1.
I don’t know how to start writing about death. This will be the second sentence. The white butterflies are still following me. I look at my hands sometimes and I can’t believe I’m real. I can’t believe I haven’t collapsed through time yet. I can’t believe I haven’t broken time yet.
I think I’m going to very soon.
2.
The cherry blossoms ripened. So did the magnolias. Spring, like a crush, arrived in slow bursts, rocking back and forth in unpredictability. Some days were misleadingly warm, as if summer had already seeped into April—the hot heartbeat of the sun pulsed against our lifeless skin, its bright glint shot off skyscraper windows and angled its way into half-squinting eyes trying to hide below cupped hands. Pale-pink roses transformed into cardinal fires on unsuspecting faces, and I became momentarily familiar.
And then I wasn’t anymore.
3.
The tail-end of August retreated slowly, hesitantly, one skipped step at a time. In its place, the chills creeped in, filling up the space around me with more discontent. And then, all at once, the free-fall of Fall swallowed me whole, and I felt so lost in the in-between that I wished it was July again so I could be toppled by heat rather than be aimless in air, looking for something to hold onto because not even I could hold myself down anymore.
The breeze bristled against my legs so I pulled up my skirt like strings on a marionette. I was sitting on the patio chair, watching the leaves on their vines—like two delicate hands coming together to pinch a marble—crawl up the brick wall, while my grandma asked me the same question for the third time but in a slightly different way. I smiled at her and gave her the same answer again. But I kept doing it: I kept retreating into my head, writing down the present as it was happening because I still couldn’t let myself experience it with my body. The patio was empty, we were the only ones there, and somehow none of it felt real. My life no longer felt real, and it hadn’t for nearly a year. I was locked in a permanent drift, left to wonder if I’d ever get out.
It hurt when she didn’t recognize me, but only a little (a lie). I had somehow somewhat made peace with the fact that my life was never going to be static, that every day was a new, untraveled reality I’d only have twenty-fours hours to get used to before moving into a new one the next day. But my grandma didn’t recognize me anymore and I realized that my grandma died over a year ago, if not a long time ago, and what was left of her was a shadow, much like me.
It’s September.
Cold again.
Wet.
I think I’m losing my mind, only this keeps happening all the time.
Summer passed by in a blink. I hardly noticed the days stacking up against me because I was too preoccupied with the past to notice the future getting away. July was a blur of hospital visits, nurses and EMTs, medications my grandma refused to take, calls to insurance companies, telling doctors and nurses “We missed you so much!” three times in a week after they asked “Didn’t we just see you a few days ago?”, recurring visits to social security offices, building management cutting me a thousand dollars worth of slack because I’m “so kind”, sweat-soaked and disembodied walks from Bay Ridge to Brighton Beach, a small handful of hours of sleep on a fifteen-year old couch, and my grandma questioning who I was in relation to her.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’re my relative?,” she asked one night as she sat on the edge of the same bed we used to share when I was a kid. I thought 26 years of life together was enough proof of our relation, but I was wrong. 26 years doesn’t mean anything. She and I cried.
That July, I watched my grandma disappear further behind the veil in her mind while I was trying to escape from out behind mine.
In August, I stretched myself into two people.
And now in September, I think I’m disappearing.
A year passes by but I only remember pieces of it, if I’m lucky.
It’s the following September and I am coming apart.
So I disappear again.
And now it’s the second day of October and we’re at the cemetery.
4.
The cemetery is different. It’s the second day of October and there is something missing—a surprising absence of heaviness, longing. For now, at least. I expect despair to pull my body toward her gravestone and then wrap itself around me, bounding me to all the feelings I’ve been suppressing for decades, like her death and my inability to accept its reality—and every other waking reality as well. Instead, the sun is alive and I am nauseous from the drive.
I walk toward her gravestone, remarking, “There’s too many dead people here,” to no one but myself. And then I laugh like a guest in my own conversation because, in a way, I always am. My grandpa and dad chatter nearby as I drift across the grass, feet hardly touching the ground. My last name, engraved into stone, stares at me like a calling card. ‘That’s mine,’ I say to myself. That’s my last name. At least, that’s the last name I was given. But what makes it mine? What ties me to this name? What ties me to me?
On some level, it feels more like my last name than it has in a while, but there is still a sense of distance, both physically and emotionally, as if the name isn’t real. As if I’m not real.
