Tag: love

Adel, the best cat that ever was

Bad: Adel had to have his lungs drained today. Worse: The vet is 99% certain he has wet FIP. Worst: It is a fatal prognosis. There are two versions of FIP, a wet version and a dry. They are testing the fluid to confirm the diagnosis. The former, which they think he has, kills in under a month once it's activated. If it is the correct verdict, then our lovely kitten was born genetically predisposed towards having a common cat germ twist inside him, like HIV into AIDS. In most cats, it's nothing, completely harmless, but in 1 in 5000 cats, it's deadly. And it seems he and his white furred brother might be on the unlucky side of that equation. We can't help but hope for a misdiagnoses, but it seems unlikely, and it's probable that their brother Schprot has it, too, as he has come down with some similar symptoms. (The tabby siblings should be fine, as we suspect a different father). TLDR: Our hearts are crushed. Time with Adel is very limited and our greatest priority. If you want to come love on him, the time is now.

A post shared by Jhayne Faust (@foxtongue) on

Our perfect cat, Adel, is dying. He’s only five months old. The thing that is killing him is beyond our power to cure; an immuno-disease called Feline Infectious Peritonitis (or FIP for short) that will slowly crush his lungs with 40cc of fluid in his ribcage a day until he can no longer breathe. In order to save him from this slow, painful, panicky end, we will have to have him put down.

I have never experienced this type of wrenching pain. He curls up with us in the nest of pillows we’ve created on the living room floor, purring madly, happy that we’re with him, happy that we’re together. He traps my hand against his belly with his paws and I leave it there for two hours without daring to move. He wraps his tail around my ankle like a monkey’s prehensile tail and I choke back a sob. Alexandre is not faring better. We are both working from home this week and constantly breaking down into tears. It is all so, so hard. Our little cat transformed us from a couple into a family, the three of us a unit of proof against the world’s pains.

I want so much from this little cat. I want to wake up with him on my face, doing happy back flips against it, while I want to sleep a half hour longer. I want the games of fetch every morning to continue, his joy at chasing the ball contagious, making every day better as he returned it for me to throw again. I want to see how big he would be as an adult, how long and sleek his body, how improbable the length of him against me, remembering how he used to fit in the palm of a single hand. I want to take him on road-trips and offer him strange food that he will refuse and walk him through new cities in the crook of my arm, his favourite place in all the world. I want impossible things. I want him to get better. I want a future that I’ve never had and now never will.

something new to learn on piano [bravery takes many shapes]


the bird and the bee – polite dance song, directed by Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric.

[…] Since I’m asking so nice
Would you just entertain
There’s nothing left to hide you away
Just show a little bit of brain

Yes that is what I mean
That’s the nail that I hit
I try to be as coy as I can
But I wanna see your naughty bit […]

-::-

We fall asleep facing our laptops; two beds, eight hours away. I have practice at this, at living far away, at being untouchable, unreachable, lonely yet loved.

The first person I had such a thing with lives here in England. He’s the reason I have the eight hour time difference from Vancouver to London permanently memorized. Our correspondence set the foundation for this place. Years of it, years of talking late at night, of mornings together, of chats and distance. There are hundreds of letters from him in my folders. Hundreds of pictures. He kept me writing, coaxed me into taking pictures. In many ways, he changed me from writing to being a writer, kicked it off, back when this journal was almost new. Back when I believed people who said nice things to me.

I was only a few years older when he hurt me, sliced his way through my center, sliced until I bled, and worse, then put me in a book full of sex that opened yet another crooked little vein. (This starts the part that’s never been public). Perhaps it was meant as a surprise? A surprise like the awful things I found out about him, how he used people; a surprise that sent everything sour.

With the open eyes of an adult, I can see that I was prey, but it took many emotional years, and many, many others to come forward with similar admissions. Women in pain have reached out to me from New York, London, San Francisco, Berlin, Toronto… We’re in so many places! There’s so many of us we might need a name. I collect them, now, his talented discarded. We are a small network, but we’ve started keeping track of the others and making friends. He has excellent taste.

I never asked him why I had a starring role in his first book, our relationship was already critically wounded and we had almost bled out by the time it was published. Was I the first? It seems too unlikely to be true, even though it’s what he said at the time. I’ve also never asked the other woman named in the novel if she had been consulted or what her place in the mess might be. Her name was easier to spot, the public attention must have been massive. (A mutual friend told me that she wasn’t, so I’ve filed her under “One Of Us (potential)” and crossed my fingers that she’s been okay.)

But I have been considering it lately. Now that I’m living just outside London, I’m only an hour’s drive away from his house. Two if I take transit, not even as long as a film. (Closure is such a pretty word. Sound it out! It’s beautiful.) Maybe I should reach out to her, the way the others have reached out to me. Break the silence, try not to fumble, and then, perhaps, ask him for tea.

