow bridge, you will fall into the void’s depths. And if you think the abyss has been covered or filled by the shadow, it will eventually bubble up and seep through the imperceptible shadow; unremittingly seizing and squeezing your heart, your brain, your soul, until you have a headache for all your crying.

This time last year I understood for the first time that my partner for life had ceased to exist years ago and that the man whom I called my partner was not that person and we were about part ways too. Until then I had hid behind him from her ghost. By New Year I would realize my life had taken an inexorable turn towards the complete unknown. I am unmoored. It is only now, the day after this fourth Thanksgiving, the first night of the Christmas Markets in grey and rainy Germany, where I have no home and only the distant prospect of a visa, that I can accept that I have been living in a state of grief and longing.

How many of us can say they have known unconditional love? I have. And, it’s very realistic to believe that I will never know it again. It was a rare gift she chose to bestow upon me; not to be taken lightly or feel self-pity now that she is gone. It was a boon granted to me by the luck of the genetic draw. For the rest of my life, I will be grateful that someone saw through me and loved me because of, and in spite of, who I am.

I have spent the last 4 years grieving, but I have never mourned her. It’s much easier to live in a perpetual state of sadness than to examine the deep depression you have sunk into and acknowledge that you can forever miss someone. Reliving memories until recently was a chore best left to dreams and moments where alcohol had dulled my reason enough to allow me the brief belief that it is natural, even years after a loss, to simply miss someone and wish they were here to hold you and whisper calm words into your ears. To be human is to err, to be sad, to dream, to hope, and even pray despite the lack of real gods this universe has to offer us.

It’s finally time to shed the veil of grief and embrace mourning. It is finally time to give thanks to the woman who helped me traverse the dense forests of life. Now that I am in the depths of this jungle, lost and alone, I recognize I have nothing to lose in embracing the reality of life without her and celebrating what life was like with her.

Aunt Susan, I have remembrances of yours that I have long, longed to redeliver. I pray you now receive them.

A Christening:

I watch a random Bollywood movie from the 1970s. The vamp queen, Helen, plays a floozy named Monica and dances on the screen drunkenly. Asha Boshle’s voice echoes in sound waves. ‘Oh Monica, my daaaarling,’ a man offstage sings to stumbling Helen / Monica as she wanders to and fro looking for him.

For 12 hours after my birth, my name was Monica Elizabeth Kilty. A rose by any other name.

They changed my name after my mother talked to her elder sister, Susan. She lived in California at the time and would not meet me until months later. When my mother related my name to Susan, my Aunt paused and asked my mother what kind of woman she expected me be when I grew up if I had a name like Monica? In the silence of this implication, my mother thought of every bad profession or outcome my future as a ‘Monica’ could portent and subsequently hours later after a vigorous debate on whether I was really a Catherine or a Jennifer, I was officially christened Jennifer Elizabeth Kilty.

A Death Foretold Part 1:

Sometimes I believe that my name should have been Cassandra Elizabeth Kilty. The Greek Cassandra was cursed by Apollo to be a great prophetess whom no one would ever believe. She foretold the downfall of Ilium and the Trojan people. No one listened. She foretold her own death, the death of Agamemnon, and their infant twins by his scheming wife and her lover with an axe. No one listened. I have always had an admiration for her and felt a kinship. Over the years, I have found that I can intuit the outcome of situations. But, like Cassandra, people rarely believe me when I prophesize and I have found it hard to trust my own intuition.

During Thanksgiving, 4 years ago, I knew that Susan was dying. She had no energy and was weak. She looked drawn and that the years were weighing heavily upon her. Her back hurt all the time and some days she could barely move out of her lounge chair. We fought. We never fought, but we fought over the course of the four days that I stayed with her. I told her I thought something was gravely wrong with her and that she needed to see a doctor. She did not listen. I called my mother and told her that I thought Susan was very ill. That I was scared she may have pneumonia or cancer and if it was left untreated she would die. My mother did not listen.

