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A story about space…and some updates.

It’s been six months, and here is why: it is hard to write much of anything else when you’re preoccupied with writing approximately 532 essays for Creative Writing MFA applications, with requirements ever so slightly but still significantly different for each school. Give us 40 pages of your very best essay samples; give us 20-30 pages; well, we want two essays, no more and no less. Double-spaced. Single-spaced. Why here (and only here, even though our acceptance rate is a scant 2%)? Why an MFA, and why now? You get 1,000 words to explain. No, no more than 500 words. No, two-pages single-spaced, screw the word count. Sorry, double-spaced.

Nothing humbles a writer straight out of writing quite like reading her own sentences about her own writing, so many times in so many forms that the words start sounding martian. “They’re right to ask,” I started thinking. “Why do I want to do this? Do I? Do I have anything to say?” Oh, god. Do I have anything to say?

I have everything to say. Everything I have to say is too much. How do you write about…all of this? [*Gestures broadly at everything.*] Yesterday, after more than an hour spent Googling for somewhere, anywhere, literally anywhere to get a rapid COVID test, I joked that perhaps I finally have to start Tweeting instead of merely lurking on Twitter, because I am desperate to scream into the void: “I AM SO MAD I AM SO MAD I AM SO MAD#@Jansm&sadlk8*EKjasD, etc etc.” (Slightly different variations of the same Tweet, every day of 2022? Could go viral, honestly. Pun intended.)

How do you write about your grandma dying, when even “grandma” is far too sugared a word for the hot salt of her influence, for the gape she left behind? I was going to call her to ask for the story behind the silver bangle I wear almost every day, which was hers, before it was my mom’s, before it was mine. I was going to ask about the moment she and Grandpa met. But I was too late. I leapt onto a plane from New York to Virginia, praying for a goodbye but getting only a few hours of shared family grief before I discovered I’d been closely exposed to COVID, just before Grandma left earth. Mourning while double-masked and vigilant, tripping over my own feet as I stepped backward when someone came close for a cry or a hug: how do you write about that?

How do you write about finally testing positive for COVID a handful of days later, and then riding out the 10-day isolation period in the basement of the childhood home that only belonged to your parents for 12 more days total? They were moving. Before the visit to New York that got me sick, and before rushing to Virginia, I’d been in that basement for days, sifting through all of my childhood things that needed to be packed or trashed: the elementary school report cards. The print-out of the email my parents wrote to all their friends when I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The “about me” poster I made for an elementary school show-and-tell, with its glue stick handiwork still in near-perfect condition, on which I included a cut-out photo of me and Grandma with the handwritten caption, “This is my grandmother, who is very much like me. We both love to cook and do art, and we often do them together.” Also on the poster: a photocopy of “one of the first poems I ever wrote,” and a drawing of the journal I used daily to “get my feelings out.” And a sketch of the world, personified with a cartoon face and raising its hand to a peace sign: “Here’s a picture of world peace, which is one of my biggest wishes.” I took a photo of the poster, then crumpled and tossed it. There was too much stuff to keep. By the time I returned with COVID, though, there wasn’t much stuff at all anymore. The space was cavernously empty. Everything was boxed. I sat on the bumpy carpet to write Grandma’s obituary and a short composition that became a eulogy, which might have been the two most important assignments of my writing career anyway. Maybe those were more than enough.

And then I returned to Oakland, but…there was no real returning. And besides, my suitcase has been packed every other weekend for months. It wasn’t just those trips. It was New York again, for a wedding. It was driving up the coast for my two-year anniversary with Lauren. It was a family vacation, two birthday trips, Grandma’s delayed funeral. I have hardly sat still enough to condense all the happenings to stories. It is hard to trace the meaning when you’re just trying to keep up.

