small fires

This morning, I woke thinking about Jesus, which is not something that I ever do. I was raised Catholic, Catholic schools for twelve years, but Catholicism is not something that I practice in my adult life for reasons which are ultimately uninteresting. But I woke, thinking of Jesus as scripture has him, in the garden of Gethsemane on the day he is to be put to death praying, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”

I blame Anne Carson.

I read the Paris Review interview from 2004 where she discusses her Catholicism. She has been talking about writing as a way to flee the self, to get outside of oneself.

Will Aitken asks, “Is Catholicism a way out of self for you?” and she says:

No, quite the reverse. I don’t think I am ever so resigned to myself as when I’m in church trying to understand why I’m in church. Sitting there thinking about my mother and all the times we sat together in church. The only good memory I have of it is leaning up against her fake fur coat during Mass. I remember the smell of that coat, how comforting that was on a cold winter day. But, no, it’s not a way out of self at all, it’s a way back into some self that I’m not sure is a good version, but which seems to be embedded or necessary.

“Do you think of yourself as being particularly devout?”

No, I think of myself as being particularly baffled on the one hand, by the whole question of God and the relation of humans to God, but also, possibly because of lots of empty spaces in my life, open to exploring what that might mean. I have open spaces where I put that question and just see what happens.

—

The day was a dispiriting one. A day in which the pettiness and meanness and sadness of self and others seemed on continual parade. I sat in meeting rooms and then at my desk. I returned phone calls. I held my head in my hands.

At the end of it, I met up with a friend and at an overpriced bar and we sat in deep club chairs in the shadow of a taxidermied moose head. Over wine, we listed our grievances for each other and found reasons to laugh. I drove home while the sky was still light.

—

“Do you think of yourself as having a relationship with God?”

No. But that’s not bad. I think in the last few years since I’ve been working on this opera and reading a lot of mystics, especially Simone Weil, I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with the emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. So, sad fact, but get used to it, because nothing else is going to happen.

—

There are things I have to do today that I would rather not do. I am anxious. I feel unprepared. It seems as though this time of year takes on a breathy urgency as the end of the school year rushes up and various deadlines loom.

I fear I am not making progress in my life. I fear I am not moving in the right directions. Or at least: not quickly enough.

I am standing at the edge of a cliff throwing scraps of paper against the wind. I am – Anne Carson, again – “babbling into the void.”

—

“When you talk about your dad, I don’t ever get that clear a picture of him. When you write about your mom, she’s palpable, she’s in the room. Why is that?”

I don’t know. I think that has more to say about her than me. I certainly did love her and have a connection, but we didn’t really get it right all the years we knew each other. It wasn’t what I would call a successful interaction. In psycho-therapeutical terms. But she’s certainly real to me in a way that nobody else in my life has been. And maybe that’s all that love is, actually…

“Realness?”

Yes.

—

In the morning, we argue.

Not so much argue really, rather: I go silent, leave the room, spend the morning close to tears. He sends an apology. I botch the response, holding on, as I am, to a desire to wound as I feel I have been wounded.

Why let go of some bitter thing, after all? Why try to let it go when instead you can harbor it, let it grow wild inside you?

I am trying to return to a better version of myself, but there are times, it seems, when the distance is too great.

By evening, I have not improved much.

I sleep fitfully. Wake while it is still dark, strange thoughts of Jesus in his garden, strange thoughts of Anne Carson, missing her dead mother.

“I miss her like an old sock,” she says. “One sock, you always need the other sock.”

Before I get up, I press myself against him. I hear his breathing change. I inhale the warm, familiar scent of him.

—

For years, I too sat in church with my mother. Anne Carson describes “a kind of thinking that takes place there that doesn’t take place anywhere else,” and I remember this, too. A kind of space and time where nothing happens and there are no expectations except a quiet collective attention inward. How the mind wanders as if through an empty house, doors and windows hanging open. Occasional song.

To return to the version of myself sitting straight-backed in the wooden pew or kneeling head bowed, whispering prayers: what might I find?

Anne Carson says:

Nothing changes, I don’t become wise about this, I don’t become ethically better or more interesting. I’m just the same person, I’m that person with this space open and I do think that for me, in this life, that’s as far as I’m going to get with spirituality.

I cannot yet explain why (perhaps I will be able to in time) but this passage, from Mary Ruefle’s essay, “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World,” just made me cry:

We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love — a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken every day into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten. In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single life span, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and for the language which we alone created, without which the letter that slipped under the door could never have been written, or, once in a thousand lives — is that too much to ask? — retrieved, and read. Did I mention supreme joy? That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult. It’s a sincere desire, but a sincere desire always complicates things — the universe has a peculiar reaction to our sincere desires. Still, I believe the planet on the table, even when wounded and imperfect, fragmented and deprived, is worthy of being called whole. Our minds and the universe — what else is there? Margaret Mead described intellectuals as those who are bored when they don’t have the chance to talk interestingly enough. Now a book will talk interestingly to you. George Steiner describes the intellectual as one who can’t read without a pencil in her hand. One who wants to talk back to the book, not take notes but make them: one who might write, “The giraffe speaks!” in the margin. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

Perhaps I have been thinking too long and too much about reading and writing as a way to pretend we are not dying.

