bitchtucci wrapped
& what if hope crashes through the door
what if it lasts a somersault
Mong-Lan, Elegy
It’s our first time meeting but K tells me about the back-to-back deaths of boyfriends in her twenties. She’s forty-eight now and has just taken out the acupuncture needles. She’s massaging the sinewy meat of my neck. It’s not enough pressure for me, but I let her talk.
She almost burned her house down because grief made her so porous and sensitive. At least, this is the connection she’s made after all these years trying to make sense of it. When a family of squirrels moved into her attic, she called an exterminator to catch them alive. He couldn’t get them all. He set up traps and told her that she might hear them struggling in the cage. Just wait for me, he said. I’ll come back and clean the bodies out.
This was not tolerable. In the kitchen, she could hear the scratching of a trapped animal and began to cry. She wondered if the squirrel was a mother, or a baby. She paced around until the anguish reached a feverish tenor. I know the way a body’s restlessness can feel like a kettle reaching full scream. She retreated, collapsed into tears on her bed, jolted back to the kitchen when the fire alarm sounded. K didn’t tell me how the fire happened but described the melted linoleum counters and her startling realization that grief was driving the car. She talked about how strangely pleasurable the clarity of sadness felt, but how she learned that she needed to live her big adult life and that it was – horrible to say it like this, she said – more important than the squirrel’s life.
This is where she lost me. I would do almost anything to release the squirrel alive. I don’t really think that my big adult life is more important than the squirrel’s life, or if I feel that way on some level, I don’t admit it even to myself. This might be part of my problem.
Mom was like this too. Mice moved into her apartment last winter. They’d steal her cats’ food and stow it inside the nest they shredded into the base of her couch. It was – oh – disgusting. The mouse piss and stale cat food commingled, emanating mothballs and ammonia and a certain gamey animal smell. The mice were insatiable, and the cats abandoned their god-given prey drive. They began peacefully coexisting with the mice. The supply of food never ran out; my mother free fed the cats on little paper plates on the ground.
Her immune system was so depleted by the chemo. It was a health hazard. My siblings set up traps and we threw the couch away. When we lifted it up to haul to the dumpster, a pile of cat food dispensed from the torn undermesh like a broken gumball machine. Jackpot. Five pounds of putrid Meow Mix.
I believe we tried to release the mice in the traps but I actually don’t know. I was never there when a mouse was caught. I think of my mother listening to the scratching miserably, weak in bed, waiting for my sister to come, hoping she would be in time to release the animal alive into the apartment parking lot. I think of my mother and her soft heart blessing the mouse on its journey. I think of my mother and her soft heart actually wishing that it was possible to continue cohabitating with the mice in some sanitary Disney princesslike way.
K asks me if I was there when my mother died. She knows that Mom is dead because it’s impossible to explain my symptoms without going there. I skirt around it at first, but K knowingly and doggedly pursues the thread, and I don’t resist sharing for long. I want to feel better. I debate myself all the time about whether etiology is important or separable from presenting problems.
“Everything is connected,” K says. Obviously it is. I’ve been waking up gasping midway through the night. I tuck myself back under a weighted blanket, folded twice or three times to concentrate the weight on my chest. The nausea, the dizziness. The nervous system panic that hits me by surprise, my mind going blank in a small animal’s freeze response. Dread is driving the car then. K is concerned about the quality of my blood and says that she sees anxiety a lot among those who are especially depleted, almost as if the body is energetically eating itself. I imagine my body eating itself and then sounding the alarm, frantically, at all costs, at any opening for panic: stop that! Stop eating me! I wait for a profound spiritual koan or Chinese medicine herb to be suggested. K wants me to eat more beets.
Oh, I think.