Aren’t you, too? Just trying to keep up? This pandemic is relentless in its mutability. It keeps changing shape, wriggling out of grasp like a snake, just when we think we’re safe. And the floods, and the wildfires, and the tornadoes — we are all trying to survive. We are creatures, remember? For our extra “intelligence” [*makes exaggerated air quotes*] in comparison to other animals, we get creative productivity as a special bonus. We lose access to that bonus when there is no space for it; when we, too, are mostly just trying to feed ourselves and not die. We are doing the best we can, with far too much happening and far too little time and energy and breathing room to process it: to be good partners and children and parents and friends and colleagues. Maybe that work is creativity enough.

I am proud of all the ways I’ve been creative in 2021. I am. (This is why I write: to dig the dignity from the mess.) I have built my first longterm home with my partner this year. I have steered my work in an entirely new direction, both vulnerable and meaningful. I have experimented with as many forms of self-care as necessary — run a lot of miles on intuitively-carved routes, cooked exorbitant amounts of farmers market broccoli, sunk my heart into so many books I’ve adored. I have also slept not enough, eaten too much chocolate, drank too much wine and coffee. I’ve felt exquisitely isolated and ached for in-person friendships, for soil under my fingernails, for a sense of direction. I’ve shattered, like, four or five mugs and glasses. I have done the best I can.

Even if — or maybe because — I haven’t written all of the essays I planned to write.

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A story about Goldilocks and redefining “home.”

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December 14, 2020: First Monday in our new place. Friday was all moving, slogging, shoving things into U-Haul, and Saturday, into house, and ever since, unpacking, arranging. We divide and conquer; Lauren spends hours meticulously arranging the most exquisite bookshelf, while I make the kitchen make sense. This feels good to me, to click into the intuition of nesting, to unfurl trinkets from room to room, and to reconnect with long, candlelit dinner conversations over natural wine, both of us fizzing with the tipsy newness. And then we collapse into bed, crumble quickly into sleep. I’m content, just trying to process how I feel about being in this new city where I don’t quite belong, don’t feel wanted. But I’ll learn. I’m curious to see what shifts. And our apartment, I adore — its nooks, its angles, its hardwood floors and long storage areas and odd quirk.

—

The school around the corner is open again, or at least it was for a moment, before sending everyone back home for the summer. On morning walks with Tomato, I’d see kids sprint sloppily past me with their backpacks flopping around behind them, late for class; in the afternoons, they’d pile up outside and jab each other with jokes while they waited for their parents, their tiny masks sliding down their noses. Finally, the big brick building — eerily silent for so many months — thrummed with life like it was always meant to, all sticky fingers and sharing and shrieks of laughter, before settling into its summertime slumber.

Restaurants and bars are open, hair salons are open, movie theaters are open, if at limited capacity. Two weeks from now, on June 15th, these limits will be lifted in California; the only restriction left will be a continuing mask mandate. Lockdown is easing up. We are allowed, however hesitantly, to hug again.

As we (in the “land of the free,” anyway) decidedly emerge from the stay-at-home phase, everyone I know, and everyone I don’t know, seems to be renegotiating their relationship with “home.”

A colleague just learned that he and his family have to move away from their current hometown. He knows exactly where they should go next, but his partner has her own conflicting knowing. Another, in the thick of home renovations, wants to spend the summer somewhere else, but her partner isn’t convinced.

After years of discussion about if and when and how to leave the neighborhood where I spent my entire childhood, my parents called last Monday to say that they’d found their dream home, a couple of hours away, and almost immediately put in an offer. One day later, they closed on this new house. It’s in a small port town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, hugged by the river from three sides.

I got the phone call just a day after arriving home from a weekend away with Lauren in a different tiny riverside town on the opposite side of the country. We stayed at an airbnb that was all warm wood panels with cool blue accents — the walls, the mismatched ceramic mugs and glasses, the futon couch and marbled kitchen cabinets. Leafy vines of pothos plants stretched across every ceiling, and crystal sun-catcher prisms dangled in every window, scattering rainbows like confetti. The host had positioned stones and shells in windowsills, on shelves, along the top of the heater, anywhere that could have looked lonely — the same way I do. The whole yard was an edible eden of vegetables and herbs and fruit trees, and the river was a five-minute drive away.

