Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

In late December, I tried to write again to fall short to the binds of writer's block and life. Yet, now, a month and a half later, here I am.   *** It's been three weeks now since the surgery narrative changed. The message on my phone saying she passed is still clear as day in my mind's eye. Two days ago, I let my iTunes play a random list of songs. That was my bad, knowing good and well that that's rarely a good idea.  Joanne came on, and it hit me as I climbed five floors, gasping for air--not from the steep ascension this time--as I struggled, shaking to put the key in my door. It's always something like that, a song out of the blue, to knock the wind and fragile peace right out of you.   That damned Lady Gaga song connected to us and me, and now it haunts me like a memory you can never fully pack away. I've lived longer with lupus and RA than I did without; that song was written about the loss of someone from lupus, yet in its release, it's more along ...

I've been back from my summer away for nearly two months. I finally put all my jewelry away that had been sitting in a lock box. I'd fish out a piece every now and then, but mostly I'd been wearing the hull I'd pulled out for the summer. That's how these things usually go. Yet, as I pulled the pieces from the box, I wasn't prepared for the memories woven into silver and stone. The black beaded chocker I wore to a friend's Vegas wedding, for which I was the Maid of Honor. She and I don't speak anymore, yet I can't pass on the necklace I've long not worn. It hangs on a back hook in the jewelry case, so I rarely see it. Memories of our twenty-year friendship linger, pervasive, and are here to stay like a roach infestation that baffles the best Orkin man, yet I won't reach out. Read a few posts back, as my heart doesn't have it left in me.     I don't have jewelry from my sister. There's a ring I bought for my Dad to give her. It'...

2020. What can’t be said about it? Well, for one, a sense of happiness. The losses of habits, community, and what we thought we needed are one thing. The loss of those we love is another. The first death happened, and I gasped. I kept it to myself and pressed on. When I told people, a few weeks later, the shock hit them . . . a shock for me per se. Mostly, though, there was no acknowledgment. I lost someone, one I had been seeing. On the westside, I moved uptown, and the space and beauty of an apartment were lost as the world froze. As I unpacked my kitchen and posted jokes in a thread about the ice cream truck outside my new place, one of my oldest and closest friends died. Died while we were jesting about the damned ice cream truck. Things that happened with that have stuck with me and soured me. I’ll never mail the letter I had written his wife when it happened, wishing her love and peace. More so, as she is still friends with my mother—of sorts, I guess—and when thin...