I spent an hour in the garden this morning, digging out some bulbs that had managed to take root, uninvited, throughout the yard. It is impossible not to think about time passing in the garden and how the hours pass, with me on my knees, accumulating a pile of spent leaves and branches and weeds and bagging them for the trash. These tasks repeated hour after hour, day after day, year upon year. For what purpose, these hours spent in the dirt?

The joy of blooms, yes; there is that. When the beds are tidy and freshly-mulched, there are aesthetic pleasures to be taken in their orderly arrangements. But that particular pleasure is fleeting and the work of it is endless.

A way to mark time, I think. To fill shapeless hours in a life that is itself shapeless. We sketch it out. We make grand gestures in the sky with our hands. But from our first breath, don’t we carry our death inside us? Cocooned within our bodies until it breaks through, its own kind of blossoming; the one inevitable yield of our time on this tender earth.

Three short pieces in conversation with Anne Carson’s “Short Talks,” from Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995):

—

On my father

In the dim light of his apartment, the moan of wind tunneling through back streets, he prepares his meal on the kitchen table. Eats there, returns to his room. The television on the floor muted, the black and white glow of it. He sits in a wooden chair. A cardboard box of photographs on his lap. Now my father is weeping.

Tonight there is no moonlight. Tonight he lets his sadness settle in on the room, a fine layer of dust on blanket and bed, on wooden chair and end table. On television, on parquet floors and on him, bowed gray head and pale flesh now graying in unforgiving light.

On screen, an endless parade of men and women rushing in and out of frame, the action of their made-up lives rising and falling, rising and falling in rhythms that we can anticipate, longing and grief in measured doses, titrated slowly to rates we can absorb.

—

On our debt to the memory of the dead

What is it that we owe to the memory of the dead? What measure fealty? What homage?

We return to the burial site bearing gaudy gifts. The peonies their blossoms so heavy and full they droop on slender stems. Their brightness offends. It is June and my legs are bare. When I kneel down before the stone, pebbles lodge into my flesh. I brush them off. I kiss the air. A bird sings from a branch nearby and then stops.

My father’s voice no longer comes to me in dreams. The years mock us in how little we remember. A limp, one leg shorter than the other. Hunched shoulders from decades of slow decline. This body, these dessicated bones. What if now from deep in the earth, they could sing?

—

On longing

There was a party in his parents’ home. His brother played piano and we gathered around. It was winter. The evening lit by candelight. His white-haired father placed his long slender fingers on my hand. I have always been baffled by fathers.

Bring your hand to your heart, hold it there. Bring your hand to your chin. Hold your hands up and take his face in your hands. Now sing.

Elements of Courtship

Bring your beloved food.
Bring food
And put it there
By your beloved.

Take your beloved to
The food.  Go
To places
Where food is.

Show your beloved food.
Point to food.
Bring it
To your beloved

Move food
To where
Your beloved is.
Keep bringing
Food.

— Ron Carlson, Room Service, Red Hen Press, 2012

Where have I been? I wake from a dream of overgrown rosebushes to find that weeks have passed in silence. Strange days. Drift and tumble.

In the dream, the branches grow wild and leggy. Thorns thicken to fierce points.

How many hours and days have passed? What wild sweet things have gone untended?

—

Days of Anne Carson: first NOX, then Antigonick. Then, “The Glass Essay,” which led me back, after all these years, to Wuthering Heights.

Then Plainwater:

“Let us be gentle when we question our fathers.”

I am thinking quite a bit about fathers.

There is a voice running warm and low in the background of these days. Is it my father’s voice?

you were so small sitting in that big chair in the dark you were waiting for me to come home how long had you been waiting you wore a blue dress it barely reached your knees you were so small your knees were scabbed I kneeled down and held your feet in my hands you were waiting so long in the dark I will come to you no matter what I will come to you when you are sick I will come to you if you need me if you are frightened I will come

—

My father is a mystery. He left so little behind. Not enough to compose a portrait of this man so that I might recognize, so that I might apprehend him. A man who seemed to have stumbled into a life that did not suit him. A poorly-tailored life for his lanky form and threadbare.

Anne Carson, from NOX:

“We want people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say This is what he did   and Here’s why. It forms a lock against oblivion.”

I am trying then, to form a lock against oblivion?

—

On translation: “I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. A guess it never ends.”

“Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.”

A kind of translation. When so little is left, you can only prowl what remains.

