I've been writing letters to you in my head for more years now than I haven't, more than half of my life with a place reserved just for you in a corner of my brain. I never felt too small for my skin when your voice was there and I'm not sure you knew that, and now that you're gone all I want is a time machine to let you know. You were precious and we all definitely took that for granted. I know that's what you're supposed to say whenever someone dies, but that doesn't make it less true.

I've been googling aneurysms for days, trying to find some combination of information that makes it seem real, that makes anything make sense. There's still time for this all to be a wacky misunderstanding.

The version of me that you saw was always better than the version of me that I see. From what everyone has been saying since you died, it seems that you made everyone feel that way. I always want to be the kind of person that makes other people feel like the center of something important but you actually did that, in ways that seemed effortless but probably weren't. I think we made more fun of you for your faults than appreciated you for all of your best qualities. I think we'll do it again, some more, to everyone else. That's one of the blind spots of being a human.

I loved that I knew you. I always will.

Mary Oliver died a year ago today. The great thing about poems is that they're always there even when poets aren't, and I've sat with her work a lot this past year. I'm watching a lot of people that I love anticipate or recover from grief, and Mary Oliver is great for both of those states. Lately I have had on my mind the second half of "The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac", her cancer poem:

3.
I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

4.
Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,
all the fragile blue flowers in bloom
in the shrubs in the yard next door had
tumbled from the shrubs and lay
wrinkled and fading in the grass. But
this morning the shrubs were full of
the blue flowers again. There wasn’t
a single one on the grass. How, I
wondered, did they roll back up to
the branches, that fiercely wanting,
as we all do, just a little more of
life?

Dear 2020,

The fireworks that were supposed to greet you were canceled because of high winds. We heard somewhere that there'd be an attempt to shoot them off at 2 am so we hung around outside an emptying party near the Space Needle to see if it was true, but the winds persisted and so we went home. They said it was the first time the fireworks have been canceled in 26 years, which is technically true but doesn't take into account all those years they happened but it was too foggy to see them. I feel like our catastrophizing has to be precise if only to keep things in perspective where we can. There's a lot out there that's a real catastrophe, and while we may have deserved fireworks we're just not always going to get them.

It's a little hard to hold 2019 in place. I think of all the slivers of ourselves we cut off and laid by just to make it through, all the ways we made ourselves fit where we were rubbing at the edges. All the days we just tried to get through. But we have a little jar of ourselves that can glow in the dark and we're sensitive at the places that were sore, and I am lucky enough that things could have been so much worse.

I think about Lake Nyos all the time, about the lake turning over one night and suffocating almost 2,000 people and no one really knows why, if it was a landslide or a rainstorm or an earthquake that set everything off. I know that there's almost no way to predict what is the thing that will trigger the rush down the mountain, the displacement of all the air. Some days that feels inspiring and most days it feels heavy. But I also think about how after that people applied themselves to keep the same disaster from happening again, and that seems likes a good place to be. If we're nothing else, we're learning.

I have a friend who posts the same survey every year addressing the same list of questions with things like are you happier or sadder? richer or poorer? fatter or thinner? and I saw it and thought, well, both. I am rounder in some places but thinner in the skin on my chest and around my eyes. I am happier and sadder both, often multiple times in the same day, happier with the woman I am settling into and sadder about the world that I'm settling into. I am poorer in dollars but always richer in a community that deepens and ripens as we all come through fire together.

I'd appreciate it if you could find something great within you, 2020, but I'd settle for nothing terrible. Let's agree to go easy on each other.

I dreamt that I was in a field on top of the Space Needle. You could see the whole city up there, but I didn't like that there was no railing on the edge, nothing to keep you from falling off. I understood in the dream that I must have climbed a ladder to get up there but the only way down was to drop into a hole that would eventually turn into a slide. You could see it on the maps and diagrams, a long tube that eventually curved gently and led to the ground a few blocks away. The first step was a plummet, though, and we know from my time on the trapeze that while I'm not necessarily afraid of heights I am not even remotely interested in falling through space. I woke up feeling like I had spent years standing there in front of that hole, willing myself to jump, knowing that some day the relief of getting down would outweigh the fear of falling.

