Spring wind I guess doesn’t reach this side of Heaven

This mountain town in March is still devoid of flowers

Oranges still hang from snow-laden branches

Dreaming bamboo shoots are startled by cold thunder

Honking geese at night make me think of home

Nursing last year’s illness I feel the season’s pulse

Formerly a guest in the garden of Loyang

Why should I care if country plants bloom late

–Ou-Yang Hsiu, “In Reply to Ting Yuan-chen”

Introducing:

I am from a place that always feels the same, like a mother’s hug or flowers on a grave. Every morning is foggy, but it doesn’t deceive me because I know by noon, the fog will burn off, and by 3 there will not be a cloud in the sky so when I crane my neck to find the sky’s center it will feel like I am in a planetarium, or waiting for a wave to break through the still heart of the ocean’s blue. 

In the summer in San Francisco, it gets colder, but if someone has never lived there or didn’t grow up there, they wouldn’t be able to tell. I wear more clips in my hair in summer, some functional and others rare, to fight off the wind from eating away at my uncombed strands. During summer at home I want to lay in parks and feel my back sweat. I itch to feel the retentive drops slide down my spine and lay there just fine in the half-cut tunnel of my vertebrae. My back only sweats in September and instead of lying in the hard grass on a Holly Park hill at home, I walk under beautiful, crying trees in Minnesota as gravity breaks, or does its job, in the plunge from summer to fall. 

I am enjoying the trees, I am; I enjoy the breeze against my neck when my hair has been combed into a ballerina’s bun and I like that I get to wear sunglasses and unshapely dresses where no one can see my body and I think my laughter hangs longer in the thick Minnesota air but I remember feeling, 1 year ago, that each day you lived in Minnesota and another one began and ended with you sweating in your twin bed, that we were embarking upon a wild, treacherous end. If you had asked me to put my finger on it, I don’t know if the specific circular pattern of my pointer’s pulp could be exact, then again, I’m not sure what it would matter to you now, but I promised you then that I would try.

 You told me that each day when you left that warm, rotten room, your jacket felt thinner, less safe. Now, I will tell you that my hair still gets greasy and the brown dye I have in it fades, the wind still blows my papers away, and my fingernails still break, and sometimes, I even feel blonde again: Shivering and afraid. But each day, when I am in the day, swimming in the present particles, limbs soaking in the splits of the sun and flailing, each one tripping, running, and sometimes shaved, I feel like a tart smile painted on a wall for others to smile back at, face to face. My discontent, looming clouds with shadows for my tree and flower friends, feels like a cardboard cutout of myself, standing shorter than me, further down through a tunnel made of blue granite, or maybe a sediment I have only met in a dream. You were afraid for your future 

self, for me. You thought:

Future me,

Can’t you see?

Shivers of bones creaking mouths wide of teeth shuddering in the cold branches howling at the wind to stop and save them but the wind never stops neither do you and I won’t be able to feel my feet, at least I presume. 

But like I told you then and I am telling you now, I will try. 

Winter Approaching

Winter is approaching, my death feels near.

It is warm here in Minnesota; 

I wear skirts with bows (this was back in a time when you still wore bows) each one hung on your skirt’s 12 sewn panels, drifting in the soft wind. 

I walk along the cement rows

Almost for forever, at least that’s how it feels

Shaded by the canopy of leaves:

Thick, alive, and viridescent;

winter is approaching and my death feels near. 

I had never fallen with fall. In my sophomore year of high school, I visited my sister at Amherst College on the East Coast. I watched the leaves fall slowly from such great heights, painting the pavement with burnt brushstrokes or maybe they were still alive. I’m not a scientist. 

My freshman year fall, I bought more and more jackets to keep my thoughts warm, preparing for winter’s arrival. Sweat stopped dripping down my back the way it did in the falling from summer to autumn, instead, it held me in its clammy moist palm, its fingers and palm facing the bellies of leaves, fingers curled in a shitty cup water could escape from in case I tried to jump out, in case I fell like the leaves from such a great height except I wouldn’t whisper through the air like a feather, I would plummet like a penny dropped from the Empire State Building gaining momentum with each second of my fall.

