i. observations + reflections
deck floor, highland park, los angeles
17 february 2026. 11:45 pm
when someone you love is dying, you can either allow the full implosion your body and mind demand, or you can try to save the reality you’ve constructed to protect you. this is, at least, how i understood the time. this is how i have always understood time.
big, bright star; the black vacuum space left as evidence of its inversion.
i have always been terrified of what i am capable of pulling into myself when i am not careful.
i have, therefore, always been careful. i have never been allowed to do anything wrong.
tonight, i get to step outside of this ever-calculation, the oppression of my space-body. tonight, i get to melt, melt, melt. serotonin brain-flood means i don’t flinch when my friends grab for me, pull me close. it means i get up and dance by myself in the living room, giggling, watching as everyone i love puddles on the couch. it means i’m not ashamed to say how terrified i am of being alive. it means i don’t feel terrified.
i am panting with joy, breathless with everything i’ve been too afraid to say or ask or want for twenty-six years. both the infant that just found her voice and the relief of her parents finally let into her world. i understand the wordless parts of me. i can speak to them clearly, i can show them to others, so i show them. i keep showing them.
hours later and the window is closing. i am prying it open; desperate to keep my light on, shining. I write in my notes app on the car ride home:
“how quickly does fear re-enter the mind, the body. the first contact to ground and i am already afraid again. something to look into”
always something to look into, figure out.
G is asleep next to me, naive to the fact that we’ll both wake up sucked into some abyss – the depth of which we’d never seen. I am sure of it. I stay up all night hanging on, protecting him.
come morning, I am dragged into sleep against my will. I resent the things my body needs. but i wake up warm, bright. I was not consumed by some star-eating darkness that leaked out when i wasn’t looking. i am capable of holding both things. i am safe in my own mind.
bedside floor, echo park, los angeles
27 february 2026. 2:14 pm.
Mom confesses to me that when her mom dies, she swears the whole world will collapse; that there will be no one left to diligently, faithfully, pray for our salvation. She hasn’t spoken like this in years. It’s slipped lately, a few mentions of Him and Prayer and Protection. Timid, sporadic; she silently tests both of our tolerances to the reintroduction of such things - God. She ducks low enough to crawl under my compulsion towards correction, denial, a scoff. What she doesn’t know is that she doesn’t need to bend so low. My own boundaries have shifted, too. Death will do that to you. Life will.
I didn’t know she felt so connected to her mother until then. I knew they spoke every day or so from her complaints about how ridiculous she was being; how she didn’t understand this oddity, or that. I knew, also, how far she traveled to get away from her family, catch some air.
How reluctant she was to go back.
I felt so foolish to have believed otherwise. I speak of her in the same tone to others. I have also left. I know this dance, and I still call. Often. I still need her, want her. She is a given.
There is much more room for honesty, anger, and temporary escape, with givens. She has always resented this. I’m sure I will too, when the time comes. You’ll understand when you have kids of your own, says every mother ever. I know my time is coming by the stillness of my eyes when I hear it. I have reached an age beyond immediate dismissal.
She, for the second time in her life, is facing the reality of our collective illusion against loss. She is negotiating terms. She is ready to accept, logically, that all things, no matter how much of you they are, will leave, disappear. They will die.
She knew this before, in a similar way that I know this. Her own father died when she was 30, just five years older than I was when I lost mine. We have never spoken about this directly. We have tried.
But it is different when you have time to prepare. The suddenness of her last run-in with death could be written off as a blip. Bad luck. God’s plan.
The inevitability of old age and decline cannot, as easily, be ignored.
In the weeks before now, she’d been mapping out time. Using words of “sense” and “logic” and “convenience”. Words that I used when I was deciding whether to stay or go during my dad’s final week, not knowing that it was his final week.
As we talked about it, I found myself much more gentle and strategic in my communication, the way a parent who doesn’t want to overstep would be. A mother trying not to flood their daughter with their own worries.
I know it makes sense to wait, but the question is not sense; it is whether or not you’d be okay not making it there, I said, shocked at how easily I could pull on this wisdom. Saddened by it.
She deferred to sense anyway. I did not blame her. It is safe. You can wrap your hands and mind around a plan. Anchor to it like a talisman. You can trust in the linearity of reason. I would have, and did, choose the same.
