the book of life

13 Oct, 2026

for adults, probably.

My best childhood friend was the very first love of my life—a type of producer, watching me “hit all my milestones”—milestones no one else was capable of seeing. It’s been like gardening, which is to say, like watching paint dry. But more than that, it’s like one old tree watching another old tree grow up beside it, two saplings with overlapping circles of memory, a shared soil and a shared language.

And over the years—it just happened to fall this way, against odds—I’ve come to think of her dad as one of my remaining father figures, here and alive, and her mom just happens to be my remaining mother figure, here and alive, and in a way they’re maybe a perfect blend of my biological parents and my adoptive ones, a drinkable red, not perfect in the sense that others mean it, but rich with love and curiosity and little quirks and blind spots.

My adoptive mom had always told me that if I ever made a single mistake, if I ever put my foot wrong, I’d be “settling for less than God’s best.” She was obviously trying to keep me to the straight-and-narrow—to her idea of it, that is—“and instead she made me terrified to do anything,” I recently said to my best friend. “But who’s to say what someone else’s ‘best’ is? Weirdly, she also gave me the salve to this, kind of the antidote.”

“Isn’t that always the way,” my best friend laughed.

I nodded. “She told me that to perfect means to mature. The process of maturation. Perfect is a verb. I’m just a grape, trying to be the best grape I can be.” I frowned. “There are many different grapes,” I continued. “Live and let live?”

My friend nodded.

“She learned that on a Walk to Emmaus,” I continued, of my adoptive mom. A Walk to Emmaus is a multi-day religious team-building event little old ladies do. “Oh, my god!” I abruptly exclaimed, of my adoptive mother. “Was she my Paul?”

I thought about it, about Paul’s rules upon rules heaped upon the Corinthians—almost a type of LLM hallucination, inspired speculation turned into definitive doctrine—directly contradicting Jesus’ own admonition, you are keeping people out of Heaven.

I frowned.

“That does make me feel a little bad for Paul,” I groused, not realizing he’d ever become a recipient of some amount of my himpathy.

I was about to retreat to sob again—days of crying, and then nights, seemingly without end, where each time I thought I’d stopped it would suddenly bubble up a new way—so I went to her mother to excuse myself before running out of the room. “Thank you,” I said to this mother figure quietly, while no one else was listening, “for letting me stay here, letting me cry here. I don’t know what would’ve happened to me if I’d been—” and I trailed off.

Crying?! her face mouthed, her face contorted with something like anger. Why are you crying?

“Oh, it’s not,” I said—worry isn’t good for her—but her curiosity was becoming concern, was even fury. She was getting ready to launch into battle, if I’d just tell her what to change or who to kill. Oh, no, no, no.

Now I was tying myself into knots trying to placate her. I was still trying to talk her down when her daughter bounded up. “What’s wrong? Mom, why are you upset?” she asked. Suddenly it was extremely funny. I reached toward her daughter’s arm, trying to stop this before it could progress any further.

“She wants to know why I’m crying,” I said, touching her arm lightly.

She groaned. “Mom!” she said. “Stop! She’s crying because of everything! You know, processing it? Releasing it?” Forgiving it, making sense of it, taking accountability, giving my life its most truthful and devastating and harshest edit yet, laughing and crying at the same time, wondering how many times I’ve passed through a mirror and back again, as if from hand to hand, like a preteen going “6, 7.” Hilarious.

“Okay,” her mother’s mouth mouthed at me. I smiled, my eyes already filling up.

“Whoops, gotta go,” I told her, as if leaving to weep were like running to the toilet for anything else¹.

My other closest friends are rich in taste, too, more velvety and with more notes, than the big flat drinkable ‘family’ table wine that most people are born into.

But I have a best friendship—a most aged, most wisened friendship, the rare kind you protect by keeping it in its own special environment. As long as we keep working at it, working not over-hard, we get to sip on it anytime. Granted, our friendship does not go along with every possible dish. That’s the thing about interesting wines. And when I’m very sad, I sometimes stay away from drinking it, and sometimes I collapse and gulp it down for dear life. And sometimes I gulp down something else with a slightly higher poison content, which is what gives it its efficacy and bite—something plain-spoken and reliable and concise—and then always the hangover, the overdoing, the oath of “never again.” Ha! Sure to bring me back down to earth. Every wine is beautiful, as is every whiskey, almost every other thing.

I’m still trying to learn to take smaller sips, to take a bite and actually think about it, to learn to edit myself in the way I was always able to edit others. It’s difficult. I’m not totally sure I can do it alone. I think everything in life might be a type of manuscript you pass back and forth, from hand to hand, revisions upon revisions.