At one point, fall was beautiful but you stopped being able to enjoy it. Maybe it was when our ex-boyfriend told us he pitied you, or when you had to start wearing tights under your skirts, or when our hot tears lost their incubated heat faster; the only thing left for them to do was fall harder, more often. They held their fight

while you lost yours.

I don’t remember if there was snow on the ground the day I decided I was ready to die. There might have been. In October, the week before Halloween, Minnesota’s skies opened up wide like a hungry, aching mouth and chomped hard until fractures of its clean white teeth fell to 

the floor in a flurry. 

Fell to the floor in a hurry.

I felt heavier, denser, closer to the ground and yet each time the brisk winds swept, I thought I could hear my bones shake within my body bag. And each day, the wind gained momentum I remember you feeling closer to the ground. 

My hair started falling out, even my eyelashes, and yet, there didn’t seem to be anything to wish for. In a study room on the third floor of the library, you called mom. Even today, I can remember your breath hot and gargling, saliva spun from a spider’s ass sewing your mouth shut. You begged like a sinner for her to let you drop out please let me come home you begged,

like a sinner 

afraid of one hot lonely summer. 

She said no, thank god for her harsh words now, that was 5 days after you decided you were ready for us to die. 

For 3 weeks, you stepped out in front of cars driving just a little bit too fast on Grand Avenue, hoping one of them would take them with you through the harsh purgatory of cement. You wished for skull shards to scatter the street, thick warm blood to paint the concrete and your corpse to finally breathe. I think it was the fading of life that you couldn’t stop smelling, breathing, consciously perceiving, all around you. 

No matter how early you stepped down from the height of the sidewalk into the black, icy street, no one would stop you, only stop for you. It made you mad. I remember the silver Carola, a storied streak on its side, paint stripped by an angry witch’s hand, white yellow eyes: this was something you could blame. You thought this is it and stepped just in time and stopped halfway only for the silver Carola to honk–it had places to be–at you to get out of its way. 

That autumn, the slow bleed into winter, you fell in love with the beauty of dying, thinking it was always going to be this way. 

Growing pains

Your camera hung from your wrist and your eyelashes stuck together, caught in a web of frost on your early winter walks. This was after you had accepted our life. I don’t remember exactly what you were thinking then, I just remember your heart feeling heavy in our chest even though our legs felt so weak, like dehydrated twigs about to break. You felt like a distant relative from yourself, feeling like you had to prove who you were to everyone you met, afraid they might get the wrong impression of you from the way your eyes sit in our skull, how short your hair was and the way our voice stains surfaces; you were a skeleton.

Twisting through Tangletown’s tame forest, jelly beans of happy birthday balloons inflated in your chest, you sighed hard and heavy, shoulders melted above your back, each plastic celebration popped with each sigh, tears filled your eyes each time your camera clicked. Only when you were alone did you feel close to yourself. You reached the corner of S Wheeler Street and Princeton Avenue, chest full of popping balloons, heavy of jelly, or was it Cannellini, beans, your kidney splintering, body aching, all you wanted was a release.

Or maybe a sliver of peace

A break from all the blank space

A long, deep breath, 

A silver coin flip, air breathing below it’s twisting belly-

A slap on the wrist. 

Heavy, you turned the corner with a pursed, suppressed mouth. You saw a group of people on the lawn in front of their shingled house. Many kids scattered the scene. Paintbrushes and crayons, sticks, strawberries, balloons: a parent’s open-faced kiss. Walking closer, you could tell it was a birthday party, celebrating 5 years of life. You wondered if you would be alive in 1 year,

 we are

                  , and watching those toddlers laughing and smiling in the golden threads of the brisk autumn sunset, your body finally breathed. The retention broke in your eyes and lips and your nose scrunched like a paper bag and as you walked past those little kids you let out a big, unabridged cry. You felt the parents looking at you with pity as your legs crossed over one another like rusted scissors, the kids didn’t notice you or give a shit, they were savoring the precious conclusion of an age’s end [1 minute, 5 seconds, 12 years,  a grade, 1 half, a millisecond]: the last slice of something connected to no school in summer, something like a tart strawberry staining their mouths for later. It’s rare that a second feels like something that could be categorized as holistic, and even rarer: “life”.

Years I am craving to shave from my arms and legs

Gone, cut, completely clean.

Seconds I want to pluck from my eyebrows

create an arch or concave.