On my last night there, my Aunt ordered us pizza and said that everything was going to be OK. She was just getting older, which made the body harder to heal, but she would be better soon. She said she had looked up the symptoms for pneumonia and for lung cancer and that there was no way she had either. I had always listened to Susan. I have always trusted Susan. So I believed her platitudes. I did not listen to myself and she died two months later.

A Sandbox:

She met me for the first time when I was 8 months old. My parents were tired. They had had an infant for 8 months and needed a break from me. They booked a trip to Hawaii, and Susan offered to take care of me while my parents took a vacation from being parents.

One day, my Aunt took me to the backyard to play in my sand box. I couldn’t walk yet, but I could crawl around, grab handfuls of sand, and take my plastic beach toys in my tiny baby hands and smash them into the soft, malleable sand. She lounged in the wiry deck chair in the Texas sunshine. Her eyes plastered to a mystery novel as she languidly smoked a cigarette.

When she looked up to check on me this is what she saw: a tiny baby sitting upright in the sand, staring at her with intense eyes that recently changed from a dark blue to a bright brown. My little arm had drawn up the side of my body to my mouth. I sat there with my right pointer finger and my middle finger poised at my mouth. My lips pucker and suck on air — an imagined cigarette. I drew my hand away and blew fake smoke out of my mouth and then continued with the same routine again and again.

She was surprised and entranced by my imitation which she mirrored taking a drag from her cigarette. She knows that my mother would kill her if she ever saw her only child pretending to smoke. She also knows that this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. From that day on, I am hers and she is mine.

A Death Foretold Part 2:

I had never heard or seen my Aunt cry. When I answered my grandmother’s telephone, it was four days after Christmas in the middle of the morning. On the other end of the line I heard my Aunt’s voice. It was dark and sad. It dripped with tears and she choked out, please put your grandmother on the line.

Her eldest brother, Stephen, had been sick since I was born. It was surprising that he had lived these last 9 years with the disease that had already devoured whole communities of people and would continue to claim millions.

My grandmother took the phone and listened to my Aunt. I do not remember if she spoke anything in return. I only remember thinking that this is what bad news sounds like. She hung up the telephone, looked me directly in the eyes and simply said Stephen is dead.

I walked outside onto my grandmother’s second floor porch. It was overflowing with greenery from her plants and it was a bright, beautiful, temperate winter day in Austin. The sun shined on me and the verdant plants while I silently picked off sprigs of mint and ate them. In contemplation, I thought of the sadness in my Aunt’s voice. In her voice, I heard the sound of unremitting grief at the loss of someone who is irreplaceable. I would not hear that voice again until I was 27. This time it would resonate from my vocal cords and into my Aunt’s dying ears.

A Tail:

My parents decided when I was three that I could answer the phone when it rings. I was eager to answer and it was probably easier to let me do it than fight with a tempestuous toddler. I would pick up the phone and say, ‘Hello, this is the Kilty residence,’ like I was living in an old black and white movie during the 1950s. This was in a time when there was no way to screen calls and phones still lived in corded cradles hanging from kitchen walls. I made dealing with telemarketers easier. Just have the child scare the telemarketer away by talking excessively to them. If it was friends or family calling they figured the person would just be amused by the mature and precocious child answering the phone.

One day I answered the phone and a minute later I excitedly hung up and screamed, ‘Susu got a puppy’. My excitement was uncontainable and the house echoed with my shouts of joy and heavy footfalls as I ran into the living room where my parents were lounging. They both looked at me with disbelief and my mother said that Susan did not get a puppy. I told her she is wrong, that Susan has a new puppy, and she will be here eminently with furry, fluffy proof. I probably did not use the word ‘eminently’, but there was immediacy in my need to be taken seriously.

When Susan arrived there was a puppy in tow. He was a shaggy, brown puppy with big black eyes and a soft, wet nose. In my eagerness, I grabbed at him aggressively trying to hold him to me. The adults told me that this puppy, named Mister Binkman but known heretofore just as Binky, was not a stuffed animal and I had to be gentle. We took him on his first official walk. In one hand Susan held my hand and in the other she held his leash.