It has been a long time, but I’ll bet his phone number is the same.

the privilege of being yours

This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.

– David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks, page 192.

I’m scribbling in that book. Marginalia in black ink. The pages are almost as pale as my skin. The words that spit from my pen are tiny, nearly incomprehensible, bumped from the motion of planes, trains, automobiles, streetcars, and an actual boat. They are call-backs, snippets and snatches, and awful jokes. “Like that time in the hotel lobby the tourists thought I was a prostitute.” My lines tilt. The words jog, my long-hand atrophied and atrocious. But this is how we will read the story together. Written time-travel. I only write to share.

We sing together. The words are slightly unfamiliar, so we play the song again, the better to affix it to our tongues. I am better at the lyrics, he is better with the sounds.

Claire takes my arm and we move forward, a cascade of notes and torch song lyrics. She and I have missed the second half of our flight from San Francisco to Vancouver, but it’s going to be alright. We missed it because of true love and chocolate and it will make a good story. We will be fine, we still have care on the line. Hers is driving down to Seattle to get us, mine is sharing music on-line and going to pick us up from a train station and offer us shelter. Their arms and our mouths. Their grace and our soft thanks. We are so grateful for how rich our lives have suddenly become. I am so grateful I cry.

My life has never been as rich as this. I have never traveled as much as I have this year. I have never felt so cherished or so rewarded. I have climbed ruins. I have walked into a warm sea. I have been to the tops of mountains and pulled with two hands from the depths of despair. He said, “come”, and he fetched me, for I was fetching, and I felt loved and I was loved and I loved him and I love him still and his eyes haunt me the way the clouds came over Chicago, the way good art can make me ache, the way it was glorious to be a passenger as my ex-boyfriend screamed us across the ridges of L.A. at twice the speed limit in the middle of the day.

“I love you,” I said. “I admire you and I like you and I appreciate you, too. All of these things are separate and each needs to be said.”

(The sunset is also beautiful, the moon also outstanding, but those are apparent and do not need to be mentioned.)

He is so pretty to my eyes that it seems absurd. I trace his face with my fingertips like I am a cartographer trying to memorize his topography with my nervous system, embed him like a program I can replay at will. The line of his side to his hip while he stands in a kitchen, his back to me, his smooth muscles sliding under clothes that I would remove. I want to taste him, I want to keep his skin on my tongue, I want to know the texture of every whorl of his fingers in my lonely mouth. I want to feel him shudder, I want him to take my face in his hands as if I were porcelain and kiss me so softly I might shatter. I want, I want, I want.

How he looks at me. I am greedy. I cannot get enough.

The annotations I am writing are mostly sweet and/or silly, but each tiny desecration is founded on affection. Even when the writing borders on the divine and all I can do is leave a mark next to a line in quiet, pure appreciation. When all I can do is put a tick next to a particular note. “Look at this, this is what I would read out loud to you, were we in bed together, were we in the same place and had enough time for books.” A lot of things are underlined.

It is autumn. I feel the dried leaves of the photos I am sent. I hear the crackling swish of what it used to be like to walk through such things, the sharp scent of winter under the softer air. There is a blurred shoe in the picture, blue jeans, and it is exactly right. It is what I need.

The ceiling over his bed is decorated with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that I bought from a dollar store. I spun a story of partners and physics, the harmony of two lovers who came together in such fine frequency that their flesh reorganized, and placed stars on the ceiling. “And this is my hand and this is your hand and my:body and your:body became our:body and the atoms danced together in forever:true. It is like they are dreaming. It is like they are the same. No longer a man and a woman, but the same.” Sometimes he takes other people to his bed, and I hurt when he does, but the sweet, artificial sky above it remains mine anyway.

I fall asleep with the book under my pillow and I wake up sobbing like my heart has been torn out so hard it has taken my voice, like I am a child who has just discovered death. I had dreamed about when my white cat died and I clawed her body out from the grave my mother put her in. How dark the dirt was on her fur and guts. I want teleportation. I want time-travel. That feeling of want, that quivering feeling of fury, large enough that by all rights it should have warped the world.

He has attached a linen tarpaulin over his truck, to better offer privacy to the make-shift bed I requested that he make in the back. It’s a two-hour layover, long enough for us to curl up together and bathe our hearts in each other’s regard. It has been over a month we have been apart and sometimes it has been hard. Our hearts are wet and warm and slippery. We talk softly and he tells me what he has learned in my absence. Last time the new word was “love”. This time the lesson is commitment. I ask him if he wants to make us all official-like. He says yes and asks what the fine print on the back of the boyfriend card entails. I will have to get back to him. I cannot yet read the writing on that wall, but even though he has hurt me before, I am sure he will do fine.

