… and an Engine on Fire
On Liminality
August 28, 2021
Joseph R. Hunt

Caveat Emptor

I once received praise from an adjunct professor at Mines my freshman year that always stuck with me. His name was Robert Snyderman – a lanky, twenty-something poet from Boulder who came down from the mountains in flannel shirts, suspenders, and Chippewa boots to teach a bunch of engineering students about poetry, literature, writing, and Borges. I remember well his wild, curly hair, his round tortoise-shell glasses, the odd way he sat in his seat, and how he eviscerated the syallabus of our Nature and Human Values class. Most memorable, though, was feedback he gave me on a poem I wrote a long time ago:

Had I had my way, I would have been either a philosophy or a literature major in college; given that my Dad saw no prospects there, he heavily leaned on me to go to Mines and become an engineer to make “bookoo bucks”. I can only imagine his chagrin, teaching high school mathematics now.

Point being: this piece is unlike anything I’ve ever written. Most all of my articles are analyses of literary themes, ideas, places, or characters; vivisections of the literary works that most impact me at a given time or place. I haven’t written a poem in seven years, and I certainly haven’t written something like a stream of consciousness piece before. Like all forays into memory, this one’s littered with errors: grammatical, thematic, temporal, and contextual. I make no claim to veracity: what follows is not how things are, or necessarily how I think things ought to be; quite simply, what follows is an exercise in feeling. I am neither a faithful nor comprehensive observer of the events that follow: full accounts, in greater detail and with greater truth, can likely be gleaned from the many people around me who’ve seen the result of the thoughts and feelings I’ve allowed to play out below.

Nabokov has Charles Kinbote, John Shade’s insidious narrator in Pale Fire. I am certainly not Nabokov, and I harbour no malignant intentions like Kinbote to befuddle or make you question this piece. Read this with a grain of salt, take from this what you will. I am not Funes.

“I’m Loving This Chaotic Energy You’ve Got Going On”

It’s summer, and I’m sitting in my living room trying to play the past year back in my head. I recognize that twelve months have past, I’ve completed another academic year at my job, I’ve been active and involved in the lives of many of my friends and family: I can look at the thank you cards and invites on my fridge, count the parking stubs, touch the hospital bracelets, and browse the photos dwelling in the corners of a hard drive. What I can’t, with great accuracy or confidence: recollect conversations with my Uncle at our dive bar; recount the great joke I heard from, or told to, to a student; remember what street I’m on, how I ended up in the turning lane, or how I’m already halfway home from the gym; feel the cold in my toes submerged in the creek, put my thumb on the name of the person I literally just shook hands with, or rattle off what the hell it was I did that day. Why the fuck can’t I remember the date of our anniversary some days?

I can’t always bear the silence, eating at the dining room table, while the black dog comes stealing up from the corner of the room. Something in me starts panicking, the pacing starts, and the next thing I know I’m stifling a sob I didn’t know needed to come up back down my throat. Somewhere, someplace, sometime else: I’m peeling myself off my spinning bathroom floor, taking inventory of just how loudly my head is screaming, checking the kitchen’s not a wreck, and wondering when someone’s going to tell me things are going to be alright. Some nights I crave the warmth of her in my bed and the comfort of being wrapped in a bundle of arms and a tangle of blankets; others, I can’t stand the company of a living soul. I crave someone to hold and comfort me, simultaneously fighting the sensation of my skin crawling being around others. At times, I’m taking my bearing between waking in the dark at night, failing to navigate liminal space between fitful wakings and awful dreams. It’s usually a race to see who’s going to beat the other to the punch – me, on two, three, four hours of sleep; or that dizzyingly quick sensation of having fucked up something good I once had irrecoverably. That fleet bastard’s done it again, and the litany against myself starts in earnest before I’ve even rolled over on my other side to relieve the arm that’s painfully asleep. Some mornings it takes an hour, sometimes two, to put my feet on the carpet and get a shower in. I start a journal and dump my mind into it. Fits and starts, high and low, long diatribes, forays into a younger version of me, and more questions than answers. Six, seven, eight months bled together, and try as I might, I can’t find the seam with my finger or spot the transition.

My old hobbies fail to lift my mood. The PC I built last spring looks more like a trap, my living room an invitation to ignore things I’ve not allowed myself to process or recognize. I have a harder time eating. I spend time with my friends and family and feel more anxious, not less, at times; that novel I’ve been working through is suddenly too goddamn hard, the drawing I’ve had half finished for years too challenging, and the barbell so outlandishly heavy. I get outside, and immediately want to go in; I sit inside, and something howls from the corner of the room or under the bed for me to get out.

Is this then? Is now yet to come?

If I Hear the Words “Pivot”, “Grace”, and “New Normal” One More Fucking Time...

I realized I wanted to teach in the same room I learned Calculus II. Brown Hall at Mines. I had sat down to work on some homework and study, a quarter of the way through my senior year, and the thought struck me that fuck, I’m going to graduate in less than twelve months. What the hell am I going to do? I had attended the fall career fair in September of 2017, spoken with a member of the Boettcher Teacher Residency based in Denver, and made it through their telephone and in person interviews. I was writing two or three essays describing my mission and vision for my classroom and why I wanted to teach. Being forced to sit down and organize a previously nebulous curiosity for mathematics and an only nascent appreciation for all the truly amazing people who guided me in life to where I am now was an enlightening experience in humility and gratitude. When I got the call from that same gentleman in October or November, I couldn’t hold back tears of joy knowing that I was doing something with myself to add to the world around me. It had been a rare moment of happiness in an otherwise bleak and turbulent couple of years.