I’d been responding to the group chat about the different kinds of relationships we have. One member of our council had posed a specific question to us, which was: how long do you wait for something to yield fruit, how you know when to call the hour of death—perhaps painfully accepting that one’s own presence, for whatever reason, is the jagged container preventing growth or harvest². And anyway, it’s hard to work while being surveilled by a manager, someone hovering to see if a kettle will ever boil, their supportive presence always appearing, as if inverted by the lens of the eye itself, like suffocating impatience, like control issues, a type of cruelty—to turn the plot over to a different flowering vegetable, to retill the soil, to decide enough, I’ve watched the seasons pass and I’ve been unable to move on, a season for everything. Who can really say why some dynamics work and some don’t. There’s a lid for every pot.

Maybe that doorway will slide past us again someday, open and waiting for its threshold to be noticed, the exit from this stage is right here, point your cursor in this direction, because everything is always inexorably turning.

But waiting for the hands to turn and the hour to strike is a poor use of time, I am told. I struggle with this, with ADHD in general, with making it to appointments without blowing my whole day waiting: sitting frozen, paralyzed, until the clock strikes, always afraid to start on something since it’s very likely I’ll get lost in a project and fail to arrive in time.

So really, I was the exact wrong person to answer this question—it isn’t the type of thing I’d ordinarily step up and try to answer at all—except I do feel a certain obligation to try to counsel, since I’d already promised to officiate. A real pickle.

My best friend, who has all her life watched me hit my milestones—a very slow project, which has required encouragement and understanding and a type of “unicorn faith,” I joked to my group chat now—“is not the same type of life partner as your spouse is. They aren’t the same milestones. It’s just not the same kind of relationship.” So it has operated in its own ponderous timeframe, based on I need a judge, I need a witness, I need coregulation, I need, I need, but I just don’t know how to do it, please be the one who shows me how.

“Although,” I continued to the council now, “she and I do dream of finally getting to just relax on a porch with our lemonades.”

And I repeated this final statement to my best friend later, and she sighed and looked off dreamily, and she whispered I’m tired, and we laughed again—laughing at our mutual dream of long cooling drink.

“We all dream of it,” I assured her, “all the girls.” My group chat dreams of Book Cruise, together, our own private island, just for a half-week of joy before it should sour. “And of course I do want it all someday with someone,” I sighed now, nodding, carefully admitting this one dream—“it all”—because of course I struggle with all-or-nothing thinking, and of course I consciously try to trim down and self-edit and pace, and fail, constantly.

She was thoughtful.

“Hmm,” she said, and she moved away from me, toward the big picture window. “We’ll find you a left-leaning cowboy,” she suddenly said, her face turned toward the setting sun outside, her back toward me, “one who believes in equal rights for women and family values.”

I looked at whatever she was looking at—hard to find, in Flannery’s words—and tried to not start crying again.

I looked away from the outdoors and admired her instead, the very sight of her already searching the landscape and horizon, looking out for me, as always, always shopping around, would you like this or should I put it back, a text message and a photograph, asking me, asking me to try, trying to teach me to start having my own dreams, and my bedroom too crowded because she grabs and buys everything, “just to try, you can always return it,” and I love it all because I love her, but I don’t know how to edit it all down into exactly what I need, exactly what I’m willing to carry. (“I have an embarrassment of blessings now,” I’d told her father the next day, “and now I’ve just got to figure out how to edit them down.” This was before three or four more waves of blessings, now many of them in unsearched trashbags. She said something to me about not worrying about going through it, because right now I need it all, but “my bedroom floor begs to differ,” I muttered.)

A cowboy, huh. But I appreciated her thinking of me. I paused, smiled at her with the light pouring in behind her, letting myself enjoy—just for a second—this bedtime story about myself. She likes to pose different futures to me and remind me I’m always free to choose: the Cheesecake Factory menu. (“It’s where dads love to get to know their sons’ girlfriends,” I always joke, of the endless forever menu, these fathers who like to watch you stare at it in horror and whisper “I need a minute.” And since I’m a serial monogamist, it is many years between trips to the Cheesecake Factory, so the options menu is drastically different from visit to visit—famously, the longest menu in human history.)

She put a tray of cookies into the oven to bake, and then we took our seats at the kitchen counter, since she’d been eager to pore over the Hallmark catalogue—the “Hallmark Dream Book,” it’s called, an overpriced wonderland of schmaltz, capitalizing on memories and nostalgia, do you like it, or do you just recognize it, a question my friend Tim put to me in college once—but perhaps it is also a type of circumnavigation, an activity that bounds and privatizes our space to talk, which is, as ever, an excuse to learn how we both feel about the world. We are constantly collaborating on a shared worldview, which has always been something that is very hard to do, but we ultimately both believe in live and let live and slap each others’ wrists when we’re failing our common childhood mission.

Sometimes it can feel like our worldviews are struggling to meet—and when a worldview is failing you, it’s usually because it’s too small. I typically enjoy minor bickering³, but I often dreadgame myself, too, wondering when I will say the exact thing that finally causes me to be asked to leave.

She gently turned the pages when she could see I was ready to see what comes next, as if turning the pages of sheet music⁴.