I want a sharp chef’s knife to cut fat tangerined heirloom tomatoes with in the summer

Perfectly in half seeds bleeding from their centers 

Like the clots of blood in my arteries: pulpy and thick like a viscous nectar

I am a hummingbird my beak is long

I taste the hibiscus’s juice

And catch ladybugs on my fingertips 

And raindrops on my tongue in the evening rain 

While the sun is low. And I have to remember that the sun will be high

If only by tomorrow or some time again.

I am continuously moving, succeeding, proceeding, greeting, and leaving

I am not 0 or 1 but somewhere in between here and the consumption of my next poached egg;

Somewhere in between Costa Rica and Big Ben.

Winter

You accepted that you were going to live: no one here was going to kill you. You went on long walks and took many photographs to capture each instant knowing once your Canon clicked, that was it. You became curious and asked questions. You still yearned for the dark during bright hours, something I still do now, and pulled your shades down at 11 in the morning; the ceiling talked back to you then. 

Usually, icicles start dangling from roofs in November, I wonder how much it takes for them to fall. Do they melt or fracture? How does the thorn strike the ground? Is it haunting like a rose? Or ruinous like a spade? In early November, the trees are almost naked. Their skin is bare except for earrings and hair clips and necklaces too; this is when they begin taking their rings off to get ready for bed. When it snows and the stubborn leaves still ornament the trees, winter is beautiful. It is not dominating then, but pleasant, like a guest who will be driving home before dark–early to sleep early to rise, a life like this will cease to surprise, my legs, the steps they take, the sunshine and the morning mist, the warm body lying in the bed next to me, the bunnies and fat squirrels, even the limp flowers starving to be taken from their thrones, feel alive. 

It is when white dominates. Twilight lasts forever and we are not succeeding in a natural succession, no wave will move our wretched body to the shore because winter has come and movement has ceased and the horizon is no longer on a pond or even Lake Minnetonka but the fat, gushing break and pull, arched back of The Pacific Ocean; Of course you couldn’t see Hawai’i. 

Whenever your room felt smaller than usual and the ceiling stared at you silently, you packed your jean bag, your beats, and your camera and decided to walk until you could no more. You always started at your favorite house on Amherst Street. Every season of every year, I have taken a photo of that house to remind me of the beauty that prevails even through change. From there, you took photos of houses you liked and at each one that your bullet escaped, you started to cry. Maybe not a cry, a cry is complete, you just stood there with suspended raindrops for eyes and a rigid, revoltingly brimming mouth. All you wanted was to move forward, stretch your spine, continue, but winter is strong and steady and harsh like a vacuum. Sometimes, there was nothing to do but cover your ears.

Winter is serene because of the way it reigns. It is full and complete like a dry glass, drunk to completion, a plate with no crumbs, a full bite chewed slowly, snow covering the grass till I can’t see the tactile texture, only a smooth dusting of powdered sugar someone left in the freezer for too long. 

Winter is bleached, kept clean, my feet seem to leave traces in places where it is suddenly gray and no longer tranquil and I am sure my footprints are unnerving: particles of me left to be traced in a place unspoiled and pure, but winter is heavy and reeks of death, like a rotten deer on the side of the road. Its debutante looks seduce me, I must not forget that the flurries that cling to each strand of my hair squeeze me and deceive me because it is winter who has brought death to all my flower friends who no longer stand tall, who no longer bask in summer’s sun because the snow and the frigid, rotten breath sweeping through my hair and burning my nostrils has obliged them to lay down and die. To lay down and die. 

Winter is desperate, romantic, and pale. At first glance it is full and brave, like the chest of a mating bird, large and pure, alive to breed and continue its legacy, genes left behind in 3 pronged fan trails. I can’t tell if I love it or hate it, the composure of winter, but I can say that sharp spears of icicles and the fist that strangles the sun earlier and earlier each day feels like a relative, maybe a first cousin, of death. No matter, standing in blizzards wasn’t as scary as when you lived in August, or September, or even in June. 