When we walked in the door of the rental, lugging our bags of clothes and snacks and board games, grief slapped me so hard across the face that my eyes welled up. This, I thought. This is what home is supposed to feel like. The space and its surroundings reminded me a little bit of my Grandma’s old house in Virginia, and a little bit of Dan and Micha’s house on the farm in Oregon, and a little bit of…my heart’s multitude of rooms, made tactile? It reminded me of the past and also the future. This, this, this. I was like Goldilocks, stumbling temporarily into the just-right porridge, realizing exactly how hungry I was, and for exactly what.

Except, I wasn’t there alone. Lauren and I sat down in the chairs that were not ours, and we lit the candles that were not ours, and we sipped from the glasses that we had precisely selected from the collection of options that were not ours, and we talked until way too late at night about how good it felt to be there. It felt good because our nervous systems were soothed and softened, swaddled by the quiet and the hummingbirds and the natural dimming of sunlight. And a settled nervous system is the sort that can prioritize connection instead of survival. We talked about the kind of longterm home we want to build, about what home means to each of us. It was just a weekend, just a fairytale, but it was our fairytale, now etched into bodily memory: this, this, this.

—

ASTROLOGY LESSON #1: The basic building blocks of a birth chart.

Astrology is a language constructed of planets (what we do), signs (how we do those things), and houses (where we do those things in those ways). This metaphor is lazy, but it’s the easiest way to explain: a birth chart is a layered cake, across which the planets are strewn like sprinkles. Each slice of the cake, which aligns with a particular sign (depending on your birth date, time, and place), is a house.

There are 12 houses total — 12 realms in which a life dwells. There is a house for career and vocation, a house for community, a house for communication. The 4th house is the house of home, as well as family. It resides, of course, at the bottommost part of the circular chart, because it represents the roots, the foundations from which we build. It is the place of grounding.

Any planets in your 4th house are the energies deeply seeded amongst close kin and domestic concerns. The sign that overlaps with your 4th house can help you examine this soil on which your family tree is planted — the ingredients, the nutrients, the texture. Traditionally, the 4th house is ruled by the sign of Cancer, the divine mother and sensitive caretaker. And so, ultimately, the 4th house is where you look to understand the nurturing, both given and received, that secures you to the earth.

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A story about cars and callings.

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There’s a group of strangers blocking the sidewalk up ahead, and so I thread myself between the nose and tail of two parked cars to walk down the middle of the street instead. That’s how I notice the necklace that dangles from the rearview mirror, tugging at my peripheral vision. It’s strung with hand-painted clay beads: tiny white skulls that almost seem to be smiling, alternated with serene-faced half-moons, their edges blue and glittered. The necklace is from a gift shop in Oaxaca. From a past life of mine. It is mine. And I am seeing it so clearly now, so plainly, because there is no window where there should be a window. The window between me and my necklace is gone. It was my window. This is my car.

I look down, and the glass is everywhere — the pavement, the seat cushions, the cupholders, the floor. It is magnificent, the exuberant scattering of tiny crystalline bits. What seems colorless in the form of a solid pane turns out to be a delightful aquamarine tint. It looks like millions of tiny breath mints. Like candy. I want to reach through the windowless space and grab a handful of it, to filter it through my cupped hands like sand, to hear its shimmering trickle through my fingers.

Lauren is with me, holding the end of Tomato’s leash, saying, “Oh, baby. Oh, baby.” It is midday Sunday and pleasant outside. We were on our way to her car, parked a few meters past mine; we were heading to the Berkeley waterfront, where she was going to study and I was going to run. Regular stuff. I pass her my bag and open the door to survey the damage. The movement jostles more shards from the window frame, tumbling down towards the ground.

