Iara’s kid leaned fearlessly over the bridge railing to peer below us. I went tense and still. My generation knew what was at the bottom of the canyon. The kid’s generation didn’t. That was a good thing. It was a good thing, I told myself, that this whelp knew so little of the cost of his world that he was willing to meet an early, ugly death at the bottom of the damn canyon.

I pulled the kid off the. He stumbled and caught himself, throwing me a dirty look. Full of fire, this one. It was hard not to see Yazid in him.

“Sorry,” I said insincerely. “My hand slipped. Now keep up.”

He followed after me with a huff, not willing to call me out on my bald lie. The hospital was in sight, looming above the trees on the other side of the canyon. He could irritate me later. 

The priests wake you up in someone’s bed. A woman cries in the other room—most likely the mother or wife of the man whose body you’ve just stolen. She will not meet that man again.

You stand and test your new body. Strong shoulders and calloused hands, so a blacksmith or a farmer. The priests tell you that you are twenty years old, born the same day as the King. An unlucky day for a boy in this kingdom to be born.

One of the priests lowers his hood. He is not a priest at all, but the King. You recognize his ancestors in his face. You kneel.

He tells you to rise. His eyes are red from crying. He has just lost his father.

When the train arrived at my stop, I managed to heave myself out of my seat and onto the platform. I did my best to keep standing as the train trundled away, but the scorpion had settled right across my left ribcage and was giving me all its venom as vengefully as it could, so I sat down on the steps to the parking lot and tried not to pass out.

“Easy, little beast,” I said to the scorpion. “You’ll be free of me soon. I don’t want you here just as much as you want to be gone.” But of course, the scorpion did not listen. Underneath my sleeves were long veiny lines of ink. I’d waited too long before coming here.

The parking lot was empty. I worried that they’d forgotten me, and I’d have to call Madeline and beg, which I told myself I was too proud to do, but I’d do it anyway if it really came to that. Then a car pulled up and Owen waved at me. I ignored him until he came out and walked right up to me, and then I looked up at him and sneered.

“I’d hoped she fired you,” I told Owen.

The fountain was first and the house came later. I sculpted three statues for that fountain. The first was a woman sitting in the water, an arrow held in her right hand. Her left hand cupped her collarbone where a wound wept water endlessly, spilling over her fingers and across her knees and away.

The second statue was of a father bent over a child, shielding the child’s head from the rain with his hands, only the rain fell from the father’s weeping eyes, dripping from his chin, falling onto the child’s shoulders, which were drawn and taut with tension.

The third statue I never finished, for it was meant to be a sculpture of Leena, who never stayed still for very long and soon disappeared altogether. I relied on impressions I took of her in passing, and those rare moments when I could cajole her into sitting for me. Then I was able to get the form of the sculpture done, one foot dipped in the water, the other leg folded on the lip of the fountain, the torso bent, her hands wringing the long braid of her hair into the basin. The water was meant to come from her hands and the end of her braid, but it remained unfinished, the face unrecognizable, one leg raw stone, the other one finished but left underwater for the minnows to nibble and the moss to climb. The water never came out of her hair, and my memory of Leena’s face never felt strong enough to set into stone. I promised myself I would finish it when she returned.

#

I’m in the middle of writing my thesis so I can finally get my PhD and put an end to this long chapter of my life and the only thing I can think about is how it’s all been a prayer. It starts with a mystery, as all good prayers do. It is followed by doubt and misery. It ends with awe.

I remember the exact moment I realized I was built for worship. I lay on my back on the top of a mountain. The next day there would be fog, but that night was clear enough to see every star in the sky. You could hear the ocean far below, crashing. I was sixteen or seventeen years old. I remember thinking, I will never be able to fathom this. We are so small, and this majesty is so beautiful. I don’t remember saying anything out loud, but I must have, because last month my sister-in-law turned to me and told me, I will never forget what you said that night.

