were i my own therapist, i think i would say the central task is to extricate my story from yours. but our story began in the bramble. an isolation so ferocious we had to jump at the we of it all.

i wish that i had known in that first minute we met
the unpayable debt that i owed you

i wonder how many songs you’ve ruined (respectfully). how sensation and all meaning turn on a dime. in a new york minute. new york turns to the hudson valley as massachusetts turns to the berkshires. it’s not as though i can avoid mention of new york. its vitality and omnipresence are a cruelty right now. also, it is never cruel to think of you.

there’s one thing i’ll do if it ever goes wrong
i’ll write you into all of my songs

i should have asked more questions about your hometown. i shouldn’t have let you wave it away.

she is dancing away from you now
she was just a wish

i am working through the mystics and contemplatives, who demand a stillness i’ve spent thirty years abusing. thomas merton, hildegard of bingen, lawrence kushner, richard rohr, gershom scholem. you are someone to whom i’d write about my discoveries if you were someone to whom i could write. you were always in motion, literally and mentally, i’d guess. you slowed down over these few years, at first intentionally. you did come to believe in the healing power of patience.

and if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
well the landslide will bring it down

i asked you for an elephant wearing a hat. i asked for a bird on the shoulder. i can wait.

but tell me you love me
come back and haunt me

when we adopted the new dog, i didn’t know you had died.

she was bee. i preferred honey. for her sake and mine, her government name became miss honeybee. days later i learned or remembered that honey was a nickname of yours.

honey you are a rock
upon which i stand

on nicknames, your friend pearl said you were tiger at camp. true, i forgot about the hobbes tattoo on your left arm. i am more calvin. so many names between you and me. was that the real root of it? i cycle through unarchived pictures from your social media accounts, interpreting and cataloguing the communications you tattooed on yourself.

i’ll find you in the morning sun
and when the night is new

pearl also sent pictures of your visits and yes, i was and am jealous. we planned for you to come here. i should own photographic proof of you and me by the ocean. it’s impossible to stomach that i never saw your curls.

and i don’t feel like crying
but i just keep crying

amanda has tried to console me, mostly by being decent but also with strange loop theory. i should read the book. it’s douglas hofstadter, for the record. i think you would have appreciated his line of thinking and perhaps even more, the mental model i have constructed of you. it is my small kindness to you and one well-earned.

beyond the door
there’s peace i’m sure

i should get around to reading ram dass. i should be here now and i believe there is wisdom there — meaning here, now.

thinking of the stolen blanket — the only material of you left for me in the here and now — did you even like napoleon dynamite? i’m so curious about this blanket’s origins and surprisingly long life cycle. what a ridiculous appendage of yours to leave me with. but to say you were ironic risks masking the relentless sincerity that was, if i had to simplify it, the core of your lovability.

i never said i’d be alright
just thought i could hold myself together

i haven’t gotten around to rounding this all out when i find out that, in your dying days, you left me your mother. i’ve never met the woman and here she shows up as though you somehow, months ago, read my mind of today, of this post-you world. of course you did. what a way to answer every nettling question. i am trying to receive with grace this act of validation and to accept the magnitude of your raw kindness. did you have the wherewithal to know how deep and necessary a kindness it would be? i wonder if i mean to say that you have personalized for me a proof of divine love. that effect would have been beyond your expectation and, in the old world, beyond comprehension for either of us.

you live on in many ways, most immediately in the of-course-she-dids.

and you were a presence full of light upon this earth
and i am a witness to your life and to its worth

one related question lingers: why? i don’t know whether you did it for me, for her, or to feel you had tied up the loose ends of your relations before at last you went. likely it was all three, plus some other reasons forever unexplained.

it’s three days later when i get the call
and there’s nobody around to break my fall

call it seeking intercession but i often pray to you. i am mindful, however, of turning you into a god (you would hate that, as would god).

i’ve decided that tonight i will say kaddish for you. maybe make a habit of it this year. it’s improper and won’t do anything and i don’t know that you’d need it anyway. surely you were good enough on earth. but here i am playing god again, making travel plans for your soul and trying to write you back into being.

i thought i would be there in your last moments or shortly before. i assumed i would say goodbye, or likelier, nothing. i assumed i would hold your hand and we’d both think, so after all this, a resolution. hope and force of will were not enough to save each other. no miracles here.

