I smiled, I laughed, I felt a melting behind my eyes watching her smile back at me. Each of us with ink sunk deep in our forearms reminding us of the love that left us too soon. What brought us to that moment was a kind of heartbreak on a geological time scale, rendered through the margins of coastal queer scenes, coincidence that looks like fate, because my first special interest was pattern matching, and that can only explain the luck that follows.

I never found support for any of my calamities in a place where I initially expected, or was instructed. The grief support I got as a kid after my dad died felt mostly hollow. Then I remember one painting in the grief center, by a girl who lost her parent to cancer. And having never mentioned it to my youngest, she showed me a portrait of herself that echoed the same thing: a reflection of a girl in a shattered mirror. My middle school heart understood that painting then, and this week my daughter showed me she does, too.

This week is a new rhythm. Last week was, too. The dishes stay in the sink longer, and dinner could be a sigh and a microwave meal. I should pick the clothes off of my bedroom floor, but my piles of papers, clothes, an archeological wonder of a day in the life ready to be examined are to let you see my humanness. I shop where Jon wouldn’t shop, make meals he didn’t make, and at first I thought it was to avoid the memories (and the occasional “running out of the store crying”), but then I realized I was also writing new memories.

And that’s what time can do. And that’s how I’ve done it. That’s the choice I made during a period of loss 16 years ago, as I saw a woman 20 years older than me, with parallel experience, whose 20 years had centered on that defining moment.

If you are lucky enough, you love hard enough to have more than one cataclysmic defining moment.

And be buoyed up by those who do not just empathize but see the profound absurdity that is this life, this body, this brief time breathing. It is a concert, a movie, a fuck, or a pint of ice cream with a spoon sunk in so deep to lift a bite that the cold travels up the handle. It is peeling paint and sound collage and single entendre subtext. There is no container for my grief but communities can be found and made of folks who have mined and carved, molded and fired and found their shapes for each of us to hold and share, not what we have seen that is on our shoulders that is alike but that we carry something while dwelling as and in the liminal.

Somewhere in the past year, I lost a bit of shame over my body. I can’t point to one thing, but my suspicion is that the front row seats to cancer’s body horror, coupled with all of the things we do for love, made me realize that we are disgusting, temporary things that can feel joy as well as suffering.

I booked an outdoor boudoir session over four months ago after being inspired by a friend whose photo shoot left me breathless. I waited so I could complete around 21 hours of tattooing on my body and heal before the adventure. I’ll probably buy access to all the photos, maybe even a framed photograph, who knows where it will go. Most of the photos have some sort of coverage, but let’s face it, never in my life til this year did I have the confidence? guts? ambition? to do this.

Life is short and absurd, and the ‘Year of Whatever’ only has the rule that so long as it doesn’t cause harm to self or others (and bills are paid, and #1 the kids are prioritized), then why. the. fuck. not?

I still have no template to really guide a path to recovery other than my simple rules. At times I fear judgment, it’s that Greek chorus inside, not judging but warning of the known pitfalls of going outside the lines; fear that the judgement will find me. I realized this week that memories are hard, and the past I can’t return to, but to fill my life with new things to remember warmly while living in the moment might be one of the ways through.

And that can look like returning to my goth-punk-radical roots. It can look like gearing up for Pride as a protest for the continuing fight to recognize the humanity in all expressions. It can look like going to more socials, and getting lost in someone’s smile for a minute. It can look like investing time into building a community with new allies.

And it can be listening to so many stories in unexpected places, outside of curated feeds, when the opportunity strikes to join together on what we share, to combine our understanding of this time. Moments treasured and fleeting, overwriting pockets of pain.