I was reading up on the Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who discovered how muscles contract and first isolated Vitamin C, for which he was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. During World War II he had to operate a black market enterprise just to house and feed his laboratory staff. Coincidentally, he was philosophically against the idea of writing grants and asking for money, preferring to be funded by rich patrons instead, which he found when he started a lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He liked dividing scientists into two categories: The physiologist who “carefully preserves
structure and subtle qualities” and the biochemist who “willfully destroys them”. (Szent-Györgyi, 1949) In a letter to Science, he writes of two other categories: the Apollonian who “tends to develop established lines to perfection”, and the Dionysian who “relies on intuition and
is more likely to open new, unexpected alleys for research”. Of course, he identifies himself as both the destroying biochemist and the intuitive Dionysian (Szent-Györgyi, 1972). With apologies to Professor Szent-Györgyi, I identify very much as an Apollonian, though I’m very much not looking for perfection.

Part of writing a thesis is to place your meager findings within the context of decades of work. It’s a humbling and rewarding task. You sit on the shoulders of geneticists who knew nothing, not the names of genes, not the paths of their transduction, not the signals, not the receptors. They just had syringes and microscopes and dreams, and then forty years later, here I am, adding mystery to the mystery.

In 1986, Iqbal Bano, a singer so beloved in Pakistan, that she had already earned the title “Queen of Ghazals” for her unparalleled skill in putting music and voice to poems, stood in front of a crowd in Lahore.

It’s hard to get accurate facts about this night on the internet. Every retelling differs in some crucial way. I’ve now seen multiple accounts saying that there were 50,000 people there. But I’ve looked up the building that the concert took place in, Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore, and at the time of the performance, the auditorium had no more than a 2000 person capacity. So this seems unlikely.

This was the only detail I was able to meaningfully fact check, so we take following details as pieces of legend rather than fact (which almost makes them better than fact): Iqbal Bano wore a black sari, the color of protest, the sari banned by the oppressive military regime of Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. She would not be allowed to perform in public after this night and her songs were banned from being broadcasted on Pakistani radio. The police raided the homes of the concert’s organizers, hoping to destroy any recordings of the night’s performance. A recording did make it out, and was quickly disseminated. Its censoring only made its popularity grow. You can listen to it here.

On that night, Iqbal Bano sang a poem.

The Boundary is an invisible line, but after a night untouched, it’s secreted its own membrane of small objects that we dutifully collect and catalogue and sort into their respective containers. There’s a box for house keys, a box for framed photographs, for children’s toys, for musical instruments, for teeth, for jewelry, for wristwatches. These are the offerings the dead like to leave us.

After we have cleared the Boundary of what has been left in the night, we watch for anything new. It’s an unappealing job, somewhere between sanitation and mortuary services, but someone has to do it, and it’s not exactly one of those occupations that allows inattention either. You can’t listen to a podcast while patrolling the Boundary, because the Boundary isn’t always where it was a few minutes ago. Drawing a chalk outline is useless, just as drawing a chalk outline for the ocean is useless. Death ebbs in tides, and takes away anything that steps in too close.

Two weeks after I started here, I saw someone get swallowed by the Boundary. He was there then he wasn’t. Six days later, we found his wedding ring lying beside the Boundary. Fortuitously, he’d engraved it with his and his wife’s names.

As I watch, I see something bright red begin to push itself across the Boundary. First the headlights, then the red hood, the cab, the yellow rubber wheels, and finally the blue truck bed. It takes five minutes for the toy dump truck to slowly inch its way across the Boundary, its wheels rolling incrementally on the grass. I imagine it must take a great amount of effort to pass objects across the Boundary, though there’s no way to be sure. I wait until the truck is all the way across before retrieving it. It’s faintly sticky and warm, as if it has just left a child’s hands.

My fingernails won’t stop growing. In one week my intestinal lining will be completely turned over. New skin in one month. New blood in four months. New bones in ten years. Same teeth. Same neurons. Same eggs. Even my fingertip can (potentially) grow back as long as it’s cut off before the edge of the nail bed. There’s a lab in my building that grows brain organoids in dishes. This requires constant feeding of the brain organoid with oxygen so that the three-dimensional mass of tissue does not suffocate under its own weight and enter hypoxic conditions. They’ve recently begun to use our two-photon microscope which allows for high penetration of thick samples with high-powered infared excitation. The laser sits in a black foam box in the back of the room and staring into its beam will burn away your retinas in seconds. The brain lab, which studies torpor, is trying to put canisters of pure, highly flammable, oxygen into this room to feed their brain organoids with oxygen while they are being excited with lasers. This has been referred to by the building’s health and safety team as “risky” and “inadvisable”. My brain does fine though. It does not explode, even though I feed it with oxygen all the time. The brain is the greediest part of my body. It steals 20% of my body’s total oxygen. However I can stand next to open flames and usually not be at risk of spontaneous and explosive combustion.

