Who watches over you

I am tired. In a very real way. In a basic, fundamental, at the core way that is not remedied by a night of uninterrupted sleep. I am tired in the way that comes with years, years of exhaustion and defeat and sadness and rage.

I'm experiencing a distinct feeling of disconnection. Everything is surreal and I'm watching a 3D movie with no glasses, subtitled in English but I speak only Hungarian. People make no sense. Things make no sense. Events and situations seem trivial and contrived and I cannot care about anything. Anything, anything. I don't care.

I think that I have used up my allotment of sunshine. Do we only get so much? I wonder. I wonder if I sucked all my happiness trying to get through things before and now I have no reserves, no cache, nothing stockpiled and no overdraft protection. I was not ready for it this time. Not. Ready. And now I scrape at my insides and claw at my head trying to pull the resin because I have to keep it up. At work. For the kids. For myself, because I try and fool myself as often as I try and fool everyone else. Today, and yesterday, and possibly tomorrow, it is not going to happen. There is no bird house in my soul. I have been finished, and now there is nothing for it but to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow, and sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow, and sleep tonight again.

I got a letter.

I did not write this

But I wish I had.

From 'Why I'm Like This' by Cynthia Kaplan.

I loved him like a dog loves a bone. Why do they do that? There is no meat left on it. Is it wishful thinking? Is it the idea that the meat was there once and maybe it will be there again one day? Or is it just nostalgia? Oh, that meat was good, remember that meat? Nummy nummy nummy. There I was, chewing my love down to a nub and then burying it and then digging it up and then burying it again somewhere else. And then digging it up.

Every word is nonsense, but I understand it

Jenny is my cousin, and she was born five days before me. When we were born our mothers were always trying to outdo each other with the astounding cuteness that was their baby girls. Dresses and frills and bows and ribbons, me and Jenny, moms and babies.

When we were six months old Jenny developed cancer. She had all this surgery and her hair fell out and she was no longer a cute baby. She was sick. My mother put me in coveralls and hats until Jenny got better. And she did get better. She had problems, sure, but she got better. She had mutated breast tissue which they said they could take care of but that she should wait until she was finished having babies. She's four years old, they're talking about her having babies. Her mother went grey, and more than a little crazy.

Jenny was a beautiful girl. Her limb of our tree was troubled and always rife with domestic violence, drug use, prison sentences. Her mother had a string of abusive husbands and Jenny grew up, always just five days older but somehow living a different life, right down the street. She was beautiful, beautiful. Dark and quiet and sadly optimistic. Once our uncle took us to see E.T. in the theater. We had never been to a movie theater before. Gary told me, when E.T. was dying, to tell Jenny that it was all right, that he wasn't going to stay dead. Jenny said I'm not afraid of dying, and I'm not afraid of staying dead. When he took us back to her house we snuck into the bathroom to chew grape gum because we knew our mothers would kill us for chewing gum.

Our cousins were very protective of Jenny. My brother and Donnie and Greg were only two years older than us, and we were all close, but Jenny was always everyone's focus. She had a life that we did not understand, and knew things that little girls shouldn't, and still she was only beautiful. She had massive scars on her stomach from the surgeries as a baby, and as we grew she would lift her shirt and ask me if they were getting better, and I always told her yes, and then I would show her my stomach and ask her if I was getting as fat as our other cousins and she would always say no.

When we were in junior high, Jenny was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Things were turning around for her, too. Her mother had married a good man, a friend of my father's, a barber named Roger who loved Jenny and her mother equally. There was a new baby, Emily, that Jenny worshipped and swore to protect. Jenny was happy, and in her happiness everyone was happy. Jenny had an adoring fan club, led by Jeremy Poe. Jeremy Poe. And he loved Jenny and swore to protect her also. But Jenny never loved Jeremy Poe, she loved Kevin Ault, who was everything that I hoped to find in heaven and who I had promised myself to when I was seven years old. Kevin, and Cori, and Jenny the beautiful gypsy who never, never got a fair shot. When we were sophomores in high school Kevin declared himself to be for Jenny and Jenny and Jenny and I was heartbroken, but happy for Jenny. In that order.