Because I’m not.
I don’t know what it’s like to miss someone because I am constantly carrying everyone inside of me while I float outside my body wondering when I’ll finally be able to get back inside. But, really, I don’t know what it’s like to miss people because I don’t allow myself to. I can’t. I am so removed from myself that I don’t know how most things really feel like, not even love. So, I move forward in life as if everything is what it is—and the pains accrue like a long-cape that gets heavier with each passing year. The ribbon, tied at the base of my neck, digs into my skin, an indentation growing deeper and deeper until my neck is whittled down to an hourglass, until the only thing I can do is what I’ve done for over twenty years: hold my breath. When I was 17, my mom said, “I can’t breathe,” and I didn’t know what she meant because I thought I had been breathing my whole life. Only I wasn’t. I know that now.
October is still, but there are rumbling echoes in the faraway distance trying to let me know that I am missing or, rather, avoiding something. So I do just that: I avoid the echoes until they get closer. They start standing like mourners in the rows of gravestones behind me, hands clasped and heads down, whistling like a sudden breeze. Every time I hear them, I turn around, expecting to see shadows looking at me, but all I get is the familiar aftertaste of having missed something. Something was there, but I have nothing tangible to point to so I turn back around to face her gravestone. The momentary distraction of the echoes allows me to ignore the sadness in my throat and the grief beneath the mask of my face. It allows me to keep ignoring that I have not accepted most things for most of my life; instead, I left my body, and in the parallel realities that I exist in, I allowed bad things to happen because that’s what I believed I deserved. Acceptance was familiar finality, but I also preferred the illusion my parallel realities afforded me instead: nothing is real, this is all a dream, and I’m the creator and destroyer of it all.
Still, I get no sense of my grandma in the cemetery, though the gravestone holds heavy in front of me. I don’t know whether I should be happy that my grandma is no longer present or sad that I can no longer reach her the way I did last year in this same exact spot. Last year, she passed through and around me like a rush. This year, nothing happens. And I have nothing to say, which is a lie because I always have something to say, but I also don’t know what to say. What can I say? Nothing. So I sit and run my fingers against a strand of grass, and I hope I can pull myself back down to Earth sometime soon.
When we start walking back to the car, a bee lands on my left shoulder and starts crawling toward my neck. I rush to take a photo, but by the time the camera loads, the bee flies away. I stare in awe, wondering how, even when I’m far from home, the bees are still following me, too.
Later, Cassie tells me that “bees are considered messengers between here and the afterlife,” and it takes me three days to understand what she meant by that, the answer staring me in the face the way the gravestone did.
5.
The second day of October was fairly bright and sunny, almost like last July but less intense, its flatness more pronounced. Last July, it was beautiful how the sun streamed through the trees, how it cast a hushed-yellow glow over the small rolling hills. Something better could come. Americana, or whatever. Last July, standing in the cemetery, looking over the hills, I wanted to be at a barbecue. I wanted the smell of cigarette smoke to snake through the air and lift me up by my nostrils, limbs loose and body light. I wanted anything but what I had.
I wanted the continuous chatter of adults as background noise while a few friends and I ate hot dogs covered in ketchup around a glass table, our wet bathing suits dripping into the cushioned seats, our preteen voices loud, fast, and rambling as we shouted over each other and crashed into each other’s half-lived sentences because we had so much to say and so seemingly little time to say it. I wanted my hair to stick to my face and my body to feel nimble and strong. I wanted a bodysuit of chlorine covering my skin, flattened heat weaving through the air like a hug, and the golden spheres of fireflies bouncing around like video game bubbles, disappearing into the forest full of dark-green trees like lanterns guiding me home. I wanted to be so overjoyed with life that it would pour out of me and spill all over strangers. I wanted to laugh so hard, I’d have to chase after my breath. I wanted an insatiable hunger for life and a satisfied tiredness in my bones when I fell asleep at night. I wanted everything. I wanted to be a free summertime child. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be me. I want to be me. I want to be the tallest girl alive. I want to be an invisible fly. I want, I want, I want, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to stop.
6.
