Death Diary: Is Grief the One Thing Art Can’t Rescue Us From?
(Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.)
August 9—Tucson, Arizona
The memorial is tomorrow.
This morning the bathroom flooded, bits of grey and hair seeping into the tiles and rugs and filling the tub.
Why does this always happen when you’re the least prepared to deal with it?
August 10
Woke up nauseous, shit my guts out, then threw up. I don’t have time for this. I need to write a eulogy! And clean his house.
Dear Dad,
Grief has torn open a room in me I didn’t know was there. I write to you from its ledge.
Love,
Anna
August 11
Sad, sad, sad. Feeling lonely. No texts from S in a day and a half. The aunts are gone and now we have this mess to deal with from the party on top of everything else.
But we spiked the Eegee’s and that’s a joy I’d never experienced before.
—
Is grief the one thing art can’t rescue us from?
August 12
Had the worst panic attack of my life last night. There was a hammer on my dresser and I kept thinking someone was coming to beat me to death with it. Any minute.
I thought repeatedly, I should get up and move that hammer. But I didn’t. I couldn’t move or breathe.
I could only wait for death.
August 13
My friends from high school came over to the house last night and G told a story I didn’t remember about my dad teaching me to drive. He was in the backseat of my dad’s ’62 Biscayne with the girl I wrote 16-page letters to.
My dad was teaching me how to make left turns. “Slow down at first, but once you’re halfway, then accelerate through the turn.”
G said he thought the memory was a lesson.
When life thrusts a curve at you, don’t stop—keep going. Move through it.
I enjoyed that.
August 14
The heart is a difficult math.
When I’m in Tucson I can’t not think of J, the first person I ever loved. He broke up with me on a Tuesday, a week before my Calculus final. I passed the test by one desperate point, earning the only C grade I’ve ever gotten in my life.
It wasn’t math’s fault, of course, but still I harbored a deep, abiding resentment toward it. I steered my focus toward languages. The sweep and gallop of poetry became my mistress.
I don’t regret it. But now, in quieter times, I wonder what might have become of me had I not allowed my grief to shut that door so swiftly. Had I allowed my heart to dwell a little longer in the acute abstractions, the tidy algorithms, the bend and snap of an equation, always inviting, always entreating you: Solve for y.
He’s still married to the girl he left me for.
I think of reaching out to him every time I’m here.
Then I don’t.
August 15
Things That Make Me Feel Good: A Short List
Brunch. Petting cats or dogs. Soft fabrics. Fuzzy socks. The smell of redwoods. Reading a good book. Affection. Making out. Sex. Dancing. Flirting. Walking in the sunshine. Lake Merritt. Good convos with friends. Baths. Dressing up. Sateen sheets. Writing something hard. Describing a feeling that’s impossible to describe. Fresh OJ or lemonade. Hot cocoa. Full-fat dairy. Coffee. Journaling.
August 16
Tried to leave Tucson this morning. All I had to do was move dad’s truck and the motherfucker wouldn’t start.
L said maybe the truck’s heart was broken.
I loved that so much.
August 17—Los Angeles
I want to be the tongue that turns your moans into weather.
August 18—Oakland
I dreamed of S, something horrid that I lost upon waking. Something about her leaving me, I’d guess.
I don’t have much faith in myself right now, my writing. It’s hard to live this way. With that feeling. I hope it passes soon.
But I made it home. No one was expecting me. But I made it.
—
Kelsey and I finished watching The Bachelorette and I’m embarrassed to admit how inspiring it was that Hannah chose herself in the end.
That she was strong enough to say, “No, that’s not enough for me.”
I should take it to heart.
August 20
Why I like having long hair—when I take my shirt off and the strands pendulum across my spine, it’s the closest sensation to that of another person touching me.
August 22
I cried over S, my life, my non-life. I’m tired of struggling. I cried even though she said yes to seeing me. I don’t even know that I want to. I feel like an alien. Like I’m faking it—faking being normal and cheerful.
Why? She hasn’t asked me to.
I want to be the person I was around her, before his death changed everything—our bodies blooming, beauty haloing us.
The sex party we went to in June. The physical fact of her. Her form and features in perfect agreement. Her thighs champagne flutes, her hips a circle of wants spiraling up and up as she walked the narrow staircase.
Her beauty is startling. I love to be caught off guard by it.
It’s like encountering a tiger in the middle of a city street, or rain on a cloudless day.
I could watch her walk up a staircase for a thousand years and be happy.
What a joke. Me romanticizing this.
—
Grief is sanding down my bones, coring me like an apple.
—
When I lay here with my thoughts, the tears fall like wet quotation marks around my mouth, like everything has already been said.
Instead the noise that comes out of me is uniquely animal—a sigh-moan. A wound-scream. A breath-cry. It’s the only noise I know how to make.
My heart hurts. Literally. As if it has been singed. It reminds me of when I would kiss you at night, after you’d put Proactive on your face. My lips coated with its chemicals.
I didn’t mind that it hurt. I wanted to kiss you in every moment, perhaps especially when it hurt.
Does it matter that every beautiful thing you said to me was only half-true? Or does it only matter that I believed it?
August 23
The softest month is your lips.
Your hips the first place I ever lived.
—
What do I do with this bird heart of mine? I asked on Instagram.
“Build a nest,” a stranger replied. “Sing.”
But I open my mouth and screams come out, the animal noise, familiar, not familiar.
And even if I could form a word it would only be your name.
August 24
Oh, these hard nights. I do not cherish them.
I liked the idea of my childhood being somewhere else, a place I could visit.
But now I am the guardian of my past. My childhood sits in boxes at the foot of my bed currently, waiting.
What will I say to S? Why can’t I end a thing that’s not working?
August 25
Well, I had a lovely time with S. I didn’t say anything about anything. I don’t want her to see my craziness.
She kissed me goodbye though. A peck but full on the lips, wet, both hands on my face. She did that.
We are like straight teenagers, unsure how to proceed. I should theoretically know better but I’m not myself anymore.
My heart is a swinging saloon door.
August 26
How to describe the panic attacks. An earthquake in reverse. Falling without gravity. An all-over agitation, like my skin is wrong, or my blood—some totality of wrongness in my body.
—
Writer is the core of who I am. Disability and queerness and otherness are my co-authors. And now, death.
—
Unexpected night of texting with D.
Her love was the closest thing to enchantment I’d ever experienced—before you, at least.
She stole fire from the gods and warmed me with it for seven years.
Now she writes me raps at 2am from across the country: “You’ll never pass this AP / You won’t even get a three”
(Read Part 4 here.)