Someone has rifled through the container between the front seats, which I use as a trash bin, and tossed the rubble around: a disposable coffee cup, some used insulin syringes, a crumpled bag of Trader Joe’s popcorn, a crushed GoGo squeeZ apple sauce from a low blood sugar, a shredded tissue. They do not seem to have taken anything; they have merely exposed the messy remains of my body’s needs, and then run off.

A curious neighbor is standing in his front yard, watching with a sympathetic frown. “It happened Friday night,” he says.

“Oh, really?” says Lauren, and I echo, “Really?” That means it sat like this all day yesterday and all night, exposed.

“I noticed it yesterday morning. Yeah. I didn’t know whose car it was.”

“Well, it’s mine!” I say, sort of sarcastically, not looking up, still examining the wreckage.

I check the back seat, the trunk, the glove compartment, just in case. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Something stolen, anything? A note? A fingerprint or strand of hair that might help me understand who and how and why? Every time I open and close a door, more of the dangling shards tumble down. The sound is a tiny applause, or an animated chorus of wheeee!, as the window frame surrenders to nakedness.

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A story about the soft stuff.

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Last Saturday — the spring equinox, and the day we went to meet Tomato — the sky was like a pop art pattern, studded with cartoon clouds. It was a 90-minute trip from our place in Oakland to some small nearby town where the two-woman rescue team was based, and I drove, so that Lauren could study for her Javascript exam that was coming up on Monday morning.

She recited her notes out loud as I steered. “Promises encourage writing asynchronous code in a way that appears synchronous. Okay. A promise is pending when it hasn’t been resolved yet. When the promise succeeds, the promise state is fulfilled. When it fails, the promise state is rejected. Got it.” Her words — or the ways they combined — were such gibberish to me, such an unfamiliar language, that they muddled into a soothing backdrop of white noise. Promise, promise, promise.

The pandemic has stripped us of white noise, like it has stolen so many things. The thick silence of one’s home can be stifling; outside, at the grocery store or the park or the farmer’s market, other voices can be tiny alarms, too close, too brash, too careless. White noise, the fuzz of warbled sound that lulls the mind towards presence with itself, has become a rarity. I had forgotten how it could be like a gauze, like a blanket wrapped around my brain to quiet its hurry and soften its sharp edges.

My eyes fixed gently on the highway ahead as we sliced through rolling green hills, resembling Scotland or Ireland or just somewhere Not Here. The watercolor blue above was a bottomless yawn, with its clouds spattered in whopping heaps to convey just how much space there was, just how wide open. You had to gape back at those clouds. They were mammoth, but not menacing, bouncing sunlight at the windshield with their swollen underbellies turned to silver.

“Each promise has a ‘then’ method that handles what happens when the promise transitions out of the pending state,” Lauren read. My thoughts wandered.

Are we ready for this? Can we afford it? Is it too fast? Too huge of a commitment? “He’s just a happy little guy,” the rescue founder had said twice on the phone when she called me four days before, responding to the Petfinder inquiry I assumed would go unanswered, like the rest had. I sifted through a mental list of potential dog names, holding them up to my memory of his face from the online listing, his wide brown eyes and scruffy chin — so serious, so sweet — that had reeled me and Lauren in.

“Promises are eager,” Lauren read, shuffling papers around on her lap. “A promise starts executing code inside as soon as the promise constructor is invoked.” And the sky scrolled by, scrolled by, scrolled by, the clouds suspended like offerings, the present suspended for a moment in the soft space of potential, in the anti-rush that happens when you know you can only be where you are, couched but moving forward.

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A story that’s really a rant.