In the fall, the sun stays in place, the cold is at a vertical standstill, and I wish I was a few years younger again because I don’t know who I am right now, and I miss the false sense certainty of self that I don’t think I ever really had. I sometimes think I made mistake opening the door to the past because ever since I did, I haven’t stopped time traveling. It’s endless: the grief, anguish, distortion, and fragmentation. I am ripped apart and scattered across my past. I am a semblance of a young woman but not exactly. I am an attempt at being a person, but really, what I am is a performance.
With every passing day, my mind becomes more and more spotless, the eternal sunshine peering over the horizon. I’m getting what I wanted at the cost of everyone I used to be.
I wish forgetting myself didn’t hurt so much.
7.
In the middle of winter, the days disappear behind me, and I disappear behind them. But my emotions drag me forward, unable to let me get lost to time. So I thank them for that and hobble forward.
I find handfuls of grief in the pockets of space between my and my grandmother’s clasped hands. She is swallowed up in my kisses.
A whole year passes.
Then another.
And another.
I did it.
I collapsed through time.
And what do I have to show for it?
Nothing.
But that was always the point, I think. I just didn’t know that when I started.
8.
I don’t know how to write about death because I have never been without it. Her. I keep coming back to death, unable to part ways. I tell no one—not even myself sometimes—that perhaps the reason I’m never without her is because I cannot be without her. I keep her around because she is where and how I begin. When I was born, I almost died, and that’s why I’ve lived the first twenty-five years of this life half-alive. It’s all I know how to be.
When death is particularly present, I break apart. It’s a split-body experience, one foot in, the rest of me out. I watch myself move around my life; I’m a passenger in my own existence. My arm shoves food into my mouth, I’m not here; my legs take me to the nursing home, I’m not here; my head clouds in the living room, and I hopelessly try to remind myself that I am at home and I am safe and no one is going to kill me, but I’m still not here. Instead, I hover outside of myself because it’s not safe to be in my body. And it never has been. I’m not here, and I never was to begin with.
I stare at people I’ve known for years as if I’ve just met them. I blackout on train rides and can’t remember who I am for far longer than is funny. I say my name and age with hesitation, like am I really sure I’m 28 and not actually 15 or maybe 5? Because I am those ages. I am 9, 5, 16, 21, 2, 7, 23. So, am I somehow lying when I say I’m 28? How did I get here again? I can’t remember much of anything from the last month. I can’t remember much of anything from the past week. What’s my name again? Oh, okay, I kind of don’t believe me.
“How old are you?”, the convenience store owner asks, his question tinged with a bit of playfulness. I feel like I’ve been caught. How old am I? 27. No, that was last year. I’m 28 now.
“28,” I tell him, after a few seconds of contemplation, but that doesn’t sound quite right either. A packet of nerves rips open across my neck and upper chest, sending granules flying down into my ribs and abdomen.
“I can show you my ID,” I joke. But even if I do, that doesn’t seem accurate either. Nobody knows how old I am, not even me. Somehow, the ID is wrong and so am I. An imposter. He waves a hand and gives me the Powerball ticket I’m buying for my dad. Maybe I’m not the age I think I am. Maybe this is another trick I haven’t figured out yet.
Most of my life has happened outside of myself. And outside of one’s body, reality isn’t real. Brick walls melt like battery acid. Ten-year old items suddenly become new. Distortions, intrusions, and momentary blackouts are normal. I bend time, just not pleasantly. I move across realities, just not intentionally. I am two people, and then several hundred more. I live in a twisted fantasy, a walking nightmare alongside everyone else’s versions of reality. I’m here but, really, I’m not.
I wonder what it’s like where you are. Maybe, one day, I will be there.
Maybe I already was.
9.
Two springs ago, I watched time split before me: I started walking through and by my past selves. Historically, my memories had remained inside my head, but, suddenly, they were projecting themselves into the 3D, giving a breath of life to versions of me I thought I had long moved away from. But really, I hadn’t. Not even close.
The first time it happened, I was walking past the funeral home where, months prior, I had started saying goodbye to my grandmother. This was the first time I had been a witness to death. It was 8:15 p.m. on March 11th. I was halfway through a five-mile walk back home. It was cold and lonely, the percussive emptiness that’s followed me my whole life was right by my side and circling my body. As I passed by the doors of the funeral home, I felt myself behind me so I turned around. I wasn’t expecting to see anything—this was simply another instance of me feeling things, of me seeing things, of me hearing things that weren’t there the way I had for years—and, yet, there I was, leaning against the brick wall by the front doors, dressed in the exact same outfit I had worn to the funeral in August: black sneakers, black dress pants, a long-sleeve lace blouse buttoned all the way up to my neck, and sunglasses. I was waiting for the funeral to start.