Within a few months, I was attending meetings at Mines for the TEAM-UP program, a campus organization run by professors from the University of Northern Colorado who worked with Mines students to find placements and start careers in education. I was interested in learning more about the job before I was thrown headlong into it by the Boettcher program, which was going to place me directly into a classroom for a year - with no funding - and only the most rudimentary crash course in how to, you know, actually fucking teach. In the course of tagging along to meetings, I recognized my old Physics 1 professor, Dr. Callan, was a major part of the organization; through her, and through Professor Fanselow at UNC, I deepened my involvement in the organization, quickly saw how untenable my position with Boettcher would have been, and was very strongly encouraged to jump ship in lieu of the Noyce Scholars Fellowship.

Right place, right time. By February 2018, I was signed on to receive $10,000 per semester through the Noyce Foundation, enrolled in a year and a half of classes through UNC’s online graduate program, and in line for field experiences after I graduated with my B.S. in Computational and Applied Mathematics. I still haven’t the foggiest how I came to be so fortunate, and the gratitude I have for my instructors, the TEAM-UP/Noyce programs, and my managing instructors at Golden High School and Alameda International Jr/Sr. High School is immense. Even if, during student teaching, I wanted to pluck my eyebrows out at three in the morning from stress, and came close on more than one occasion to a complete emotional breakdown.

By May of 2019, I had two job offers from two high schools in the northern part of Denver and in Parker, respectively; I finished my student teaching with a real, honest-to-god job lined up in August and couldn’t have been happier and more proud of how far I had come. I spent the summer anxiously anticipating what it would be like, leading my own room, my own way. The autonomy and creative freedom to lead my students both excited and terrified me: no one had ever placed me in a position of responsibility for others before, and here I was, staring down the barrel of a roster 150-something students deep. I was giddy, naive, and full of excitement. And, perhaps most of all, I felt like I was growing into the man I wanted to be, after an incredibly dark season after my Dad’s death.

That was a good summer.

The year that followed was both incredibly challenging, impatiently demanding, increasingly rewarding, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. I regularly spent ten or twelve hours writing lesson plans, organizing class materials, grading, and anticipating my students abilities and skills; I laughed more in my classroom than I had in a long time; I watched my students grow, as people and as learners. I came home every week with a funny anecdote, a frustrating story; oftentimes dog tired, and ready only to collapse on the living room sofa and sleep. It was an incredibly creative and productive period, and I heard from many students that, despite my inexperience and lack of resources, I was their favourite teacher.

Nothing quite describes the feeling you get when someone you know tells you you’ve made a difference.

The second semester of that year proved colourful. I had been following on AP News an odd, tangential story evolving in Wuhan, China about an emerging, flu-like illness that was beginning to rapidly spread within the country. Lockdowns were triggering, and the international media watched on with an equal interest (which is to say, not much at all) as that of Ebola in 2014. From my own forays into epidemiological modeling in a mathematical biology course, I understood much of the basic terminology used to describe the outbreak and its dynamics. I read about it every day. It was certainly fascinating seeing something like this in real life, versus an academic setting – at one point, I even wrote a rudimentary Excel spreadsheet using forward Euler’s method to run a very simple SIR model. Within a couple more months, these concerns seemed trite and even in bad taste, as cases began popping up in the United States. Teachers began discussing the possibility of a truncated school year. Staff meetings surrounded the possible necessity of preparing to teach online and equipment was distributed as a contingency. In March, we broke for spring break; halfway through, our school informed us we would not be returning, and the last time I saw most of my first class was the final day before then. The rest of March, April, and May were confusing, disembodied attempts at providing students with learning materials and “opportunities”, poor attempts to engage our kids, and the ultimate failure to keep over 70% of our students’ attention as they enjoyed a four-month summer break.

That summer, the whole fucking world lost it’s marbles. Case counts exploded internationally, and US infections and deaths climbed to dizzingly high peaks in truly frightening fashion. My now ex, my roommate, and I organized grocery store runs in the event that suburban Denver took a route similar to Wuhan (complete, mandatory isolation), dividing to conquer the grocery aisles among similarly worried faces. Toilet paper became a luxury, canned and frozen food flew off shelves, hand sanitizer suddenly stopped existing, and everyone battened down the hatches for something that hasn’t been seen in a hundred years. No federal, state, or local governing body had even a remote grasp on what to do, who to refer questions to, or what to base guidance on. Your local pastor at some bible-thumping Baptist congregation had about as much clout as Anthony Fauci, Andrew Cuomo, or the fucking president. The wearing of masks, social distancing, and basic etiquette became a political problem; someone’s basic right to their health a platform and billboard for signifying allegiance to ideology, rather than to common sense or concern for one another. Conversations broke down, arguments abounded, and friends subdivided themselves into “bubbles” into or out of which no man or woman could roam. Our immediate workout group set groundrules, organized movie nights, and our limited weekend plans were set. Griffin and I often wondered how many times we could drive down Santa Fe at 5:00 in the afternoon with absolutely no traffic on the way to non-essential workouts, without getting stopped by police. Gas prices plummeted to something just shy of $2.00/gallon. It was, and please pardon the pun, something not unlike a fever dream.