We sing together. American music. Bruce Springsteen, half of an album I have never heard through. It is like being wrapped in a blanket of safety, a black blanket pulled from the trunk of his car on a date we had once in Seattle, half our history ago, the city spread out sparkling in front of us, the expression on his face in the shop when I insisted he help pick out our foolish ice-cream. His ultra-organized “Have you even met me?” at odds with “All of this is new.” He is an artifact of his culture, parallel yet almost completely foreign to mine; of guns, bullets, and punk rock. It used to be that I did not want to care for him. Now we are apart, I would go blind for him. Now we apart, I am furious.

I stand with my bare feet on warm, dark earth. The water is a blue I have never seen in person, so clear it fractures light into rainbows as it moves. The stars at night shine brighter than our own sun. I hold a plastic mask in one hand and the straps to a jangling, industrial body-harness in the other. I am an angel of change. Somewhere close, a mountain discreetly explodes. I take pictures no one may ever see. The flowers that sprout from my skin are tropical, my heart is a greenhouse. I am actively looking for more laws to break. And the drums keep beating. They have been beating for months. The drums are huge, the light-show spectacular, and his body is pressed against mine in the crowd. We are hiding in plain sight. I do not have even a skerrick of doubt left. I am a valkyrie. I moan with relief, as he does. My forgiveness is larger than the sky.

I am so grateful. I am so grateful, again, that I cry.

a collection theory of unlinear operators

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

– Marty McConnell

  • Leatherdo – a stainless steel multitool hair clip designed by Yaacov Goldberg.
  • Beautiful Beast – a golden spider broach worn as a temporary piercing.

    I’m flying out again on Saturday. This time to Vegas for a week of security conferences: BlackHat, B-Sides, and DefCon. I’m only official for one, but another is free and the third I shall attempt to sneak into, because I probably can and it’ll be fun. Also, what else is there for the poor to do in Vegas?

    My time “home” in Vancouver has been busy, but mostly without anchor. I domesticate well and gladly, but my attachments are to people, not places. My days, instead, have been spent on phone calls with New York and messages on-line with Michigan, Washington, Ontario, and Oklahoma. Nothing that digs me in where I am. I have spent the majority of this summer away, living basic out of a suitcase, and confirmed that not only do I enjoy/prefer it, the only things I miss are my ferrets and (sometimes) Seattle. So the crusade to pare my apartment down continues. The desire for rococo minimalism continues. Soon my life will be nothing more than a pair of ferrets, some media and data devices, a spot of taxidermy, some art, a few weapons, and an elegant wardrobe of motorcycle and combat gear, Victorian lace, and kevlar flounces.

    A more telling list may not actually exist.

    Which reminds me, as soon as I get an influx of cash, I have projects to work on again. I’ve been window shopping for a used motorcycle, drive shaft, no spokes, a machine with muscle unlikely to break down, but first is safety. Sewing with leather, something light-up with spinal protective armor, and a jacket to resurface. LED’s, el-wire, arduino VS raspberry pi. Ideas nipping at my heels like starved little purse chihuahuas shaking in the harsh reality of my financial winter. Ideas that had long been erased. My resources are shifting, bruised heart on my sleeve, capabilities ratcheting back into gear, the coastal combinations of care like cards on a table. There are no aces hidden next to my wrist, but perhaps I’ll embroider one in. I have a deep love for those tiny, clever touches.

    Meanwhile I find myself unable to spend more than three nights in a row in my own bed. Crashing over at Nathan’s, crashing over at Nicholas and Esme’s; laundry, dinner, a long run of Orphan Black. Different reasons, but the same underlying dis-attachment to my where I keep my things. To further push this, I am attempting to sublet my room for the month of August. I should have done it sooner, for June and July, given how little I was there, but starting now will have to do. I don’t know the map past August 12th, but even if I do not find my way to the desert, I will make do. I am inhabiting my language, embracing my internal architecture all the way to the edges of my vision and I have the keys to five other houses on my key-chain. I will be okay.

    It is an awful place, but I am beginning to look forward to Vegas. The teal sky stretched like silk over the blind roads and senseless cacophony, the inevitable black t-shirts with witty taglines and open bars buzzing with abuse. It is not going to be at all like my last time there or the time before that or the time before that. Each visit before has been fraught with conflict, stress a thin note running through every decision. This time I will not be alone, isolated or rejected. I will not have been sent for to stand as a peace-maker to sordid drama, I will not have been brought along as a sop, I will not be going as a dismantled half. No matter how this week unfurls, (and it does have some very interesting possibilities), none of the previous scenarios will have a chance to duplicate. There will be a tribe this time, there will be people I care for who care for me. (My best medicine). New people, new skills. This trip will be unique and for that I am grateful. The city will not poison me. Though the Vegas strip is a manipulative construct, a gigantic shrine dedicated to the worst of the states, the people I will be walking with share my inherent refusal to genuflect.