“If you’d like to start celebrating Christmas early,” I murmured—having always teased her that her favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, is an American tradition and therefore an artificial hindrance to international Christmas launch season—“we can start right now. I don’t think I really need to celebrate Halloween anymore. Just let me have three creepy Christmas items, please.”

She looked at me in shock.

“Are you being serious right now,” she said.

I nodded. “Yeah,” I sighed.

Halloween is my friend’s least favorite holiday; she can’t bring herself to celebrate it. It used to be because of how we were raised—at her church, they simply did without—but now it is because she does not find cozy comfort in the dark things of the world, or the idea that it is necessary to disguise ourselves as those things as a way of hiding from them while they pass over and around us. And my feelings are much more complicated, but I do understand why she thought my high school werewolf costume was nuts: knowing her best friend was buried somewhere inside there, in full masquerade, under sheets of teased crepe wool and spirit gum and rows of unconvincing fangs.

To me, Yule is just as dark as All Souls’ Eve, or even darker. She would not appreciate knowing this about me; it would make her mind race. So I thought carefully about a different way of saying this to her.

“The truth is,” I finally sighed, “maybe they’ve been blurring together for me for a few years now.” I meant that every year had seemed to move faster and faster, with each autumn and winter melting together—perhaps an effect of global warming. I hesitated. “This isn’t anything to do with Danny Elfman,” I added, suddenly brittle.

“Who’s Danny Elfman?” she said.

“I’m just saying I’m not so much of a Nightmare Before Christmas fan,” I sighed, although I acknowledge I should enjoy it well enough, this idea of the soul’s harrowing before Christmas.

“I’ve never seen it,” she said. “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

I shrugged. “Whatever,” I said. “I’m already Jack Skellington, probably. And while I do love autumn—”

“And I already got you a pumpkin!” she exclaimed, indignant, pointing at the beautiful autumn runner, the pale wicker pumpkin to match, and somewhere, probably already in the dishwasher, a pie dish that matched the tablescape. Her point was that I’m already celebrating Halloween.

I blinked and laughed. “Yes, it’s perfect,” I said. “I’m very happy with this celebration of autumn. Thank you. I feel seen and appreciated. But you saw it—Wal-Mart has all their Mr. Christmas⁵ stuff out anyway, and hardly any Mr. Halloween, and the only Halloween stuff I liked was Mr. Halloween, and their creepy-Christmas blow-molds.”

We laughed. There had been a couple giant lawn-scale black-and-orange light-up candles lined up, like timber, next to the identical red-and-green ones. Just a palette swap, that’s all.

And anyway, for the past few years of marriage we’d put up our skinny tree on October 1, decorating it for Halloween before transitioning to Christmas. “And actually, my Halloween ornaments are mostly Shiny Brites!” I told her. Glass ball collectibles with vintage flocked or spray-frost vignettes of silly frights, a thousand chilly-night stories, or memories, hung on one tree.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, delighted, because the way I decorate for Halloween is like celebrating her idea of Christmas. And she and I celebrate Christmas the same way: hanging the ornaments, an opportunity to share, to reflect, holding the memory in our hands as if a story could be contained by a fragile globe, do you remember when, a feat of time travel, the story almost unchanged each time, structurally intact and polished to a gleam. I’m pleasant and merry at Halloween, too, did you ever hear the one about, except I feel holiday cheer around black cats.

At one earlier point I’d paused near a Wal-Mart papier-mâché witch, surprised, had said, “Oh, I think I like her. Look at this face.” Then I’d turned her on the merchandise shelf, tilted her face skyward, presenting her visage for council assessment.

“A very gentle face,” she agreed.

Peaceful, soft, with shining eyes, my secret weak point. My husband had bedroom eyes, a smile without tension. Someone once stopped me, at a conference, to tell me how much she liked my husband’s eyes. “Oh, yes,” I told her, heavy-lidded, and irises that shift in the light, sometimes a glittery green. I put my hands to my mouth, shyly hiding my smile, so happy someone else could see it, too.

“Yes, like an art teacher,” I whispered, of the witch’s sculpted face. She had the it factor, the humanity, the sauce.

So if I can just put out a couple of creepy early Christmas things, I said to her again, if you think it won’t bother anyone, or if they can look the other way and mutter that’s just Jenn’s weird idea of decor, and yes, of course I love the pumpkin, I love harvest season, and even more than that, I love the chilly interim November between the one holiday and the next. I love the whole thing, so of course I’d be more than happy to just skip observing Halloween⁶.

“I know I did say I was turned off horror forever,” I continued, frowning, “but everything is much less scary to me now. I’m back to enjoying some stuff. You know, when it’s a metaphor.” I do have a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dichotomy ornament that is a lot of fun to look at.

She looked up and stared at me. “And just a metaphor⁷! Not your real life!” she squealed, and I laughed and nodded.

Suddenly looking very happy, she looked down at the page again.

