In one of my earliest memories, my mother asks me what I want to be for Halloween and I say a lake, which she mishears as leek, so she starts talking about how leeks accumulate dirt, something I didn’t appreciate until the first time I made potato-leek stew, the grit like tiny beads that had unspooled from a necklace into my mouth.
I had to settle for Little Red Riding Hood, walking willingly into the mouth of every wolf, entangled in the dark woods of my mind, which I always envision as the woods from the Frost poem—the snowy ones, not the ones with a forked road.
The way words evaporate. My therapist saying, of course you’re depressed, leaving the rest of the thought unfinished, floating there.
I had no sufficient words for my friend when he was dying, so I would ask him questions: What’s the best album you’ve listened to recently? and What was your favorite Halloween costume as a child? The neuropathy in his hands made typos inevitable, and deciphering his texts was a challenge that I came to enjoy.
I keep waking up in the middle of a dream where he is still alive. All I can remember is the part where he reads my poem and texts: Thit wad so goog.
An unfinished dream is like two worlds that won’t fasten: a necklace with a broken clasp.
Imagine the process of becoming rain, how terrifying to let go from a cloud, to watch all of your friends splatter as you realize your destination.
I don’t know what to fear anymore, what name to give the flat-faced monster, glassy as a black lake.
When the creature reaches out his hand, will I:
A. help him out, or
B. let him pull me under?
A lake, I told my mother, with water that stays put.
My only writing advice is that one punctured word—death, or grief, or goodbye—will leak its dirty water all over the house.
Teach your darlings how to swim away.
Watch them get smaller until eventually—like everything—they disappear.