    • That which the inferno does not consume, it forges.

    “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” ~ Maya Angelou

    “What are you doing, can I help?” I murmured, softly pulled from sleep by the man who was quietly getting ready to leave for work. It was the day before my birthday. He had been very careful, but the sound of a suitcase zipper had been enough to wake me. He chuckled and sat down on the hotel bed beside me, his weight creating a curve in the mattress that pulled my body to his. I gratefully curled against his broad torso like a cat to warmth in the winter. “You sweet girl,” he said, “how delicious of you. I can think of a way.” He reached out and stroked my hair, then leaned down and tilted my face to meet his. I was sleepy and soft. His hand was gentle on my face, as were his lips on mine. It was perfect.

    (Writing this is difficult.)

    Another hotel, another man, someone I used to love. We unexpectedly tumbled into each other years after we had last been close, a surprise coda to an awful time, and after I remarked on how strange a beast memory can be. “This.” I said, pressing my hand against his shoulder for emphasis. “I remembered exactly how your hands fit with mine, the geometry of your fingers, but this, how the length of my arm is precisely the width of your shoulders when you cradle in my grasp, this I had forgotten. I still know you while I do not. It surprises me.” He smiled wryly, “You’re not writing about us in your head again, are you? Writers. Incorrigible.” But I hadn’t been. I had lost the knack when I lost my heart. Yet now I am, months and months later. My time since has opened the gate.

    (Writing that was easier.)

    Neither of these men are people I could claim as mine, but they were, just as I was theirs. How near we all are to disaster at all times. I’m starting to type this from a plane, finding comfort in the turbulence that is distressing the other passengers. To such tolerances airplanes are made! With such cleverness and scientific understanding! The wings flex even as the snout pushes forward through the air unconcerned, the shaking accounted for, the math figured. This is not how airline disasters are made. Each engineered piece interlocks to create a miraculous whole. The more we jostle, the safer I feel.

    If only it were so in relationships.

    My heart, lightly returning to me, feels haunted. I shuffle through our time together, examining every interaction and conversation like tarot cards for clues. I find nothing. He was honest in every particular, but one. His family.

    -::-

    I met him on the dance-floor at a conference, completely unexpected. (The odds are good there, but the goods odd.) I wasn’t certain our first few dates. I was hesitant to kiss him goodbye, hesitant to start something long-distance again, yet we found magic writing together on-line. He was well read, political, and his sharp wit inspired me. He was smart, funny, and harassed me without mercy. Eventually I point-blank asked what the catch was, “How is it that you’re single?” He explained that he travels too much for work, the same problem that plagues plenty of my more interesting friends. I felt encouraged, cared for, and delighted, enough that I shelved my long-distance relationship concerns and replied, “I can live with that.” “I hoped so.” It was two in the morning. He got us a hotel room. We had a pillow fight. It was on.

    We were meant to have another night together for my birthday, I was going to ditch Vancouver to travel down to see him, but he had to cancel. Work scheduled him away that week. This was not unexpected, this was part of the engagement, so I told him I understood and expressed the appropriate California-envy. Fourty-eight hours later, he proposed flying me down with some of his endless air-miles. If I could find somewhere to stay after he head home to Seattle, he told me, I could stay as long as I like.

    I stumbled, but I recovered. Gladly, gratefully. And blind. I didn’t know where we were staying or when I was flying out. I knew nothing. Eventually it was puzzled that my flight left on a Tuesday, but I didn’t have an itinerary until 4:30 Monday morning. And that was fine. It’s was trust exercise. It was fun. I was happy.

    He picked me up at the airport, checked us into a hotel in San Jose, and kissed me like I had been missing for years. Once his work-trip was done, we moved into my ex’s flat in the Castro in San Francisco.

    I was smitten. I hesitate to speak for him, but he seemed equally so. He met my friends, we went on little exploratory ventures, he sang flawless, soul-shattering, classically trained opera in the shower. Everything was all splendid. He was incredible. We, together, were marvelous. We get on so well it was improbable. He was generous, kind, and effortlessly carried me up a tall flight of stairs when my ankle gave out like I was stuffed full of feathers instead of chagrin and admiration. I felt blessed and adored and adored him in turn. We didn’t sleep at night. He smiled all the time. I blossomed.

