Hitching a ride, trusting a partner, marrying the same person three times
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In the months following Mom’s death in February 2021, I tried to get her to say something to me, to speak to me. If anyone could communicate from beyond, I thought, it was her.
I know now this is the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship: right before the woman leaves. It’s when some women get murdered. I was lucky.
Today in heaven / my father turned 105. / Finally working steady daylight, / he’s got it knocked: / eight to four, / double time and a half, / no asbestos, / no shoveling slag / on the open hearth, / no boss, / thirteen weeks vacation annually, / kingdom come. / The union up here takes zero shit.
In my dreams my mother keeps walking out of the kitchen singing, / You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. / She never sings past the first verse.
And two months after the cancer finally ate through / the last tissues that separated him from death, / I get a message from his e-mail address, / urging me to click on a link I know I shouldn’t
On the phone, at a gas station, in our dreams
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that almost everybody on earth is currently more aware than usual that they’re going to die. . . . People are becoming more racist, xenophobic, and willing to engage in hate crimes than they were in the recent past, for example. But being reminded that we’re going to die can also bring out the best in us, making us more altruistic — at least, toward people we consider to be part of our group.
I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization — in that clear way, not that oh yeah way — that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon. Ross Gay
I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization — in that clear way, not that oh yeah way — that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon.
Ross Gay
Maryam: And then the soldiers — oh, the soldiers. I’d take my time with them. I’d do to them everything they did to you. Maybe I’d leave one or two alive so they could learn how life can be a long nightmare.
Yeshua: I tried to make people see that all we have to do is turn around, leave that whining precious self behind, let it go and see the wholeness of God’s Name, but people want magic and miracles and kings—
If you are more close to the dying / than you would like to be, then it is time for the sky / to grow larger than the earth, than the sea even.