two and some-odd years ago, my almost-but-not-quite-yet boyfriend came over to my childhood house, where i was still living at the time, and took these photos, because i had a DSLR that i never used and he said “let’s use it,” and i said “okay,” because the sun was out and i wanted an excuse to smile and laugh and bask in that glow of new love and the smell of fresh summer. you know those early-june days where you can almost taste the strawberries and the flowers blooming all around, before that kind of listless anarchy, that soup of heat and frustration, sets out in july and august? it was that kind of day.
this was before all of it started–before the lily-white curtains that blew around my apartment when the wind came crashing through on winter nights, before the nights passed out together on the bathroom floor, before the jazz bars and bloody noses and the dancing in my tiny kitchen, the screaming fights and quiet mornings, the apple-cheddar thanksgiving pie.
this was the beginning, before we felt like static electricity waiting to strike, when it was all itchy black lacy bras and would-you-rathers and wine’n’honey and lipstick’n’spit and petrichor, a word i taught him on our third date because i wanted to sound impressive and poetic and mysterious when the downpour started on our way to the bar. we slowed down and let it come, and the rain washed over us like a sort of crude baptism–welcome, it said. you are starting something new and it will be great and painful and terrible and light you don’t know it yet, it said. we showed up like drowned rats. he taught me shuffleboard. i met his friends, and they let me into their little gang, and i stood in the glow of their inspeak and how effortlessly cool they all seemed, and i leaned into him with far less trepidation than i should’ve. i didn’t care, i didn’t care about anything but the way his wet hand felt in the back pocket of my wet jeans in the corner of the bar, backs to the wall, when it all felt like a secret. back then, he was the calm and i was the breaking storm and it was all so gentle and fragile and new.
here, in this picture, we’re a month out from the hospitals and three-AM doctor calls and pill sorting boxes, the articles on EGFR mutations that i couldn’t quite parse, the smell of bleach mixed with rot and the crinkle of those yellow sterile gowns, and the prevailing emotion i had was…relief. for my mom, for myself, for the ages i’d spent tensed up wondering how i could make it better, how i could fix this. i couldn’t anymore. i couldn’t save her. i had failed at that, and it was over. my shoulders relaxed, and i met a boy at a party and he took pictures of me on my deck, and the sunshine sang.
and i look at that person up there in the pictures, and i marvel at how she thought that maybe grief could be a sort of compost for love, that it could be the flint for something new. it wasn’t, that grief isn’t where it grew, but i think a lot about that weird limbo–between the death and the grief hitting, the brief hiccup of calm, days unstructured by doctor visits, days spent quietly marveling that i was alive in the universe despite it all, and hey, isn’t that worth celebrating? isn’t that worth singing with the sunshine and listening to the cicadas in the southern heat?
i look at these photos and i wonder if i am too far gone from that now, or if i have been knocked into a tailspin by it all that i haven’t found my way out of, if i couldn’t have held on just a little longer to that sunshine on my skin, the way it blossomed, and i wonder and wonder and wonder if i am a ghost of her, if that’s all i can be now, if i can somehow crawl my way back there. i don’t think i can.
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