Jenny and Kevin did not stay Jenny and Kevin for very long. A year later and Kevin had moved away, and after eleven years of hope I accepted that Kevin would never look at me the way he looked at Jenny. And that I may never see him again, and again I was heartbroken. I moved away, also. Jenny married a different boy, one who knew she was beautiful but had not sworn to protect her, and he didn't. They had two babies, and I had two babies, and we sent pictures and told each other that our babies were equally perfect, me and Jenny, moms and babies.

When the younger pair were six months old, Madison, Jenny's baby, died.



I thought that my heart had stopped, but it hadn't. I thought that the sun would go dark, but it didn't. I thought that in time, things would be okay, but they weren't. Jenny's mother lost her mind, again, and in her grief she selfishly left it to Jenny to take care of everything, including her mother. Roger was out of the country on missions, where he would cut the hair of orphans in Mexico. Jenny's mother could not function, and could not take care of Emily. Jenny took Emily, and made the funeral arrangements, and raised the money for a memorial by herself. Jenny, beautiful in her grief, and the girls would later comment that she had always looked good in black.

Roger returned to find his granddaughter dead and his daughter gone and his wife locked in her house, not the woman he had left. For years he tried to keep them together, but she eventually left him. By then things had fallen apart, Emily was a mess and did not wear it as well as Jenny had at her age, and her mother fought Roger for her and Roger was by then a police officer in our small town and it tore everyone apart. Jenny's husband did not stay either, but then he had never loved her the way everyone else did. He had thought that she was beautiful, and beautiful women do not have dead babies.

Two years later a girl we had lived with in high school, Becky, died of cancer, leaving three young children behind. Jenny commented that she, Jenny, was lucky to have only lost one child, and that it must be far more difficult to know, to know that you are going to leave your children motherless and not be able to do anything to stop it.

After some time Jenny remarried, and this time it was Jeremy Poe. Jeremy Poe, and now it was his turn to be happy. And they had a little boy and Jenny said that's enough, that's it, I cannot have any more babies, and Madison was still not there. But with the decision to end her reproduction came the opportunity to undo the damage wrought by the cancer of our infancy. So it began, with the doctors and the surgeries and the medicine again. Twelve months ago, and when she's done, she will look like everyone else because while everyone else knew that she was beautiful, Jenny never did. But it isn't easy, with the doctors and the surgeries and the medicine. And she was sick.

And her back hurt. She couldn't pick up her little boy, because her back hurt. And she said to the doctor, my back hurts. And he said that was to be expected. And she said she was weak, and he said that's to be expected. And she was worried about her test results and he said That's all to be expected, we know what we're doing and what we're doing is going to make you sick before it makes you not sick. You just wait, you're going to be better than you've ever been.

She had an X-ray of her back, which showed that one of her ribs had detached due to a swelling somewhere. Thus, her back hurt. Last week she went to a different doctor. And today my aunt called me and said that the cancer in Jenny's spine is so advanced that she will be dead in three weeks.



I cannot conceive of a world in which someone thought that this was a good plan. I have cousins, terrible people, that die of hepatitis in prison because the choices they make render them unfit for society and all of nature, even their own bodies, rises up in protest. I work on people that, after reading their charts and histories, I ask myself why their death was not more painful. And I stand at the graves of my friends, beautiful women that want nothing more than to live a happy life and give their children a happy life and take pictures and die, old and happy in their beds, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, and I watch their husbands and children and wonder how they're going to make it. Mike, and Jeremy, dads and babies, and wonder how you can explain this to them. Because every word is nonsense.

I've got wheels, and you wanna go for a ride.

It's really that simple. I have something you want. You have something I want.

Jason calls and says that he's missing something, what is it, what is it, he's thirty now and is missing something and doesn't want to miss it anymore. Can he come up? Can I find time? No, he's not going to be bringing anyone because there's no one but that's neither here nor there because he has a feeling that what he's missing is not something he's had before.