It was 8 a.m. on the last day of August, but this me, ‘present me’, I, was still in the first half of March, standing in the cold on this side of the timeline, black and dark blue in isolation. On August’s side of the timeline, it was early morning. The hot air teased suffocation, and handfuls of yellow and sky blue tried to pull her up and out of it toward sense of optimism. She struggled between both, wanting to float up, but finding the misery of the ground all too familiar, its grip obvious around her ankles.
August looked at me, with the excitement one gets when seeing an old friend, and started walking over. I stared confused, torn between incredulousness and concern. How could there be two physical manifestations of me? And who was the real one? Surely me, but which me? And if this was real, how was this real? Or, had I broken my brain again, the way I have my whole life, little by little, until my grip on reality finally gave way and I was in psychosis?
That was the answer. My brain was broken. I was seeing things that weren’t there. My grief was distorting reality so I didn’t have to feel the swelling aches inside of myself. Because if I stayed with the grief, it would make my body cave in and on itself, and then………………….I don’t know. I’ve never stayed with my grief. I never learned how to stay with anything.
She came closer. I froze. How could she manifest so easily into a three-dimensional form outside of my mind? If she touched me, would I disappear? If I touched her, would she become real? Did she know something I didn’t? She had an all-knowing energy, as if she had seen a future I hadn’t, even though she was the past and I was the future. But was she actually the past? Yes, but her ability to live in my present made it so that she was no longer in the past. I had brought her into my timeline. Or had she brought me into hers?
Shame snaked through my system and started to fill my face. August looked so cool, and I felt so ridiculous for being able to see her. How was I doing this? How was I seeing things?
She stopped a few inches away. I hesitated but she smiled.
“It’s okay,” she said, and I was embarrassed.
She had a level of self-assuredness I knew I had, but always struggled to maintain. It faltered often, went in and out depending on who or what was around me. But she looked and moved so cool that I wished I was her instead. I wished I could understand how this was happening, but I couldn’t. I still sometimes can’t. I am a stranger in my own history even when I come face-to-face with myself.
The second time it happened, I was walking down Shore Parkway. Something told me to stop walking when I got to the corner of Nostrand Avenue, so I stopped and looked to my left. At the end of a long block, I saw a memory of me at 19 years old. On 19-year-old-me’s corner of the block, it was nighttime and two coworkers were talking to her. She was uncomfortable, sensing an energy beneath the coworker’s words that forced her to put her walls up; but she kept smiling because a bubbly personality will keep everyone happy, she reasoned. Then she dropped all pretenses and stared at me across some fifty-plus feet. The coworkers kept talking to her but she had broken away from that reality to merge with mine. I looked around, wondering if anyone else could see her, but I realized that I was all alone with myself, like I always have been.
Her 19-year-old gaze was penetrating and unflinching; my 26-year-old body shrunk underneath it. And yet, at the same time, it felt like the most natural evolution in my understanding of myself. Here, I could see how I existed across multiple timelines, swimming between years, never really anywhere permanently. I was floating in a layer above reality, drifting along the seams.
Still, I smiled, giddy that I had a secret that only I could—and would—ever understand. I watched her and the memory play out. I desperately tried to connect to her. What could she tell me? What did I need to know?
But she didn’t say anything because we only ever speak in feeling, our lives a series of memories stacked on top of one another other, all crushed beneath, subsumed by, and drowning in feeling. Dying in feeling. All of it is feeling unprocessed, unintegrated, unmetabolized, trapped, frozen, stuck. And that was the answer I didn’t want. That was the answer I was unconsciously and consciously avoiding at every junction.
I left her there, promising I’d come back to her another time when I could connect to her better. As I walked home, every so often, I would look over my shoulder to see if she was following me, but she wasn’t. Not in the way I thought she was, at least. Two springs ago, I thought I watched time split before me. It was another year-and-a-half before I learned that I was dissociated.
Sometimes, I remember something a tarot reader told me a long time ago:
“You are the only one who sees the stars.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can see you laying on the grass, looking up at the sky. You see the way the stars move. You see the galaxies. You see all of that. They don’t. Your parents, they don’t see it. Your friends, they don’t see it. No one else sees it. Nobody does but you.”