In the central nervous system, neurons don’t renew, although the field of neuroscience is enterprising, dogged, and motivated by millions of dollars of regenerative medicine funding, at least in previous iterations of the NIH, so perhaps I speak too soon. In some ways the self is immutable. In some ways, I will never change except to degenerate. Neurons share fate markers¹ with germ cells whose fate is egg/sperm then zygote then embryo then fetus which suggests that immortality can take different physiological forms. That fetus will have fingernails in ten weeks and those fingernails will keep growing. When my grandmother carried my mother in her womb, the fetus of my mother already carried the eggs that would one day be fertilized into the zygote that would develop into me. The genetic and environmental conditions of the grandmother in this way have transgenerational effects. In fruitflies, we call mutations “grandchildless” when they result in the ending of a grandmother’s lineage. The effects are not known until two generations have passed. It is easy to visualize these effects in fruitflies, which have a life cycle of ten days, although since I am eight years into studying one such grandchildless mutation, I can say that they are not easily understood. It is even more difficult to study these effects in mammals, let alone humans, who obviously live much longer. And that’s the argument fruitfly biologists make when they want to get funded by the NIH, at least by previous iterations of it.

Luis Aparicio was a shortstop in the MLB from 1956 to 1973 and is considered perhaps the greatest defensive shortstop who ever lived. In the book The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, a fictional version of Luis Aparicio has written a guidebook for shortstops. It advises:

“To field a ground ball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.”

The only reason the film even premiered at all to that many people was because Jordan had the bright idea to apply for a grant from the Doc Agnes Foundation for Young Filmmakers and we got eight hundred and fifty dollars, which was barely enough to buy a new computer. Later, everyone found out that Doc Agnes was a satanist but we didn’t know that at the time. At the time, Jordan and I were just pretty happy to get a new computer. Keeping an angel on the last one’s hard drive hadn’t been good for it.

Jordan bought a suit for the premiere, and I borrowed an old dress from my mom, this uncomfortable heavy-skirted thing that Jordan goggled at before settling down. There were two other films being shown after ours but I don’t really remember the specifics. By that time, we had figured out that if we picked up flutes of champagne and drank them fast enough, no one stopped us. They didn’t end up showing those other two movies anyway.

It was at Doc Agnes’ house, of course. He had this whole private movie theater set-up that took up the entire third floor, and everyone filed in, loud and tipsy, cheerfully rustling their silks and wools and whatnot. Jordan and I sat in the last row, sweating and nauseous, like we already had hangovers. Ours was the first movie. It was fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds long. By the time the film was done, the projector was smoking so much they had to douse it with a fire extinguisher, and an image of the angel in the shape of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 32 had been burned into the screen. All twenty people seated in the front two rows passed out. There were reports later of hallucinations, visual impairment, cognitive dysfunction, and loss of appetite.

When the car finally stopped, they were in the middle of a long field surrounded by trees, the sun setting over tall grass. They had run out of road a long time ago. It was as good a place as any to stop driving.

The exact stopping point was in the center of a triangle made of three shrines, which was apparently auspicious. The third shrine still looked mostly like a person, so they left offerings at the other two and avoided the third. Anselm was the superstitious one of them; he insisted. Through careful measurements, he determined which shrine was closest to them. It was beneath an old and mighty yew. There was nothing left visible of it, buried somewhere in the roots of the tree.

It was hard to know what to do when there wasn’t anywhere left to drive. The car belonged to Michon, who had been the sole driver and thus the leader, but now that the car was no longer in use, this hierarchy was to be replaced, though none of them were very keen to discuss the matter. Privately, Michon still believed that they were the most capable leader of their trio. However, they also wanted to sleep in more in the mornings.

Now that there was nothing left but the sky, it was hard to talk about anything. Michon didn’t hear Sophia speak for six days. They didn't even notice her silence, not until she spoke one morning, her voice ragged with disuse. She told Michon and Anselm that she had visited the third shrine, but it had moved.

I recently read The Four Humors by Mina Seckin and it made me think about funerals.