“Oh,” she said suddenly, remembering something. Her brother had phoned. He’d been doing research. He’d been struck by the thought, why we don’t just replace mom’s voice with a digital one. Neither of us could remember the name of the thing, but the vibrating frequency digital megaphone. “I think he’s right,” she said, astonished. “The technology already exists,” she said.

I gasped. I began to melt down. “This is it,” I said, so fervent, with such unhinged certainty it was alarming for her.

“No today I—” I said, shuddering. I kept trying to explain and her eyes kept glazing over. I began to panic. “I wonder when you had that conversation,” I said, gasping, “the realization came to me, but I—wait, why did you even bring this up?” I asked her. “How did you even think to tell me this?” For a second we could not seem to hear each other. “No I’m saying you’re right, it’s just,” I said. She was visibly turned off, her body turning off, turning away from me.

No, stop, listen to me, I told her.

She paused, blinked several times—a tiny bit miffed that I won’t let a miracle just be a miracle, won’t agree without always adding on my personal—

This is just confirmation, I said—borrowing, against my will, the language of a cabbie psychic, praying she would not recognize the spiritual jargon. Yes, I’d had the thought independently. Yes, the thought had initially been misguided. Earlier in the day I’d been startled by a memory, one that was intrusive and scary. Over 20 years earlier, Drew Colglazier and I had been in the late-night Burger King smoking and joking, and I suppose choking on smoking, gagging and laughing and chain-smoking our way through a conversation about the inevitabilities of the day I’d lose my own voice and how I’d possibly manage afterward.

I’d jolted in bed, remembering this old conversation while I was typing about something else. I’d stared at the curtains for a long time, why this thought right at this moment?, afraid that I really had sealed my own doom. And of course the conversation had been about being trach’d and needing, eventually, a vibration-to-audio voice instrument.

“Yes, of course I thought I was having a dark premonition of my eventual future, and of course I was filled with dread. Because I did think it was all about me,” I told her, touching her arm, “and it’s not about me, is it? Is it ever?” Reassuring her. And we laughed. “And what if my own greatest fear is another person’s miracle?”

And we both stopped as my sentence had finally found its point and got itself settled in, like a dog turning and turning until it finds its exact position on the rug—the patience it takes, sometimes, when a thought wants to erupt out of an unplanned sentence, organically and therefore very poorly paced, unless you happen to enjoy math rock and most people frankly don’t—and we stared at each other.

“Isn’t that how everything works,” she finally said to me, nodding, after the longest pause.

“Yes,” I whispered.

We looked down at the catalogue. I stared at the Lord of the Rings ornaments again, since they’d inexplicably inspired her to tell me the thing in the first place.

I looked at the page and not at her. “I think maybe not a cowboy,” I said slowly, and wryly, as if I were shopping around for something. “Who’s the really hairy one,” I asked her. “Hadrig?”

“Hagrid?” she asked me, a thrilled disbelief, her eyes lighting up.

“Whoops, no,” I said, narrowing avoiding a conversational trap. I tapped the page, now, a flash of irritation. No, I would never knowingly or deliberately venture into that universe without cause—my apologies—unless it is to steal an herb that only grows in enemy PvP territory, as one does as a chef in WoW. “He’s not here,” tap tap, “the hairy one,” I repeated. There was no picture of the hairy one. I frowned. “And stacked,” I said, trying to not sound lascivious about it.

She stared at me.

“Like. Hard to tip over⁸?” I attempted to clarify. Steady on his feet, I meant. I frowned. “He’s got his,” I sighed, trying to describe just one salient feature of his.

I hunkered down, “it’s like,” I said, sitting on a padded kitchen swivel stool trying to pantomime a low, hunched combat position, trying to role-play as a tank. Then I moved my arms around, feeling around in the dark for it, trying to assume his exact position. “He’s got his, uhh,” I repeated. I moved my left arm into the defensive. Was I trying to pantomime a shield? I frowned. “No, it’s not a shield,” I said, disappointed. I shook my left forearm one last time, trying to feel whose arm this was. Oh, He-Man’s. That’s Masters of the Universe, wrong IP entirely. I sadly dropped my left arm to my side, leaving a thought unthought, and I raised my right arm a little higher in the air and felt it. Yes. This. I shook my arm. This. “What am I holding right now,” I said, hoping she could somehow see it for me. I shook my arm again, trying to feel the weight of the thing. “What’s this,” I said, inviting her to chime in anytime.

Now I peeked at her. She shook her head at me, bewildered at this game of charades, where I was clearly trying to bypass my aphantasia, trying to remember something—something very obvious to most people—by recognizing it in my limbic system, by fully inhabiting the repressed memory of seeing and then feeling around for identifying information, heft, proprioception, interoception. Other people definitely also do this but super do not take this long. “It’s like a mallet,” I said now, remembering my favorite mallet. I’d most recently used it to hammer away at a ziplock bag of chicken breasts.