And what a privilege and a burden to see things no one else does, to be alone in a world only I can witness.
10.
Spring also carried a little death in it. Even if the delicate sing-song birds woke me up at six am, and the air tasted fresh, the death of winter was underneath it all. Something had supposedly finished. I had moved on from something, and yet it lingered, like acid burning through my forearm and my shadow pointing at the hole to say, “See, you missed all of this. You missed all of me. Here I am.”
It was never warm for too long. It was never sunny for too long. The long-nailed cold would always come back, digging into the flesh of Spring and pulling it apart to show me exactly what was still underneath: the death of my old selves. And I couldn’t look away from that. I couldn’t stick my head in the ground and pretend I wasn’t seeing what was really happening. All that time, I was hoping to find comfort in a season that has only ever forced me to start over.
On cold days, I lived in a still-life painting, flatness imbued into every moment. My still-life painting, a series of fruits on a table, waited to be sliced in half but the knife in my hand wouldn’t budge. The shiny veneer on the fruits was dull, like a streak I couldn’t wipe off despite my best attempts. I tried chewing the fruit because I needed something to bite into—something to spread across my mouth and get stuck between my teeth—but they were all fake.
I did love the cold, though, and for a very simple reason: I loved how it came alive on Danny’s face. Cherry cheeks and wet eyes, runny nose twitching twice. In the wintertime, every exhale covered Danny’s face in a fleeting cloud. I waited for each one to dissipate like a magician’s grand reveal. There!, there he is again. Like he never left.
“I love you,” he said with no fear in his heart and not a single tremble in his voice, every word solid as it slipped into my ears and spread across my body like a promise. Then he hummed, once, a satisfied acknowledgement of his love for me—and with his exhale came another cloud to obscure us from the world—and I thought, ‘Who is the ‘you’ that you love? Because, surely, it isn’t me.’
I had so many yous I hadn’t introduced to him yet. There were so many people in my body, some centuries old. Does he really know me? And if so, how could he love me? He can’t even see all of me. Because if he did, he wouldn’t want me anymore.
When it was cold, my head was mostly quiet, like an ice sheet over a lake. I thought about very little. I floated through life unconsciously. I had some semblance of a routine, even if underneath it all, there was a whole lot of rot. I didn’t see the rot, though; I didn’t see the contents of the lake, the monsters lying in wait; rather, I was still good at repressing it and them from myself, so that I could continue with my false peace.
But when it was warm, it wasn’t so quiet. My mind turned into a retroactive pinball machine. I thought about my body a little too much, so much so that I wanted to crawl into myself and suffocate. I felt my body at every odd end, every protruding corner magnified. Thighs stuck together like paper and gum, skin on fire begging to sink into concrete so I could become a flesh puddle. I was much more comfortable spread thin. Please don’t look at me and please don’t see me. Suddenly, I become very real to others.
But I am much prettier when I’m barely here. I am disappearing exceptionally slow, and I’d go faster if I could, but for some reason I can’t, so come back in six months, or don’t come back at all. Everyone is always leaving anyway.
It was better than it used to be: my self-hatred and insecurity had whittled into tree stumps and their roots. But I was still aware of my body and all the ways in which my performance wasn’t perfect.
‘This isn’t me’, I’d think while looking around my room, all the colorful toys and figurines staring back at me as if I was an imposter.
‘This isn’t me,’ I’d think when I saw a photo of myself next to others. That’s not what I look like. That’s not how I remember myself. How do I remember myself? I don’t remember myself. So, that’s me? Sure. I guess.
‘This isn’t me,’ I’d think when I’d relapse for the fifth time in a week.
This isn’t me, that wasn’t me, none of it’s me. None of this is who I am, but nobody knows me in any concrete way to begin with, so why am I looking for definition? I’m trying to define someone who has never been a real person to begin with.
“You are the nicest person in the world,” they say and they don’t even know who I am underneath all of this. They don’t see through the artificial sweetness, the thousands of layers of identities I’ve built up. They don’t see the expert control I exert to contain myself. If I came truly alive, I would lose everything I carefully built; because if they did see through all of it—all of me—, then I failed at what I set out to do many years ago: never show my true self.