Introverts, like myself, relished the opportunity to crash in the living room with a pile of books as tall as they were, with no excuses to make or questions to dodge about weekend plans. I fulfilled a longtime dream and assembled my first desktop computer on my first try, hooked it up to the stereo and TV in the living room, and enjoyed the newfound freedom of summer uninterrupted to play videogames with my friends, watch movies, read two or three novels I’d been putting off, and enjoy a hell of a lot of downtime with the people in my immediate household. I picked up mixing cocktails as a hobby, given that every bar in the world had pretty much gone tits up, and quickly ingratiated myself to my friends and acquaintances as the guy with all the liquor who knew how to make them real fucking good.

As all things, this, too, should pass: the new school year was just around the corner, and I began following board meetings. Our district failed to organize a plan for how or when the school year would begin until late fucking July, literally weeks before the first day of school. Board meetings were littered with querulous sessions in discussion with the Tri-County Health Department about what we could or could not do with classes in person; a vote was taken to bring teachers and students back in person, after the deadline for teachers to sign their contracts for the year. No formal opportunity for teachers or students to have a stake in the conversation was provided.

The new year began tenuously: students came in anxious and we, the adults in the room, had no satisfactory answer to their questions or any comfort to give to their concerns. Rooms were dismantled and much thrown away to try and make space for social distancing guidance between desks, people with Masters degrees became glorified janitors, and rules and regulations changed on a dime. Quarantines became frequent, and the crippling effect of having an entire class sent home with less than 24 hour’s notice became as much of a problem for students as teachers. Instruction suffered, student learning became borderline non-existent, absences for family funerals increased, “mental health days” among students ran rampant, and no accountability was given for lack of student participation or involvement. We limped along, dragging whoever we could, as long as we could hold out.

In November our principal informed us that we were being sent home – not because of the hundreds of students or dozens of teachers rotating into and out of isolation or quarantine, and certainly not because some fucking genius in the district office had recognized that a dangerous and unreliable classroom environment is no place to learn – but because our security and admin staff had been quarantined. No one was at the front office to run the show despite the dozen or so AP’s, deans, secretaries, or other non-teacher bodies in the building. We had less than 24 hours to inform students via e-mail, Remind, or course page announcements that we were indefinitely going home.

This was, easily, the darkest period of the year for me. Every day consisted of staring at an assortment of white names in black boxes for eight hours, talking into the void about polynomial long division or trigonometric identities with no reaction, no discernible evidence of students learning or even enjoying the class. My world shrunk to the size of my room. No jokes, anecdotes, stories, or interactions with my students. Just blank screens and silence. Add to this: a frustratingly schizophrenic administration attempting to hold teachers accountable for an untenable scenario, no interaction with departments and coworkers, no collaboration. Everyone was scrambling to get a fingerhold and find a method, a lesson, a tool, or a curriculum that would help their faltering students and give some demonstrable progress – or even a reason – for this godforsaken year. All this, while battling complete exhaustion and burnout. We kept this up for three months, until we returned in person again in February of 2021.

The return to class was, at first, terrifying. Teachers and students alike were divided about the return and mask enforcement, attendance, participation in classwork, and basic fucking etiquette all became points of explicit discussion. Teachers were almost roundly ignored in decision-making withing the building and the district at large. Not until teachers began receiving vaccines in mid February did I begin feeling some semblance of hope for salvaging the rest of the semester. Many of our students were so far gone, and so many teachers combating real life at home, that everyone, it seemed to me, was just waiting for May to roll around so we could all just go home. Everything that had given me joy in my work was sapped away more days than not, I was always concerned about my health, and my private life was a shambles as I tried to learn how to be more present in my (now former) relationship with my ex, do everything in my power to comfort my Uncle as his wife died, and tried to keep myself from completely falling apart every week. I recognized a silent desperation in myself that often came up on Sunday mornings, as the realization that another week of stress, grinding, and frustration waited for me. Many days after work, I’d completely shut the world out, playing videogames, mindlessly surfing the internet, or even just staring at the wall for hours at a time. I didn’t have the tools, the consciousness, or the ability to change much of the scenario, so I retreated within my own head to make an attempt at coping with the daily frustrations, the anger, and the deep and bitter disappointment. It became harder to be around my friends, maintain my relationship, and engage in my hobbies.

I often used to crack the joke, in my first year of teaching, that every week I was trying to “land the plane” with a wing and a prayer; after the last year, the idiom seemed insufficient.

So I appended.

The year’s been like trying to land a plane on a wing and a prayer, with the one engine on fire.

Eulogy to One Tough Motherfucker

My Aunt Pam and my Uncle Pete took my sister, my mother, and I in shortly after my mom and my Dad divorced around 2000. I was four, my sister was two. My Aunt and Uncle owned an apartment in Aurora, and gave a spare bedroom to my sister and I, often watching us during the day, ensuring we were dressed, cooking and feeding us, helping ferry us back and forth through the unique hell of every-other-weekend divorce custody exchanges and making certain we weren’t falling behind in school. My Aunt and my Uncle taught me to read, to count, and to think; one of my earliest (and fondest) memories of my Uncle involves him, hungover, on a… Sunday? In winter, tired of hearing me explain the existence of clouds for the umpteenth time using God. After rolling his eyes, he put a pot of water on the stove to boil, guided me towards the front door, and promptly – and effectively – demonstrated the intricacies of phase changes. Watching the steam cloud rise into the air like some acolyte furtively bearing witness to a forbidden ritual, he punctuated the awestruck silence, and I’m paraphrasing here, with: “See? There’s your Jesus!”. As for my Aunt, I recall Dr. Seuss in the living room. When I was young, I repeated lines due to a difficulty identifying when to scan down the page at the end of a sentence; as a result, I often repeated myself like a looping vinyl record. However, I had just mastered the ability, and my Aunt had mistaken the repetition of Seuss as my error – imagine my difficulty in trying to convince her, with my limited capacities at four years old, until handing her the book. I often remember her humour, her much too quick wit, and limitless patience with my sister and I as we tormented and frustrated our caretakers like all children know how so innately and fluently.