“Ah! Aha! And my axe,” I said, triumphant, quoting a famous line from the Internet. “I think this was that axe,” I said, an argument all settled now. I micro-pumped my forearm a last time—victory—before relaxing again. I looked at her.

“That guy. Who’s that guy,” I concluded. “From all the… traveling guys.”

Not all of them hobbits, so I’m trying to be inclusive, and not all of them little guys, since there’s Legolas, easy to sweep the legs out from under, Pippin the most handsome to me, and Gandalf. But for life purposes, I just need the guy who is soft and crunchy to the touch and willing to be an axe murderer should the need arise.

My friend Robyn once joked that I “sure had a type”—she meant, aesthetically, a lumberjack—and I was irritated and said she had no idea my type, and then I gestured around us, sitting in our regular bar somewhere in the Midwestern U.S., “look around you!” I hissed, of the men circulating around us, all dressed alike, some wearing glasses, some wearing beards, a couple of them hipsters demarcated at the knee by a tight hand-cut denim summer short. This is not my type. My type is nearsighted, ideally with perfectly shaped ears, if you must know—that, if someone has piqued a certain type of interest in me, I casually crane my head to check the sides of his head, if he keeps moving, I keep moving, like a boxing match, cringing as I turn with him, sloshing my beer, trying to get a quick peek in there, imperfect ears not my absolute dealbreaker, but—

“Who’s the one with the axe?” I asked her.

“No idea,” she said.

I didn’t know what I was on about, either. “Yeah,” I said, smiling to myself, flipping to the next page—unable to picture or name the character, not a picture but a promise, from a movie I’ve seen only once, based on a book I’ve never read, “yeaaaahhhhh,” I said saucily to myself, “that guy.” Missing from the Dream Book of Christmas tree ornaments, delisted but not forgotten. Maybe next year—if there’s enough demand from fans. I don’t know. Maybe demand peaked a couple decades ago.

Maybe I can’t or won’t speak on what I want—being unwilling or completely blocked, in a way, from even entertaining the question—because I know what a nightmare it can be to find yourself in a house you’ve designed yourself, as in a song by David Byrne about finding yourself in a real-life Second Life house.

There is yet another TikTok mantra—what I desire desires me more, what I need needs me more, a reassuring reminder that things will noodle⁹ their way toward you—and as a reader of my own life’s text, to ever say what I want, for sure and for certain, and how that is ever supposed to look, is to deny a writer, or more likely an exquisite corpse of writers, another funny little literary flourish for the reader. But I also know that a hope is its own type of little curse, that hope is dread, and that hope kills possibilities, tributaries. And I’ll always get the exact right thing at the exact right time, and I understand that the lesson isn’t any individual person, it’s building a village.

“I think it’s because you’re a writer and editor,” the realtor said to me suddenly, “but it’s like you understand how a comma’s placement changes the meaning of the whole sentence, except that in this case the comma can be a chair in the room.”

I was delighted but simultaneously blindsided, so I asked him to expand on his point. He couldn’t¹⁰. We both laughed it off.

He asked me if I’d watched any Black Mirror. I hesitated, then admitted I hadn’t—a couple episodes, maybe—but only because of something specific that had once happened. “I guess I’m pretty avoidant,” I said to him now, smirking. “Charlie Brooker used to review video games, you know,” I added. I sighed.

What about the movie Ready Player One.

“Ernest Cline,” I said. “Uh, is who… he wrote the book, I think. No, I haven’t.”

“It’s pretty light,” he said, “so I don’t think you’d find it too, uh,” and he hesitated, “triggering.”

I squinted at him suspiciously, wondering if I’d been looked-up and background-checked. It really didn’t matter. I shrugged helplessly. “Yeah, I mean it sounds interesting,” I said.

“I know it’ll probably require a lot of hard work and planning,” I said, “but I dream of one day running into this office shouting I’m ready! I did it! I won the lottery, or I got a book advance, or I wrote a novel and it got optioned as a TV series, we are ready to go!” I looked demoralized. “Most likely that first thing, though,” I admitted to him. “The hard work, the planning.” I gestured, rolling my hand in the air, exhausted and sad and bored.

The realtor asked me if I had a financial adviser already. Yes, in fact! Then I told him the man’s full name and location, as if to prove the credibility of this incredible fact.

How many destitute, unhoused single women have both a realtor and a financial adviser? I didn’t exactly go looking for them, either; they both gallantly volunteered. That’s nice! I’m trying to learn how to be my own lucky charm.

“M-Miss Frank,” the adviser said to me recently, a little catch in his uncleared throat.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to surprise you by actually picking up this time,” I teased him, and we both laughed. He asked me what was up. I told him what was up. He repeated it back to me, making sure he had it straight. “Sounds like you have the lay of the land,” I said to him grimly.

He thanked me for my forthcomingness and told me to not be alarmed. He said a few more things to pump me up.