—

It was a Sunday night in winter.
I heard his sentences filling up with fear.
He would start a sentence – about weather, lose his way, start another.
It made me furious to hear him floundering –

my tall proud father, former World War II navigator!
It made me merciless.
I stood on the edge of the conversation,

watching him thrash about for cues,
offering none,
and it came to me like a slow avalanche

that he had no idea who he was talking to.
Much colder today I guess…
his voice pressed into the silence and broke off,

snow falling on it.
There was a long pause while snow covered us both.
Well I won’t keep you,

he said with sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land.
I’ll say goodnight now,
I won’t run up your bill. Goodbye.

Goodbye.
Goodbye. Who are you?
I said into the dial tone.

(Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”)

—

While I was in college (a different kind of prowling) he called me unexpectedly one evening. I had not heard from him in years. You could come visit me, he said. You would love the pool here. It is sunny all the time. I will cook for you. I will make you all your favorite things.

You don’t know my favorite things.

Tell me what they are. I will write them down. Tell me what they are and I will make them for you.

—

“Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, love, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands. Maybe this is the way it should be – what anthropologists call “normal danger” in the encounter with alien cultures. It was an anthropologist who first taught me about danger. He emphasized the importance of using encounter rather than (say) discovery when talking about such things. ‘Think of it as the difference,’ he said, ‘between believing what you want to believe and believing what can be proved.’ I thought about that. ‘I don’t want to believe anything,’ I said. (But I was lying.) ‘And I have nothing to prove.’ (Lying again.) ‘I just like to travel into the world and stop, noticing what is under the sky.’ (This, in fact, is true.) Cruelly at this point, he mentioned a culture he had studied where true and false virgins are identified by ordeal of water. For an intact virgin can develop the skill of diving into deep water but a woman who has known love will drown. ‘I am not interested in true and false’ I said (one last lie) and we fell silent.”

(Anne Carson, “Diving: Introduction to the Anthropology of Water,” from Plainwater)

—

My father had a dear friend who convinced him to move away. He became a part of his family: Bill, his wife, their children. He was more theirs than ever he was ours. Eventually, he remarried. “I have never been happier in all my life,” he told me in a letter he wrote in the later years. “I have never been so much in love.”

But a woman who has known love will drown.

—

I visited him once. It was sunny all the time. I sat by the pool and swam the cool lengths of it. I did not drown.

He had not yet met the woman he would later marry. His happiest days were still to come.

Bill drove us to the airport. We embraced on the sidewalk while the skycaps blew their whistles.

I brought back no souvenirs.

Let us be gentle when we question our fathers.

It was the last time I saw him.

Some years ago, I bought a bunch of houseplants at one of the big box stores and most of them have done well. Or at least, the ones I still have can be said to have done well. I don’t remember the ones I may have lost along the way. I don’t take particularly good care of them. I go for too long without watering. I am inconsistent with pruning. Despite my carelessness, a few have thrived.

I attend to a long overdue repotting project. I set up in the kitchen. It is quite a production. First dragging out the oversized bag of potting soil, then the perlite, then the sphagnum moss. Preparing the new mix with shovelsful of each, blending in my largest mixing bowl. Then washing the old containers, then filling them half full. The gentle extraction of the plant from the old pot. Distressing the roots to prepare them for their new soil. Situating, re-positioning. Covering over the roots, tamping down. And then finally, a soft soaking spray of water from the pull-out hose of the kitchen tap. It is a messy task. There is wet soil on the counter, the floor, on my arms. I repeat this four times. There are a few more plants that are ready for larger pots, but I have tired of this particular domestic chore and there are others to attend to, so the rest will have to wait for another weekend.

I have come to appreciate the comforts to be taken in these repetitive household tasks. The opportunity they present to still the part of the mind otherwise churning with questions, self-doubt, wandering down paths of memory best left undisturbed. To focus on a sequence of orderly steps. To see a series of actions through to a visible conclusion. I am not, of course, saying anything new.

—

It has been difficult, being back. The cold does not help. This year, this protracted winter, I have felt the cold in my bones, felt it creep through my body, chilling the blood. It is hard to remember warmth. It is hard to remember even the bright sun of a few days ago, its thin heat so fleeting. Then again, I have been told that I do not do well in making the best of things. I have been told that I expect too much.

In a conversation several years ago, I was bemoaning some part of my work that I did not enjoy. “I don’t like to do this,” I said to M. We were in the kitchen; I was working at something on the counter. I had a litany of complaints. When I paused, he asked: “Why not just like it?” and we laughed at first. But his question has lingered with me in its direct, almost absurd simplicity: Why not just like it?

I have tried, since then, to embrace this challenge, delivered even as I know it was, in half-jest. Attempting to turn in my mind: “I don’t like making small talk at cocktail parties,” to: “I enjoy meeting new people and learning about their interests.” From: “I am anxious in unfamiliar situations and my anxiety can sometimes immobilize me,” to: “I welcome the opportunity to overcome my fears and to practice new skills.”