Ceaseless Goodbye

It was April when you got a text from your father saying your grandfather was dying. He didn’t use those words then, but when I look back now, he was telling you he was dying. You had made it through winter, or so you thought; April is spring in most of America, but not here in Minnesota. Snow still governs the trees and the grass, restricting life, restricting green. Everyone waits in apprehension for the snow that is to be the last, even if at the time of the last fall, they don’t know it. You had accepted our life, no one said we always had to enjoy it. And that was how you decided you would live, how our life would be. 

Our grandfather was one of my dearest friends. We wrote letters to one another every two weeks since my youth, since before I knew how to write or articulate what it was I was feeling; he always knew how deeply I felt even if I wasn’t great at relaying what those feelings were. We rode horses together through the desert, our palettes dry, hearts racing, I couldn’t stop smiling because loping with him made me feel alive. The bridge of his nose scrunched up when he laughed or sneered–he always said he was a lizard or a bear or something very scary and inhuman: something to be feared. 

He loved to joke and tell lies and stick his tongue out and drink iced tea outside when the weather was warm and talk about books and feed birds and plant flowers and cut their stems when they were ready to die and collect turtles and place them on his bookshelf in a jumbled line. I took two turtles from his house when he died. At museum gift shops and junk stores I look for turtles to scatter around my room. I keep them around for moments when I am folding my clothes or cleaning and I see one out of the corner of my eye and I get to think of him, sometimes, I even think of you. 

The day before he died you facetimed him lying in his white hospital bed, his face pale. Held by the hand of your father, you said goodbye. Eyes wet in the dorm lounge, you told him you loved him for the last time. Some things must happen for the very last time. 

Snow White

“My dear, as you may know, I am dying.” He says to me. 

I begin to cry. Again. Again. Again–I told myself I wouldn’t.

“Do you have any profound life knowledge to pass on?” I ask him. I wish I hadn’t said to pass on. It feels so final. I wish I hadn’t acknowledged it. It means he is dying. 

“I have lived a wonderful wonder-full life, my dear. My only wish is that you do, too. It takes hard work, but I have lived a wonderful wonder-full life. Be kind. ” He never speaks so simply. 

“I have, I will: you are an easy person to live a wonderful wonder-full life for.” I tell him. 

Brick after brick. They sit sit sit. Are they going forwards or backward; I can’t tell. One after another sit in a perfectly straight line as they build each wall. They are stained and bleached, but they still hold their burnt color. Each wall builds a building – do buildings build towns? Are towns complete?

There is silence. I look at him lying in the white hospital bed, his perfectly Snow White hair sits as it always does. I am on Facetime, held by the hand of my father. I don’t know if I wish I were there. Perfect? Perfect. Yes, perfect. pərfək(t). perfectus ‘completed’, from the verb perficere, from per- ‘through, completely’ + facere ‘do’. Complete has been perfect. Perfect is complete. 

“Write a novel for me, my dear. About us. You are a wonderful wonder-full writer.”

“I will, for you.” And I will. I will. 

“Are you in a forest?” He asks me. 

“Yes, Grandpa, I am in a forest. There are trees behind me, one after another, after another, after another” I say. I laugh a little, another tear rolls down my moist cheek. I am not in a forest. He is high on morphine. He is dying. 

One tree does not make a forest. How many trees do you need for a forest? What makes it complete? How do you know when it is finished? When it is perfect? When it has been perfect.

“Goodnight dear, I love you. You have given me a wonderful wonder-full life.” He says to me. It is not night. He is dying.

“Goodnight, Grandpa. I love you so much. Don’t let the bed bugs bite. I love you.” I wish I could say it again: ‘I love you’. I wish I hadn’t said don’t let the bedbugs bite. It was a stupid thing to say. I feel like a child. Another wave of tears hits me. Like a keen wind. I can feel my hair being pushed back horizontal on my head. The trees are looking at me. 

My dad pulls the phone away and I am crying. He is crying too. I ask my father if he thinks that is the last time I’ll ever talk to him. He says it very well could be, and it is. My grandfather dies the next morning with each of his sons holding a hand. 

I begin to cry. I am crying. I am grieving the conversations we will never have. The letters he will never receive from me and the letters he will never write. He is, fuck, he was, the name the ball of my pen would write on dirty teeth colored envelopes for years. I don’t like how it sounds in my mouth. Was is a brick that sits hard in my mouth. It’s not very easy to chew on, I fear I may break a tooth. 