The book’s main character has just lost her father. She’s spending her summer in Istanbul, and in the first part of the book, her only goal is to avoid her father’s grave. She’s looking for her father, and she doesn’t think she’ll find him in the grave.

The funeral is this specter that hangs over the book. It happened right before the book begins, and I really love the way the book describes the funeral rites, mostly because I think they’re beautiful traditions, and also because it fits so well with other themes of the book: the way we burden each other in grief, the way those burdens are welcome, the ways we isolate ourselves, the ways we can be forgiving, unforgiving.

“Before the funeral, you have to wash the body. If it’s a male body the men wash it. If it’s a female body the women wash it. Uncle Yilmaz washed Baba’s body with my cousins. Then they put the body in a white cotton bag. No coffins allowed. Your body will become soil faster this way.”

I’m here.

It’s not like you said it would be at all. The ring is in perfect homeostasis. Most of the greenspace has been cultivated into wetland. I mean, if you think about it, the bots probably figured out that would lead to the most ideal carbon flux. If I had a few more weeks here, I’d—

You don’t have weeks. Keep looking.

I know I don’t. I’m just saying more people should know about this. More people should see this.

In May, the light in and around our apartment changes. I discover all over again how many windows to nowhere the apartment seems to have, windows that just face other people’s windows. Light steals in through some elaborate ruse during the summer months. When I first moved into this apartment, it was December 2020 and the room I was in had a window that only faced west. I would wake up in complete darkness, go to work, and then when I left work it would be dark again. I began to have recurring dreams where I would discover hidden windows in the apartment where light would come in. In the dreams I stood by the sunny windows, in awe of what I’d missed.

The other day I was so struck by the sight of our dark kitchen lit by the yellow glow of light from the usually sunless window that I had to take a picture of it. I thought, right now, this kitchen looks like a memory I will have one day.

I am made for nostalgia; it is what I’m for. I miss people all the time. Every song and street corner must be imbued with associations of the past in order for me to have experienced it. The other day I was on a crowded train, no seats available, and it made me miss the cold months when I first moved to Boston and the train would be empty. Completely empty. The car to myself. No one on board. No one was going to work. No one was going to class. In my journal entries at the time I wrote that these were the worst months of my life. Why do I miss it? My memories have softened. There’s something frightening about the lack of objectivity; there’s something forgiving about it too.

Content warning: Death/Afterlife

I meet him in the building’s lobby, which looks like just about any lobby in a three block radius. Marble, glass, gold. A misshapen bronze of some Greek legend. A doorman who smiles at him and not at me.

I try not to stare at him as we wait for the elevator, but on the way up he smiles at me a little knowing. It’s a night like any other, he says. And here, there are so many nights left.

The apartment is so crowded that the party is spilling out into the hall. He disappears almost immediately to find us drinks, and I do my best not to beg him to stay. It didn’t work to beg the first time he left, and maybe this way I could get used to him being gone.

Today is my first day fasting for this year's month of Ramadan. The first fast was technically yesterday, but my body was bleeding, and I was exempt.

It's strange doing this again. The last time I fasted was in New York, so it was probably 2019, and I have done maybe a day or two since then when I visited my family in California. My body follows learned somatic responses. This morning, I woke up before dawn to eat. I remembered the words of the intention to fast in Arabic as if my lips were waiting to say it. I remembered how to bend at the knees, I remembered how to wash the insides of my nostrils and ears, I remembered how to ask for blessings, I remembered how to turn my head, first to the right to greet one angel, then to the left to greet the second angel. My muscles moved; I spoke without knowing I was speaking.

It's 2:00pm as I write this. The sun will set around 7:00pm today and I will break my fast. Already, my body feels light, radiant, heady. I've been reading texts about Sufism in Islam, how to deny the material, how to purify the heart, how the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of God, how greed is a curse.

I'm angry all the time these days. Angry at injustice, at corruption, at the complete disregard for human life. I've felt, lately, that my mind has not been clear, and I want it to be as sharp as it possibly can, to cut away all the lies we tell ourselves, that it's okay for some people to die, that it's okay to be silent, that it's okay to turn your face away from what's happening. I needed to strengthen myself.

As the old story goes, the traveler came to a giant hill. His feet sore and his back weary, he wanted nothing more than to sit down and never look at another hill again. He told himself that he would enjoy his rest much more splendidly with a pretty view to look at, and so he tightened the straps of his sandals and made his way up.