    -::-

    My urge to write about us is basic. I can’t not. He’s not mine, but he was. And he risked his entire personal life to be. It is sad and tragic and hurts, yet I respect how much that’s worth. I want to write about everything. Honor his indisputably stupid sacrifice by capturing every moment of our time together in amber, sweetly displayed in this glass screened case as an exhibit of That Time. “This is what he risked his world for. It was not small, nor tawdry.” We felt lucky, we found joy, what we made together was satisfying and darling. Was it worth it? It’s not for me to say, but I would guess no, not for him.

    He didn’t betray me, but himself. The tragedy isn’t mine, but his and theirs.

    -::-

    He left after a week, singing so loudly out the window of the rental car that I could hear him from a block away. Even as he left, he made sure I was alright. Then I moved in with Heather for a bonus week full of good people and happenings. It was an enriching time. There were long walks through new places, a cocktail party, a rooftop BBQ, a rave in an abandoned train station, time with new friends and with people I already love. Then I flew back to Seattle for more fun and good people. I went dancing, I made new connections, I had a tai chi lesson on a roof downtown in the sunshine. Life was good. My sweetheart was in Colorado for work, but I was looking forward to seeing him the next time I could.

    Then I went for lunch with a friend who I met through the same conference, though years ago. New information. To say I was suddenly having a bad day is an understatement. We were hopeful, there was a lot of benefit of the doubt, but then the phone numbers matched. The phone number of my sweetheart and “my friend of ten years whose wife is…” Oh. Pregnant. Not with their first child.

    Our relationship was obviously not a thought out decision. Aside from the deletion of his family and claiming to be single, he didn’t hide a thing. Everything else he told me checked out.

    -::-

    I was in Vancouver less than 48 hours once I came back from Seattle. Time enough to put my passport in for renewal, basically, then repack and head to an airport to sleep, so I could head back east to visit Toronto and Montreal for Recon.

    My plans shivered a bit once I was out there, and I ended up spending more time than expected in Waterloo with one of my best friends, Ian, his charming wife, and two lively children. We all spent one warm night in his back yard, their daughter cuddled against my body, our feet in the pool while Ian dove and twisted like an otter through the water. We lay on our backs and watched the sky. I pointed out the International Space Station as it drifted overhead. Their daughter sighed and lay her head on my shoulder, asked about the stars as I explained constellations. His wife’s laughter was just beautiful as the heavens.

    Is this what my lover had balanced me against? This sort of home? This ease and grace and care and trust? I’ve never had anything so honeyed as this small slice of family. No one has ever tried to build so much with me. How divine it seemed! I wondered what my presence could have pumped through his veins. How much did his heart race? There are easier ways to find adrenaline. Lying there, surrounded by their life, I didn’t feel worthy of the sacrifice. I was grateful the darkness meant that no one could see me cry.

    -::-

    I was attacked the morning of my birthday on my way to the Facebook campus for lunch. Pedestrian sexual street harassment that I stood up against until he escalated too far, until I had to run. Eventually I fled along a train from car to car, concerned for my physical safety, desperately searching for a conductor while a stranger stalked after me shouting awful things, “Cunt, whore, I’m going to break you.”

    He was thrown off the train, but it rattled my entire day, threw me off my stride.

    My lover salvaged even that. He arrived too late to join the hot-tub evening, I was being kicked out for the night when he came to the gate, but he was late because he’d brought a surprise. We sat at an iron table outside my friend’s apartment, (an anonymous place in a terrible suburb of anonymous buildings and fussy street security), while he produced a tub of ice-cream from a bag, then a package of candles that spelled H-A-P-P-Y B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y, and a birthday card and a lighter.

    No one sang and I forgot to make a wish, but I felt more cared for in that gesture of grace than I had in a very long time. It was darling and sweet. “I understand it’s late,” he said with some satisfaction, “but we had to celebrate!”

    My distress fell away. I may have been attacked, but I was in California, swathed in adventure, and this man had sent for me, flown me down for a romantic birthday get-away, to be embraced in his care. This man, this thoughtful, considerate, and brilliant man, he liked me back. The world was unexpected, but finally benevolent. It was the best birthday I’ve ever had.

    -::-

    (Have mercy on me, even knowing the truth, I do miss him.)

    -::-

    Everyone else who knows is furious, but I have a lot of hope for him. For his relationship, for his family. (He’s a good communicator. I don’t know anything about her as a person, past her name, but if they’re together, I expect she must be excellent as well.) It’s going to hurt, it’s going to be hard. As it should be. I am sorry that his choices led him to test his home in this fashion, but I don’t hate him, I’m not angry, and I’m not bitter. I feel for him, even. How afraid and sad he must be.

    I’m down a relationship that was gracious, compassionate, and loving, and a friend, but it was a new thing. I’m just abruptly single again. New things fail all the time. He may have lost something much greater.

