A great deal of me would have preferred not to be born. And since being born, a great deal of me has done its best to remain suspended in amniotic fluid, a membrane and a mother between my body and the world. I would have liked to never get glasses or not to hear, tried starving myself and sponging up alcohol’s warm barrier until I felt nothing or free. Around the time I had my first period, people I knew—young people—started to die. Every few years another would leave—suddenly and violently, sometimes a few at once—and that too became a strategy. I could feel them close by, wrapped their deaths around me like shells left hollow and waiting on a beach, and ventured toward where they had gone. It’s tempting, in grief, to do that. So thin the curtain becomes then—nearly transparent. My friends transported quick to the other side, their blurry forms still visible, I thought: Why not pull it back a little? Why not step across?

All ways of returning to source are not equivalent. Though there is not wrong or right there, no bad or good, the routes taken have each their own orbit, their own signature. Boundaryless, I toyed with several of them before choosing to stay here. I tried punching holes in the atmosphere with drugs and sex, leaned so far into the bright rocket of mania I thought I might finally blast through. I ran naked into the freezing ocean of my mind, tried to extinguish myself. And yet, always a small candle lit within, waiting to be returned to, always the love of others, always the world and its vigorous glittering paradoxes holding me in time.

35 years old, I am no longer dangled over a cliff edge. When I travel beyond the earth, I go protected and come back when called. I have my helpers, an orb around me still new but steady and not going away. What has changed? Age? A sense of each day’s miraculous arc? The right kind of love or habits or medicine? No one thing but the candle grows brighter, makes itself known daily even when I am plastered by despair to the bed, even when another friend floats into the firmament, even when fire and flood and fire, even when war and war and war.



Jam comes to me in a dream. As in many dreams of them, they are alive, have been alive this whole time—the past six years of their death. We are standing in a river. The river, ours. In the dream, I have known they were alive, but I have not wanted to talk to them. Alive they are not what death has made  of them—returned to the shimmering creature they were when we met, when we fell in love, poets young and boundaryless, a friendship for the ages; alive they are tortured, outside themself, a layer of thick gray clay again between us. We stand in the river where their ashes were spread, down the bank from a sycamore planted with more ashes and their name at its base, a bank steep with sand and rock. The grievers stepped and slid their way down, stood to watch ash become the silt of the river bed Waist-deep in flowing water, I wanted to be their body.

In the car a few days later, I feel them on a long flat stretch, before turning north toward the mountains. This time, their presence is as it has been more recently—not the ghost of my darling friend lingering, stuck half-here and wanting to be—a guide, a helper, having moved to the side of my dashboard where the ancestors sit. Standing in front of the Pacific Ocean, I watched it happen—their form arcing like a sun from one edge of the horizon to the other. Driving the high desert, it is beautiful to be with them again, in this new and steady way. I ask why they are with me—afraid, at first, that another suicide is coming. But it is not that, not today. Instead, a hello, a moment together, a reminder of our love that I have so often doubted, wondered at since they left. And a message to begin again to write.




Lately, when I go up to my dashboard, others have been there, too. Rachael and Michael and Katy and Christopher, sometimes Loren even, Jones, J., their brother. All dead and waiting for me to write. They haven’t been pushy, just near, lined up just behind my dead family as I finished writing their book. Off to other work now, the family has gone, and the friends are here, front and center ready to help.

When they appear, I try to understand what it is together they have to say, what it is they want. Write about dead friends? About young death? I thought I was through with that, had done it before, years earlier, in a book I told myself was to help other people be with their grief. Really, it was to heal me, and as time passed, I found a plane in my mind and flew high up, saw the book for what it was: neon sign pulsing HOW TERRIBLE, HOW YOUNG, HOW IT MADE ME WANT TO DIE TOO. I let the book go and felt tired. Tired of myself and my grief, of the stories I’d been telling for a decade, of my swimming in the water of it as a way to point outward instead of turning toward what had been in me long before any of them left.

It takes a while to understand they want a book about suicide.

They did not all die of suicide. Not in the ways that tend to be called to mind when the gong of the word is struck, anyway. Not all of them were car in a closed garage, flung from fourteen stories, a hundred pills in the stomach. Some were murdered by others or slowly died at the mercy of their failing bodies. Some left in ways that were murky—fell or jumped, stopped taking medicine, drank until their organs failed. Those who wished to be clearer about their exits died of guns—to the head, to the heart—or by means their families worked hard to keep private.  

But of course the dead are wise. They do not want the book to be about suicide in the way I would have younger and angrier and grieving approached it—their glittering specimens tacked open with tiny pins in romantic accounts of their final months and moments, philosophical treatises on their courage and agency—the way I have needed to approach it so that I might find a logic to assuage my heartbreak and keep me from following them. No, this time I am to release my gruesome poetic inclinations and grow up, write not of the searing instant of their endings, but of tenderness—of the soft centers they brought into this world that writhes with horror so ambient it becomes the air, air we are supposed to know how to breathe.

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