They provided a safe home during an immensely chaotic and wildly unpredictable time in our lives, as the family my sister and I had known disintegrated around us into fractuous, bitter fighting. Screaming matches, confusion, and animosity were a hallmark of that period, and without my Aunt and Uncle, my sister and I would not have survived with any snowball’s chance in hell for a normal life. They acted as parents and guardians for us when my Mom worked nights, my Dad moved to my hometown east of Colorado Springs, and our extended families drew rigid, deep, and vehemently caustic battle lines. I spent twelve years embroiled in the vitriol and hatred my parents held for each other, fighting every week against total despair and isolation: my feelings of loneliness, melancholy, and borderline depersonalization fell on deaf ears. It was a mortal sin to admit I missed my Dad in front of my mom and former step-dad, lest I earn an hours-long berating about how ungrateful, selfish, childish, and wrong my feelings were. Anything nice I tried to make or do for my Dad was met with attempted or successful redirection, guilt trips, or outright denial. They regularly played up how well they took care of us, and made a point to demonstrate how poorly our Dad did. My severely infrequent phone calls with my Dad were monitored. I cried myself to sleep usually one or two nights every week: were my mom or step-dad to hear me, I would be punished. Our trips out to visit Dad were contingent on the mood and charity of my two other parents. They regularly disparaged him, often in front of us, and sometimes in the company of our family friends. I was once grounded for threatening to kill my former step-dad after he threatened to harm my father. The stories I can tell are so numerous and so painful, it’s sometimes difficult to even recall portions of them. The anxiety, fear, and rage I felt every day in childhood continues to make appearances well into my adult life.

This went on, without fail, for the near entirety of my childhood until I told them both to go fuck themselves, that I wanted to live with my Dad. I outright refused to be part of that family and after 126 days, they shipped me off to Denver on a nighttime flight Christmas Eve. I woke up in Colorado Christmas Day 2012, to fresh falling snow in the place I had called home all my life. I can’t recount a day in my life when I was happier.

My Uncle, whom I look up to and respect more than anyone else on my Mom’s side of the family, was not himself immune to the chaos. I only later learned my Aunt, his wife, was the only person other than my Dad’s family who advocated for me during this time.

There won’t ever be words, acts, or gifts sufficient to repay what they did for us. These acts of generosity and love continued for all our lives.

I learned my Aunt was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer February of 2016, while waiting for my girlfriend at the time to pick me up from a night class at Mines. My Uncle called me, and advised me to find somewhere to sit down – I walked into the student rec center, and paced the upper bleachers for an hour while trying to parse and understand the information my Uncle had given me. Within months, my Aunt had begun an aggressive treatment plan of radiology, chemo, and surgery affectionately referred to as the Red Death among recipients. In a little over two years, after a grueling fight, she entered remission on a battery of long-term, low-dose chemo drugs. Apart from the natural consequences of a brutal and extended fistfight with her illness, continuing to care for her two sons, and – yes, even then – looking after me as I came to her for guidance and help surrounding the most toxic breakup I’ve ever heard of, she came out of it holding her head high, beaming with the smile she was renowned for all her life.

We received the news that she was terminally ill with a resurgent cancer in February of 2021. The cancer she had fought so resolutely had spread throughout her body: into her lungs, her lymph nodes, and even her brain and brain stem. Without immediate and drastic action, it was not known how long she’d have to get her affairs in order, say goodbye to her children, and to her husband.

By March, she was under the knife. My Uncle and I sat, three steps away from blind panic, in the surgery waiting room for five or six hours before we broke for a quick lunch down the street. He got the call that her neurosurgeon – a cocky, self-sure bastard – had managed to remove everything malignant in her head and brain stem, that she would be recovering within a few hours, and preparing to transfer into a wing of the hospital for recovery and preliminary rehabilitation. My Uncle and I, sat at a bar, were close to tears among strangers; we returned to the waiting room, where we anxiously waited for another two hours for news, and until he ultimately knew where she was and told me to go home and rest.

I was not OK. My elation and joy at hearing how well her procedure went was rapidly engulfed by the Pyrrhic realization that, no matter what good news we had, her time with us had now become painfully, tangibly finite. We knew we had a matter of months, perhaps a couple of years with any luck, to spend with her and get the family prepared and ready. I strangled the emotions roiling in my chest and throat as I turned the key at my front door. My original plan entailed watching the sunset with a cigar in one hand and something very strong in the other, on my back porch. As is often the case in Colorado springtime, the snow had yet to melt on the back patio, necessitating a shift in setting: atop a dining room chair in my front yard, I smoke, drank, and sobbed in the reddening evening. I’m fortunate that in my covenant-protected, suburban neighbourhood, nobody’s mother or father came to question why some asshole in his twenties was draining several bottles of whiskey in hair-raising time and coming unglued for the whole street to see. At that point, I had long past given my last fuck for the month. The neighbour’s had free HBO that night.