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Our recycling bin is currently feathered with the torn-up shreds of last week’s New York Times magazine, and the reason is that I’m a freelancer. Since I’m self-employed, I have to buy my own health insurance. My plan’s monthly premium is a staggering $435.70. That still doesn’t cover all of the insulin and continuous glucose monitor supplies I need to survive. When I go to get refills, more frequently than not, the pharmacists balk as they ring me up and ask, “Are you sure? You know this one box costs $400, right?” With warmth, but exasperation, I usually say something like, “Well, I’ll die if I don’t take it, so yeah.” In fact, many people with diabetes do die because they can’t afford their meds, which are criminally expensive. To say that insulin “costs an arm and a leg” is not only a metaphorical idiom.

Anyway, healthcare challenges aside, freelancing is a gift that’s been accessible to me via the privilege of random natural skill and family support and higher education and a whole lot of luck, plus stubborn independence that I have to be careful not to confuse with the rugged individualism ingrained in white supremacy culture. It means I’m always able to work remotely, so the pandemic didn’t change that or render me jobless. In fact, my income was higher for those first few months than it’s ever been before or since, because I took on too many client projects and worked myself to the bone. The great thing about working yourself to the bone is that you don’t have to feel things besides stress and exhaustion, so there was only so much energy I could spend consciously processing my fear of what might happen if I got sick. But I dreamed about COVID a lot. I still dream about COVID. Anxieties about forgotten masks and noncompliant strangers and hospital visits sneak their way into almost every sleep. Here is the actual data: people with Type 1 diabetes, like me, are statistically about three times more likely to die from COVID than those without. The stats are nearly identical for people with Type 2 diabetes, the more common kind (which is, unlike Type 1, reversible, though this also requires privilege and is a subject for another day). Numerous factors have been found to be significantly associated with illness severity; “modifiable factors,” like average blood glucose that can fluctuate in tandem with one’s health habits, have a smaller impact than “static factors,” like race. This, too: a January study found that Black patients with Type 1 diabetes and COVID were four times more likely than white patients to develop ketoacidosis, which is an urgent and life-threatening diabetes complication.

Today, California is beginning to offer COVID vaccine appointments to folks with chronic health conditions. But Type 1 diabetes does not make the cut. Type 2 diabetes does, as long as your A1C (a test that measures a person’s average blood sugar levels over a three-month span) is above a certain number, thus deemed “unhealthy” enough. (An A1C of 7.5 counts, but 7.4 does not. This is the difference of…maybe one slice of toast in that entire three-month span? It’s meaningless, almost arbitrary, in a way that an actual human assessment of a patient’s intersectional risks would not be.) I emailed my endocrinologist — the doctor who costs $435.70 a month to access — to ask if there’s anything she can do or suggest for me, copying and pasting the data I found. She responded in less than 24 hours. She basically said, Nope! Just keep checking the website for updates!

And so — because I can; because I drastically lowered my freelance workload over the course of the pandemic so the stress alone wouldn’t kill me, but not quite enough to qualify for unemployment support; because I ultimately shifted the direction of my freelance projects when lockdown rendered the risks worthwhile for the sake of greater emotional/mental satisfaction, and now I really make my own hours and often find myself alarmingly responsible for my free time — I spent over an hour in the middle of last Tuesday just trying to figure out a vaccination option. And also reading more and more diabetes mortality data. And also thinking about how this country punishes people for taking juuust good enough care of ourselves, or trying to; about how many ways it chooses money over lives; about how more than 500,000 Americans are dead (is it 530,000? 538,000? The exact number doesn’t matter, is meaningless; too many is too many) and we’re just supposed to be grateful.

I scanned the room for something disposable. Contemplated shattering a glass, but grabbed the New York Times magazine instead. Tore it at the seam and ripped it up, scattering the shreds like anti-confetti across the kitchen floor while I sobbed. And then looked at the mess, sobbing harder, lungs heaving. Bent down and crumpled up the magazine bits. Moved them to the recycling bin, handful by handful.

The system doesn’t grieve, doesn’t get angry, doesn’t choose right from wrong. We, the humans, must. The embodiment is our responsibility.

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THEMES TO EXPLORE

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