But if I finally showed my true self, then I’d finally be free. And I don’t know if I am ready for that. I’m scared. I’m scared because to become who I want to be, this version of me has to ‘die’. I can’t go forward if I’m ‘this’. She has to go. I have to go. And I don’t want to die. I’ve grown so accustomed to myself. I am so familiar to me. I don’t know what’s on the other side—and I won’t until I get there.
11.
I am a child and I am very rambunctious. Silly. Manic. I dance in the middle of the street with my shirt pulled over my head. I am theatrical. An actress. I like drawing. I like running. I like playing tennis. I roll my eyes. I am honest and I say things bluntly. People don’t like that. Some say I’m mean. The boys don’t like me because I beat them at tennis, so they get violent. Other boys say I’m a bully. I have friends but I don’t feel like I do. I don’t think anyone likes me. Why would they? I’m so loud. I wish I was like the other girls because the other girls are pretty, feminine, and likable. Things just are. I just am. And I just don’t like myself very much and I don’t know why.
I am a child and I say the wrong things. I can’t speak the language. I’m not sure how to say blue in English so I point and mouth things and draw cartoon characters and everything is so loud around me, none of this makes any sense. Some boy thinks my name is Mary-Jane, so I believe I’m not someone worth remembering. One day, my grandpa leaves me by the Pre-K classroom door and I cry so hard that I remember the seeming abandonment for two decades. I don’t feel like I fit in much of anywhere. I’m a girl but I don’t feel like one. I think I’m weird and odd and angled wrong. I need to be fixed. I ruminate and worry and I don’t even know that I am because it’s become so normal to me. I remember almost everything, and I wish I didn’t. My life would’ve been so much different and better if I didn’t remember everything. I might’ve grown up to be a real person.
I am a kid and I am quiet. I hide my eyes. I lower my voice. I don’t tell anyone much of anything. I put on a mask and hide my body. I become someone people will like and it works a majority of the time. No one actually knows me and neither do I. I’m too far removed from myself already. I’m something, but what, I don’t know. Slices of black bread and apple juice comfort me. I sit on the floor of my room in the dark sometimes. I like the cold because it feels like a hug. People don’t like me as I am so I become someone they do like, even if it means breaking myself apart and tucking the fragments behind walls and amnesic barriers all around my psyche. One day, I might put myself back together. And it will take years.
I am a 29-year old child and my life is happening outside of me, waiting for me to catch up.
12.
In the Spring, some days it drizzled, others it downpoured. I liked the downpour days because I loved the smell of petrichor that burst from the crevices of the Earth. I loved the way it plunged into my nose. I loved the sudden taste of dirt in the back of my mouth; it was as if I was so hungry for life that I chewed my way through the ground to experience it.
I loved the empty streets when it rained. It made me feel like I was one of the last few people left on Earth. I loved how you could only hear the rain: the tender pitter-patter against windows; the harsh jackhammering against car hoods; the uneven zig-zagging down bricks and siding; the rushing flow toward storm drains. I loved how clothes stuck to my body, fabric bunching up to reveal a sliver of skin above my waist, a crescent waiting for a safe touch. I loved how my hair draped across my shoulders and neck like sprawling Spring branches. I loved looking at Danny, a raindrop precariously hanging off the edge of his eyelashes, brown hair matted across his forehead, hands dripping with desire. And then there was the kissing: all wet, messy, and loud with laughter. Raindrops pooled beneath our tongues. Noses glided off cheeks like water slides. Sopping clothes folded into each other. I liked kissing in the rain because, for the longest time, it was the closest I could get to being almost in my body.
And then there were the in-between days, yellow-tinted grey and slightly warm. If a day could be a question mark, those were it.
In the late Spring and early summer, storms came to Brighton Beach, but sometimes they never really started. The sky turned grey, the air surged into skeptical warmth, and tension rested heavy beneath the clouds like a water balloon seconds from bursting. Brighton became a tiny island in the center of the universe. Everything seemed pinched; everything needed a release; everything was on edge, but there was a makeshift blanket wrapped around all of it, an attempt to soothe our anxieties. We were living in-between two worlds, something I knew all too well.