The view atop the hill was indeed pretty, and as the traveler caught his breath, he saw that there was a large boulder crowning the hill, on top of which sat a small army of crows. The crows made him quite uneasy, but the crows, equally uneasy of his presence, made their exit hastily enough, and the traveler gratefully took his rest in the shade of the boulder.

Only three crows remained. This was fine, the traveler thought, though he'd never known crows to be so silent and so still.

The boulder, he noticed, had a very distinctive shape. The traveler, his rest forgotten, began to circle it, examining it more closely. Its folds and crags, he decided, looked almost like faces. Three faces. The first face was pleasing to look at – it reminded him of a childhood sweetheart. The second face was a little distressing – it looked almost like his poor late mother. The third face looked almost like himself.

You wonder about the heavy feeling hanging on you today.

It's the gray sky, perhaps. When you half-walked, half-jogged to the bus stop this morning, it had rained only a few minutes before. The air was so soaked with it that by the time you made it to the bus stop, there was sweat running down your back. Today you unzipped your coat, a spring day in February. Soon it'll be time to put your wool coat away, which is for the best, because there's a new hole in the right pocket. You bought this coat secondhand in a thrift store your first year living in New York City. The left pocket has already needed to be stitched up. You have no idea how to sew, so you took the coat to California, and your mother brought out her sewing kit, the one her mother bought for her when she was in elementary school. She made careful stitches in the torn cloth, and every time you put your hands in your coat pockets, you feel those careful stitches on the left, and the ragged hole on the right.

It's probably not the sky.

Earlier this week, you got drunk with your labmate and talked about your mothers. The first time you ever got drinks with her, you were both in New York, and she wasn't a mother yet. She has a daughter now. She worries about the kind of mother she is. She read you a quote she'd heard, about love and control. It wasn't really the words that stuck with you, but the earnestness she said them with. It's the way prayers are said.

I read a sentence in a paper about cell contraction during gastrulation that made me tear up a little today, which just kind of illustrates the level of underwater I am right now. This year, seven whole years into my PhD, I've finally figured out why it's so hard for me to care about other things: it's all my horrible, horrible thesis' fault.

The paper begins by describing cell contraction. Cells, during the early shaping of the primordial stuff of an embryo, like to contract. They contract a lot, contract often, and do it at very specific times and magnitudes. This is how tissues are shaped. This is how you get a brain instead of a butt. One sheet of cells decides to get smaller on one side and fatter on the other, and suddenly you have a spiral, which means more layers, like folding pastry dough. That's gastrulation, baby. We're layers all the way down. As Lewis Wolpert liked to say, "It is not birth, marriage or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life." Not sure about that, but it's catchy as dicta go.

Back to the paper:

My mother asks me what happened when I was nineteen, to make me realize I was different.

Nothing, I say. Nothing except that I was nineteen.

My mother says, I am sorry you suffered.

I tell her I only suffered her suffering. My life is a joy I wish I could have shared with her sooner. I am glad I didn’t.

My mother's uncle was the first in his family to come to America. He came by way of Chicago, but he ended up in Southern California, and when he had a house with a backyard, he put down roots. Specifically, guava tree roots, cherimoya, pomegranate. Whatever could grow he grew. When the rest of his family followed him here, he brought them fruit from his garden, but he hated (still hates) being trapped in conversation, so he left it in grocery bags piled on their doorsteps and drove back home before anyone could come out and talk to him.

In kindergarten we were asked to list something we admired about our family members, and I said: I love the way my grandfather cuts fruit. No one knew what to make of that, but even then I knew that the way he cut fruit was spectacular. In his hands he would slice an apple the size of a softball into neat segments, decoring it cleanly, not a single bite of flesh wasted, not a seed left where it should not be. He had an eye for fruit. Pears, watermelon, lychee, cherries, strawberries, oranges, persimmon, papaya, honeydew, grapes.

He loved mangoes most of all. In Pakistan, he used to visit the orchards himself, bringing home every kind of variety as soon as they were in season. In California, vastly limited, he would still bring home crates of Kent from the Indian grocery store as soon as they came in, would menace us into eating at least three slices before we got sick of it. No one else was allowed to cut fruit in the house, or use his knife. This was his realm, and his alone. He was a painter, and a musician, and to this day I still think his greatest art was cutting fruit.