 I dreamt that I was on a reality show about making fireworks. Since fireworks are among my top five favorite things I was excited to compete, though it occurred to me just as I woke that I've never gotten around to actually learning how to make fireworks.

I dreamt that I had surgery on my skull, cracking it open all along the top. It took all the hair in a line across the whole top of my head and scraped out a long divot of blood and bone. They patched me back together but no one wanted to acknowledge my wounds. I was embarrassed and sore and angry, but right before I woke up I realized that I could play the staples in my scalp like a piano.

I dreamt there were four kittens and I could choose whichever one I liked.

I'm not sure how long we've been inside this whale. It's hard to tell time inside of a whale, turns out, and moreover it turns out that time inside a whale doesn't really matter. When you're in, you're in.

They tell you that you should just keep swimming, like a shark, that if you stop swimming you'll drown. You're meant to keep going until you get through. Whatever counts as a motivational speech. And so there I was swimming along, trying not to drown, and along came this whale. You'd almost have to laugh.

I know you think I'm half crazy most of the time anyway, all worst case scenarios and hurricanes for hands, and it is sort of comforting in here. It's dark and warm and sure it smells a little fishy, but the whale's heart is whooshing and thumping and it sounds safe. There's no hurricanes inside a whale. I've been in worse places.

There's no way this ends well, of course. I imagine that eventually the whooshing and thumping will stop and we will become whale fall, settling slowly to the bottom of the ocean in a sudden, deep, expanding silence. The scavengers will come scuttling around and we'll be able to hear them scraping against the outside of our whale, coming closer and closer. Eventually, sooner than we like but probably slower than we know, there will come a crack that makes it all the way through. The ocean will rush back in and there's no swimming down there, only black and rattling bones.

All things being equal, inside of a whale is probably not the worst case scenario. At least in here I can stop swimming.

We've always known our apartment is haunted, although "haunted" is a little strong for whoever lives there with us. There's clearly another occupant, but not one that's particularly interested in us. We've all cohabited peacefully for years.

One night, before I moved in, I went to bed alone and dreamed that I was asleep in the bedroom when several people I didn't know showed up in the doorway. They all filed over to look closely at me while I stayed very still. Awake, the cat, never one very interested in direct physical contact, climbed onto my back and slept there for hours. I suffer from sleep paralysis fairly often and this was the opposite of that--it felt as though I had been judged and accepted. I never had the same dream again.

Whoever else is living there isn't particularly active. There are some unusual sounds without a clear origin that happen sometimes, and often the origami hearts that hang in the doorway will sway gently with no motivating breeze. The apartment feels inhabited, but no one is popping up wearing a sheet on their head or throwing anything around the room. In college we had the sort of ghost that interfered, and while it made for more exciting stories it's the sort of thing that gets old after a while, and I much prefer the situation we have now. If one has to be haunted, best to be haunted by a ghost that has better things to do.

The cat died unexpectedly in December, and it's been hard getting used to the absence, unlearning the habits of caring for something else, working through the guilt and grief. I'm home by myself a lot, and it has been interesting how much lonelier it feels now that something that was there isn't anymore, as opposed to those ten years that I lived alone and felt just fine about it. Lately, I have been seeing a lot of movement out of the corner of my eye, hearing a lot of noises that aren't there, seeing almost realized faces where there isn't anything. It feels like someone is there. On Friday I came home from work and was sure that there was someone else in the apartment, even though my boyfriend was in a different part of town.

I think the ghost misses the cat too. 

One of the worst things about summer is that my hummingbirds go away. It's better for them, of course, since there are real flowers everywhere and all the bugs they can eat, and that's healthier for them. This summer the crows nested just across from our bedroom window and we watched them have and raise three little baby crows. Still at the end of every summer I get worried that they won't come back.

Mythologically, hummingbirds are supposed to be good luck, bringers of healing, good luck, and joy. The Aztec priests carried a staff decorated with hummingbird feathers that they used to suck the evil out of anyone struck by a curse. Almost everyone across the Americas has a story about hummingbirds as the spirit of people who have passed away.