It seems silly now, to see these things written down. But I must admit that there have been occasions on which these little tricks of mind have made a considerable difference.

—

There was a time when I was more caught up in the trappings of domesticity. When I ironed in the evenings, sewed dresses for my daughter. One might speculate on what I was trying to do – create a kind of order in what felt otherwise like chaos. I was in my twenties, having recently lost my mother, then my father. Transitioning from graduate school to some kind of “real” life. Transitioning from married to not. And then later, to married again. One might speculate. Things fell apart. I have put them, to the extent possible, back together.

—

In a letter, a friend once said: “I am angry all the time. I am nearly always filled with rage.” I thought: How odd to say such a thing. And that can’t possibly be true. At the gym, I listen to a radio interview where men in their thirties talk about a project they started and they say it came from a place of anger. “That’s where the writing comes from,” one of them says, “this rage.”

On the way home, I think about this. Is that where the writing comes from?

I try to think about the ways in which I am angry, but instead, I think about sadness and I find myself tearful in the shower. There is something satisfying, I think about weeping with water flowing down all around you. I let it go on.

—

So, you’re driving along in a right-turn-only lane. There is a traffic light, a right-turn arrow, and it’s red. It’s early. There are hardly any cars on the road. No one coming, no one behind you. But the light is red. Do you turn?

I wait. But I think about turning. I count to ten. I scan the road. Still no one. Now that I have considered turning but decided to wait, I have become a bit invested in the waiting. I am now, in a way, committed to obeying the traffic signal, am I not? The seconds pass.

I chastise myself. Why not just go? But then I think: Shouldn’t the rules of the road be followed, even when there is no one else around? Even when there is no one watching?

—

Am I angry all the time? It is hard to know with certainty. I have read that an inability to express anger appropriately can lead to depression. That suppressed rage can manifest indirectly. What do I have to be angry about really, I ask myself. And what good does it to do be angry about things over which I have no control?

As I acclimate myself to middle-age, I am struck by how difficult it is to let certain things go. Certain beliefs about oneself, certain investments in particular narratives about one’s own life and its possibilities. I am a victim of circumstance. I am one who is always left behind. I am lovable or unlovable. I am skilled or unskilled at one thing or another. I am too ambitious or not ambitious enough. I am impractical. I am selfish. I will never be able to …

If there is a persistent anger (or perhaps I can refer to it more gently as a “frustration”) it is one born of grief. Of mourning the shapeless, inarticulate possibilities one’s life may have at one time seemed to present; potential at its most abstract, unrelated to action or consequence.

As one moves on, building a life one decision after another; erecting the scaffolding for the platform from which one views the landscape, one small stone (Do I turn now or do I wait?), one steel beam at a time, shapeless possibilities fall away and the vista increasingly becomes determined by one’s vantage point (How high the scaffolding? And the platform, oriented in what direction?)

—

The plants are at their most vulnerable after re-potting, so I try to situate them where they can receive an infusion of bright, filtered light. I check the soil each day for moisture, turn the pots so that they do not grow only in one direction, reaching, as they will, for the light. I check the leaves. I trim the brown ends of palm fronds. So far, they appear as though they will do well.

In the early morning mist, we walk across the street to the ocean. The sand is cold and wet. My son sheds his socks and shoes and runs toward the water. The piercing cold does not slow him. He stands still for just long enough to let me roll the legs of his pants up above his knees. That’s good, that’s good, he says, wriggling away as I try to roll them at his waistband too.

He runs back and forth along the water’s edge, waving his arms, playing a game with the breaking waves that follows its own internal logic, not immediately discernible to onlookers. We stand a distance away and watch him. The smallness of his body against the vast sea.

—

We had started in Los Angeles where we visited college campuses. At the first, a young man in a long-sleeved shirt and tie spoke to a group of us gathered around a metal table while just beyond us, students lounged poolside, the blue water glistening in high afternoon sun.

Later, M. navigated the unfamiliar roadways, where impatient drivers darted in and out of lanes like hummingbirds in a field of foxglove. We made stops. For a bookstore, for a tiny farmer’s market. We made a late lunch of strawberries.

In Santa Barbara, we sat on a patch of dry grass while our children waded in the still pools of water trapped between banks of sand.

From there, our route hugged the coast, the Pacific Ocean at turns blue and green and gray at our side as the sky darkened.

—

I made this trip once before, decades ago, with a man I did not love, but needed very much at the time, for reasons that I am only now beginning to understand. The soft underbelly of self seeks salvation in others, does it not?

At Jade Cove, we walk the long path down toward the water. I remember a sandy beach where we sat on driftwood and let the waves break at our feet. But this time, we don’t get far enough. The path is winding and long and the air is cold. Instead, we stop on a rocky elevation and watch the frothy waves pound against the cliffs. The heart aches at such beauty.

—

He had theories about love. We all do at nineteen, don’t we? “There are three stages, he would say: discovery, conflict, coalition building.”