I couldn’t remember the last time before that I had quite literally wailed aloud. My most violent and soul-rending moments had come during the depths of my grief after my Dad’s death; it had been years since the last episode that left me questioning why I was even alive, laying in the snow, half freezing, while on the walk home in Golden on my 22nd birthday. I called my now-ex-girlfriend, hardly able to speak, asking if she’d come home – she wasn’t available, and wouldn’t be down in my neck of the woods until the next afternoon. I called Josiah and Daniel Butler, and as meekly as a drunk can, requested that they help me pray for my Aunt and my family. I hadn’t prayed in years, and haven’t since experiencing my first existential crisis in 2015, but they kindly and gently asked god to watch over her, her boys, her husband, and me. I’ll never have the words to describe how much this meant to me.

I haphazardly dumped all my anger, confusion, hurt, and despair on them over the phone, while my roommate and my friend Griffin sat with me in the lawn helping unburden me of a few drinks and my last cigar. I cycled between racking sobs and repeatedly asking why the world had to be so goddamn cruel to my family while my friends did their best to comfort me.

I was out there like that, half blind in my delirium and grief, for two or three hours. Time moved differently that day, and in my state, I was far from a fair observer. We pulled the chairs back inside, cleaned up the lawn, and got the house/kitchen back in order. I was sick, took a bath, and fell asleep on my bathroom floor, wondering in what past life and what terrible act an ancestor of mine had done to piss karma off so. After an hour or so like that, I did what I’ve always eventually had to do: I cleaned myself up, pounded enough water to alarm even a fish, and threw myself into bed hoping for an exigent sleep to pull me away from that day.

Thank you Daniel, thank you Josiah, and thank you, Griffin.

Within a month, my Aunt’s condition deteriorated to the point of hospice care. Under the un-care of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center, my Aunt underwent an (which was, much to my Uncle and I’s fury, completely unknown to us) emergency trip to the Aurora Medical Center for precipitous drops in blood pressure. She never fully recovered the ability to speak or move with any complete reliability or autonomy, and struggled to fight, uncomfortably, to stabilize enough to go home. When we did get her back to her living room she was incoherent, unable to move or act without assistance, and visibly in pain. My Uncle and I did our best with very limited information or knowledge to try and make her as humanly comfortable a woman in agony could be.

On April 15th, she had to return to Aurora Medical Center via ambulance; I came to the hospital with my cousins – the very same one she had her neurosurgery completed a month prior – to see her, and watched on in horror as nurses poured into her room to stabilize her as her condition rapidly declined. My Uncle and a friend of the family stayed with my Aunt all night, while I brought my cousins home in a snowstorm to get away from that place. I slept on the couch, thinking I had seen my Aunt for the last time without saying goodbye, or that I loved her. The medical staff at Aurora worked non-stop through the night to get her into condition to die at home, in her bed, with the assistance of hospice care. Our hospice nurse, whose name reminded me of something more fitting of a pornstar than the gentle, kind soul she was (Something Paradise), massaged my Aunt’s feet and hands, helped us get her into bed, medicated her liberally for her pain and discomfort, and kept us calm and informed on the process one undergoes when one is passing away. She kept us sane, level, and focused on looking after my Aunt; if not for her, I can only imagine in my worst nightmares what that day would have looked like. I promised my Aunt to look after my Uncle and her children. I told her I loved her, and thanked her for all she had done for my sister and I. I promised her I wasn’t going anywhere, and would be at her side indefinitely. On April 16th, shortly after noon, I held her hands, with my Uncle, as we comforted my Aunt Pam for the last time, told her we loved her dearly, and watched her breathe her last on earth. She was surrounded by the people who loved her most, listening to the voice of her mother.

The room smelled of lavender. She loved lavender.

Not as Handsome as I Never Was, But...

I first met Dave, the (later) president of the ATO house at Mines, at casino night my freshman year at Mines. I walked into the basement of Green Center with a couple of people from the second floor of Thomas Hall, looking to make some new friends and have a little fun. School clubs and organizations had set up card tables throughout the spacious room, and I saw a tall, lanky guy in a ratty t-shirt and a sharp jacket sitting at a blackjack table. He looked at us, invited us to sit down, and we played cards and listened to him talk about greek life for a couple hours. He invited my friend, Thomas, and I up to the house to see it, meet some of the members, and chat about our time at the school so far. I was up until about 1 or 2 in the morning talking to him – I still remember distinctly our conversation about Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Within a few weeks, I was a pledge at the house, and went out to play cornhole on Kafadar with some of the guys from ATO as they raised money for charity. Dave introduced me to his parents, and his sister – who happened to be cute as hell. I chatted with them some, played some cornhole, and went about my way.

Such went more than a few incidents with her: within a year, tangential conversations over physics problems, favourite books, and chance encounters ensued. I didn’t really see her again until almost three years later during the second half of my senior year, when I began taking part in the weekly pilgrimage to the Rock Rest Lodge for $2 pints on Tuesday evenings; I sometimes saw her passing by the windows on the way in/out, and never failed to wave like a madman when I’d recognize her in a semi-drunk state. Come April of 2018, I was out celebrating E-days, our school’s yearly extravaganza, with a friend of mine and her pals, fighting off a hangover I had earned the night before. I met up with my friend Wolf at some house in south Golden, where a keg race was in full swing. While shooting the shit, dodging staggering undergrads in droves, I looked over and locked eyes with her, in full regalia: pint in hand and a fanny pack that read “PARTY” across the front, something more a commandment than a statement.

We talked, I added her on Facebook, and we started up a conversation. I was – comically unsuccessfully – trying to get a date with another girl, but rather quickly realized that I really like this girl. Within a few weeks, I was finding every excuse to meet up with her. I jumped into an ATO – Sigma Kappa social (I can’t play volleyball to save my life, but it didn’t make a damn difference to me), and not long after spent about eight hours at a frat party talking to her exclusively throughout the night, admitting to how nervous I was around her and enjoying every minute of her company. Wolf takes a photo of us three on his polaroid camera, and it becomes one of my everyday carries in my wallet: if I were to be found dead on the road, they would see a photo of my sister, a hand-written letter from my Dad, and a photo of us. I carried that photo of her for three years, without fail.