I am face down on the massage table, head in the hole, and I tell her yes, I was there when my mother died. We all were, me and my siblings. We’d been with her around the clock for weeks, sleeping in armchairs and cots, tripping over each other to pee in the night, turning the brightness down on our phones so as not to disturb each other when we stopped talking and retreated to scrolling to pass the sad hours. I tell her that we stayed there after, that my sister and I slept in the bed with her overnight. Two tears leak out of my eyes and it’s distantly interesting to feel them slide symmetrically to the center of my face and gather on my nose. I stop talking there, but I remember everything. I put a silver bracelet around her cooling wrist, my new silver chain bracelet. I wanted it to gather her energy overnight or something. I had the feeling of wanting to be so close to her, forever. Anything that touched her acquired profound import. My sister watched me do this, and after I explained, she shyly took off her engagement ring to put on one of my mother’s long, beautiful fingers. We slept on either side of her like angels holding vigil.
I had just gotten a tattoo of a heart locket with feathery angel wings on a chain. It was still fresh when Mama, sleepy from the way death was beginning to call blood from her extremities back into her heart, asked about it.
We were holding hands and laying next to each other. I watched her greedily while she rested, tracking the rise and fall of her chest. Sometimes I squeezed and she squeezed back, a language we had spoken for years. Her eyes drew closed but snapped open from time to time. I could see her lithe eyes trace my body and land on the tattoo where my wrist faced her wrist in the mirror of our intertwined hands. “What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s about you,” I said, “and that Emily Dickinson poem. It’s been stuck in my head all spring. Hope is the thing with feathers - that perches on the heart.” The real line is “that perches in the soul,” but I always misremember it.
Mama slow blinked at me. She didn’t like that I got tattoos, even the ones that were about her. That was okay. The tattoo was about her, but for me. It was about the great project of my life: hope is not about hoping for a particular outcome. All outcomes are bad eventually if you are a person who struggles with vairagya, which I do. Hope is about hoping you’ll be so awake and alive to the beauty as it’s happening to you. Hope is about hoping you’ll say goodbye very, very proud of how you stood in the gales of wind with each other.
Chains fascinated me as my mother got sicker. I contemplated how strong the links could be, interlocking through round contours which can bear a massive amount of pressure by dispersing it evenly throughout the shape, unlike pressure applied to angles or corners, which tend to snap and break at the inflection points. I loved taking my bracelet on and off – how quickly and easily we can break the chain, not by violently pulling it apart, but by releasing it through a simple mechanism. How important it is to learn to love something free. Hope lives there especially.
Eleven years ago, at Buena Vista Park in San Francisco (which is the park with the swing that overlooks Haight-Ashbury – you know it, maybe, even just in a dream), I encountered a black padlock on a chanlink fence inscribed with that Emily Dickinson line. I was with someone I was falling in love with but I hadn’t told them yet. I knew I would. It was delicious, knowing that. Hope is the thing with feathers. Remembering it now, I think of Gabi’s idea – that it’s precious and full of gravity, the time between knowing you’ve fallen in love with someone and telling them. She advises to enjoy wanting to say I Love You for as long as possible because you’ll find yourself trying to say it in other ways. I love this time so much that I have been known to wait too long. This matters because in the slow, lovely, isometric inner torture of waiting, I have sometimes lost the virtuousness of how big and true and generous it is to say I Love You.
Three weeks before Mom died, I needed to take her to the emergency room. She was vomiting blood and couldn’t eat, not even the hard boiled eggs we’d make in batches of four or five for her to eat with her soft mouth and the salt shaker she kept on her bedside table. She didn’t want to go, but I begged. “I’m scared,” I said, “and I love you.” She acquiesced in the end, lifted her arms and let me slip a clean black dress over her: the tips of her fingers first, then a gentle tug past the crown of her head, like an obliging infant. When she gathered her strength to walk on her own to the bathroom, brushing her her teeth and taking a white washcloth to her face, my heart felt like it was clawing its way out of my chest to get to her. I was amazed by her strength, and by the small slivers of dignity she always gathered for herself. I took a secret picture of her. I thought wildly, hope is the thing with feathers!
There’s a room in my house which used to be my office but which is now an in-between room. One of the final tasks I did at my mother’s apartment this summer was a load of laundry. A last load of laundry. I separated out towels, sheets, things I thought I could use. Her bathrobe.