“What stage are we in?” I asked one night. We were walking along the beach in the cool damp air. There was a sliver of moon and a scattering of stars.

“Discovery, of course,” he said without pausing.

“Maybe we can pass through conflict,” I said, turning to face him.

He shook his head. “No one passes through conflict. We either make it or we don’t.”

—

We head out to a series of rock formations and along the way, our son stops to examine the piles of tangled kelp drying on the beach. “Sea monsters,” he says, pokes at them with one foot before he walks on.

He and M. climb the rocks. I sit a distance away and watch. It is difficult not to think, even as I am watching, these are the best days. He is pure feeling. Without artifice, without doubt. He runs on not questioning whether we are following behind him because he has never known us not to be there. And the two of them, so free, as they weave their imagined tales.

“Pretend I am the emperor of this rock and you are the imperial guard.”

—

He drove me to the airport in his rented car. Walked me to the gate, kissed the top of my head. “See you in the fall,” he said as I backed toward the walkway. I held my fingers to my lips and waved before I turned away.

Two weeks later, I received a thick yellow envelope in the mail with the photos from our trip. Me, standing on a rock formation looking out to sea. Or in front of the old mission in Santa Barbara by the fountain. Or mountains shrouded in mist in early light.

And six weeks after that, he was back in the northeast, the heat of summer just beginning to break. We had written letters and talked on the phone. Fought over one thing or another. The cracks were starting to show. How distant those perfumed days along the coast. Those evenings smeared with stars.

—

Nothing lasts. Or rather, everything changes. Everything washing over us so quickly we barely have time to recognize it as it flows. Love, desire, sadness, joy.

Even when we hold our arms open wide to receive it. Even when we try to take it in, to say: I am happy now, watching these people I love move across this beach like they are made of pure light.

We blink our eyes, we turn our faces away. And as if in a single moment, it is gone

(for M.)

there will be no cantata sung
over our bodies as we
breathe the stale air of your
hotel room

we brandish rage
throw ourselves against these
frail trestles
the palm of your hand pressed flat
against my white throat

later we rinse ourselves
in the thin trickle of grace
left rattling in these
unconsecrated pipes

our lady of hotel bars
our lady of anonymity
our lady of perpetual sorrow

I drive down to New York after work, in the dark. The trip is so familiar. The traffic heavy at times, although not unexpectedly so. When I arrive, it is late, but my aunt offers to make a meal for me, which I have to decline several times.

I will stay with her tonight, then in the morning, make my way to Brooklyn, where I will spend the rest of the weekend on my own. A kind of bliss in solitude, both as space to clear the noise from my head and as a reminder, too of all that I have in the company of the people I love.

(The way that to truly see a thing is to look away and then look back)

To be reminded, in a sense, of all that is at stake in living.

—

I sleep lightly and wake early. Make breakfast for us both and sit with my aunt at her kitchen table. I ask about her friends. She tells me about the woman who thinks she is in love with a man who is dying. How she hovers around the edges of his life, his family. There are grown children, ex-wives. She was close to him decades ago, but not since then. She re-enters his life with unwelcome ferocity. Visits him in his home a thousand miles away. Sends gifts to him, to his family.

This is not about him, her friends suggest gently. Perhaps this is something that you think you need to do, but it is not.

But who among us can truly hear the admonitions of our friends when we most need to?

—

My aunt tells me how she has been visiting the dying as a hospice volunteer. She tells me how sad she is all the time. “I don’t think this was a good idea,” she says. “I’ve not been happy in my retirement.”

I tell her she should try to find something she has waited all these years to do. When she was younger, she had painted. A stack of canvases in our basement. There are photographs of her standing near an easel on which a half-finished oil painting of sunflowers waits. She has her long brown hair caught back in a striped scarf. She is looking over her shoulder at the camera.

“I’ve looked at a few things,” she says, “but nothing has grabbed me.”

Perhaps, I suggest, you have to be the one to do the grabbing.

“I know,” she says, “I know you are right, but I just don’t know what to do.”

Our conversation meanders. As it winds down, I ask her something that I have wanted to for some time. I am not certain how to ask it, so I say it directly:

“Why was it so important to our family narrative that I was the good child and my sister was not?”

The question does not seem to take her by surprise.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s how it has always been.”

You were always so good in school. You excelled at everything. But with D., it was not like that. Your mother was always sending it notes, making excuses. But not for you. You never caused a problem in all those years.

“But this can’t possibly be true,” I say. We remember the things we want to remember. This can’t possibly be true.

“It was,” she says. “It was.”

I press her. Even about our adoption, we were set up like this. I was born in Seoul and I was healthy. My sister, in a distant village and sickly. I was wanted; my parents killed in a car crash. My sister, found abandoned. I lived in a foster home in the kind care of strangers. My sister in an orphanage, neglected. “But our paperwork is the same,” I say. Everything about our histories is recorded in the same way. “Found abandoned at the Dongdoochun Home for Babies.” Where did these stories come from?