There was a park on Brighton 2nd, adjacent to the boardwalk. Inside it, near the swings for older kids and adults, chain-smoking grandpas played chess. Sometimes I sat and watched Danny play against these men. I was more focused on their faces and unspoken tells than the actual game at hand. I didn’t know how to play chess, but I knew how to read people. The twitch at the top of the right cheek, the momentary-flared nostrils, short, thick fingers repeatedly rotating chess pieces between them like a cigarette, darting eyes, lips pushing down a snarl. I liked reading people because there was so much to learn in the way their bodies betrayed them. I liked reading people because if I could predict their actions then I could stop myself from being hurt.
Of these chain-smoking men, I was familiar with one in particular. Kim, with his round, hard stomach, and cratered face, was my childhood best friend’s surrogate grandpa. He vaguely remembered me, the way most people do, but I remembered him and her well. I remembered their black cat that I actively avoided, the view out the bedroom window where she once gave me a secret I still haven’t untangled from myself, the computer we played GTA on, and the Pokémon GameBoy cartridges that passed through our small, sweaty hands. I remembered everything because it’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to do well.
I didn’t smoke, but I liked the different smells that a cigarette could produce. There wasn’t only one. My favorite was stretched out, like a piece of taffy or a mystery Airhead, the nicotine concentrated in the middle of the smoke cloud. The second the scent plunged up my nose and into my head, I was back in the deep heat of July, blackberry stains on diagonal sidewalks, grass-stained golden knees, fireworks dotted across a black sky, hot dogs outside Shea Stadium with my mom and grandma, flat-chested and broad shouldered preteen years of misgendering, a massive pool and moss-covered benches in the middle of a Jewish camp in Staten Island, and any other memory laced with the scent of cigarettes.
“You have a good boy here,” Kim gruffed in Russian, “he might actually beat me.”
Danny had beaten him all five times they played.
I tried stifling my laugh, and I failed miserably as I looked over at Danny. He stared at the board intently, but his lips betrayed him, a small smile forming on his face. I playfully rubbed his thigh.
“He is pretty great,” I easily admitted. And as soon as I did, I no longer wanted to be sitting there. In the distance, I saw myself standing at the shoreline, waiting for the waves to get tall the way they did when I was little. One day, I would stay, but that day was still far away.
When I was little, I’d run into the waves even though we weren’t supposed to. It was dangerous and I knew I could get hurt, but when you’re young, it doesn’t feel real until it happens. Running into ten-foot tall waves felt like a challenge I could win. And I did, every time. But the water never did purify me the way I hoped because it couldn’t penetrate me deep enough.
Danny rested his palm on my right thigh; I came back to the present, using his hand as my neutral anchor. He didn’t have to say it, I knew what he was doing. He was grounding me, and even though it was buried beneath layers of protective mechanisms and walls, my love for him swelled the way the waves used to. I could see the rest of my life slowly unwinding with him and that petrified me.
Danny and Kim continued playing, the cigarette smoke ever-present, a hovering obituary. The swings creaked behind us. A chorus of children laughed, their shrill shrieks circling the park like a hula hoop. I am 28 and yet I am their age, too. I am still floating across time. I am still floating outside my body. I am here and everywhere and nowhere all at once.
13.
Somehow, it is now summer. The seasons pass by. Barely a blink. I’ll be 32 soon enough and maybe, just maybe, I’ll finally be in my body. All I ever do is wonder what that’s like. But, for now, I have the pleasure of being distorted, stretched across collapsing timelines, compressed into a little girl, stretched into a tall, friendly giant. Everyone thinks I’m in love with them and nobody knows a damn thing about me. But neither do I. So I’m not so different from them, I guess.
Summer used to scream at me and I would scream right back until my guilt crept in and I swallowed my scream. Now, Summer is quiet and apprehensive around me. She doesn’t know what to do with me and neither do I, so she goes back to doing what she does best: she starts pulling apart my skin and the fat under my arms; she scratches over the stretch marks on the inside of my thighs, branding me as hers again. She digs into the scars around my breasts until I’m dripping blood down my stomach and over my legs, and I’ve never felt more alive than when she turns me inside out. She shoves her fist in my mouth and tells me to bite down; and I do, drawing blood from her wrists. It spills into my mouth, and I swallow and laugh, and she does, too.
