March 13

The vocabularies of rupture, a book open & supplicant upon a table. Harder now to lend my time to abstraction, our time now measurable in mere days. At every instance I wonder at it & appraise it anew, measure it, weigh it, find it enduringly appropriate, however it blackens towards becoming. But listen: this morning in the coffee shop I ran into Samantha, who wore a khaki baseball cap pulled low over her brow to hide her tears, who seemed to wear her body like it was searing her to the touch. Her boyfriend went missing Sunday night & was found Tuesday morning at low tide with his seat-belt on & airbag blown in his inverted car in Deer Harbor, where he skidded off a cliff, rolled repeatedly, & fumbled unconscious into the sea to drown. He was the evening-shift flagger for the ferry, so everyone on the island knew him, if only from behind their windshields. & this morning as I sat, my own sadness the object of my contemplation, she told me that she cannot shake the image of him there in the cold water, the black night above, drowning helpless. Her every sentence trailed off into a kind of sneering disquiet, a silence built of darkly insinuated stutter. How she scolded herself. How she should have handled things differently. They had just, a week ago, moved in together with her nine year old daughter. Unpacked boxes of his things litter her home, boxes that need to be unpacked in order to be packed again, his name scrawled in magic marker over the sides. Can you imagine this scenario? & she tells me as she leaves, maybe this will lend us perspective on what we’re going through. Stef was going to rent her old apartment, & works tonight at the restaurant where Samantha got her a job. I shudder at it.

The point is not at all that my own sadness is somehow diminished by relativity, or less significant or more selfish—it is none of these things. But it is a choice we are making, a willing fissure executed under the auspice of a necessary kind of hope. Sadness is only one aspect of something that weds it to thrill & joy & respect & integrity. We do this for each other, for ourselves, to better our lives & our capacities to love. & so this evening, an hour ago, when the sun faltered & lazed behind the alders on the ridge & the light went soft & the high cumulous clouds began to drop in & Steve came down to tell me he turned off the propane to the barn, my sudden sobbing was in no way diminished. We carry hearts in us, each & all, & they share the same lexicons I think, regardless of context. I can grieve for a stranger. & I can ache for myself. Steve & I talked for a while about my plans, even through moments of welling tears, about where to go & why, what he advises. It felt good, oddly, to ungrip the façade, to see a truth reveal itself without preface or fabrication, glaring & obvious.

Now, a good fire of madrona, since the cedar stock is shot. Waiting for the rain, seeing dim insinuations of starlight behind layers of unlit cloud that hang heavy, a black gauze over the valley. I still can’t quite fathom what’s happening, but at least it’s happening, & what a wonder there is in that. What an extraordinary thing, life, & how beautiful that it sings in us yet. How truly beautiful.