“I don’t know,” she says. “That’s what we were told. I don’t know.”

“All I know is when your mother took you back to Korea, she was told that there was a woman there who wanted to see you. And the people at the agency told her no. Don’t let her see you. That’s what they told your mother. They said: Don’t complicate things. You don’t know what the child remembers.”

—

The morning is crisp, the sky a pale blue with high scattered clouds. I take the west side all the way down to the Battery Tunnel. I am anxious driving this part of the trip; it is unfamiliar and the traffic around me seems impatient, unforgiving. One lane of the tunnel is closed, so it is narrow and I am a bit tentative.

As I adjust to the tunnel darkness, I see the headlights of the car behind me are close. The tunnel is long and winding. I feel a tightness around my heart. I take a deep breath to still myself, remind myself to keep breathing.

It is difficult to remain calm, but unreasonable, I know, to panic. I keep driving, uncertain of when it will end, the car behind me so close, propelling me forward at an uncomfortable speed.

Another deep breath and another, until finally, I see a bit of sky.

Two and a half miles, I learn later.

Later, there are reports of a car accident nearby. A young expectant couple killed on their way to the hospital to deliver the baby. The baby survives.

Who will take care of this baby?

—

I arrive at the hotel early in the evening. I am more tired than I had thought I would be. I try to read, but am distracted. I try to write. Instead, I sleep.

I wake with my head aching.

The friend of my aunt, who is trying to save the dying man, has a younger brother. I don’t know all the details of this story, but he was adopted as a child, but never told. Everyone in the family knew except him. It was not until both their parents passed away, a few years ago, that he learned this.

Soon after, he found his brother. It turns out that his brother lives close by – a mile or two away – from his own home. They bond to each other immediately and intensely. Their families gather for holidays. They talk all the time. The sister, my aunt’s friend, is devastated. She tells him: “First I lose my mother, then my father, and now you.”

When I first hear this, I want to say: “This is not fair. She is not being fair.” I want to shout it, really. How dare this woman say this! Her brother has been lied to his whole life, and now he has the chance to learn something about himself, to find some part of himself that has been missing. It is cruel to say this! It is unfair!

But then, I think in matters of love - in matters of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we love, and why - who among us, really, can be fair?

There are times when in my peripheral vision, I will detect motion – blurred or a smear of light. How one might expect to catch a glimpse of a ghost. This ghost, unconvinced perhaps that it should reveal itself to you, inconsequential and mortal as you are.

And so a test: A shifting of light. A breath of wind just enough to flutter through the loose pages spread across your desk.

Clever ghosts. Nudging you awake in the small hours.

So you rise, make your way down the stairs. Fill a glass of water at the kitchen sink. And as you are about to set it down, you turn your head.

Is that you, ghost? It is a lonely hour. Stay.

—

If I am asked, I will say that over time, my ambitions have become more modest. A few quiet hours to read, to write. Now and then, with friends, a lingering dinner for which I have made fussy and overwrought preparations. An afternoon at the beach, the brown limbs of my children dusted with damp sand. A familiar hand on my thigh as the light fades.

Long gone the daydreams of boardrooms and sleek suits and wood-paneled offices. The immigrant daughter’s fantasy of ascendancy. The orphan’s compulsion to prove a particular kind of worth.

With each day that passes, it becomes clearer how ill-suited I am for such a trajectory. How unwilling I am to bear its myriad costs.

—

We choose a table by the window, my friend and me, and it overlooks the dark river. She has been sailing. A couple weeks here at home and then she is off again. She names the islands: Antigua, Barbuda. And then the saints, she says: Lucia, Vincent, Christopher and Kitts.

A vocabulary of difference. She speaks to me of island and rainforest. Mango and breadfruit and the quiet Caribbean at night. And when I tell her of my life, it is parking lot and sidewalk and desk. It is gas station and snow.

She tells me of her friend, who is dying. And of the woman whose son hung himself in his apartment several months ago. How she hears from her every couple weeks. It is dark, the messages say. It has been so dark. But now after some time has passed, she says, there are at least fleeting glimpses of light.

—

My mother, in a dream, once told me that I was a spirit sent to protect her from sadness.

You are a ray of pure light, she said.

She was standing at the foot of my bed. She was wearing a nightgown I had never seen. It was satin, the color of the flesh of a ripe peach and its hem grazed the floor.

I was sitting up in my bed. That is too much for me, I said. And she grew agitated, raised her voice:

You are a ray of pure light. You are a spirit. A protector. You do not choose, she said. You are chosen.

—

I walk through the city on a cold rainy afternoon, my hood up, my eyes cast down. This protracted winter, relentless.

There is a man standing beneath the bus shelter, and as I approach he calls out to me. Excuse me miss can I ask you a question.

I am sorry, I say as I walk past.