About two years ago, I fell in love with this fluffy grey bathrobe. I have its twin. I wear mine all around the house, where the loose sleeves trail into my pasta sauce as I’m cooking absentmindedly, thinking and thinking about something else. I bought her the same one because she hated the cold of her apartment. It was chilly from the natural draftiness of the old walls but also with the muscle memory restraint of poverty.
When we finally had enough money, I told her over and over to turn up the heat for herself, but she rarely did. She left the back door cracked for the cats to play outside even in freezing temperatures, and she layered three old quilts on her bed – my old mattress from college – and turned on the little space heater that her neighbor tried to give her. She insisted on paying him ten dollars for it. Sometimes she’d maneuver her feet to the very edge of the bed, seeking the warm hum. Her room was a cocoon.
I gave her the robe as if I’d really cracked the case. If I couldn’t change her habit of restraint, perhaps I could add something to make it more bearable. But she left it hanging on her bathroom door. I saw her wear it once or twice. She only wanted to wear it when she was clean, and it never became intuitive or reflexive to her the way it did for me. She felt it was too luxurious to wear casually around in her real life. She was saving it.
“Can you do my bed?” she asked me before I left every day. In her tossing and turning, in all of the hours she spent bedbound, the blankets would slip around, accreting all manner of the day’s fragments: errant cracker crumbs or pine needles unsticking from the wet, adventurous paws of the cats. I shook them out and placed them back over her little body one by one. They settled like parachutes, warm gusts of air slowing their fall almost impossibly. I tucked them around her feet. I looked at the shape she made with more love than I thought I could bear. I’m still trying to bear it.
I washed her grey bathrobe. It’s heaped on top of the laundry basket that I threw into the room in my house which used to be my office. Her low Korean table is in there too. She told my sister to give it to me. Her bedside table, a solid wood bench. So many papers, her death certificates. Why did I order two? No one has asked to see them except her vituperous old landlord, and I would never have given him his own copy – I can’t give any part of her away. Her dried seaweeds and gochugaru still wait for me to use them, but I feel like I’ve been eating the same six meals over and over again for months. The many kinds of seaweed wait in the wings while I continue to eat their simplest relative, packets of seasoned gim, standing at my counter with my leg in absentminded tree pose, saliva collecting under my tongue as if my very cells desire salt. I clean the rest of my house but treat the room like a transitory space, a train platform for objects that can’t be thrown away.
As it gets darker and colder, more train platforms create themselves in my house. My kitchen table fills with books and journals, interesting pens. My bedroom vanity collects clean clothes, the pile growing so tall that sometimes I smoosh the fabrics down, hoping that the little rubber tree in the corner can catch more of our city’s debonair winter sun.
Grief has brought me closer to detail, a feeling like running my tongue over the inside of my teeth. I drive home from work and just chew on phrases. “It bears repeating” almost makes me cry several days in a row. I picture Atlas bearing the weight of the world, and imagine a drawing where I label the world as “repeating” and Atlas as “it.” It’s so true, I think to myself, shaking my head. Some things do bear repeating. They really bear it.
The week before Thanksgiving I get another mama tattoo: a little ballpoint fish drawn on an envelope. She called me angelfish as a young child. The letter was from 2013. I was living in France with the lover I eventually said I Love You to. Mom wrote it for a care package she sent to my dusty little second floor apartment in Pézenas, but I wouldn’t get to read it until years later. This year, actually. In her haste, she sent the package without the letter, which my sister found somewhere in her apartment and gave to me.
I had to pay 75 euros just to pick the package up from the little postal office in front of the high school where I worked, which was a huge sum to me at the time. It was the customs fee, somehow first collected by the French postal service, then collected by the postman from the secretary, who had fronted the cost for me in small town good faith. There were Korean japchae noodles, gim seaweed packets, maybe a book. I don’t remember. I missed her so much that year. The thing I remember most is cutting out and saving the addresses she’d written on top of the cardboard box, brought to my knees by her handwriting.
I bring the letter to my tattoo artist and she asks, “How is your mom?” and we cry together when I tell her the news.