i think you found a moment’s peace. i have to think so, knowing you and how these things go. what would you have left me with? i left you in the end to weed alone, too deep in that tenebrous garden to be reached. finally something i couldn’t understand. finally one of us failed to reach the other. i don’t know why i’m thinking to ask it, but did you pray for me? was there a revelation?

i thought of summering there, as if there was still time.

i just checked—we sent more texts than i remembered. we spoke more about logistics than i remembered. we tried so hard. we talked about things that are hard to read and hear again. i thank god i saved your voice notes. i cling to this catalogue of your complaints.

alex reminded me that you visited rhode island. i’d thought i’d accidentally taken your blanket from your house, but you’d left it at mine. i’m bad at returning things so i rarely borrow, but i kept yours on purpose. i thank god i stole your blanket.

i wrote you a poem once. i wish it had come true. your inbox will see this. you will not.

i am still early in my search, hoping to find you in some place other than memory. there’s a model of you that is mine alone, and hallie, it’s a heavy one. so was yours of me, which i guess is gone forever. i’m left to tend to this particular you. i’m the only one who can. i will. i wish i’d promised you something.

love you so much, my beautiful friend. i thank god those are the last words you chose for me.

i didn’t know any better but these were mine for you:

sweet hallie,

i felt like we’ve always known what to say, but i don’t know what to say. i know that moments of strength or peace or clarity must come and go, and i recognize the feeling of not wanting your words to suggest some kind of permanent state of being brave and wise and ready for whatever comes your way.

i don’t know how you’re thinking about the soul right now, but i like to think that as pure souls, we are in essence all of these qualities and that they are buried under the weight of the external world and an embodiment experience. i am glad at least that somewhere along the way, the fear and pain opened my mind to things my rational brain couldn’t accept and to the fact that there are things that exist beyond my comprehension, on a plane i just can’t access. i don’t see it as any more unbelievable than quantum physics. i see god—whatever that means—everywhere now, in so many outrageous coincidences.

there is a hasidic practice, hitbodedut, from the hebrew for “seclusion,” that is these days understood as talking out loud, ideally in nature but anywhere is fine. it’s pouring out all of your spontaneous thoughts and feelings as if you were talking to a parent or best friend, without really stopping to think.

unrelatedly and relatedly, i became a person who thinks of hamlet all the time.

horatio:
o day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

hamlet:
and therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
there are more things in heaven and earth, horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

unrelatedly and relatedly, have i shared the lark ascending with you?

love,
jesse

to hallie amalia evans, forever

a neighbor asks if i know why there are so many birds around here. says she just found out herself. says she can’t believe it. says the paved road where my bicycle is standing used to be a bird sanctuary. i can’t bear to tell my wife but i have to tell my wife, as it’s my wife who knows them best, frets without end over how to keep them here, asks with awe why we in this small city, with our trucks and gas mowers and leaf blowers, are still known to these birds.

six months ago the scene from my window wasn’t much different from today’s.

picture dawn, my writing desk. the second set of twinkle lights make these poems an event. red cedar fence below elbows next door’s split leaf philodendron. on second thought, might be the sexier one—monstera deliciosa. 

out there, a bird i can’t identify without the app sings, screams, beckons, wails, confronts, invites, promises, insults, forgives, insists, retracts, entices, rejects, exults, performs, or wonders aloud with the rest of us:

fear fear fear or tear tear tear or queer queer queer or peter peter peter or teacher teacher teacher or c’mere c’mere c’mere.

could turn my head to the left, to the right, consult my wife, open four more windows, glue myself to the seat till dusk or get up to go have a look, study migration patterns from here to atlantic canada, and wake up tomorrow no closer to knowing what the good neighbor communicates.

two pink bicycles, parents in tow, all portrait-ready in the morning light. two squirrels gesticulate wildly around the backyard oak, likely loading their arsenal of acorns to fire at the dogs. a video of the morning dog walk comes through from my wife. finally found her friends again after the storm.

the female bigger and more beautiful, the male posturing beside a ditch, carving into the insides of some rodent. a former rodent whose essential self must be migrating now to womb or shell, cashing in tokens of karmic innocence for a more desirable prize. maybe a pair of wings, maybe a community more welcoming to its kind, maybe the promise of a longer life and less violent death.

i am learning my physiology. i am learning how the wild animal of my writing alters its behavior when seen. 