Hey, he says as I quicken my pace. Hey, don’t you hear me calling you?

The rain has kept the skaters away, the rink downtown pristine and white. A saccharine loop of music plays as rainwater collects on its surface.

It is raining harder now.

—

Through a friend, I am introduced to a woman, another adoptee, and we meet to have a drink downtown. We talk easily. We have traveled, it seems, on similar paths.

When she speaks of her adoption, she says: All my life I have been the one who was chosen. It is only recently that I have come to understand that I am also the one who was given up.

We sip our drinks. We touch our napkins to the corners of our eyes. We laugh. This sudden intimacy thrills. After years of guarded, cynical youth, how willing I have become to take comfort from wherever it is given.

When we are done, we embrace, make plans for the next occasion.

I walk to my car in the cold damp night and think how strange that we should come to know each other now. All these years, I have embraced only the unwanted, relinquished self. How tightly, all these years, I have held this. To imagine the other side of this coin. To not only have been given up but to have been chosen.

—

For a time, as a child, I had an invisible friend. I cannot tell you what I called her because the name is such a strange and inexplicable phrase that I cannot bear to see it written down. But she lived in a narrow pantry closet in the kitchen of the apartment where I spent my childhood.

After dinner, while the adults lingered at the table, I would slip into the kitchen and stand by the closet and call to her. Sometimes, she would talk to me through the closed door. Sometimes, she would tell me to open it. And once in a while, she would beg me to come inside.

It was not easy for us to both fit in there, with the dustpan and the broom and the rolls of paper towels. But her requests were so rare and she would ask so sweetly, in a voice barely above a whisper.

Come inside, my friend, come inside.

I am so lonely here. Come inside.

On the morning of the last snow day, I stay in bed late, let the sun come up without me. All night, strange dreams of riding trains. Fitful sleep.  

I wake thinking of my father, who has been gone for many years. I am thinking of him, riding the train to see him in my dream, although this is not something that ever happened while he was alive.  

A palpable absence. The shadowy outline of a man who hovered at the edges of my childhood – just beyond the rooms of my house, just out of reach. 

— 

The next day, M. leaves early for New York. There is silence in the house when he is gone.  

I take my son to school, a route I have not traveled in some time. He is quiet, too. We wait behind the bus. When it pulls away, I drive up to the door. There is a teacher waiting just inside the glass doors to greet the students as they arrive. He runs toward her.  

— 

This is my life now, the dropping off, the picking up. The sitting around conference tables and sometimes, pacing a large room among flipcharts and whiteboards, clutching a clipboard or maybe staring at my phone. There is comfort in its contours – predictable, contained. Apprehensible.  

I sit at my desk, peel an orange. Sip coffee. Such quiet pleasures, this bitter coffee, this sweet fruit. There is snow on the ground and there is sun today and the bright light reflecting on the snow through the slats of my window blinds seems a reminder of some higher order, something approaching the divine. This is, perhaps, as close as we get.  

— 

After my mother died, I called Hospice to volunteer. They gently told me no, that it was too soon. Wait a year, I was instructed, maybe two. This rejection stung. What I wanted most was to be with the dying.  

There was no comfort in being with the living. They were too vibrantly, urgently alive: My college friends were piling into cars and driving to New Hampshire for a weekend in the woods. Or pulling all-nighters studying for exams. Or playing pool and drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Those were not my people. Not now. I wanted to find solace among the suffering.  

I languished. I took a part-time job at a law firm. I drafted letters and copyedited reports. I stood by the copy machine and waited while it spit out sheet after sheet of paper, warm from its machinery. I walked these pages around the office, handed them to people. Sometimes, they handed things back. I made stacks on my desk. I made labels for file folders.  

— 

It is not something I would choose to do now. Now, I think it would be too hard. The relentless reminders of mortality. The continuous practice of loss.

We need, I think, witnesses to our final hours. And there will be others, I expect, beside whose beds I will sit as the breath leaves their bodies. But not yet, I hope. Not now. 

— 

My mother believed that there were many more occasions than the formal holidays that were worth celebrating. We marked half-birthdays, the anniversaries of our adoptions. Report card days. Dance recitals. Some years, we celebrated the first day of spring or of winter.  

On these occasions, we ate cake for breakfast or wore crowns of paper flowers. We went for ice cream sundaes and stayed up late or we tied ribbons around all the doorknobs of our house.  

I took this from her, these impulses, or I did at least for a time. Wanting to imbue as many days as possible with an aura of celebration. Light up these simple days. Make these humble hours shine.  

I find it difficult to sit still in the humble hours. Celebrations and their attendant pleasures are seductive.  

Then after, untying the bows and discarding paper crowns, thinking next time, we will do more. Next time, won’t our pleasures be multiplied? 

— 

I wrap a few small gifts for my family late last night and leave them on the dining room table for them to find this morning.  