A friend of mine, noticing the obvious chemistry, joked about getting her number if I didn’t make a move. Not to be outdone, I asked and she delivered. We held hands behind our backs, talking until the sun rose; we grabbed breakfast at the Golden Diner, where I almost snorted coffee through my nose I was laughing so hard at her puns.

Sometime later, after a drink or two for confidence, I give her a line about getting up to some fun that night. She asks what I’ve got in mind, and I relay something along these lines:

“Let’s just say I’ve got in mind a scenario where I’m making breakfast tomorrow morning while you’re getting dressed in my room.”.

She shoots me down, but the texts continue streaming in. She’s definitely interested.

Within a week or two, she invited me out on – what appeared to me – a date; of course, having a face made for radio, a guy like me doesn’t say no. We drove up to the Fisk planetarium together in her Chevy blazer, and she told me how much she liked men in ties: with a mischievous glance, she explains it gives her something convenient to grab onto when she got close to them.

Hook. Line. Sinker.

We watched the planetarium’s rendition of Stranger Things’ soundtrack, toured the CU Boulder campus, and I invited her back to the Golden Moon Speakeasy for a drink or two. The night went so smoothly, I was near giddy. I grin, ear to ear. We sat down at a booth, and I asked if she had ever heard of the 36 questions for love. I joked that, being two students from Mines, we’d need to test the set, empirically; she agrees emphatically. We talk for an hour or two, working our way through the list, and get to a point where we need to share three things we think are true about both of us in the moment. She gives me a line that we’re two attractive people, and we’re having a great time. I grin from ear to ear, and invite her to finish answering the questions back at my place where I can mix us a couple more drinks. We go, I put a gin mule in her hand, and we continue.

I open up about my Dad’s death; she comforts me, opens up about her own past, and immediately I can feel a deep bond beginning to form. We make it through the final questions in the wee hours of the morning, and I remark that there’s, sometimes, one last addendum: to not break eye contact with your partner for one or two minutes straight. She picks up the gauntlet, we begin, and I plant a kiss on her not thirty seconds later.

The rest is history.

We begin seeing each other at the drop of a hat: I blow off studying for my last final, she ditches homework, and we go get lunch. We grab drinks, stop and talk on walks to class, and fail to keep away from each other for any appreciable amount of time. I’m having lunch with my mom before graduating, tell her about this new girl I’m dating, and, I shit you not, I look out the window over her shoulder and see her coming down the street, beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen, in a flattering black dress. I panic, my mom laughs at me, and mom introduces herself to her as I smile sheepishly. My graduation happens, she congratulates me, attends my graduation party, and we spend the entire night talking and cuddling on the couch.

After I graduate, we make dinner one night, enjoy a few drinks, slowdance in the living room and get to know each other better. A thunderstorm rolls through, and she steps out on the back patio, arms outstretched, eyes closed, and feels the rain fall on her face. She’s gorgeous. We rough-house. She takes me down and lands on top of me, and I can’t help but smile like a fool. I tell her that I’m falling in love with her. I want something serious with her.

She panics and shares with me the challenges she feels about letting herself be loved – she quotes Perks of Being a Wallflower: “We accept the love we think we deserve”. I’m panicking thinking I’ve blown something good; things are tense for maybe a week or two, but she agrees to be exclusive with me. She’s working through some things around her previous relationship, and I try to respect her needs while fighting the anxiety and nerves in my head. She’s amazing, and I know I’ve caught lightning in a bottle; clutz that I am, I’m terrified of jolting or dropping it. I write her a love letter. It’s one of many over the years. I learn her favourite flowers and colours, and her favourite candy. We watch rom-coms. I introduce to her my favourite love song, and it becomes our song. I give her the best parts of me, and she does the same.

I accompany her on a trip during Father’s Day with her family on the Rio Grande scenic route to a beer festival; we visit her brother who lives in Denver in a nice apartment near Coor’s Field; we generally get up to trouble. After a fight, she tells me she’s ready to be in a serious relationship in June.

By early July, she tells me she loves me. I was in love with her since I was flat on my back on the carpet, back in May. I feel the happiest I’ve been since I lost my Dad; I feel the happiest I’ve been in a very long time.

Our relationship is rocky; she’s a tempestuous, fiery, stubborn woman; she’ll never take life on its terms without a good jab first. We butt heads and have minor (and major) disagreements, we step on each other’s toes as we – never quite right – learn how to listen to one another, support each other the ways the other needs, and love the rough edges we both have. I enter my early experiences with teaching, she completes her field session for Chemical Engineering and begins her second to last semester at Mines. Things are passionate, fiery, and dramatic; honestly, as difficult as it is at times to get along with her, I know deep in my bones I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love her. She levels me with a look, and with naught but a touch makes my entire day. Knowing I’ve made her smile, or laugh, fills me with joy. She’s my confidant, and my partner in crime.

Come January 2019, I’m entering student teaching, which saps all of my time, energy, and attention; she does her best to support me and push me along at my low points. There are more than a few nights I fight off an emotional breakdown by the skin of my teeth, and without her, I don’t know how I would have made it. She finishes college, we attend a special ceremony honouring the women graduates of Mines, and she receives her decorations for graduation. I watch her graduate, and am full of nothing but pride: she’s the funniest, smartest, most driven woman I know. She’s spit and vinegar. I never did like demure women – I wouldn’t know what to do with a woman who couldn’t kick my ass, and without a doubt in my mind, I know she could best me in every way.