A Death Foretold Part 3:

We are sitting at our bar when the phone rings. Our bar is Texas themed; a kitchy little place in the heart of San Francisco. I am drinking a purple concoction and chatting tipsily when I look at the ringing phone. It’s Susan, I say and Andrew tells me to take the call. He’ll finish his drink and close our tab. I quickly say yes. She had been so distant during the holidays. I wanted to hear her voice to ease the disquiet I had been feeling since spending the last Thanksgiving with her.

I walk out of the bar into the gloomy, foggy night and answer the phone. My apartment is steps away from this bar and I chatter quickly about a TV show I had stayed up all night watching as I head home. She listened patiently without saying much until I tell that I have arrived home. I walk in the door of the apartment. I ask her how she is and there is a pause and in that silence I know that this has been a setup. I realize that Andrew had patiently taken me out and gotten me slightly drunk in anticipation for this call. My mother must have called him earlier that day to say that Susan was going to call me after work to deliver the news.

Instead of turning right, into the main room of our house, which acted as both a living and bedroom, I turn left into the bathroom. The bathroom is the only room in the house with a door. I glance at the mirror in front of my face and see panic. My Aunt is telling me that she has some news and I need to prepare myself for it and to be strong.

A choked out sound comes out of my tangled vocal cords, it’s meaning is clear although I can form no words. It means, no. It means you can’t do this to me. It means that you lied to me when you said at Thanksgiving that you were not dying.

After this preamble and my response, she continued: She has lung cancer. It is terminal. She has no intention of fighting and next week she will enter hospice. She is clear and concise on all these points.

I stand next to the wall and rest my forehead on its cool plaster as I hear these words and choke out sobs. I press my full face against the wall and paint it with my tears. I hear the front door open and close. I ask her if I can call her back and I hang up the phone dropping to the black and white tile floor. I cry uncontrollably. I know Andrew can hear me and I hate him for it. I hate Susan for waiting so long to be diagnosed and for not consulting me before making her decision.

I try to reason myself out of my dread and sorrow. Maybe she will change her mind. Maybe I can change her mind. I hit my head against the wall. I know she is stubborn and has already made the decision. Thinking that her mind is changeable or that begging will change her mind is about as useful as banging my head against this wall. But at least this pain is physical and not the wrenching feeling of my heart shattering into a thousand tiny pieces and scattering to the winds.

A Tenor:

Pavarotti, she says to me. I look at her inquisitively. We had just woken up. My parents had recently divorced and this is not dad’s weekend. My mother is traveling. So Susan is on parent duty after I begged her to not leave me with my grandmother.

She is doing the Sunday crossword puzzle and drinking coffee out of a mug with a large, languishing orange cat that reads ‘Tomcat’ on it. I tell her I like this coffee mug best because my father’s name is Tom and it reminds me of him when he is far away.

She says Pavarotti again, this time sounding out all the syllables. Pa-va-rot-ti. I ask her why she keeps saying this? She gets up and goes to her CDs and produces an album by the Three Tenors. She points at the large, smiling man on the middle right of the album cover. She says that he is Pavarotti and he is the greatest living opera tenor. She puts on the album and sits down besides me with the crossword puzzle and her eagerly sharpened #2 pencil. She points to a clue and says that the answer is Pavarotti. She asks me to spell his name for her and I do not know how. On an empty corner of the newspaper she sounds it out again, Pa-va-rot-ti, and asks me to spell it as she goes. Once she is done with the lesson, she gets up and goes to the kitchen and starts to cook breakfast as the tenors continue to cant.

I stare at the puzzle and the place where I learned to spell his name. I am proud of myself and vow that I will never forget his name or how to spell it. As I listen to the music while examining my handiwork, I decide that I like opera. It is different than the rock music my parents listen to and my grandmother’s sappy country music. Liking opera makes me more like her.

A Death Foretold Part 4:

Her siblings and I gather in her room on January 8th. Yesterday, we had met with hospice and she was now being treated for her pain and made comfortable for the inevitable. She seems more relaxed and happier than I have seen or heard in a long time. This is the calm before the storm.