Summer sinks into my skin and I am ten again. I am running, running, running. There’s a phantom sensation of blood at the bottom of my throat. I know what the future holds. I’ve run too much, I’ve gone too far, but I can’t stop. My hair sticks to my neck. I am so beautiful, I am so young, and while I have been hurt, it hasn’t been enough to break me down fully. Yet. I can’t feel the hurt therefore it isn’t real. My eyes are big and my smile is radiant. I am mostly myself, but not really. I have my whole life ahead of me but I can’t see it.
Summer falls back into Spring. I put on a sweater and jeans and I go watch a movie in a theater I worked at when I was 19. When I come home, the apartment is empty and I feel guilty for enjoying myself too much. I should give myself to others, I suggest, but I only want me for myself. I pack a bag of food and for the first time in two weeks, I visit my grandma in the nursing home. I have not accepted this reality and we’re one year into it now. If I don’t accept things, then they’re not real. So I don’t accept myself.
I float when I leave the nursing home, which always takes too long because leaving is a grieving process. I have to kiss my grandma three times on the cheek—three because two doesn’t feel enough and three feels Goldilocks-right —and I hold her hand for a little bit and then I walk away but I stand by the nurses’ station for a minute to make sure she’s still okay in her wheelchair and we wave to each other and her wave is so cute and child-like but then I worry that she’ll die between the moment I leave and the moment I see her the next day so I go back into the cafeteria and kiss and hold her again and we repeat this cycle at least one more time before I finally make peace with the fact that this might be the last time I ever see her so I leave and once I leave the building, I feel relieved, like she’s okay, like she’ll be alive tomorrow, now let me go home. So I go home. And then I forget that she has dementia and I forget anything that happened before this moment and I keep forgetting except I don’t because all I do is remember.
14.
In the past two weeks, snow has snuck in like a secret. Last night, as we walked through the park, the snowflakes fell slow, landing and melting on small stretches of our skin. Danny’s face glistened under the silvery glow of the moon, so I reached out and wiped the dampness away with my thumb; he smiled wide, baring teeth, and my body went quiet, stunned into submission. ‘There’s something about you,’ I whispered in my mouth as my hand returned back to my body, ‘and I don’t know what to do.’ But like a magnet, it did so with resistance because my hand no longer wanted to be by my side but by his. I was betraying myself again.
‘You really are different,’ I said in my head as I stared at his smile. A part of me waited for him to open wide and swallow me whole. I could already feel his teeth cutting through my flesh and piercing my neck because that’s what they always reach for first. Instead, he leaned in to kiss my forehead, and the warmth started to thaw decades of deep freeze. My toes wriggled in my boots. Water rose all the way up to my ankles. I flexed my fingers and shards of ice cracked and fell to the ground. I hadn’t been swallowed. I hadn’t floated away. I was still here. I was still alive.
“I love you.”
I was supposed to be happy, I was supposed to feel at ease. But all I could think was: ‘Who is the ‘you’ that you love?’ He didn’t really know me. And even if he did, how could he love me? ‘You can’t even see all of me,’ I wanted to say. ‘And if you did, I don’t know if you’d like her very much.’ But the night was so perfect, so I told myself to be quiet like the snow, and not loud like me.
He grabbed my hand in his and gave it a gentle squeeze. He was trying to tell me, ‘You don’t have to say anything’, so I listened. I nodded and he smiled at me. I smiled back, which gave him the cue to start leading us out of the park. The water sloshed around in my boots.
With my mouth slightly open, I swallowed cold air, unable to stitch the words I had never told another man before. My drowning feet pulled my body forward, but I was still stuck back there, back where he said “I love you.” I turned my head, and saw myself staring at me. Who did he love exactly? Her? Who is she?
I looked at her and she looked at me. She waved, shyly. I wanted to drop Danny’s hand and run toward her instead. I needed to protect her. At 28, I was still leaving little pieces of myself everywhere. I was still scattered across my past, fragments of me floating through the years like lost objects in space. And I was desperately trying to find every single one of them so I could put them all back inside me.
If Danny turned around, he’d see her, too. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m the only one who can see me. I try my best to not let my selves leak into his life. I don’t tell anyone of my sightings. I keep them to myself. I keep myself to myself like a project needing to be fixed, a monster needing to be cleaned, an animal needing to be domesticated.
“Are you alright, darling?”
I turned back around, glancing at Danny, his eyebrows knitted, and his brown eyes filled with concern and care. I squeezed his hand. I didn’t know if he would believe me, but I said “Yeah,” anyway.
Because I will be.