“That was very coach of you,” I said to him pleasantly. I love when an expert is my expert. It gives me way less to freak out about.

At one point I blurted “I like to put uhhh electrolytes in my water,” and he happily told me he puts electrolytes in his, too. I smiled and intimated that we probably do this for different reasons, but then I realized this was silly, because we do it for the exact same reason: for our water to work smarter, not harder. My dietitian, a sports nutritionist by trade, is great with people with chronic health issues. My physio was the same way; she could train anyone, but she specialized in AuDHD and hyperextension.

“So that’s… yeah. I’m saying I want to put electrolytes in money,” I told him. He howled.

“I love that. Now you’ve given me two things,” he said. “‘Financial fawning’, and electrolytes in money.” Aw. He’d read about the thing I’d mentioned, the fawning. I blushed, although he could not witness me doing so.

Later I told my best friend that I feel grateful to’ve found the one finance bro on Earth who does not find me violently weird, as most unfortunately do. “I think he finds me—”

“Fascinating,” we said together, and we laughed.

I told my friend, not a cowboy, not a fantasy dwarf; I’m unfortunately married in my heart. She was horrified. I shrugged. Honestly it’s more like being a nun. It’s like I’m married to the feeling of the sun on my face.

And it doesn’t even matter; certain stuff belongs in the cosmic dustbin of theoretical. And then it becomes very taxing to bring my own attention—my most precious resource, currently my only resource—fully into the present room, out of the quantum and into the grim material room I’m locked up in. So I have to put all my focus into chopping a carrot without chopping myself. Having my mind elsewhere will be the death of me.

Please get onto ADHD medication, a member of my group chat implored me—citing statistics, the danger I pose to others on the road with my long-lost brain. Still, I wonder how badly I really need medication. I’ve been present in my life before, have compartmentalized myself into strict day/night cycles. I can do it again. Uptight by day, forgetting all about what matters, and then dreaming at night—no more blurring October and December together.

Anyway, I can make almost any room a home, or rather, homey, like a home. If the final room of my life does not find me all settled in the way I’d hoped, that’s just the tragedy of the room I’m in. It’s a bit like that Got Milk commercial, where he wakes up surrounded by fluffy cookies and no cool drink. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to go for me: realizing yet again where I’ve ended up, and then back into the thick of it¹¹, trying it out yet again, an infant with no memory. Who knows.

One night I was in bed whispering to the empty space next to me: trying, just this once, to articulate my wants to my ghost husband, someone in the wrong time and place, now relegated to the quantum dustbin of fantasy. “Okay,” I whispered to the space, “here’s how I imagine it. I bought this soft blanket because I imagine you,” and I unrolled the comforter, “showering after a long day, oh it was so hard,” I whispered, mocking-gentle, “and I pull it over you like this, and your skin is clean and soft, and the blanket against you feels—” I frowned. “Well, this blanket was very soft,” I said, touching it and scowling. I scooted under it, too, pulling the fuzzy thing to my chin and looking over at my delisted spouse. “But then I washed it twice. It was very cheap.” I sighed heavily, feeling the fuzzy just-ok texture of my once-plush comforter. “They make more expensive ones,” I murmured out loud to nobody. “In this dream I’ve gotten you one of the really nice ones.”

Recently I realized I’ve been trying to treat myself the way I would treat my ghost spouse, and I sobbed. I am my own ghost spouse.

It was a little over a week ago. “I think I’m glad I didn’t go back to school,” I was telling my best friend.

We were sitting on the bench in the sunshine. A heap of useless degrees was what my adoptive mom had always wanted for me, and I’d wanted that, too, sometimes. “I had the money,” I admitted grimly. “But I just kept… not going back to school.” So how badly did I really want a mountain of degrees?

“I would’ve been avoiding life,” I told her. “I mean, I wanted that insulation, I wanted to avoid life.” Nevertheless, I’d continued to pay all my tuition to the school of hard knocks instead. We laughed.

“When I look back now,” I continued, “I think I’d already learned a hard lesson about being spewed from the mouth of an institutional setting¹², and how many more times did I really want to learn it?” When someone sees you coming toward them in the workplace and announces they will not be mentoring you, not providing you any career or growth opportunities, not grooming you to take their place—“she’s just a blogger!” the manager had spat—it’s a gift¹³. They’re giving you the gift of not becoming them. They won’t let you, no matter how hard you try.

And when someone blocks your path professionally, you pivot. When every path is repeatedly blocked, and you keep pivoting, you start to become something else: a Renaissance man. Like Da Vinci’s illustration, a human compass. “Because now you’ve seen the map from every angle,” I said to her, “the lay of the land.”

I admitted that I’d fallen into the same trap as an acquaintance of ours, “putting my sense of safety into expert opinions,” I told her, “institutional opinions, based on secondhand data that have nothing to do with firsthand, lived experience.” Obviously the two should not live in opposition to each other, but one is often threatened by the other. I shrugged.