Anyway, they started showing back up last week. In the beginning it's always the younger ones first, who probably don't know where all the late-season secrets are. In a few weeks they'll all be here, flashing back and forth. The older ones aren't afraid of us at all and it's possible to sit at the window and watch them from a foot away. They could be good luck, and even if they're not they're good luck anyway.

We put aside some of our dignity, carving off pieces, knowing that they might be needed later. It's always in the shortest supply when you need it the most, like very good cheese or tissues at a wedding. I would keep it bottled in jars and hidden all over the neighborhood, if I could. I am always worried that my dignity is going to drain out of me and pool around my feet just when I need it the most--we have a pretty tenuous relationship most days, anyway.

I was reading about flea circuses the other day, about how when they started with real fleas the ringmasters would hitch the fleas to their contraptions with microscopically small gold wire or thread, or glue tiny things to their tiny legs, and set them out to perform. It looked like wizardry but was really just garden variety cruelty. How high can a flea jump? Only as high as you'll let it.

Anyway, if you can find a flea circus these days it's usually built of motors and magnets with maybe a few token fleas hopping around, and these trade-offs seem obvious. Still you would think I'd have noticed when those thin gold wires appeared, when I tried to jump and slammed right back down. I thought I was driving this chariot, but it turns out this chariot is driving me. We're moments away from going out of style as it is, and only history will tell if any of this is magic or not.

Yesterday, walking home from work, just past the window that sometimes has kittens but so inconsistently that it's maddening, there was a box of flowers. You could smell it before you reached it, which was disconcerting itself in a part of the neighborhood that almost always smells like urine and spoiled produce. Inside it was packed with five or six mixed bouquets, wilting slightly, with no one nearby who seemed like they would be in charge of this box of flowers.

I stopped and contemplated it for a minute, sheepishly. What was it there for? Would someone noticed if I took a bunch? Were they there for taking? There are always a handful of other people walking one way or another on the sidewalk, and none of them seemed interested in this box of flowers. As usual, I wondered briefly if I was imagining them.

I left them all there, ultimately. Possibly free flowers don't counteract possibly stolen flowers, and I'm just not willing to take that chance with my agreement with the universe. Anyway, it was nice enough just to visit them.

I know you thought you were throwing that coin into a wishing well, but I regret to inform you that it was actually my heart. I can see how you could make that mistake, but the trouble is that now I have your wish all stuck sideways in my inferior vena cava, and it's causing a bit of a ruckus.

Last week I was early for a dinner. I am always early for almost everything except work, especially in this town where half an hour late still counts as early. There was a park on the way to where I was going so I stopped, spread my jacket on the grass, and opened my book. It had been raining off an on all day and the wind rattled the leaves all around me and raindrops pattered the grass. I couldn't tell if they were new or if the trees had just been holding on to them all day, but the leaves were so dense over where I was sitting that not one of them hit me.

Yesterday I was walking home from the store and met a bulldog who saw me coming and refused to move until I stopped and patted it on the head. I can't say this doesn't seem ideal, in a lot of ways; to just stand firm on the sidewalk, unshakable, demanding affection. 

Yesterday afternoon we were on the ferry back from Bainbridge Island. It's rare that it's warm enough to be outside on the deck of the ferry for more than a minute or two to appreciate the novelty, but we spent the whole ride across right at the front, goosebumped and getting in the way of people just trying to take pictures. The top part of the mountain was out, and the city sparkled as we approached it, and I started thinking, "what if there was a natural disaster right now?"

I could picture it in either direction. What if Mt. Rainier just blew, shooting its top right of into the air, raining fire and mud and ash on everything south of us. What would that kind of shock wave feel like on the water? Would the ferry stop or would we just keep creeping closer to the dock? I had two peaches in my purse and a small bottle of balsamic vinegar, which would not keep anyone for very long, and I could see the ferry full of passengers smashing and looting the little cafeteria and all of the vending machines. 

What if there was an earthquake and downtown just dropped into the earth? I could see the Space Needle slowly topple sideways, a thick cloud of dust rising up to hide the rubble, screams echoing across the water. If it was the Seattle Fault that blew, would it drop our ferry down into it too? Would we be stuck in a whirlpool like when Ursula gets mad at the end of The Little Mermaid? 