    So that’s that. I am disappointed, but mostly I am sorry for his partner. I’ve been somewhat in her position, though certainly never to such an extreme. I wonder what will happen. If it has happened before. If this will be the end of either his affair(s?) or their relationship.

    I wonder and I wait and I know, soon, we will again say hello. It took a few weeks, but he finally reached out and replied to one of my messages while I was in Toronto. I’m leaving for Seattle today for ToorCamp. He has asked to meet up to talk as soon as our schedules can allow. I gratefully said yes. He is cancelling travel in order to make it right away. We should be in the same place at the same time next week.

    I can barely wait to find out what he has to say.

    written the week before the water fountain

    “We mistake sex for romance. Guys are taught that pushing a girl up against a wall is romance. Sex is easy; you can do it with anyone, yourself, with batteries. Romance is when someone you like walks into a room and they take your breath away. Romance is when two people are dancing and they fit together perfectly. Romance is when two people are walking next to each other and all of a sudden they find themselves holding hands, and they don’t know how that happened.”

    ― John C. Moffi

    There are different kinds of happiness, different breeds of comfort. I have always understood that. But while most are thin and pale, nearly unsatisfying, some rare types pull light from the sky. They bite the sun like a warm fruit. You and I, we could one day be the latter, we have a chance at that, to blaze and remake everything we’ve ever wanted better or unbroken.

    Why build a narrative while we’re still moonlight? Because underneath, fire, the reflected light of what we both know we could eventually build. We could be something I had forgotten, though I’ve seen it in others, an alloy neither of us have found before but both instinctively understand is stronger than anything we’ve ever known.

    I think of you often, conjuring you accidentally in small gestures, like the desire to send you links I know you would appreciate, and sometimes I dream of you, too. Pretty dreams of small things. We explore a burned out house together. There’s a mirror at the top of the stairs and you touch your finger to where my nose is reflected. Our eyes meet in amusement during a conversation with someone else. You toss your hair. We ride to cities neither one of us have been to. I mock complain about my leather pants and you tease me about my ass. I find the letter you wrote for me and hid in the Portland hotel.

    I wake feeling like you miss me and wonder if you’ll call before I’m conscious enough to know you won’t.

    The word root of passion is suffering. I wish it were a lesson we have not learned so well.

    Occasionally I am furious at the people who hurt you. Occasionally I am furious at myself for not being able to be as shockingly transparent to you as you can be to me.

    Mostly I just miss you.

    Your smile, your sweet unbearable smile, and that two tequila promise we didn’t cash in. The way you tilted your head when you wanted to be seen, when you wanted to be called on your adorable mischief, secretly desperate to be caught. The way you shied away from seriousness, even as you threw yourself towards my kiss, even as you knew that you were making a small pledge every time you met my lips, I can be trusted, to match mine, this will be good. Smoke, mirrors, and then you at the center, ethics and anarchy and complicated in all the ways I love best, waiting, wanting me to find you, hoping and dear. You were such a surprise! Such a pure and wonderful surprise.

    “”I will love you forever”; swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. “I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday” – Is that still as easy?”

    – W.H. Auden

    The beach was chilly, the stars unexpectedly sharp, the water quiet. We walked through the sand, the wind and night, sweeping it all in with a certain hesitant delight, and I was the witch Cassandra prophecying fear. We agreed that we would need patience with the same. That the hardest part would be holding onto that glimmering future flame, trusting that our fears would pass and we would be better for it. That we could do more than survive, but thrive as well, as long as we held fast and remembered that we would be okay.

    Yet the simpler path was to fold. So you took it, the timing the worst it could be, because isn’t that how it always is? I can’t blame you. I believe my life prepared me for this and for you while yours did not prepare you for me. I know what your fear must be like. Feeling vulnerable sets off my fight or fight response. My terror is gigantic, a shaft cut through my heart that reaches to the center of the earth. All I can do is shake, hating it and myself for having it. You’ve seen it, the hyper-vigilance, my pupils pinpricks, how overwhelming and physical it is. (You are, in fact, the only one who has.) But not only can I weather such things, I understand that the only cure is more of the same – in vivo exposure therapy, trauma erased through positive reinforcement with care on either side. Hardship forces growth, but support fosters the blossom.

    As I soaked in the the coruscating landscape of San Francisco from the top of Grizzly Ridge during one of the last days of twenty:thirteen, someone set off illegal fireworks from the side of the hill near where I sat with my friend. I thought of you and the ones you were planning and I flooded with appreciation for absolutely everything. The warmth within me was new and I knew it was yours, a gift you had incidently given me. The crackling, criminal explosions became my strength, both a reality and a metaphor, a person and a place, and I held onto your memory then and I laid it over top of my pain. I catalogued my flaws, I examined yours. Even with that dreadful math, for the first time in a very long time, the good outweighed the bad. And I knew, somehow, no matter how terrified we might become, no matter how many times we would plunge into fear and have to wait, have to heal from what came before, we would eventually be fine.