I love seeing the fish on my wrist. Driving north on St. Helens Road, I train my eyes on it for a second before I look up. The St. Johns Bridge has just become visible in the far distance, obscured by the hill and the mist gathering in the branches of the trees. Unbidden, commentary about the futility of getting to the bottom of my feelings visits me. What bottom? It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. It’s navel gazing. You feel sad. Simple.
When I’m almost over the bridge, getting to the city side, I see a friend of a friend start to make her way across. She’s on a walk with someone and she’s laughing. She looks so beautiful. We have talked a few times, long talks, and I could roll down my window to say hello to her, but I just smile in the car and let it be my secret.
The fish reminds me that I have been loved unconditionally, eternally, and perfectly, and that I better start acting like it. The bottom falls out and out and out, and love is still left, glimmering like a lucky penny I can’t stop finding.
I manage a shower before midnight on the 30th of December. I step out and check the little pink clock on the shelf. 11:57pm. I am safe.
Koreans have old superstitions about luck on the New Year. You’re not supposed to shower on New Year’s Eve or Day – you don’t want to wash the good luck away. As a child, I thought of luck as something that could drip down my dark, wet hair, into the drain. You’re not supposed to sweep either – don’t sweep away the good luck.
I read in some stupid post that the Irish believe in flinging open the windows and doors on New Year’s to let the bad luck air out.
It’s cute to think of luck like this: so tangible and small, something to be protected or shooed away, like puffs of dandelion or wayward silvery little moths.
Maybe the superstitions become so well-trod and sentimental because our memories are always finite eventually. The superstitions, carried by so many of us, only grow clearer with each tread. It’s a relief to have traditions that aren’t just ours. I don’t worry so much about forgetting because many people are in charge of remembering with me.
I wish I could call my mother at 12:01 like I always do. I wish she could tell me something very true in her particular way. But I carry her superstitions still, and I believe I always will. It comforts me, how easy they are to remember. The memories we have together seem to dissolve the harder I try to catch them, maybe because I’m the only one left to keep track of them. This is the gauziness of new grief. I know this because I’ve loved and lost many people before mama and even after her. Still, still. She rises with the moon as my biggest loss.
When this Richard Siken line makes its rounds from time to time, I always stop to process it: “Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.” I have the tee-shirt my mother wore on the day she died in a Ziploc bag thrown haphazardly on the train station of my bathroom shelf. I grow brave enough to open it and smell it every few months. I know that each time I smell it, I release more of her. I try to mete out my need for comfort so it can last. The shirt smells less and less like the sweet, milky warmth of her and more and more like the laundry soap.
I washed my hair before New Year’s Eve, just in the nick of time. I will keep what I can keep. Comfort is no small gift. I will surrender it all eventually. Hope is the thing that suspends it in front of you even after you let go. You can keep looking for as long as you need. I hope I hope I hope.
*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
bitchtucci wrapped booklist
I spent swaths of this year where reading while eating was the only way I could make myself eat. I filled many journals of looping, inky, almost illegible writing. I talked to so many friends and wrote wise things they said on post-its to place in my journal later. It was a searching year.
I read many twisty, grim novels. Many books of poetry, often for comfort, for the second or third time after a long elapse since first reading. I read a lot of nonfiction books — texts on spiritualism, Buddhist books of the dead and dying, pop-psych, psych theroy, lit theory. Reading about ideas brought me significantly back to myself when I felt the most lost. I hunted for free pdfs and often found them, feeling like a hacker or something — or like Trinity from the Matrix. I read a metric ton of gay historical fiction romances, a few fabulous, but many cringey and bad, with awful, saccharine sex scenes I’d skim through, almost as if reading too carefully risked that the same sort of cloying, stilted intimacy would start to bleed into the sex I had in real life (it didn’t).
Reading anything feels more transportive to me than TV because unless the tenor of a movie or show is just right, my mind wanders. Reading requires me to inhabit a story completely. I will put a book down or reread a page five times if I’m not grasping the writing. With TV, it’s so easy to slip away and think about other things. One funny thing about anxiety is how interesting it is. If you’re good at fishing out details, anxious perseveration starts to feel a lot like – well – creating something.