We agreed that everyone thinks that way and made a joke about it and moved on, but my crisis brain had started and as usual couldn't stop. I was almost disappointed when the ferry pulled up to the dock and everyone was unscathed, as though I had spent that 30 minutes training for a marathon that was canceled at the last minute. And then I took the light rail home and the train didn't crash at all, and I spent the rest of the evening on the couch, exhausted by all the catastrophes that didn't happen.

Sometimes I think about the anatomical models in the Capello Sansevero, two bodies that are a tangle of the whole system of blood vessels built on top of a scaffolding of human bones, their skulls hinged so you can look inside and see all the places that blood lives in the brain. From the 1700's until a couple of years ago everyone thought that they were made of real veins, plasticized in some mysterious old time-y mad alchemist way, but it turns out they're just meticulously constructed from iron and silk and beeswax. Just like real veins.

When I was there in 2008 I was trying to cram myself back together, which is hilarious in retrospect because I didn't know then how many more ways there are to be broken. If only we could run away to Italy every time everything fractured. Those figures looked like I felt, all flensed and exposed, open for every breeze that might pass through, grotesque and familiar.

But then I feel that way most days, and it is remarkable to me that you can't actually see through my skin to the thirteen gnomes running around inside it. I seem to have a face that doesn't show much no matter how much it feels like it does, and I am reserved by nature and usually standing quietly enough that I might be invisible, a foot shorter than everyone else and nervously picking at my cuticles. I don't know that I want to be a billboard but it might be nice to give my gnomes a vacation, to let all the running happen on the outside instead of the inside.

Raimondo di Sangro was the wizard behind the collection of treasures in the Cappello Sansevero, and the rumor was that he could make blood out of nothing. He died earlier than he would have otherwise because he spent so much time working with dangerous chemicals but on the other hand he left a legacy of significant spookiness and wonder. Even if you can't make blood out of nothing it can't hurt if everyone thinks you can.

And maybe that's the trick. Maybe I will never be a billboard. Maybe I will always just be a tangle of iron and silk and beeswax instead of real veins, open and exposed and quiet and still. Maybe it's ok if the only ones who see are the ones that are looking, if the magic is a trick but the trick is magic. 

There's a mock orange tree along my route to work that I only noticed for the first time this spring. I have walked pretty much the same way every day for the last three years, but this tree is on the other side of the street from what has almost always been my route. Lately the neighborhood has gotten more full of people with cars and my usual crossing doesn't have a crosswalk, so I can't always safely rabbit across where I'd like to. I resent it, a little, all of the cars and the new people and what they've done to my neighborhood. But then there's this tree.

Mock orange trees were introduced to European gardens from the Ottoman Empire when a diplomat in the 1500's came back to Vienna. He brought with him lilac as well, and the two trees have been linked ever since. In the language of flowers mock orange means deceit, which I suppose makes sense since it's not actually an orange tree, although it seems a little rude to lay the blame for that on the plant. Lilacs mean basically everything depending on what region and time period you're in, but they got their scientific name because of Pan, who chased a nymph through the woods until she turned into a tree to hide. He didn't find her person but he did find her tree, from which he cut pieces to make the first pan pipe--because when you've been rejected, why not pause for a second to invent a musical instrument. This seems to me like a much less comfortable origin that just being a tree that smells like another tree, and I'll always pick a mock orange over a lilac.

I have no idea how the tree managed to get to where it is. The part of the road that goes past it runs along the side of the freeway, mostly just full of blackberry brambles and unhoused neighbors--there's nothing even remotely decorative about anything anywhere near it. In the spring I was walking to work and there it was, smelling like orange blossoms and jasmine, seemingly sprung out of nowhere. The flowers have faded now, of course, but I think about how they were there whenever I pass the tree, reaching out through the brambles.

I think of how often it's possible to be surprised.

A big piece of dandelion fluff followed me home for a while yesterday. It was there when I crossed the street, hovering just above my eye level over the sidewalk. We made eye contact, this traveling wish and I, and I watched it float a little higher for a minute, moving so slowly, seeming out of sync with the wind. I turned and kept walking, but a few steps further down the road I noticed its shadow on the ground from just behind me and to the right. It startled me slightly--had my own shadow been replaced by dandelion fluff? Am I really just a wish in girl clothing? That would explain so much--but we were traveling at different speeds and were soon parted.