What is the difference between touching one out of a complete whole? Doesn’t that mean you have touched the whole? I have been touched; he has left a hole. 

I think of the letters I have saved from him sitting in a desk drawer at home. I have saved every single one. Hundreds of them. Every single one. His loopy cursive and the wisdom each swish and swoop holds. I think of the letters I have written to him, I wonder where he kept them, where they sit now. Feelings, faults, and fantasies I have shared with no one but him. Can he live inside of me? Can I keep him alive inside of me? I will let the bricks sit heavy and full inside of me.

I look out the window and it is snowing in April. Snow white flurries fall to the ground. He is not Snow White: he cannot be awoken with a kiss. I’d like to think they are little pieces? Flakes? Morsels? Slivers? They all sound so incomplete, [I can’t find the right word. Write words, for him] instances of him, falling to the world, to the forests and the buildings built of burnt bricks. 

Eating Spring

The day my grandfather died just happened to be the season’s last snow. Every year It shocks me how quickly the weather gets warm. How little rumination the grass, trees, and roots do, how quickly they forget. I miss him, but every time it snows, I believe instances of him fall in my hair and eyelashes, on branches and buildings, in polluted streets, as he tries his best to make things clean. Like he is kissing the frozen deadly world better, awaking it with a kiss. 

In a few days, many minutes, a sliver of this month, it will be his 1 year anniversary of death. I think of him often. At first, you couldn’t stop crying at the thought of him, but now, when I see turtles and monkeys and photographs and when I talk to my father on the phone, I only cry sometimes. Lately, his presence makes my eyes percolate like a strangled sponge and I know he would have wanted my thoughts to be with the living and I know he would think that I think of him too often but I promised I would keep him alive inside of me.

And this is how we will keep him alive inside of us. 

Like the snow, I am an amalgamation of many instances; I am waves lapping on the shore, ripples blemishing the smooth surface of Lake Harriet by a skipping stone released from calloused fingers, my tongue reaching to lick my chapped lips, and each muscle and organ fighting, falling, climbing each time I breathe. I am the pollen varnishing a bee’s soft coat or stuck in someone’s nose, making them sneeze. So many of us are allergic to pollen and so many people I know fall in love in spring. 

I am the girl who was afraid of winter 2 years ago and I am the girl who cannot wait to experience her first Minnesota summer. I am the girl who will, in a month or so, be sitting in a lawn chair reading the copy of The Blind Own I purchased at Louise Erdrich’s bookstore, while her large, orchid hat shades her cheeks, shoving the sun to fall on our pale, crossed legs. 

Energy fleets, my eyes warp in ways my thick glasses cannot fix, my heart cramps as my stomach bleeds and some days I wish movement would end completely and my pulse would cease. But then I remember that after winter comes spring and even though I love the way my back sweats, autumn has such beautiful eyes, their color always changing, their shape always a surprise. I remember that people are employed to forecast when the rain will stop and that makes me smile because I find such pleasure in dancing in its unpredictable showers. 

Spring is loud and bright and when I realize I have seen the season’s last snowflake fall, my heart turns a cherry blossom shade of pink. Or at least I think. I sometimes have trouble looking inside myself without the sharp blade of a scalpel. No matter, the air smells like fresh cut grass and charming piles of dirty snow linger for many days under the creeping sun and people sit outside for hours, their skin burning, bladders full, mouths projecting laughs that I truly do believe 

hang longer in the dense Minnesota air. 

It is in spring when I think of my home the most. I call my sister and my father and my mother, even though she never picks up, so I can see the sticky crumbs left on my kitchen table and the chairs where my cats lay and the path the sun takes and where its predictable shade falls each day. I watch the sky follow my sister as she walks to The Good Life grocery store and I’m always amazed by how ordinary and plain the shade of blue is, it simply has not changed. I laugh at the things she has to say, my eyes crinkle and my cheeks are full and blushed because I love her so much. I look down at my feet. They are surrounded by orange, red, and purple tulips and I think about how forgiving the Minnesota dirt beneath me is. Reaching, my fingers caress their streaky, soft petals, their floral scent filters through my nose and I sneeze. I tell my sister I love her but I have to go: I have a life to live here. I have change I must endure and death I must feel, but I also have spring I must bask in and all of summer to blossom.