May Third

twenty years from the edge of the world

Twenty years ago my sister died by suicide. Isn’t it strange how one can write a sentence that contains so much? A thousand stories unspooling forward and back from the moment she left the end of the cliff, so many of them unknown, untold. Up in the air.

Where it was, where she wasn’t anymore | 2004

Today I took Dante to school and took myself to the spa. I sat in the hottest tub and read fairy tales until my mind refused the words and I just sat and soaked. I took myself to the nail salon and sat across the plexiglass for a silent manicure of a softer pink, a color of 20 years ago. I went home and ate leftovers with eggs and read the New Yorker, an article about Judith Butler I later finished on my phone. I sat on the floor of the sun room — a room that doesn’t know yet what it wants to be — and opened a big flat box of Kelsey’s 20+ year-old photographs, one of two here, one of many altogether. I flipped through envelopes of snapshots, those partnered artifacts of an other time. Hermes (feline psychopomp) came and rubbed himself against me & atop the photos and with cramping legs I took it as a sign to quit, dancing on the edge of overwhelm.

I took myself upstairs and with the other cat for company I crawled in bed and napped from 1:22 til almost 3. Seeing myself in Kelsey’s photos and through Kelsey’s eyes unnerved me. There’s so much more to say about that, but: a thousand stories, still unspooling. We were so clueless. So dumb and brave, so wrong.

20 years now, intervening. I feel old now, I feel old today especially. I feel old in the way that I would’ve seen myself now, from then. Old like mother-of-a-teen-boy tired, cat-napping perimenopausal dreams in the afternoon.

10 IDEAS A DAY (symptomatic)

1. WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS??! I thought a hot flash would be like a night sweat, a passing heat. Not this red-alert light-headed emergency vehicle body boa-constricting my chest while loosening guts and spilling abject tears on whatever’s near. Dear god, get me off already!

2. yes, I do mean get me off

3. constantly exhausted but rarely sleepy, wired but energetically tapped out

4. Tuesday, in the car at sunset yelling at Dante to look at the clouds then crying that no one ever wished on their deathbed to have spent more time on Facebook marketplace THEN laughing about having ordered 48 ant traps on Amazon: we call these “mood swings” as if they’re playground kit

5. brain fog — pea soup — pee soup — soup night — more cookies — what

6. everything required of me feels like a massive, irritating impossibility. make a phone call? fuck you. respond to an email? you’re fucking kidding me. make plans? I plan on being in Tokyo by Monday, watch me (/watch my kid for me)

7. I now grok the stories of the mothers and the wives who just up & walk out. It’s not right, but it’s tempting. This morning on the drive to school I wanted to gag the kid, or eject him with a button. It’s not you, sweet Dante, it’s me (but would you please shut up now)

8. and then i’m sniffing his head when he leans on me on the couch and remembering the little babe in arms he was, so chunky fresh and burbly and fuck, I’m crying again

9. Dizziness, nausea, brittle hair, dry skin, itchy palms, dry eyes, headaches, back aches, 10 days of migraines, dry lips, itchy feet, dry mouth, raging thirst, sugar cravings, caffeine cravings, hyperactive heart, greasy hair, furrowed brow, rage mouth, panic attacks

10. [memory loss]

in bed with the orange cat and my receding hairline

COMICS ABOUT

Kels Comic #7 | London, UK | 2005

Over several days in the spring of 2005 I drew seven pages of comics about Kelsey’s death and then — just stopped. I wrote about her, I made her death the subject of my degree show, I wrote my dissertation on autobiographical comics as a means of exploring rupture… but I don’t think I actually drew any more about her for a very long time.

Santa Cruz, CA | 2023

After my nap I made myself some coffee and sat down to edit a piece I wrote last spring, the beginning of this book I’m writing (am I? I’m trying to). I’ve been worrying it and working it over in my mind and I feel like I made some progress today, splitting it in two: a prologue and first chapter (that of the Queen of Pentacles, the first card I drew).

So without (much) further ado… for all of you who helped me sell out the very first edition of the Bon Sequitur Tarot deck over the weekend (thank you! thank you!)… the prologue, though subject to change:

(& oh yeah — I keep forgetting to ask, but here I am remembering and asking: tapping the “like” ♡ at the bottom of this page is an easy way to help the algorithm help me, will you please?)

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My husband died on July 1st, 2020. But this can’t be true.

My partner died on July 1st, 2020. Wrong again: according to the law, my friend.

Not partner, as that would imply a taxable relationship and we had none. Nor husband — because, despite having had a mid-size wedding at a charmingly rustic venue during the tail end of the season, attended by most of our nearest and dearest and adhering closely enough to early-21^st-century wedding trends as to be indistinguishable from the real thing: live bluegrass performed by musician-friends, taco truck, hand-painted signs, self-written vows — the fact remains that we never signed any government papers and thus, when Ben died 999 days later (OMG) he died "single, never married" and I was plunged into the greatest (or latest: there have been many, they’ve all been the worst) loss of my life simultaneous to a dilatory probate process of which I was both executor and primary benefactor. But for those 999 days (and many since) he was my husband, and I thought we would have much more time together than we did.