I learn to play our song for her: I love the way it melts her heart. When she looks at me, I know a peace and happiness I haven’t felt for years.

We get up to a multitude of adventures: drunken escapades in Denver for her birthday(s); inadvertently accept an invite to a burlesque show in Boulder at a bar/coffee shop/bike repair store/theatre; we celebrate our (botched) 1st anniversary with our favourite bartenders at the Golden Moon Speakeasy, who pull bottles off the shelves for us after close, and get us hammered while we thrash to shitty metal/alt music over speakers that usually play soft jazz and muzak; random trips looking for a lost cellphone that ultimately lead us to Fort Collins; $4 wine nights watching trash TV; general shenanigans with our new and expanded circle of friends; endless nights talking for hours, cracking each other up, sharing our dreams, and reveling in one another. Things are wonderful, and challenging. I’m growing and living every desire I’ve had for a happy, loving relationship with this beautiful, hilarious, kind, and fantastic woman. I wonder nearly every night why she’s chosen a guy like me, and balk at my uncharacteristically good fortune. I wonder if, and when, she’s going to recognize she can do better.

At one point, I relay to her the terror I feel at the prospect of losing her after she graduates, as I’m deeply in love with her, want her in my life, and battling the dissonance of knowing I can’t/won’t leave Colorado (she wants to move out of state). I love her more than anything, and want nothing but for her to be happy. I’m lost on what to do or how to feel. She comforts me, tells me that she loves me, and that we should take things one month at a time.

On the anniversary of my Dad’s death, I feel intense fear and shame. I’m ashamed of how deeply and intensely his death still affects me, and colours and shapes my outlook. I fight to get out of bed, meet the day with grit teeth a hair’s breadth from a breakdown, and come home. She welcomes me, holds me, comforts me, and makes one of the worst days of the year – the memory of the worst day of my life – bearable.

She wishes me a happy birthday.

I never learned how to thank her for this.

I take her to the El Paso County Fair in my hometown: we dance two-steps, drink cheap beer, play carnival games, and I show her my home. I share with her the near mythical stories of my Dad, and open up to her about how badly I wish I had a place to belong. She helps me begin building a home and a life for myself, and teaches me that, no, my life isn’t over; that yes, I can be happy again. I move into a new home, and begin building a space and routines that I can be proud of.

Things begin changing once I start work. As I enter my first year of teaching in August of 2019, I begin working maniacally hard to ensure the success of my students, who I’m now entirely responsible for. This is my first experience teaching on my own, and the first step in my career. My nerves are through the roof as I overextend myself volunteering to help coach our school’s wrestling program and pouring my heart and soul into my classroom. She pushes me, supports me, helps me grade at ungodly and unreasonable times, and does her best to be there for me when I inevitably make mistakes. She struggles for nine months after graduating looking for work; she takes a temporary job as a bartender at a winery in Parker/Castle Rock, moves back home with her parents, and fights the self-judgment and false shame that comes from watching many of her friends move into careers. I comfort her: she’s a brilliant, talented, and incredibly dedicated woman, who gives her entire being to the causes she loves and believes in. I’ve never seen any woman so tenacious; I admire her grit every damn day.

Her time will come. This I know deep in my bones.

Come March of 2020, the lead zeppelin comes down; she spends more nights with me than at home, afraid of infecting her mother or father. I begin teaching from my living room, and we hunker down together. We begin seriously discussing her moving in with me (which excites and worries me to no end), and by the summer we’re living together. Our dynamic changes: I begin struggling badly with the loss of my independence, attempt to cope with living with another person for the first time in many years, and badly try to balance my hectic professional and personal life with her needs as my live-in girlfriend. We argue over petty and trivial things, like the trash, cleaning the house, and cooking. She gives me the passive-aggressive routine as I begin volunteering with our school’s wrestling team, something which brings me an immense joy, accusing me of putting her on the back burner and ignoring her entirely on how I spend my time. Every weekend I’m with the team, I’m worrying in the back of my head about how she’s going to give me a cold shoulder or rebuff me, how she’s going to listen to my stories about the day cold and indifferent. I begin feeling unheard and misunderstood; I don’t feel appreciated anymore, or admired. I often feel criticized, and like I’m failing to make her happy. She begins feeling minimized/ignored in regard to her thoughts and feelings, like she doesn’t have her own space in our home, and physically disconnected from me. I often feel from her more disdain than love, unappreciated, and judged. I sometimes feel like she’s just tolerating me – one night, as we’re out celebrating my friend Griffin’s birthday, I relay this to her half drunk. I get no answer. My anxiety mounts rapidly, and the night-long conversations we used to have become non-existent. We fail to connect, as we come closer together than we’ve ever been. I struggle to talk to her, and she struggles to talk to me. We start walking on eggshells, afraid or unable, perhaps both, to address the issues that begin cropping up in our relationship. My mental health begins to decline and I recede into my own world in an attempt to understand and deal with my own personal fears, problems, and doubts. I feel like I’m failing her.

The confident person I used to be when we met starts receding.

I learn one of her favourite cocktails, and make a special one, just for her. A simple pattern, drawn in Peychaud’s, across the top lets her know how I feel.

They come in threes – all the small, good things.

Dead of night.

Three brake lights.

Your lips pressed
on the nape
of my neck.