My father's parents lived in our house, and I rarely saw them show each other affection. That was how it was. They hardly knew each other when they were married. They were together for more than sixty years, and I only saw their love if one of them was hurt, and when they cut fruit together together at the dining table. My grandmother didn't cut the fruit, but she made things out of the fruit my grandfather cut for her. She pickled the lemons, made lassi and balai out of the mangoes, and in Ramadan she made fruit chaat.

Keeping a journal really saved my beef. I never thought of myself as a person with, like, thoughts until it was time to write them all down. I thought, after a month, I'll have found the end of it, and I'll have written myself empty. But it turns out that I'm not as vacant as I think, and now I've kept a journal for almost two and a half years. Of course, whether any of it is any good is another matter — most of it is quite bad! But oh the joy of it. And the best part is, it's mine, it all came from me, so I can plunder it all I want and no one is the wiser! So here I am. I've discovered narcissism in myself and it's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.

In related news, I have an essay out!

March 2, 2021

Winter had to have the last word, so this morning it was so cold I thought I would die waiting for the train. The wind would stick me to the icy rails and then the salt would cure me into leather and I'd just have to stay there until the warm rains came to defrost me.

In this life, I was born girl-shaped. 

My mother didn’t know how to read. When I started speaking dead languages to her, a little after my tenth birthday, she looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. Our neighbor died — they could smell him stinking in the narrow hallway — and I went in with some of the other kids and took some of his stuff. Some books, a small chess set. You were always good at chess. After I find you, you can teach me the rules all over again.

When my mother found out I could read, she tried to smother me in my sleep.

She was crying, which was why I woke up in time to fight her off. I kicked her in her belly and ran. By that time, I already remembered what it was like to kill someone, but I let her live. You’re the one who told me it was bad luck to kill mothers.

A retelling of the legend of Ranakadevi.

The potter’s daughter gathered clay from the banks of the Bhogavo, and watched the funeral pyre burn.

The funeral procession was long gone by now. Their elegant horses and gleaming armor had made quite a sensation in the small river village. But the men hadn’t even lingered long enough for the flames to die down, or to disperse the ashes. They had disrespected the dead, in Hadma’s opinion. 

She had more than enough clay gathered by now. Soft and scented sweet by the river. Hadma had purposefully squatted upwind of the funeral pyre and all of its voluminous smoke, but now as she stood, the wind changed direction and she caught the smell of burning flesh.

Let me tell you a story about two sisters.

(Content Warning: Suicide, Homophobia)

They were born in Pakistan in the 1970s only a few years apart, and came to America when they were young. By the 90s, they were in Southern California. One of them was a lesbian, and the other one wasn't. Their mother was also a sister -- she had three sisters, in fact. One of those sisters was my grandmother. These two sisters are my father's cousins.

The Desi Muslim community of Southern California was in its fledgling stages. The family was more tight knit, the four sisters keeping everyone in each other's pockets, keeping each other fed, keeping each other practicing the faith, organizing the weddings, organizing the funerals, making sure no one was alone when it mattered.

“I can’t be the only one left,” said Lovell.

I said nothing. Most of my focus was on steering us away from the debris.

“Take us back. There were still people on the engineering deck. If they put on their suits in time, they could have survived depressurization.”

“My objective is to get survivors to safety,” I told Lovell.

January 31, 2021

Last day of January. February is the worst month but at least it’s also the shortest month. And then it’ll be March. It’ll be spring.

I’m ready to not feel disoriented again. I want to feel present where I am, to commit to where my body is. Even if it’s hard to find sometimes.

Did her mind finally take flight like it was always secretly longing to do? Did it come free to float there in the fog? There where she will not batter the others, like she herself was battered? Will the cycle end with that one final ascending? Are there stars up there? Does she still remember the first time she held me? What songs are there to sing where she is? Will she dance like when she was a young girl? She has become untethered but, below, her hands still remember how to tie knots. To fasten her sari. To fix my grandfather’s necktie. To loop string around my mother’s ankles and keep her down, keep her sinking, like she herself was sunken, once.

She is kinder now. She can’t be hurt and she can’t hurt. Can you get so full of memories you just stop keeping them? A trail of discarded moments left by her feet as she wanders. Conversations we will have over and over with her, and then never again.