    Even now, months since you ran, pulling behind you a cloak of everything you never wanted to be plus some, I still believe that to be true. You hurt me. Spectacularly. I can’t deny that. But that’s short term. Days are long, but years are short.

    I remember the glimmer, I still acknowledge the flame.

    So you. Writer, anarchist, lover of art, programmer to the people, equal, dreamer, every-man, king. You are still welcome in the shelter of my heart. And I want you to know you can always come back.

    The door is always open, I will always be your friend.

    Living the Social Event Horizon.

    Before I offer the rather wildly satisfying anecdote that I want to write about, I need this caveat: there’s a persistent rumour-myth that claims “Jhayne knows everybody” that is patently untrue. There are thousands upon thousands of dazzling people I have never met and will never and, though I find this sad in the same abstract way that birthdays are, that’s just the way it is.

    My relationship to this rumour is complicated, as it affects my identity, community, and influence, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. While I appreciate that it allows me to play with social capital in a way that not everyone does, it also flies in the face of my self interest, beating black wings of denial that chase opportunities away. (“Oh, I’m sure she already knows that fascinating person. Spoiler: No, I don’t! But you’re right, I should. Introduce us!). I treat it much like fire, warm and attractive, but requiring a respectful distance. There’s a lot of layers there. Reality – only a vague relative to myth. So it endures, even as I persist in my role as a philosopher-assassin, refuting it to death. And honestly, it persists like most myths because, underneath the hyperblown twaddle, it contains a seditionist seed of truth.

    There, now that my denial is out of the way, I’m going to blast it completely with indisputable evidence to the contrary. Probably with a sound like “quash.”

    (It’s a terrible thing to share after I’ve just spent a paragraph tearing down the splashy premise this anecdote supports, namely that no one is out of reach of my network, but too bad, I’m new back to this writing thing and I’m going to be a dreadful player until my vibrato returns. There are going to be far too many commas, oblique and post-modern applications to punctuation, unruly mazes of brackets, harrowing mixed tenses everywhere, and wandering, unhelpful, and contradictory mixed metaphors. And you, dear reader, and future me, will just have to suck it up, because this little tangle of connections is just too baroque and delightful not to share.)

    So! Livejournal. Bringing it back. Way back. Eight years, maybe. Possibly nine. Somehow I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a scathingly clever Jewish woman who lived (and lives) in Wisconsin. I don’t remember how I found her, probably Warren, same as everyone else, but I fell in friend-love with her immediately. Here in the present, we’re still friends. We didn’t meet until 2012, but our connection was enough for her to hand-pick me to attend her intimate wedding anniversary party in Madison last year and it was enough for me to put my life aside to better scrimp so I could attend. I probably would have stolen a car to go if the plane thing hadn’t worked out, actually. Stolen a car because it would have been less work than hijacking a bus. This is a lady I’ll hide some bodies for, is what I’m saying. For her or her beautiful husband or their beautiful child because that is how I roll.

    She and I, we chat sometimes. We discuss disabilities, recovery, life, bravery, creativity, where to get good chocolate, all the usual things. And boys. Oh my, have we ever. She has hers all nailed shut, she’s set for life, but my history? We once sat in a chinese restaurant in Minneapolis and looked at my shoddy relationships and threw our hands up and despaired for at least an hour. Deservingly so. More recently, though, we’ve been talking about family. Bailing my brother out of jail, my dying parental figure, the trials and tribulations attached to both. (I don’t have many local people to discuss topics thickly smeared with emotion). Except our last conversation, which took an even more unexpected turn than usual. I think I had maybe been catching her up on the latest episode of The Lame MisAdventures of My Autistic Brother when I dropped an unusual name into the mix. (We will, for the time being, name him M, which is the most transparent sort of obfuscation possible. Sometimes I’m not entirely sure why I bother. See: paragraph 4.)

    “M!” she exclaimed, “His name is M? Where do I know that name?” I am completely taken aback. That was a lot of excitement. Yes, I replied, jotting in a few background notes. He’s in Seattle; I met him though the people I camped with at Burning Man; we’re in the midst of a surprising flirtationship. She shook her head, dark hair flying everywhere, trying to remember. “There was some drama there, oh hell, what was it? I know that name, I know who that is! This is going to drive me crazy.” My curiosity blazed. There was no feasible way it was the same person. None. But the name!

    I stopped what I was doing, nearly holding my breath, fluttering panic hanging in balance with mad delight, waiting in paused dread for the revelation that would either justify or cause everything we had been building to tumble and fall. (Running through me like dark water, in which way had I been gullible this time?) I felt weakened the way rust melts iron. How could these two people, from such wildly different backgrounds, wildly different everything, be connected? I love the impossible, but drama is hardly ever a positive word. They would get along, but how would they have met? I couldn’t think of a way. And she was right there with me, overcome by the absurdity of this strange potential connection.