Not something he's had before. Jay. So fucking stupid. Years and years and what do we have? He has never called me by my full name. He's sent me a letter in which he addressed it Cori Cordelia cordelia CORDELIA but he's never called me by it. We all call him Jay but he signs them all Jason. Sometimes with a middle initial. Sometimes no closing, just a trail of words ending in a question mark. And I am always left with a question mark.

He once told me that he was thinking of getting married. I said I didn't know you were seeing someone. He said I'm not. I said Well, when you find someone, will I be invited? And he said that I would already be there. And then he left to hike the Appalachian Trail and I didn't hear his voice for months but I got a postcard every week, and every week there was a drawing of a different tree and it said I thought of you here.

He called and said I want to come see you, and the kids. I feel like I don't know them at all. I said You don't know them at all, and wouldn't recognize them if you saw them. He said That's something that has to change, and then he left for Brazil and was gone half a year. I got phone calls that I couldn't hear and letters that rambled and gifts that I set down and stared at. Who does he think I am? I wonder, often, who he thinks I am. I'm not a rock. He breaks my heart.

He breaks my heart, every time he calls me, every time I see him. He holds my face and talks and talks but has never kissed me. He holds my wrist when we walk but has never held my hand. He has slept with his head in my lap but never on my chest and I swear to God he's trying to kill me. He says Remember that I'm always thinking of you and that I care about you more than anyone. And I say nothing to him. I don't hold his wrists. I don't sleep in his lap. I don't tell him how important he is and do you know why? Because I do not.

But I have something that he wants. He doesn't tell me what it is, and I don't ask. I don't want to know because the awareness would make me different. Jay scares me. Jay makes me look at myself and my surroundings and my situation and actions. Jay keeps me from doing a lot of things, and I do things with him in mind. He doesn't know. Because he has something I want, and I know what it is. I want him to stay just the way he is, forever. I want him to always be just out of my reach. I want him to continue to live the life that I would have lived, had I done things differently. I want him to be that mirror in which I see what I lack and make adjustments. I want him to be what I hope for, what I long for, those days and weeks when I think there is nothing left and I tell myself that Jason is left, I could still have Jason. I could still have Jason and all I would have to do is say it, say Jason, yes, I would love for you to come to me, alone. And be who you are, and have always been, which is only you.

I had never seen a firefly. I had always wanted to, for years, years and years. Something so simple. An insect. Phosphorescence. Wings and a flutter and a flash of light. I'd never seen one and I was obsessed with them, how they'd look and sound and feel. I wrote essays, imagining what fireflies must be like.

But then I would think, one day I'm going to see one, and all this will be gone. And that's a little of what happened. I went to Detroit, to visit Tiger Stadium. Detroit is a terrible, ugly, hateful city that lights up at night with the fires of a thousand projects and the lights of a thousand buildings and the glow of a hundred thousand million fireflies. I was standing in this park watching the ships and the sun was going down and I became aware of them one at a time, until there were so many that I could not distinguish their light from that of the others. But that first one, that first firefly, and I was hopelessly entranced. Watched it, and watched it, and watched it and said There. That is a firefly. It is real and I have seen it and held it in my hands. An insect. Phosphorescence. Wings and a flutter and a flash of light and now I know what the enchantment is.

Now I know what the enchantment is. Now I know, and it is concrete in my mind because I've seen it and held it and while I have the memory of that first firefly, and the swell of light when they all flew together, I have lost the wonder of not knowing. I have never written another word about fireflies until this instant. I have not spent one moment in wonder, questioning, hoping and dreaming. Because I have had it, and I know it, and I no longer feel that pull.

Jason is that pull, for me. Jason is the moon. Jason is a compass and I never, ever want to have him because I don't want that to go away. Because eventually, he would stop holding my hand, but he may never stop holding my wrist. At some point, he would not long for the comfort of my chest, but he may always come home to my lap. I can't accompany him to Brazil or the mountains, but he may always be thinking of me and maybe, maybe, I'm that pull for him. Because clearly I have something he wants. And that makes me the luckiest girl, on any side.