A Year of Less Magical Thinking

I spent yesterday morning listening to my friend Courtney read her own poems in Rattle Magazine’s database. It doesn’t feel very modern to admit that grieving just seems to beget more grieving, but it certainly feels that way to me. The loss, and then the realization of the loss, has been expanding in my life’s sky over the last year the way a star dies. Blooming, in a sense, and then eating its way through my own celestial neighborhood like a rumor, slowly but permanently ending the way things used to be around here. Along the way, I’ve noticed anew how comforting it is to read about characters in books being swallowed whole by grief. If it’s someone else’s life then it’s easier to handle the reality that the importance of our time here is found somewhere within the red-orange, supermassive ache of loss. Fiction, or at least narrative distance, helps mortality feel worth it, like moving a piano into a third floor apartment. Unendingly heavy and obtuse, but imagine the music.

As I listened to her read Poems About Grace, I was struck that maybe this is what it means to live forever now. Your voice locked away in the safety of a business model, and your friends and family confident we will always know where to find you as long as the server farm keeps its lights on. The remnants of your life scattered across the internet like a constellation waiting to be traced. To become something helpful for the rest of us in navigating what remains of our own time here amidst the obstacles of our individual pain. When my friend Christopher’s sister died during high school in a wreck, I listened to “Understanding in a Car Crash” by Thursday with him for months as he drove us from one unwanted local haunt to the next. I kept throwing his cigarettes out the window of his car because I said they were going to kill him, and frankly I’m surprised he never beat the shit out of me for doing it. I think he was too sad to care. I laughed about that memory as I lit one yesterday morning not so much because of the irony but because of the stories we tell ourselves to board up our windows against fear. His sister had just died out of nowhere and I was lecturing him on a mechanism we can use to barter for more time. Fast forward years later, and Logan called me crying to the point of collapse to tell me Courtney was gone and I kept asking her “what do you mean?” Both times trying to form a committee of protective comprehension in an effort to ward off tragedy, and both times failing. This isn’t a tobacco advertisement or a commercial for living on an unnecessary edge, it’s just the truth of the situation. Death and its timing is not a dialogue, no matter how much we devote ourselves to self-care or self-awareness or self-hope.

I don’t have much interest in living in a world without Courtney in it, but I’ve resigned myself finally after a year that I’m going to have to. I’ll go on hoping her ghost or those of the other friends and family I’ve lost along the way turn out just to be them alive again and running through the house covered in a sheet, and I know I’ll always be wrong. But I put the flyer from her funeral on the altar in my office and have been burning Catholic candles to Mary just in case. She loved Mary, and carried the same conflicted faith with her that I do so I guess some part of me felt like an offering might suffice when I still don’t have any words to pray. I suppose I’m becoming provincial and strange in my middle age, but I think Courtney would be proud. She had a way of holding me up to the mirror by the scruff like a cat to introduce me to my own life, and I think she’d laugh at seeing her memorial next to a ceramic toad sitting with a mushroom and a birthday card from my parents. Truly a blend of our attempts at divinity, and maybe terrestrial enough to be true.

I told a friend one time that meeting her felt like someone threw a brick through my living room window, so I wasn’t too surprised when her death left me feeling the same way. She was suffering in undeniable ways, and I’ve spent most of the time since she passed hoping deeply that she’s in a better place. There’s an uncomplicated paradox in grief. A feeling at times like someone is there while knowing they’re not. And as she finished reading Baby Love through my headphones for the 4th or 5th time, I thanked her there in the morning dark for sharing her writing with us, and for her wound of a life. It was harsh and incredible to know her, and I’m grateful so many of us became entangled in the sounds of her strange, beseeching harp.