If this year in particular has been able to teach me anything it is this: sometimes there is no why, there only is. Today, the lesson to take in is that I don’t have to know all the answers, I truly don’t, I only have to be able to rely on the help that is offered and know that it is offered truly and without strings.
I was thinking this as I was driving to work this morning, stressing about all things and the Lesson of Brian, that sometimes there is no why flooded my brain as the road wound through the reservoir climbing to the bridge, tears streaming as I saw my favorite mountains across the water, a beret of soft clouds snuggling their peaks. “I want to go there, I want to go there” I said out loud. “I don’t know where that is but I want to go.” A warmth came over me, and a raven flew up from beneath the left side of the bridge to accompany me all the way to the other side. Lifting high and higher. I see you. Nevermore alone.
Tag: grief
Day of the Dead November 1, 2025
1:52p
There’s currently power but no internet, so there are limits on what I can do that I am used to doing the way I am used to doing them.
Music is limited to the “dance cardio workout” daylist from Spotify last night which isn’t so bad. I can’t connect to the Sonos speakers, but I can connect to my Bluetooth speaker, so I’m not limited to the phone volume.
I’ve saved a number of book-sized boxes and so I’ve begun to take down Brian’s books from the shelves for Patrizia to collect. I’m taking breaks to smoke and play a game and then go back to it. Cleaning the shelves comes next. And then perhaps my things can go there, out of the bags where they are, huddled on the floor.
On my list of things to look for on Facebook marketplace: a turntable. I no longer have the analog speakers I used to so that kind of sucks but I’ll figure it out.
I have laundry running, linens and pillows.
To look for in the house: a tarp for the firewood, snow tires.
I plan on cooking for myself, in fact I’m getting kind of hungry so maybe I’ll go do that now. Thinking about the meal that Gary and Brian would make for me, if they could. Thinking about how they both loved to make food for me. I can see them, discussing, although I can’t forward Gary’s face, he remains as he was, forever 46.
Hungry.
It’s after three; the ideas about caramelized onions and garlic and chicken and pasta forgone for the more-possible accomplishment of the last of the tortellini in the family-sized package. Water boiling, music still that playlist from last night and while yes I have often played songs on an endless loop for days it’s always of my own choosing. Not the same two-hour-twenty-six minutes on shuffled repeat of shitty retail. Water aboil, ready to dump the tortellini in and nope. Mold.
Grateful for angel hair pasta of which I have much. Truffle salt, butter. The grated Parmesan in the fridge is also beyond safety so into the bin that goes too.
Closing in on five.
I can’t look things up. I don’t like this.
Discovered that my personal playlists are available, so Nile Rodgers empties out of the speaker.
I’ve gotten seven boxes of his books packed, and have found a few on the shelves that I’ll keep. Putting those with the smallest version of my library that has come with me everywhere, yes there are books that I always want physically around me and no, a photo of them really won’t do. Both copies of Budge, mine and Gary’s. One copy, the better copy of Adams’s collected works. Lilo Raymond’s book of black-and-white photos with the unmade bed on the cover that has always been my sense of home, found only now. My altered book.
I liked wearing makeup yesterday, the effect it had on me if nobody else. Cutie whose name I can never remember thank you for making my day first thing in the morning by telling me I looked fantastic in my outfit. It’s literally just me in my weed witchy clothes, so, no costume, so, valid, honest feedback wearing things that show my whole braided challah shape that Brian loved. Juicy.
Five oh nine. Nine boxes packed. Still no internet.
Took an accidental nap on the couch; could be worse, left leg up with a heating pad on my knee but no CPAP mask. Seven nineteen now, heading to bed. Morning will come tomorrow; may as well meet it well-slept.
Still no internet.
among the wildflowers
I am imagining your beautiful skull
clean and white and gleaming in another forest
as beautiful as when it was covered by your skin
soft and creased and lips puckering to welcome mine
I am imagining the creatures that are feasting on you, much as I clung to the words we shared, the love we shared, surrounding you and enclosing you as you surrounded and enclosed me
You have given yourself to the world as you have yourself to me, completely and unabashedly.
You are the most unselfish person. The only way to continue is to follow your lead.