as the body is its own planet, i suppose the brain is its god. in which case maybe the body is its own universe. or am i wrongly suggesting that earth, or the universe for that matter, is brainless? in any case, we—insofar as “we” are the brain that controls our thoughts and behaviors—are responsible for the stewardship of the bodily universe we’ve come to inhabit. do you have any idea how many bacteria call any given human body home? or that we require them to survive and thrive? the microbiome within each human houses 10 to 100 trillion microbial cells. those microbes contain 200 times the number of genes in the human genome. we’re teeming with bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and the viruses we may or may not consider living. when we extend an ethic of nonviolence to its radical but logical end, we recognize our responsibility to care for the universe of the body and its trillions of inhabitants. violence against the self is violence against a whole ecosystem of unfathomable scale from the perspective of the microscopic. it’s systemic by definition. the microscopic life isn’t a sexy one by our standards, but it’s a life.

our homes should be brimming with life, unboxed, inviting us to dance and sleep in nature’s shapes, tearing us from vanity. none of us will ever be as beautiful as a monstera albo. or my staffordshire terrier. i wish this oneness—the understanding that beings exist to render service to one another—was enough to resolve my fear of nonexistence. i wish that my sense of equity was enough to convince me that the universe of my mind and body and the soul they occlude is not special. to reconcile the fact of my insignificance with the nearly 32 years of phenomenological research that refutes it.

how many lives have you taken? how much space do they occupy in your mind? how can you move through the world more gently in light of your awesome power to decimate? can you remember how often the normal thing is the wrong thing? we have known all along that the purpose of a life is to live and help live.

Read previous post

Subscribe now

this is hour 21 of a three-day(?) fast. there goes the pen, vanishing at the mention of self-restraint. the fasting tea i bought from a bearded dude at the farmer’s market doesn’t seem to be suppressing my hunger, but i’m hopeful that its alleged 102 minerals will benefit my body, and my mind’s capacity to withstand the body’s necessary deprivation. we’re talking sea moss! i assume that’s the part that makes it taste like metal. i am sensitive to bitterness, and everything. the idea is to starve the cells that need starving. it would be dishonest to ignore the convenient overlap between my physical and spiritual pursuits. cancer has decreased the weight of liberation’s barriers to entry.

i didn’t think there would be much to say. that’s not true. i didn’t think there would be much i would be willing to say. i can’t be an unreliable narrator when i am the only authoritative voice on my own experience. i don’t want to write about blood work, terror, and grief. i don’t know that you want to read about that either. i wouldn’t. i admit with characteristic reluctance that putting pen to page does change the process. or it seems to, now that i have a full three minutes of experience with it. i guess it forces the brain to slow, to follow a single thread instead of frantically snagging every loose end, only to have to sift through pounds of nonsense to extract a useful mineral of thought. or maybe the fast is bringing clarity. they say that happens. 

at what point in a journal writing practice do you generate a piece of writing? hopefully never, because if that is the end goal, i have set myself up for a devastating shame spiral. even without the intention of creating something, embarrassment. but what a stupid thing to cause embarrassment. who is there left to convince that i know how to write english sentences?

i have been so alone. i don’t yet know how to articulate it. i think this can help me excavate myself. the part of me that is legible to someone besides a fellow young patient or survivor. every time you pause here to hear me, you brush off a bit of the dirt. we are all ultimately untranslatable, but still i am convinced that my suffering is uniquely impossible to understand from outside the afflicted body.

i can dream. of making meaning. of one day assigning worthiness to malignant cells. of this space as a written record of survival. but i can’t risk—what, peace and self-betterment—becoming an expectation. from others or myself. i don’t know if that is because i’m clinging to victimhood, that it has hijacked my identity. more that my spirit can’t cope with further unfairness or misunderstanding in this most unfair of desperate circumstances. meanwhile, i cannot seem to care about the lord of the rings.

i don’t hate this. the journaling. i do hate the rest of it. i am glad that ana and sunlight are here most mornings.

i am writing in lowercase to shrink myself. to signal deference. to eliminate the possibility of failure before i have even begun. to get out ahead of judgment. who could judge me? i am writing in lowercase because i sometimes need to put cancer at the beginning of a sentence without giving cancer more than it has already taken. when the going gets tough, please do remember i was nominated for a pushcart.

Subscribe now