It’s damp and cold outside and the few people she wants to see before she lapses into the sweet dreams of morphine’s lasting sleep have gathered to reminisce. My uncle Ricky is here having driven up from Houston in a hurry after mother called him and told him if he didn’t come now, there would be no second chance. Mary will spend every day and most nights here until Susan dies. Shawn, who lives the closest, drives over every evening for dinner. I sleep on a mattress in the living room. Mother has been here since last week. We sit together in her warm bedroom pretending that this is more like a reunion and less like a farewell. Hospice workers tell you that once the patient is released into their care, it is likely they will die within a month. Susan will be dead in 12 days.

The siblings sit around the bed where Susan lays and I sit. They have all known each other for over 60 years and they delight in telling the stories of their childhood. Their grandmother’s warm kitchen that always smelled of fried onions. The fights they had with each other and rebellions they perpetuated on their mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles. As they delve deeper into their adult lives, they speak of the hardships they went through and that it would have been hard to survive those difficult times without Susan. I realize that each of us leaned upon her for support and guidance as we made our messy way through the world. What was lurking underneath the words we spoke was this: we aren’t sure how we will do it once you are gone.

When she gets tired and weary, we make our exit. We decide that Rick will stay in the guest bedroom and mom will go and stay at Mary’s house. I am asked to be her nurse. Every two hours my alarm chimes and I get up to give her the medicine. The third time I get up, I do not go back to my bed, but lay down beside her at her behest. I am tired but cannot sleep. I try very hard not to cry as I lay awake staring at the dark ceiling listening to her deep breaths.

A Vampire:

I told her I wanted to be a geisha and she told me I was going to be a vampire. It’s Halloween and this is the first year I am allowed to go trick or treating. Susan is taking me, but we cannot agree on what my costume will be.

I want to be pretty, I tell her. But she does not listen. She orders my mother to go to the costume store to buy me a cape. I can wear my Catholic school uniform of black dress pants and a white collared shirt. Now all I need is a cape and hair / makeup.

She wets a comb and brushes and gels my hair back. The water and gel make it look inky and stripped. I think I look like a dapper man from movies from the ’40s. She produces a book that is a step-by-step guide to doing costume makeup for Halloween. It even comes with the makeup that you need. I point to the cover with the little girl geisha on it, but Susan turns the page to the vampire section and proceeds to color my face white with black cheekbones, black under eyes, and a black widow’s peak. She colors my lips bright red and draws fangs off my bottom lip with vermillion blood dripping off of them. My mother returns with the cape and I pose for pictures waving my cape around me and looking deadly serious into the camera lens. She tells me this was the part I was born to play.

It’s a cold, dry October evening, unusual weather for a central Texas autumn. I don’t notice the cold as I go door-to-door, grabbing candy and trying to scare the adults that answer my exclamations of trick or treat. I am told on several occasions that I am a great vampire and one man gives me vampire teeth that fit like dentures into my mouth. In my mind this makes me an official vampire.

Susan let me stay out well past my bedtime and when we return home my mother berates her it being such a late hour. She and mom take off my makeup and run me a bath. As I play in the bathtub, I hear them talking about all the candy I had received. Even mom is impressed. As they pull me out of the bathtub and put my pajamas on Susan tells my mother that everyone thought I was the best vampire they had ever seen. She kisses me goodnight and says she knows I was the best vampire that ever lived.

A Death Foretold Part 5:

I take over most of the night shifts nursing my Aunt. I go to Mary’s house to sleep during the day, but I can’t sleep because Susan is dying. So I lay prone in their soft, luxurious bed and watch episodes of Sherlock. It’s the only thing that can make me laugh and distract me right now. For months afterwards, I will be unable to read books other than Sherlock mysteries and rewatch Sherlock. It’s my small comfort. A small bind that ties me to her and this moment.

Looking back, I would not give up the tragedy and the sadness that comes with nursing a sick person through the final stage of life. What my family and I went through was difficult, messy, and drama inducing. During these fragile moments, we were tired and sick with despair at losing the most important person in our lives. She was this to all of us: friend, caretaker, therapist, guide.