It was no surprise, then, when she called in the same situation as I had called her months prior. Stuck at the airport, last-minute, cross-country flight, with no sense of whether she would touch down in time.
I coached her through this, too.
If they try to make you check a bag, explain the situation. If they make you check it anyway, ditch it at the airport and come back for it once it is all over. They will hold it. Do not wait.
I began to pace the way I did as I waited for the taxi that seemed like it would never come.
I remembered the only thought I had for 6 and a half hours that day. The first time I spoke to a Christian God since I was nine.
Please, let me feel his hands while they are still warm. He doesn’t have to make it, I know he won’t. But his hands, please. Please.
I snapped out of it when she told me she’d start boarding soon. My heart sunk for her. Us two, little girls, together.
I told her I’d pray before she could even ask me to. My knees dropped the moment we hung up the phone.
Dear Lord, I said, hands clasped. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
I asked for her safe travel and arrival. I asked for time. I asked for warm hands.
When she made it there, I smiled to an empty room.
When her mother passed, I looked to the sky, knowing it would not fall; my mother’s arms burdened with an invisible weight. When I called, she seemed proud to hold it.
Ready to.
~*interlude*~
parked car, echo park, los angeles
10 march 2026. 3:32 pm.
the kids next door, everyday, playing.
big ones and small ones. learning names, calling them. always a ball, a bat, a bike. movement in all directions; one central force they return to. the adults of their apartment building come and go; smile both ways. I can’t help but smile too. i didn’t think kids did it like this anymore — long afternoons into evenings, outside, doing nothing together. figuring it out. making it all up.
“did you ever get in trouble at school? did you ever get in trouble??” the little one yells, over and over. he needs to know. he wants to talk to the bigger ones about it – see how they feel, how they make sense of this thing, trouble. I find myself listening for an answer, too. I am still trying to make sense of this thing, trouble. I am still trying to make sense.
every day these kids, outside, screaming.
I haven’t let my voice release like that in years. at least not unplanned. I need time and a dedicated car ride to somewhere secluded. A $39 rage-releasing, processing class in a hip neighborhood. You know, separate. Away. Alone.
it’s too embarrassing, I think, to be so big and so loud. to reach any higher than i am. to reach out to anyone on a whim; because I felt like it; because I don’t know why, but it felt right in this moment, and I trusted it, and now I am here. Receive me!
Every day these kids return. They teach each other, play, learn.
If there is a love different than that, I don’t want it.
If there is a love different than that, it has another name.
ii. narrative
i have been gifted many delicate things. i am always careful with where i put my hands. i am rigid with the responsibility of training myself, keeping it all together.
when you are sold a safety that is isolated, individual, you have to work very hard to keep it together. you will step on others to get there, then on yourself. there will never be a there that is secure enough.
if you are a nation, you will draw borders, build walls, and arm them. if you are a person, you will do the same. everything is downstream of the environment that you live in. every behavior tethered to the beliefs that words birth in us.
i have clung to assurances, edges, knowns. i have forced a world around them, running from anything that challenges the reality i’ve built. but there is not a safety that i, alone, can reach. no isolation or self-constitution that will feel satiating to this primal fear of harm.
there are people who know this better than me. i am lucky to learn from and be loved by them. they waiting for me to allow myself to fall apart - sitting with their arms outstretched, ready to catch the goop i refuse to become. i am a shivering shelter dog in the center of their circle, resisting the prospect of touch and a warm bed. i have long run out of rope living this way. i am ready to try something new.
i painted this image that wouldn’t leave my head for weeks after Dad died; called it ‘grief is something we hold together’.
i am starting to see that we are holding all of this together. i think we can call it whatever we want. we can believe we are opting in or out of this co-holding as much as we want. but here we are, all of our hands wrapped around it.
if there is a God it has a face I know. i believe in a safety that is ours.
iii. further research
What tethers you to your ability to move through life/to not be paralyzed with fear?
How - beyond the absence of harm - do you define safety?
How does the language of [attaining, earning, fighting for, etc.] impact how we collectively orient around the concept of safety?
At which point do you know you are safe enough? Too safe?
What have you negotiated away in search of safety? What have we, collectively? Was the trade worth it? How do you know/not know?
iv. appendix
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
“I am safe in my own mind” a reminder I needed. Thank you ❤️
This is so beautiful and so sincerely written. What a talent to write about such difficult things with such beauty.