Here are books that I can’t stop thinking about. They weren’t even necessarily my favorites. But actually sort of they were:
✿ Dear Memory by Victoria Chang
I had to read this one slowly this fall. I am always moved by ephemera. I loved the zine-like fragments of handwritten notes and documents that accompanied the poem letters which often ached in their simplicity. I loved the long conversations with other writers that happened in citation.
I have been wrestling with memory for my whole life. Of course. Everyone does. My fear of the death of my mother was germinated and well-watered by watching her be abused in my earliest memories. This uneasy feeling stayed with me for our whole lives together. I felt jealous and protective of memories even as they formed. I recall being eight or nine, watching her pick fresh-growing mint from beside the steps of a misty house in Bodega Bay, preserving the bitter, high salinity smell and the look of her long, pale fingers in the damp verdure. I wrestle with the way my sadness now has painted a wide brush over so many memories. I wonder if they’re gone forever, or at least dulled forever. Chang wrestles immensely with memory. She pieces together family stories so familiarly, and beautifully touches the ripped edges where a certain kind of immigration erases and loses things, as if she’s squinting at objects that have just fallen off a cliff. She says in one letter, “I wonder how memory can become larger and larger” and I lean closer to the book, desperate for her to tell me how she’s accomplished it. Ah. I simply loved how many ideas there were. The meticulousness. How specific and worthy one family’s lore is. How much a gift it is to peek inside anytime someone wants to share.
✿ All Fours by Miranda July
An Ayanna recommendation, and a very recently finished book. At their behest, I listened to the audiobook, all over a very difficult span of November and December. I would stop mid-stride — in the middle of a crosswalk holding my dog on a slack leash or with my toothbrush shoved in my mouth — and let my mouth hang open in surprise. July has a gift for starting a sentence and then ending the sentence in a completely fucking different place. I would want to look around and ask, “Did any of you guys hear that?” or “What the fuck is going on?”
This is a book that made me think about so many things — in the shower I listened to it intently, staring at the tiles in the colored light cast through my shower curtain, absorbing the white noise rhythm of the showerhead. In the water’s sussurus, I could almost hear the gears of my brain turning like the tiny chimes of a wind-up music box. Yes, it’s basically a book about a white bisexual woman on the fucking verge, and yes, the first third is more captivating than the last two-thirds (maybe because I’m a tad too young to get it). It is worth the read because it is is an incredibly connection- and contrast-activating book. I keep wanting to describe a particular scene — actually, just a small, off-hand exchange between two characters within a scene — to explain how it reminded me of the idea that the sad side of assuming best intentions is that you’re ASSUMING INTENT AT ALL and CAN BE VERY WRONG — but I don’t want to spoil any of the absolutely demented plot twists that happen.
Everything that could possibly remind me of this book does. I see “Distributed and sold exclusively by Trader Joe’s in Monrovia, CA” on the goat cheese wrapper and gasp.
✿ Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
I read a lot of Adrienne Rich in the foggy ten day limbo of my mama coming home from the hospital before she died. I would almost fall asleep on the mattress that my sister dragged onto the floor of the tiny second bedroom, reading Adrienne with a pencil in the tiniest, most surreal amount of awakeness I had – a thin, hypnotized feeling like lucid dreaming – underlining very beautiful and very true slivers of words. I thought about Adrienne Rich’s death (Santa Cruz, 2012) a lot. About a third from the bottom one of my most favorite poems ever, Splittings, she says something that I’ve repeated to myself thousands of times over many years: “The world tells me I am its creature.” THE WORLD TELLS ME I AM ITS CREATURE. “I am raked by eyes / brushed by hands.”
Rich is so gifted at turning things just to the side and smiling generously at you and saying, “You innately can see a different perspective. You want to have your mind changed.” It’s so very beautiful to not be so attached to your little theories in your scared little life. Rich is so good at digging you out of a well-trod thought, like, “Consider!” and then just a wide hand gesture moving across all the land.
