Death Diary: On the End of Believing

(Death Diary: Part 1 is here.)

August 1

Anais Nin, on the end of her affair with Henry Miller: “I wept because I was no longer a child with a blind girl’s faith. … I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe.”

That is how I feel about you. Despite every ending. I love to believe.

You called me your Twin Flame, your quantum entanglement, temptation incarnate, a hypothesis that refuses to be disproved.

You called me the Santa Ana winds and the most beautiful woman on earth.

You said we were made of the same stardust.

When I asked if you were the love of my life, you said, “All three of them.”

You said these things and I believed you. I believed you. Even as you pushed me away, ignored me for months, refused to speak with me.

I let you affect me. I held myself under the spell of you because, like Nin, I love to believe.

But no more.

You will never hurt me again.

—

My father will never read another thing I write.

That is a hard little stone in my throat.

—

My dad and I used to go to IHOP every Sunday. It was like our church.

We would come and wait with all the large families speaking fast Spanish who had just left actual churches and we would drink too much coffee and eat shitty pancakes together.

I’ve had 8,000 breakfasts with him and it’s not enough.

I’m furious at all the shitty pancakes that I will not get to enjoy with him as I go on and he doesn’t.

And now I’m that fool crying at an IHOP.

I want to be very drunk. I want to be with S. I want a gun. I want to walk until every muscle in my legs gives out.

—

S texted, “Good morning. No nightmares, I hope?”

I did not reply, Only the waking nightmare that is my existence.

I don’t believe that—not really. There is a lot of hope here. It’s just hard for me to hold onto.

Hope is a live fish dancing in my palm.

If S asked me not to sleep with anyone else, I would.

But she’s not asking.

—

You can’t catch a fish with poetry. But that is what I’m doing. Trying to do. Was trying to do. With you. Grasp you, understand you.

As if you can woo a tiger with words.

August 2

Dreamed of you again. Except “you” were ugly, with short, damaged rainbow hair. I fell to my knees and embraced you like a child clinging to its mother’s skirts.

I can’t do this with S anymore. It’s making me insane.

My heart is a canvas that’s been punched through.

—

I am the poetry nobody invited.

—

I keep going on all these dates. These endless first dates. They never go anywhere. They’re like the physical manifestations of GIFs. Playing over and over and over, long after they’ve ceased to be amusing.

But I am trying. No one can accuse me of not trying.

And that is what I take pleasure in. That is what these dates give me. A pretense of hope.

On tonight’s date I ordered a drink called the “painkiller.”

It didn’t deliver on its promise.

August 3

There is a such a muscularity to S’s mouth—even her pauses have a pulse.

—

I am unwell.

In the bath I remembered how you stuck your hand down the back of my pants at the Museum of Pop Art, with my dad standing three feet in front of us, unaware. How we also fucked in the bathroom, and in the Wrath of Kahn exhibit.

My sadness this time wasn’t over you, however, but the knowledge that my dad and I will never go to another museum. He’ll never meet my wife, whoever she may be.

This is so much more upsetting than any terrible thing you’ve done to me. And in this upsetting, a kind of relief.

—

And S. Sweet S.

I am losing my mind. Each moment I fly off and return, perturbed, fine, not fine, insane, haunted with doubt, and lathered with lust.

I am afraid to be too intimate with her. I am too raw, too sanded down.

I have spent these months without you convinced my heart was inert—trapped in a box that you locked and threw into the ocean. Then death came along and hijacked it, turning it once more into a thing that is wildly, uncomfortably alive.

Tell me, I’m begging you, what do I do with this bird heart of mine?

—

My writing lately has the clipped, repetitive fervor of a last prayer. I have no focus. No chill. Who would choose me? I wouldn’t even choose myself.

August 4

Grief has its way with my body. Like a lover or a parasite. I am its benevolent host, its cheesy costume, its dumb soldier obeying. I cry violently and randomly. When I think of him not being here. When I see pictures. When I think of all I’ll never know about him.

Grief is starving me. I can’t eat. I can barely cook. My mind is a burning bush—I can’t shake the awful thought that S is going to leave me any moment now, that she is wrong for me and I don’t want to see it, or I do see it but can’t stop it—because my need for affection is bigger than the inevitable demise of us.

Oh, S. The soft sigh of you. The way your hands move like hummingbirds on me when you are about to come. The way you say da-da-da-da when trying to move a story along. The way you ache for your aliveness.

I adore these things. I adore you and am terrified of you in equal measure.

Each morning I wake up convinced I need to end this, and by nightfall I have talked myself out of it.

—

“To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.”—Mark Nepo

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”—Carl Sagan

—

One of the things I will never get used to as a deaf person is the way deafness hijacks moments, takes them from me, makes my life renderable and understandable only through others.

Like with K. How I didn’t hear the doctor say that my father had died, but could tell because she gasped. Thank god she was there, to gasp on my behalf.

“What a thing, to be able to gasp when a person you love needs it,” she said, after I told her this.

What a thing, indeed.

August 5

Grief is love. Not an aberration of it. Not its opposite. Grief is the excruciating, molten center of love. The core of who we are and what we share.

August 6

Yesterday was mellow. S made us lunch and we coworked and then later watched my brother’s short film that stars my father.

I cried seeing him move, seeing him shuffle around and mumble in his aliveness and also because it was so painful to grow up in that silence.

I didn’t have the foresight to think I might cry watching this, but S sat down next to me and stopped doing laundry and held me while the tears rolled silently across my face like tumbleweeds and I was grateful for it.

There is something so tender and strange about this, us. About our bodies together in stillness. Why do I have to figure it out? Why do I have to know what room to place her in my heart? Why can’t I just sit quietly in the room and enjoy that?

We kissed goodbye, tentative, uncertain—like two hummingbirds attempting to drink from the same spout. And then I could not look her in the eye. I looked everywhere else.

Even as I realized I was doing it, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want her to see me, suddenly, horribly, awkwardly. I was too flayed in that moment. Too skinless and itchy for such tenderness.

August 7

“Something bad always leads to something good” is such a shit thing to say to someone who has lost a loved one.

I mean, sure, the sheer randomness of time and life ensures that “something” good will happen to all of us if we look at things long enough and hard enough.

Like, last night I had no panic attacks. Huzzah! Something good! But it’s not like you get a cosmic birthday cake because death interjected your narrative.

The implication of such statements* is, “So stop being so fucking sad already.”

*Megan Devine talks about this in It’s OK That You’re Not OK.

August 8—Tucson, Arizona

Tucson is dead to me. This place I loved. The place I was born, spent 22 years of my life in, the place that once held every fire in my hand. It’s gone now. He was what was keeping it alive.

I’m weepy and just want to be drunk. (I’m not.)

As I drove down here I kept thinking how weird it was that he didn’t tell me to check the air pressure in my tires. I did it myself and pretended it was him saying it.

I am my father now.

(Part 3 is here.)