I don’t know. “Imagine if I were obsessed with chasing a tenure track right now,” I muttered, and we both smirked at each other.

Eventually I wandered toward the outdoor trashcan with a carton of orange juice that had sat around in the fridge long past its best-by date.

“Did you try the applesauce yet,” my best friend’s dad asked. He was sitting in a lawn chair supervising the neighborhood kids.

“Not yet,” I told him. “I was looking for it when I got sidetracked by this, uh, very old orange juice.”

It came up organically—we’d been talking about my best friend’s baby brother—and I explained about second or third grade. All the students had been tested for the gifted program. My score had been the highest by, you know, a mile. Through the roof. In all, I’d been tested three times over the years, my particular score unchanging.

“And that stuff doesn’t mean anything,” I said to him, and his daughter “wouldn’t’ve been intimidated by that stuff anyway, because she knows it doesn’t mean anything.” He nodded. “But somehow everyone found out about this score, and it’s why everyone in town treated me like a monster. And all these teachers and moms were constantly trying to kneecap me, you know, She’s not so great, she’s not as smart as they say, or What did you mean by that? Are you trying to make me look stupid? To a little kid.” I bit my lip. It had colored almost every interpersonal interaction. Eventually I’d gotten to high school, where everything was basically fine, like it almost had never happened.

He asked me who the leak might’ve been, since that stuff is supposed to stay private.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. It might’ve been my own legal guardian, I admitted. She might’ve wanted to feel exceptional; she might’ve wanted support, because she really did not know what she was doing. Ultimately, though, it’d made her act like someone she wasn’t. “I think she quickly realized the only thing scarier than a rabid stage mom is an even bigger, uglier stage mom,” I said to him sadly.

Anyway, I gradually became aware of what had happened. One day, not very long after that test, I’d been rolling around on my skateboard in front of the house outside one afternoon, when a group of high schoolers spied me from a distance.

“Hey!” one of them shouted. “You’re that weird smart kid!” And the gang of teens beelined straight toward me, surrounded me. They stood too close, towered over me, tried to quiz me on… everything.

I was scared of them, so I’d tried to make them laugh. Then I’d offered them colas from the fridge, “ran inside, got Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes, the coolest drink you could drink in 1991,” I joked. My best friend’s dad didn’t react, so I clarified: “It’s like a little old lady beverage,” I said. “And then I rolled down the driveway on my skateboard with colas in each hand,” I told him, cringing. “So cool.” A very cool presentation of gifts to the teens who’d cornered me out of sheer curiosity.

I paused. “It’s the first time I can remember trying to buy someone’s friendship,” I said out loud¹⁴.

“Huh!” he said, visibly startled. I shrugged.

Then he told me about my best friend’s baby brother. The middle-school gifted-program teacher had really been out to get him, my best friend’s dad explained.

Wait, does my best friend know about this? I asked him. I’d just been telling her about this lady a week earlier. The woman had terrorized me.

Her dad didn’t think so. We compared notes. My story was, of course, awful. His own son had self-sabotaged just to get away from her, deliberately blowing his grades. “I’m out of G/T,” he’d told his father, smug, slapping his report card on the table before disappearing into his bedroom.

“Yeesh,” I said.

Pretty wise, though; I’d kept with it and suffered instead. I wondered aloud if I’d somehow made life harder on my best friend’s baby brother, just by being such a difficult child for her, a few short years ahead of him.

“She had her own son, you know,” I said, of the middle-school gifted-program teacher, trailing off. I wasn’t sure how much more I should say.

My best friend’s dad was silent for a long time.

“She was a bitch,” he said suddenly, in a beautifully neutral way.

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “I guess we need them around for some reason.”

Anyway, he continued, the third-grade gifted teacher had been so supportive—

“Mrs. Koenig!” I exclaimed, turning to him, beaming. “She gave me my first thesaurus!”

He told me his recollection of Mrs. Koenig, standing there trapped next to the middle-school gifted teacher, making horror-eyes at the parents but unable to intervene in any meaningful way. He remembered this very clearly.

The six-year old suddenly ran up the driveway, sprinting between us. “I’m getting snacks from grandma’s house for my friends,” she announced to us, a full sentence, gasping for air as she sped by.

“Uhh,” the child’s grandfather said.

“Hm!” I said.

Then we were talking about where ideas come from, wanting credit for stuff we might’ve not actually thought of ourselves—the concept of simultaneity, actually—and, laughing, I was laying out the whole scenario, how it is honestly perfectly likely that someone saw my detailed mockup of a Nintendo console years earlier, joking that I’ll never really know for sure whether I were an unpaid member of Nintendo’s Wii U hardware development team. Not their most popular console, either! We were both snickering at this, tears in our eyes.

Something drifted in the air between us. I batted at it irritably, shooing it off. Then I watched the fluff float off to my left.

“Was that a white feather,” I asked my best friend’s dad.