Impending grief makes you selfish. You think that you can negotiate with death and when you work as a nurse you think you can stave off the inevitable. You tend to act as the hero. Inhabiting your own version of the world, you don’t recognize the face of sorrow and dread on everyone else around you even though they mirror your own. During this period, my mother will remind me time and again that I am not the only one losing Susan — this is not my suffering alone. Unfortunately, the reminder of this is unnecessary and unhelpful because grief is self-indulgent and even though we shared a commonality, each of those nights I was up with Susan and each of those days I Iay prone, watching Sherlock, I knew what it was truly alone in my own version of sorrow. To this day, this cannot be shared.

We finally had to ask hospice to provide us with a nurse after a week of taking care of her. The decision was made after a particularly bad night. Shawn and I were in the house and at 3am I heard a crash come from my Aunt’s bedroom. She had fallen to the floor in a morphine stupor after having tried and failed to get up to go to the bathroom. Shawn and I tried to lift her dead weight up and back onto the bed, but we were not strong enough. We were scared and sleep deprived and I tried to reason out a plausible way to lift her. After one last try, I sat on the ground cradling Susan in my arms while Shawn frantically screamed at me that we were killing her. I told her to call hospice and they sent a nurse. After we lifted her onto the bed, the nurse cleaned her up and said someone would start coming by in the mornings and the evenings and they would be sending a hospital bed. She said that these were going to be Susan’s last few days.

A Graduation:

On the week of my high school graduation, a 35lb raccoon died in our attic and started to rot. It was the early June and the Texas temperatures were already reaching 100 degrees. The smell became unbearable and our house unlivable. I moved in with my Aunt for the week. She lived nearby and had a guest room that I stayed in more often than I stayed in my own room. I felt safe and happy in her house. It was located near the highway and I would listen to the cars racing past which, to a romantic city girl, sounded like waves rushing up the sandy shores of beaches.

I did a lot of laundry the week of my graduation. Everything I owned smelled of decaying raccoon and she and I laughed together as I busied her washing and drying machines with my malodorous laundry.

At night, I would lay with the window open and the window air conditioning off relying on my room’s ceiling fan revolving in steadfast circles and a breeze from the window to keep me cool. My bedroom window was located directly on the front porch, so I could open the window, lie on the bed, and talk through the screen to my Aunt who was smoking in the rocking chair on her porch. Sitting there with her, smelling the sweet cigarette smoke wafting in those soft and wiry Texas window screens, is how I will always remember her. Like a Catholic confessional booth, I would confess my sins and ask for guidance.

One night, I asked her about love and relationships. After taking a draw from her cigarette, she said that relationships were about balance, but rarely did they ever strike a perfect 50/50. She counseled that as I grow up and live into my relationships with others, I should understand that feelings sometimes ebb, but with the right person they also flow back. Your partner will also feel that same ebb and flow and you have to prepare yourself for moments where they are unable to give you all of themselves. Instead of being taken by surprise or feeling hurt by that person, you have to understand that as their tide ebbs yours would need to flow to help create stability and balance. It may become a 40/60 balance for a period of time, but with the right person the scales would eventually reset and at others times that person would need to give more towards you when your tides were ebbing. She said that this was hard to find in someone because we’re taught that real love is constant and remains the same. That, she said, is the biggest lie of all. If you can’t understand that all love and relationships have to evolve with time and circumstances, then you are setting two people up for failure.

Laying in bed with that screen between us, the air cloudy with cigarette smoke, I knew what it meant to truly trust and know someone. She listened and never judged. She advised, but never pushed me or dumbed it down to make it easier to hear. She trusted me to be intelligent and know myself. She told me she would always be there for me.

A Death Foretold Part 6:

They told me I had to leave. That if I didn’t go home, she would continue to linger and not let go. They have already bought the plane ticket and I needed to pack now in order to make the flight. I plead and beg and cry and reason and no one listens. The deal has been signed and sealed and delivered; consent it not mine to give.

On the plane, the young man next to me talks at me. It turns out he is my coworker’s cousin and he’s Jordanian, so we have common bonds. I eat an entire box of cookies as he babbles on. I feel grateful that his conversation does not lapse. If there is any silence in this cabin I think I will start to scream and rage and beat my breast in frustration and mourning. I cannot let these emotions betray me.