What does she see where she is, so high above? Does she still dream where she is? Dreams she can’t share with anyone. When was the last time she told someone her dreams? Does she see her whole life below her like a vast and unfamiliar landscape? Who is that girl? Armor-less and unrecognizable. Does she know yet all the people who she will slip into this world? A matriarch’s parade marching at her back where she cannot see them. In return we will give her more memories than her mind can bear, and this is what will send it away from her.

How many times have you pierced through the veil and seen what lies hidden? Those truths that you are forced to keep to yourself because no words exist for that unsettling sight, and besides, you’ve forgotten it already, or at least made yourself forget. You wanted your mind to be safe again from lurking horrors. Next time you’ll know better. Next time you’ll keep your curiosity to yourself. Next time you’ll look away.

If we were all unflinching in the face of things we were not meant to see in the first place, what would be the worth of curiosity anyway. Fear is all part of the gamble. A part of all of us that wants to be shocked, snapped into pieces, irreparably changed. I’d like to think that I am made of sterner stuff. But really I just want to be unmade into something a little more interesting. It is a coward’s way to step away from the edge and I would like to not be a coward.

More and more I have grown covetous of stories with doors in them. I love the idea of leaving a place behind and traveling unspeakable distances, seeing unspeakable things, and then coming back to find everything just as you left it. Familiar and untouched and so much smaller, because your horizons have widened too far for you to fit here anymore. There and back never again.

MARCH

The trees are blooming. I’m glad I went out to see them. I plucked a blossom off a branch but I forgot about it in my bag and now it’s all crumpled. So it goes. I want to cherish this last spring in New York, but it’s hard to do that at the epicenter. The city feels normal, but I think it’s used to finding normal. It’s got restless bones and they’re used to shifting.

APRIL

Allah save me, I want to leave. Get me out of here. Most Gracious, Most Merciful, All Knowing, All Forgiving. Let me out. I want to leave my head. It doesn’t feel safe here anymore.

The lake house we stayed at was haunted.

I’m a safe distance away from it now, about an eight hour drive through mostly Pennsylvania to be exact, so I can tell you. Something lived in that old, creaking lake house. 

Sound travelled through it strangely, and at all times you felt like something invisible was listening in on your conversation because most likely something was. If you were in the upstairs bedroom, you could hear a conversation held in the living room below so clearly it was like the people were standing right next to you. This could possibly be explained by The Hole In The Floor, but more on that later.

We dubbed this invisible presence Chris, gender unspecified, and welcomed them as an unofficial seventh member to the group. It is possible that Chris followed us home, but that is unclear. 

Times like these I think finding strength in peaceful moments can be such a powerful escape from everything. So let’s talk about haunted lakes.

In October, my friends and I took an improbable road trip to converge upon Lake Eyrie in Ohio. As someone who grew up close to the Pacific Ocean, there’s something about the stillness of a Great Lake that’s unsettling to the extreme. It can be so quiet for such an enormous body of water. An ocean is terrifying and always moving and you always know that it’s so preoccupied with its mysterious unknowns and its own vast ecosystems of life that it’s not going to give a fuck about a puny mortal like yourself.

The lake, on the other hand, is watching.

Maybe it’s because I lived in a desert where it would rain maybe three days a year, but that much freshwater still boggles my mind. The lake’s moods are ever-changing. From our little haunted house (that’s a different story) we watched it go from still and quiet, to churning with restless anger. My friends and I sat on the deck and watched it rear up like some enraged eldritch creature and smash itself against the rocks like it was trying to grab us. No thanks!

Everyday I look for ghosts.

I’m not actually superstitious. Superstition requires a level of caution that just gives me a headache. If I find myself overthinking something, then it’s time to take a nap until it stops. It’s 2020. Who has time to be anything but reckless?

But I love looking for ghosts! There’s something wonderful about an everyday haunting that makes the world that much lovelier and stranger. Those times when you feel like you’ve pierced the veil of the mundane and seen something old and incorporeal dragging its heels in the dark hallway of your place of work late at night.

Those ghosts are the best kind. The ones you only see out of the corner of your eye, that make the funny spooky sounds, that reanimate old faulty equipment in your lab (I work in a lab) and set them off at unexplained intervals, or at unnatural speeds, or make a funny smell.