I don't know where it was going, but I hope it got there. 

I read a book a few weeks ago about the last voyage of the whaleship Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale and sank, abandoning its whole crew to a couple of rickety whaleboats and the ocean. Just when everyone was almost dead they came across a small island that had a small source of fresh water only when the tide was at exactly the right place. Three of the men from the ship decided on this island that being lost at sea is for suckers and they'd take their chances on what barely counted for land, and they watched as their crewmates sail away again. They eventually made it off the island alive but that tiny spring, their main source of fresh water, was never seen again.

Last night I was up for hours, crazybrain spinning like a mashup DJ, layering the Lizzo song that has been stuck in my head with an imaginary conversation about something I'm mad about at work with a series of ludicrous worst case scenarios. I keep hoping to age out of late night worst case scenarios (or, let's be honest, any time of day worst case scenarios) but it never seems to happen, so I still just sit there for hours counting the rats scurrying across the patio below and worrying about what if gravity fails. Last night I plotted and plotted about what to do about an emergency appendectomy this weekend while my boyfriend is uncontactable in the woods, and truly it is both exhausting to be me and to be around me, sometimes.

Surprisingly, sticking around on that island turned out to be the better option than sailing off again, since the cannibalism didn't get going until later. Elsewhere on the island were eight skeletons of people who didn't get rescued later, which must have been a disheartening sight to find once their shipmates sailed off and their water disappeared. Mathematically I'm sure the chances of them being rescued were vanishingly small--almost all of their shipmates would be dead and eaten by the time the remaining whaleboats bumped into civilization again, and the island that they were actually on was a different one than what everyone thought they were on. But civilization was bumped into and the captain of another boat cared enough to check one more place for them, and they made it out alive.

None of the guys left on the island were the guys that wrote books afterward so there's no way to know how it went, but I keep thinking about the feeling of going back to where the water was and waiting for the tide to get to the right spot and it just...never happening. I imagine you'd be haunted by a lot after a whale sinks your ship and you're lost at sea, but it seems to me that there must be moments that would stick more firmly than others, and by any reasonable standard--and my late night disaster planning--that would definitely be one of them.

For a while there it was like being a bundle of nerves in a petri dish, everyone just clustered around and watching to see what stimulus provoked a rainbow or a rat king or a neutron star. I know being performatively exposed is the way of things now, but it came to a place of feeling hollow and forced, a place where what was once a release was now a burden. I have never been much of a liar. And I was ok with having once been good at something that now seemed colorless and dry--sometimes wells go empty, and deserts are their own kind of beautiful. There are other ways to make sense of the world.

But we live in a world where the permafrost is thawing and you can find pretty much everything you've ever lost somewhere, and I guess a solid side effect of going hollow is that there's space for something to be again. Eventually. If it feels like it.

And then Mary Oliver died, and I couldn't stop thinking about the poem that is tattooed on my bones:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver is always right, of course.

So you have been on my mind, is what I'm saying. Last night I had a dream that I was at a party and people all around me kept saying things that I wanted to tell you, referenced over and over articles that I wanted to read and torture and turn back around. In the dream I was filling my pockets with stories, greedy for them like when stone fruit finally comes into season after a long winter of potatoes.

For the moment, I guess the wind has changed.

The thing is...

The thing is that there are days where I scare myself with my own shadow and can't call it a metaphor, where I can feel something creeping up behind me and it turns out it's only myself. The thing is that our hands might be folded and still but our blood is still rushing around just underneath. The thing is that our blood is full of plants and animals and aliens and magic and we might never know until they've banded together and formed a resistance party and started to demand a way out. The thing is that I can feel a disaster hovering somewhere close, round and grumbling, and I don't know if it's coming this way or if it's only another asteroid that'll whistle past and pretend we weren't even here.

The fourth rule of fairytales is that there are stories stacked up in the underbrush that you don't see, and maybe that's just because they're not your stories. There are a lot of us, lost in these woods.