“Yep,” he said.

“Hmph,” I said, annoyed. I fell silent and turned and stood next to him, facing the cul de sac with him.

The six-year old rolled through us, down the driveway, toward her group of neighborhood friends.

“Capri Suns in each hand,” I narrated¹⁵ under my breath, “and on a scooter, no less.”

Very cool.

I ran into my best friend by the freezer.

“Did you know—?” I asked her. This adult woman I’d just been telling her about, this lady at the middle school, had also terrorized her little brother.

Her dad walked up and filled in the gaps in my story. These were semi-amazing childhood parallels.

My best friend’s eyes flashed. She didn’t know who this woman was, of course. Because she hadn’t gotten to take the IQ test for G/T placement. She’d spent her whole life feeling stupid because she hadn’t gotten to take the test. No one had ever seen fit to place her anywhere, ever.

“Well, you weren’t around yet for the first test,” I said, “but the middle-school one, everyone took,” I said, aghast. “That’s why it was so awful. Alphabetical seating. Long cafeteria tables. The fluorescent lights humming overhead.”

I don’t know why you were repeatedly blocked from this track, I told her firmly. I don’t know how you kept getting locked out.

Her face broke. She sighed.

“Did I ever tell you,” she said.

She’d been walking around a weekend college fair. She’d paused at a booth to look at the available literature. When the booth’s pair of representatives realized she didn’t know what Vassar was—

“Oh, god,” I said.

—they’d iced her out, completely stopped responding to her questions, tight-lipped and smiling at each other knowingly. A representative at a neighboring booth watched it all happen. That man had called her over.

“He was from an HBCU,” she said carefully, “and I didn’t know what that was. I think it was Howard.”

I nodded, smiling.

“And he told me all about it.” He’d loaded her with brochures, even memorabilia. “And he said that although it is historically Black, I was free to apply. They consider everyone.” Her eyes were shining, moist. “He spent all this time with me. He saw what happened. I have never felt so welcome,” she told me, her voice thick with feeling.

My smile was very close to bursting. At the end of her story, I nodded.

“I do remember you telling me this,” I said to her, “shortly after it happened. It’s a really beautiful memory. Bless him for giving that to you.

“Between then and now, though,” and I wiped my eyes, “they did very famously admit a white student. Named… Rachel Dolezal.”

My best friend and her dad crumbled cackling.

“And she felt so welcome—” I said, pushing them both straight over the edge¹⁶. They eventually gathered themselves again.

I smiled, tender again. “Back then, though, you really could’ve gone there,” I said to her, “if you’d wanted. It would’ve been hard. People would’ve looked at you and wondered what you were getting out of it. That’s tough. That would’ve required, really, a lot of inner certainty and fiber.” Which my best friend has, rolls and rolls of it, but we’re talking about 17-year olds.

“Do you still think about it?” I asked her. “That possibility?”

“I was just so grateful to him,” she said. “But it was right before the accident happened.”

I nodded. Yep. It would’ve been unwise to venture very far from home.

Who really knows why anything happens.

When I was a little kid, I did matter-of-factly blurt out some autobiographical facts about myself, even though my guardian had warned me not to. People won’t understand, she’d told me. Like, I did try to self-edit, but certain topics were impossible to avoid. I remember struggling to complete a family tree in elementary school class. What kid struggles to complete a family tree?

And the other kids around me just… never believed¹⁷ a word out of my mouth. That’s how it went.

Nothing that had ever happened to me was that strange, even—very mundane vicissitudes, in the scheme of things, domestic dramas and a lot of scene changes—but they still arced beyond my peers’ understanding of the world, and a lot of adults’, too. The real obstacle was my peers’ developmentally-appropriate limits of experience¹⁸.

It’s taken me a long time to respect that other people don’t want to hear a life story, don’t want to hear why you are the way you are. It’s as good as fiction to them. They cannot understand, and they don’t want to hear your cover story, either; they just want others to treat them well¹⁹. Okay. That’s not a crime.

So I always knew I was going to have to pivot to fiction writing eventually, a little bit against my will, because everything sounds like fiction to somebody. That’s just because of our respective limits of experience. It all sounds like fiction to someone, so it might as well be. I mean, I guess.

You know, and I know, my adoptive mom used to tell me, but does the rest of the world know, really hamming it up. If this was from a thing, I have no idea what she was quoting.

And anyway, you can’t just tell people things. You have to trick them into wanting to hear a really good story. Then maybe you can tell them the full truth, meticulously framed as hearsay: “Oh, this happened to a friend of mine, some years back. I might’ve gotten the details all wrong.”

I described to a close friend my recent purge of emotions, but I accidentally typed “purse of emotions,” and then I laughed and laughed at this slip of the finger.

“We are living in a pocket universe,” I joked to my friend, “God’s little purse of emotions.”

Oh, my loves. I will record your names down again and again, all of your secret names, in every time, in every language.

happiness at great cost