I take the metro home and drop off the talker at his stop. He is grateful for my company and for helping him arrive safely at his destination. I wish him safe travels and continue my ride home. I think Andrew and I talk upon my arrival. I know I sleep. I go to work for a half day on Friday. I think I do normal weekend things that weekend, but I am a just a zombie going through the motions of life and do not remember any details from those four days. I was just waiting for them to call me to tell me that she has passed.

The call comes on Monday morning at 6am. It’s my mother. Susan has died. She is being transported to the funeral home for cremation. Mary and Mother had spent the last hour washing and dressing her. Susan wore slippers and silk, pink pajamas into the depths of the crematorium. She would have liked it that way.

Mother says that she and Mary will spend the next days going through Susan’s belongings. I am Susan’s sole heir, but they will take care of it for me. Mother will bring me what items she thinks are best to keep.

I hang up the phone and cry and Andrew holds me. He tells me not to go work, but I decide to go anyways. I can’t hide from life forever I say and I sink into the bed pulling the covers over me and sob. People send me flowers and offer condolences. Then, life keeps going on.

A Magnet:

It’s my second month in San Francisco and I am still unsure of myself in this new place. I miss the familiarity of Texas and understanding the culture around me. I feel lost in my thoughts and I am physically lost most of the time as I roam the city.

I spend about an hour on the phone each day talking to her. I tell her the same fears and concerns over and over again and she listens with patience. She tells me to acknowledge my worries and concerns. She says not to be so hard on myself and that this will all sort itself out with time. She asks me for my address.

In the middle of January, she sends me a heavy card. When I open it the card is a black and white photo of a man walking along a road into the distance. A quote by Anaïs Nin underneath the photo reads: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

When I open the card there is a large, square refrigerator magnet. Printed on it is a quote from Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’,

“You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, live right into the answer.”

A Death Foretold Part 7:

Susan’s ashes are received by the family and kept in Shawn’s pantry until Mother and Mary have the fortitude to retrieve them in October. On another visit, my Mother and Mary spread Susan’s ashes in Mary’s backyard. I am not there.

Mother tells me about this over the phone on a dark morning as I arrive at the metro station to go to work. She says it so nonchalantly, like it should have been expected. I am paralyzed and can barely breathe or speak. I have been denied two means of closure: to see Susan through each stage of the disease and into death and to perform the last rites of spreading her ashes and releasing her matter back into the world. For days, the jinn of Susan has been emancipated back into the world and I had been oblivious to this change.

I won’t visit Susan’s final resting place until almost 4 years later. I finally meet Susan’s ghost in the waning moments of my 30th year. Years ago, she gave me a small, smooth black stone and told me that when I was feeling anxious, needed something, or had a dream, I should hold and rub it to channel my thoughts, feelings and desires. I remembered this while I contemplated my Aunt in the garden and then go and find the stone buried deep in the bottom of my purse. Now, I use it to channel her and feel her presence and serenity with me as I wander. I hold it in my hand at the beginning of most days and it lies under my pillow most nights.

The Lonely Hunters:

He sits next to me in a blurry room and we ponder if we will ever see each other again. I say aloud that I hope we will. He nods in agreement. For a few days, the gulf of loneliness was bridged by the shadow of brief desire and a mutual need for companionship.

Over the course of our evenings together, we had acknowledged that we dwelled in a cold and lonely place. I told him I had deserted everything that I knew, but that wasn’t what made me lonely. I said I had been alone for a long time now and expected that I would always be alone. He tries to comfort me by saying that it not true: we are not all alone.

I think, but refrain from saying, that we are both alone and will always be. That is the burden of humanity. We can sit next to one another, we can smoke together, our bodies and minds can come together, mingle and embrace, but these moments are just an illusion of communion. Eventually the seat next to us will be empty again. The two cigarette filters will mark their ashtray graveyard — lifeless and abandoned to their cold graves. Our bodies and minds will eventually disengage. We are just two ones left lying next to each other.

Despite my reasoning, that other burden of humanity, known as optimism, plants a small seed of hope in the mushy tissue of my brain and my heart. A chorus emerges singing silently, I hope I will run into you again — I have been traveling so long.