We stand around for the few minutes we have when we are all back together again, before we head off in different directions. There is unwrapping. There are small sounds of delight. We embrace each other. We touch. We wish each other well.  

Outside, from the porch, we see that a light snow has fallen while we slept. It has covered over the snow that had been muddied by passing cars. It obscures, for a time, the dark ground beneath.    

On the first morning after the storm, I sit at my desk and try to remember a line from a dream. My son is playing in the next room. His voice rises and falls. He says: “I’m creating a game that will see how much knowledge you have about Star Wars.”

I say: “I should tell you that my knowledge is limited.”

“Well, we’ll see,” he says and returns to his play.

I can hear my husband outside shoveling snow. The scrape of the shovel on the wooden porch. He slipped out this morning without a word, did not interrupt me at my desk, where I have been sitting for the past two hours, reading, writing, trying to. I watched the sky go from dark to light. These are beautiful hours, early morning. Such quiet.

I spend the day like this – reading, cooking, making attempts at writing things down. The simplest pleasures. Chopping vegetables – leeks and carrots and celery. Minced garlic. A pile of chopped parsley. Swiss chard and red kale. I make a cassoulet. A roast chicken. A kale salad. I fry potatoes.

Between the simmering and the roasting, I take the laundry still warm from the dryer. Fold it, make piles. And the dishes from the dishwasher: warm plates and silverware come out and mixing bowls and measuring cups go in.

How satisfying these tasks have become. How unexpectedly sustaining.

—

On the second morning after the storm, I read an article about freezing to death. What happens to the body as it reacts to the extreme cold. The way the blood thickens when the core temperature drops. The way the heartbeat becomes erratic.

The strange, cruel sensation of heat in the moments just before loss of consciousness. How some people who have frozen to death are found undressed, having shed their clothes in an attempt to stop the burning.

M. is outside again. Through the curtains, I can see motion against the backdrop of white, but from here, I can’t tell for certain if it my husband or the movement of the tree branches, laden with snow, rustled by wind.

Later I go out, too. We’ve lost one of our snow shovels, or at least it is buried under several feet of snow, so I use one meant for the garden instead. We work in silence. My progress is slow. In this particular domestic chore, I contribute little. I start our cars, clean them off. I go back inside while he is still working. I fill the teakettle.

—

We meet for dinner, the four of us, early forties, married a decade a more. Maybe we are all a little overdressed, maybe too much lipstick for a weeknight. We all see people we know. They saunter over, chat at our table. We order oysters and wine and laugh loudly. The company emboldens us.

One of us talks about leaving. Moving west or abroad. We’re applying for jobs everywhere, she says. We’re ready to go wherever.

Seven children among us. Four boys, three girls. We are writers and artists and architects. We came here from New York. We came here from Paris. Some of us have jobs with healthcare. Some of us have lost our fathers.

Later, I hear distressing news about friends of friends. A young woman dies in her sleep. Another, a sudden illness.

M.’s parents have had a good week, though. One night there is a concert at the facility where they live and his mother and father sing along.

—

My son starts with easy questions nearly anyone could answer. “Very good,” he tells me, “but now it’s going to get harder.”

He holds up a space ship that I cannot name. I shrug. He shakes his head. “What about this?” and he holds up another.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I have no idea.”

He leaves the room and I turn back to the piles of paper on my desk.

—

By afternoon, the sun is out, high and bright. A friend of my son’s comes over and the two of them discuss what to do first. “We have a lot of work to do,” he tells me as they climb the stairs.

I am working on something that is more difficult than I had anticipated and so I find myself easily distracted. I wander into the kitchen, make tea. I re-organize a cabinet. Run a cloth along all the countertops.

—

How close can you get to a person? This is the question I am turning over in my mind. It is not mine, but Nan Goldin’s, and I am trying to write about her photographs. I watch an interview with her in which she asks it several times, says it’s a question that drives her work. How close can you get to a person?

And when she says it, in my own mind, I answer without hesitation: Inside, inside, get inside.

—

Over dinner, we talk about desire now in these marriages, after children, in these forty-year-old bodies. One of us talks about a passing flirtation with a man in a coffee shop. One of us talks about a former lover. “What could possibly be more powerful,” one of us asks, “than feeling desired?”

We pass on dessert. We check our watches. “I just want more,” one of us says. “I want it to be the way it was.”

A man at a table nearby glances over at my friend, and for a moment, I see her the way he might. She is beautiful. Her dark hair frames her face. Her skin is pale and smooth, her features delicate, doll-like.  

She leans forward and lowers her voice. “It feels unfair to ask sometimes. There is so much on his mind. He is working all the time. The kids.”

She stands up to put on her coat.

“But I just want more than this.”

Outside, in the cold night, there is snow on the ground and a light snow falls. In the parking lot, we embrace, promise each other we will do this again before too long.

And then the four of us disperse, each to her car. Each to her family and her warm house, the lights on the porches burning.