2014, I made a lot of things in you.

I spent a mentionable amount of time this year sitting on the floor of the living room, burning wood and etching glass and once stabbing myself in the leg with a linocutter. I have felt unmoored, I guess, from most of the hobbies I used to ride, and I have spent so many years not touching things with my palms that I wanted to feel things more than thinking them. I also live with a maker, which has surely shifted the ways in which I experience the world. In any case, most things feel safe enough to touch with my whole hands.

My horoscope at the beginning of the year predicted that I would commit no major acts of self-sabotage this year, and I think I may have managed that. I worked hard this year in a lot of intangible areas, in working hard, in being a better partner, in maintaining perspective. It has been a rough year for the world in general, and I have been doing my best to not make it worse.

We looked at a lot of beautiful places this year, on the Washington coast and in Oregon and California. I suppose someday it might get old, how different this land is from the smooth sand I grew up with, but until then I plan to keep filling my eyes all up with it.

2014, I hope that you are leading to a 2015 of change, to a year when we are not suffering from outrage fatigue because there are just so many things to be outraged about. I hope that things are getting better and safer instead of just louder. I read a story a few months ago about a German town that tricked a neo-nazi march into indirectly contributing to an anti-nazi charity, and I hope that's what you were, 2014: the decision point that will trick the world into being kinder.

In dreams some nights I stand on the edge of a rocky seawall wearing rainboots, watching some sort of commotion in the distance. Deciding to go see what it is and expecting shallows below I always step off the seawall and sink, boots filling with water, down into the cold blue unknown, no shallows anywhere. On the land no one has noticed, and I fall slowly through the depths with alarm but without panic. There is always one final improbable breath to be found inside my chest and then I wake, upset at not being more scared. It is always this way of drowning, slowly and quietly and without ever knowing just what drew me into the water in the first place.

The subject of drowning is one where dream interpretation really shows its seams. If you dream of drowning, they say, then you are probably...drowning, in a feeling, possibly good but also possibly bad. But is it really drowning if you are not trying to fight your way back to the surface? Awake, certainly, but I have started to think about this more in terms of sinking than in terms of drowning. If we're trying to discuss something, my brain and I, we should probably be talking about the same thing.

Awake I tend to find breath hard to come by, the air around me somehow thinner than it should be, my lungs less committed to their task. But sinking in water turns out the be approximately the same as drowning, with an added lack of self-confidence which I suppose makes sense. This fall has been a struggle, and I have spent a lot of time alone. They say that sinking suggests a situation in which you can't find the right approach. In general I wish that brains were less obvious, more subtle, that asleep I wasn't telling myself what I already know awake. In general I wish the air pressure would stabilize and loosen its grip on me, that I could breathe deeply and sleep soundly.

In general, I wish that I could understand the commotion in the distance without having to step into the water.

We are going to Mexico in January, and I had to renew my passport in order to be ready. The new one came this week, all stiff and empty, and I am feeling pangs about the old one--the way it always flipped open to my Chinese visa, prompting an exasperated sign from the immigration agent who would have to wrestle it to a new page. All of the airplane stamps in it, crooked, hastily applied at unforgiving times in unfamiliar airports. I haven't been so many places, but a lot of them were there in that passport, which is now...recycled, I guess. Where do all the old passports go? It's better if I don't know.

Mexico seems like a reasonable place to start the next 10 years of adventures, someplace I hadn't really thought about visiting until suddenly it revealed itself to be exactly the place to go. One of my goals in life is a swim up bar, so we're going to cross that off, and we'll snorkel around some sculptures that are being claimed by the sea. (A side effect of living with a sculptor is that I think about sculptures more than ever before.) There's the obvious benefit of leaving rainy old Seattle in January for the beach, although rainy old Seattle is pretty charming when it's all hunkered down behind steamy windows and misting gently in the 5:00 streetlights.

Right now my new passport smells like new passport, but I suppose it's only a matter of time until it is creased and falling open naturally to something new, some place I'm not sure of yet. Part of the history of me becoming this girl was kept in that old passport, so it can't be anything less than interesting to see who comes out of the new one.