    A few frantic minutes later, it surfaced. I laughed in incredible relief. When I had first met her on-line, years before I ever went to Burning Man or started visiting Seattle, her best friend was S, a woman from New York. S was smart and sassy and fun and completely in love with a boy.

    A boy named M.

    Two degrees apart, a decade away.

    Isn’t the world splendid?

    I love it.

    Devorah

    There’s something about the smell of the place that clings to my skin. Perhaps it’s a disinfectant or the lotion she rubs on her skin. Possibly a mix of them both. Either way, it has become the scent of her dying and it won’t let me sleep. As soon as I am home, I step into the shower to rinse it off, knowing that I am sluicing her touch from my body as well and uncertain if it should feel like a betrayal.

    Her name isn’t one I mention here. We’re unrelated by DNA. Until recently, for almost a decade, I only saw her on Jewish holidays. The entire story is more complicated, a byzantine web of different familial relationships, but the truth remains, and it all boils down to this one simple fact: My mother is dying.

    She has severe young onset Parkinson’s and she is not going to improve. She is not going to rally. She is not going to be saved by a miracle, a drug, or by therapy. It is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system that currently does not have a known cause or cure and kills her brain cells in certain types of pathways, destroying her body from the inside. Her symptoms are typical and so is the progress of the disease. The medication they have her on at the care home help, but they are gradually becoming ineffective. Other than her body failing, her symptoms include memory loss, inability to focus or stay present, mild paranoia, depression, and slight dementia. There is no recovery. Nothing about this will get better. It will not “be okay”. Her failure is inevitable.

    I try to visit at least once a week. I try to always bring some kind of treat. (Otherwise, the chances are high that she might not eat that day). I bring flowers and movies on a memory stick. I bring printed out pictures of her loved ones that I tape to the wall where she can see them from her bed. I offer her my service in any way I can. I joke that she has won a life-time supply of chocolate, now that the end of her life is close enough that I can finally afford to guarantee such a magnificent promise.

    We lie in her bed together and she snuggles up to my body the way I used to press into hers when I was five. Her body has wasted away so much that she barely has any substance at all, so there are no problems fitting both of us in her hospital style bed. She is so fragile, it is hard to believe. I could probably carry her a mile in my arms. Instead I support her shaking limbs and brush shea butter onto her skin with my fingers and try not to count her vertebrae. I love her so, so much.

    She has other daughters, but I am special in that I am a bridge, the physical avatar and “child” of her relationship with my godmother, her best friend of over 30 years. My visits ground her as very little does. And I touch her constantly. I can’t not. Even when I sit on the floor at her feet, we twine ankles, we perpetually hold hands.

    We discuss everything. About when I was a child, about when she was a child, our loves, our relationships, our disasters, but also activism, feminism, poetry, technology, sociology, history, literature, religion, psychology, education, and nanotech. When she is present, she is clear, intelligent, and sharp. Her life has been endlessly inspiring, one of bravery and protests and marches and academia and marathons and that spark still exists sometimes as light in her eyes. The end of her life, she says, is the one adventure she knows she will get right.

    Yet she is one of the only people alive who has known my life. She is one of the very few human beings on the planet that I know actually loves me. And she is about to die. I got the phone-call from the care home today. It is going to be very, very soon.

    There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Visiting her is one of them, even as it breaks me. Even as I cry every time I leave. Even as I still don’t know how to say goodbye.

    to hell with me, just let it burn

    I dreamed this morning that there was someone else in my bed with me. I woke up quietly, slipped to the foot of the bed, brushed my alarm off, and then crept around the room, getting dressed as silently as possible in the still, quiet dark. I dreamed the details of clothing, the smooth sound of carefully opened wooden drawers, the brief blindness of pulling a dress on over my head. I could feel that he was still asleep, though I knew if he was awake he would be watching and I liked that, too. I chose earrings he had made for me and over the knee high socks with a pattern of flowers that I had worn for our last anniversary. I sat at my desk and wrote him a little note to find later, “good luck with the promotion. i love you. x” then I left it by his keys. I knew he would get up later, read the note, smile, then bike to the library to work. I kissed him before I left, nose deep in the crown of his head. I wanted to crawl back in with him, but there was a focused satisfaction in padding around so quietly, getting ready for work and knowing he was still sweetly warm in my sheets.

    When I woke for real, I felt like I had traveled through time and space. Same room, different universe, worse place.

    It was a memory of a time with Jon that never was, a time-line where he didn’t commit suicide.