thursday evening, 8:18p 4th september 2025
I miss your kisses
There haven’t been any since I kissed you last.
I can hear you telling me that I need to be kissed.
I miss the way you look at me
the way you see me
There has not been any of that, either
except in the glimmer I catch from the corner of my vision
People listen to me, for a time, because I have interesting and useful things to say
but then they go.
You stayed, staid.
Sturdy and safe, secure.
My haven in the wilderness.
The wilderness surrounding me seems to be balancing out, equalizing with the wilderness within
much as a bucket of water surrounding a bag of hard clay will soften it.
I sit in your chair, having eaten, smoking
I can feel your huge hands on my shoulders, surprising you the first time you did so by how hard they are, belying the soft surroundings
I grinned at you, happy to have pleased you, pleased myself with my complexity.
I wasn’t done with our conversation.
It is unfinished.
There is so much more to say.
329p tuesday 2nd september 2025
I think about how disturbing it was, to the woods, to the forest
When I found you dead and began screaming.
Sitting here on your porch two months later in the near-quiet midday, only the occasional screen door squeak and slam, the crickets, the
what is that banging is it gunshots
of the deep woods
I think about how deeply I offended the forest, tearing her air open that way, and how she has welcomed me in.
How, in this peaceful deep quiet she has comforted me, presented her ever-evolving palette.
10 august 2025 746a
how many things can happen in a life before there are no good things left in possibility?
how many devastations do you endure before your own comes way too soon or way too late?
how wide is the ebb and flow and wax and wane and nadir and pinnacle?
no, I don’t want to live in fear.
it is only always one more thing that swings it
one more trick to topple.
the tiltawhirl is tiring, exhausting.
I am living in the good and kind and love and I want so much to stay.
I want to stay here.

twenty-nine days.
I woke up in your bed this morning, a Thursday
four weeks after I was supposed to.
how has it been 4 weeks already.
It’s like you’re just away somewhere
just out of reach, but not really
I can feel you here, everywhere here
I know you know
I know you are here
I can feel you enveloping me, keeping me safe.
I can hear you say,
“look at you!” your voice sparkling as much as your eyes
your presence is as thick as your mustache.
You have given me such gifts.
sometimes I feel like I just haven’t seen you in a bit and that we will have a date soon and then
i haven’t seen you in a bit and I haven’t heard your voice in a bit and I haven’t touched your face in a bit
The last thing I did was stroke the back of your head which was fuzzy and soft and you may or may not have shaved it for our date that evening
(how long does hair grow after you die)
((i am not going to google that))
but you were dead long before I found you.
I know what the official time of death is. It isn’t real; it isn’t true.
The feel of your peach fuzz hair on the palm of my hand, the cold firmness of your back.
I knew it would be cold before I touched you.
For our date that night, I was going to bring you some of my fresh harvest, my medicine that you helped with, that I had just begun curing but was still quite spectacular already.
I sent you photos of them every day, I’m sure you didn’t see much difference in them but comparing side by side you could. I made sure not to send too many because I know that is overloading.
You helped me raise the lights, saw how I talked to the plants, witnessed me taking care of them.
I have so many things to share with you that are now silenced. Except here.
I can’t send you pictures of my face to show you that I’m thinking of you. I don’t get to see your face when I do. I don’t get to see how many millikittens you’ve assigned it. All I can do is extrapolate.
I know that you felt my love for you until the very nanosecond you died. I know that you were conscious of that. I know you have no doubt that I loved you up until the very moment your body shut down and your energy dispersed because I can still feel it. I know that for a fact. That is not anything I will ever doubt. And I know you never doubted my love for you as I never doubted your love for me. There was never a second to question.
I am so sorry that people broke your heart. It hurts me to know that there are people who caused you so much pain. Pain you shared with me, somehow I was able to put aside my own and take yours in. Pain I had struggled under, showed you how to handle; pain you witnessed me defeating, pain that feels easier to avoid now.
I am grateful for your years of unending patience and soft lovingkindness and truly listening to me, comprehending me. For this allowed me to not feel bitten those last few weeks and instead ease into our dates because they were our time and no one else’s. Ours.
You have given me such gifts.
I think it’s the mornings that are hardest
I think it’s the mornings that are hardest
Yes, the mornings when there’s no one to send out this 💜 my heart
There’s no one to tell
I’m awake! I’m alive! I made it through another night!
It’s also all the times during the day I want to share my face with you, where I want to show you that I am thinking about you, because you could always tell.
It is all of the times that I think about you, your face, your smile, your very name makes me glitter and squish up like I am being devoured by you.
my eyes open, and before I can see anything, I see you.
Your goodness is so pervasive, it has wound around every part of my life, tangling, reaching, connecting all of the things, like mycelium.
To focus on the things that I would prefer, instead of the things I would not; put the energy there, please.
I have one of your overshirts, I’ve wrapped myself in it this lovely autumn morning in July. I haven’t washed it, I took it from the hook where you left it.
Hi love.
×××
3 september 2024 near to close

sharpie pen on tissue interleaving
a lonely satellite
orbiting a years-dead star
flying ellipses
not smoothly
sometimes smoothly.
Other times jagging into deep recesses of space and time
getting lost in the cosmos
dust to dust
ashes to ashes.
521p
9.3.24