“Pictures form and dissolve in my head:
we are walking in a city
you fled, came back to and come back to still
which I saw once through winter frost
years back, before I knew you,
before I knew myself.
We are walking streets you have by heart from childhood
streets you have graven and erased in dreams:
scrolled portals, trees, nineteenth century statues.
We are holding hands so I can see
everything as you see it
I follow you into your dreams
your past, the places
none of us can explain to anyone.”
✿ Togetherness by Wo Chan
I picked this book up because I was so enchanted by the cover. Animals with faces in bright colors. I love feverish, diary-like poetry. Like them, like you, I map great significance onto these many ordinary events. One poem about Yelp reviews makes me cry. I watched so much “Chopped” depressed in my early twenties and I gasped when a poem about risotto began with chef Scott Conant on a judge’s panel, and again when another poem mentions Alex Guarnascelli. The poems hop step to step: vulgar, funny, very fucking honest. I feel so taken care of by queer Asians who write with longing and sadness and old wound embarrassment and hero worship of their mothers and families.
✿ Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.
Everyone loved this book this year and so the fuck did I. Yes, it’s essentially about an emo brown boy, in the grand tradition of sad brown boys who often create their own problems, as in There, There or Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
While slower in pace, Akbar’s writing is at least as tight (and often more) as those predecessors. He writes with incredibly cogent and specific prose about strange and singular situations – he reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez in this way. In the rubble of those situations, Akbar will offer so many sweepingly beautiful jewels, like, “Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.” It’s funny, too, like, “It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”
I love when poets write novels.
This is a book about incomprehensible loss, being alone with yourself, about the vulnerability of wanting to be cherished and remembered, and the incredible gift of being together and giving your attention to someone else. Attention is the start of devotion and so forth.
✿ No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz
This was recommended to me by my wise dyke clinical supervisor who is teaching me Internal Family Systems therapy. Sure, dry, generalizing white guy writing, but so accessible and what a useful therapeutic orientation. I gravitate toward many of the symbolic and loosey-goosey therapy modalities, so love to use IFS with my clients, these squirrely children. So much healing happens in approaching magical thinking quite seriously, and children grasp the exploration of pretend so elegantly. I trace their bodies on big sheets of butcher paper, careful not to nick their clothes with my black marker. We locate Anger inside, and search for who can help them.
I am a person who sometimes resists parts of myself. I ask myself, “Do I have a right to feel this way?” and try to talk myself out of a feeling. How unbelievably the wrong question. But it is my fascination with and deep love of people that has always guided me back to a fascination and deep love of my own stupid broken heart. “No Bad Parts” can be just one of many whispered incantations.
✿ The Henchmen of Zenda by KJ Charles
Charles is my favorite of the gay historical fiction writers. She is a research glutton and an incredibly beautiful writer. This book saved my life when my mom was so near death and I needed to be completely transported. The premise is so stupid and delicious. I think maybe a person would call it swashbuckling, so I will. It’s about an assassin-for-hire working for the awful half-brother of a corrupt and annoying prince whom you, dear reader, agree deserves to die. The assassin is hired by the half-brother to help depose the prince (deny, defend, depose core). There is an accidental falling in love. There are schemes and plots within schemes and plots. It moves quickly and is not too precious about anything. There’s a moat and it’s the most prominently a moat has ever featured in anything I’ve read. It’s some of the most fun you can have while reading.
*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
Here is also a playlist I have been putting together and changing around this month. It’s a weird one, good for a sad long drive when you can really listen to lyrics carefully. It includes such inspired choices as putting the demo version of “A Sorta Fairytale” right after the original version of “A Sorta Fairytale.” I love the garbled way Tori sings, I love how plain and beautiful her langage is. “I’m so sad. Like a good book, I can’t put this day back.” This one goes out to all the baddies who know that it feels like communing directly with god to listen to songs obsessively, catching nuances every time. It is so fucking divine to be this sensitive.
I love you very much. Don’t forget!