Black inked wrists.

Sticky notes.

I throw her a surprise luau/birthday party at Chatfield Lake in the pissing rain and cold. How can it be pissing rain and cold in the middle of fucking August? Everyone looks like they’re doing their best to be happy, but she’s the only one beaming. It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t fuck it all up.

The school year from hell begins in August, and we’re invited to a wedding shower in September; she’s received not one, but two job offers from Hawaii and the Colorado Departments of Transportation. My coworkers, who adore her, listen in trepidation as she weighs the decision to remain in Colorado or leave. The conversation turns to me, and I feel the immense pressure I felt over a year prior.

Do I beg her not to leave, or tell her to make the decision best for her?

I choose to be the man I want to be someday, and tell her and the assembled peanut gallery that I love her, and have always supported her in being the best version of herself she can be. I swallow my fear and say that I’ve always, from day one, wanted her to be happy; if that means she needs to leave, I’m going to be the first person kicking her ass out the door. I’ll never allow myself to stand in her way. I’m not worth it.

Things become distant and tense from that point onwards. She feels that I’m distancing and removing myself from our relationship, but what she doesn’t know or understand is how loud and constant the fight in my head is to try and keep my class from sinking, manage my stress, and fight back against my fears and insecurities in our relationship. I love her immensely, and have demons coming up in my mind from my past that I’m struggling to manage. I’m doing my best, and attempting to look after myself. I don’t think she understands.

She stays in Colorado, but decides to move out into her own apartment in February. She’s wanted a space of her own for years, and I, knowing how important to her this is, enthusiastically encourage her search and back her decision. I organize a massive group of my friends and mobilize some of her own; we move everything she owns to her new place in an afternoon, help her set up, and let her settle in. I miss her near immediately: I no longer have my better half with me each night to hold; no one to share the jokes, joys, and stresses of every day. I cook for myself, sleep by myself, and spend entirely too much time by myself. I learn my Aunt is terminally ill not long after she leaves, and I struggle to cope with looking after my Uncle, helping care for my Aunt, and manage my own personal life and a dumpster fire of a school year.

She tells me she’s afraid we’re growing apart; I do the best I can to visit, plan dates, and spend time with her, in between patching the holes in a boat that’s rapidly taking on water.

She asks me to attend a wedding – the week before finals for my students – in Utah, which I can’t be at. I’m deathly worried about my Aunt, burnt out at work, not sleeping/eating/exercising enough, and at my near wit’s end. It’s not the first wedding we’ve been to. I’ve attended three with her before, and don’t understand the significance of this one. She’s a bridesmaid. She seeks my feedback on a dress, repeatedly asks if I can’t spare even one day, and eventually leaves. I mourn my Aunt and support my Uncle; we go to a dive bar in Aurora after I see a friend of mine in Broomfield, and I get into a heated argument with my former step-dad. She hears about this and becomes irate, accusing me of lying as to why I wasn’t in Utah. I’m deeply hurt, ask her to stop calling me a liar, and eventually tell her to leave. I need her support, and instead I’m met with an accusation. I spend one of many nights alone, longing for someone to wrap an arm around me and let me come undone.

I want her to stop yelling at me and instead comfort me. I call her later, apologize, and do my best to make it up to her by being there with her and her friends as often as I can. We celebrate a friend of hers’ birthday in Castle Rock, getting drunk playing lawn darts and getting caught in a thunderstorm. She drunkenly berates me on the walk home in the rain – in front of one of her best friends – and I shut up and avoid her the rest of the night. I’m hurt, and eventually just leave. We go to a brewery with some friends of hers from college, and she openly talks with her friends about how she almost fucked some guy at a frat party in front of me. I bite my tongue and say nothing.

I recognize how deeply the death of my Aunt affected me, and begin seeking therapy; she says she’s proud of me, but will “believe it when she sees it” as to whether or not I stay with it. I relay to her how I’m starting a big project to explore my spirituality by going to church again, and get the same message: she’ll believe it when she sees it, whether or not I actually follow through. I try not to let the words cut me, but I can’t staunch the bleeding. It comes through the gaps in my fingers.

Two or three weeks later, I fly out with my Uncle to bury my Aunt’s ashes next to her brother in Los Gatos. Her parents have watched two of their three children pass away before them now. My Uncle is a shambles, and I have to leave him there in Los Gatos to make a wedding the next day. We go together. She’s in a lovely yellow dress, and she looks happy. We have a great time, dancing and drinking with my now closely-knit group of friends. We snap a few photos, including a portrait under a neon sign reading:

She comes home in tears the very next day and tells me she can’t be in a relationship with me. That I didn’t do anything wrong, that there’s not some other guy, and that she loves me deeply; she tells me that she doesn’t recognize or love who she is anymore, she doesn’t know what she wants in life, and needs to learn how to love herself.

I break down, tell her that I want her to be happy; I also beg her not to leave. She lingers in my room while collecting her things, clinging to me like something desperate and small, almost whispering how badly she doesn’t want to leave. I’m numb from the shock. At 1:30 in the morning, I watch the taillights of her Chevy turn the corner behind my house, collapse on the ground, and sob hysterically until 4. I howl like the night after my Dad’s funeral. Not since then, or perhaps one time before, do I feel so abandoned and alone. I get on the phone with my friend Josiah, relay what’s happened to him, and begin burning through a bottle of rye through the burning tears. I don’t want to remember. I’m not sure I want to forget, either. I know for certain that I don’t want to be here, and now.

The next month is a maelstrom of confusion, disarray, and pain. I meet with, talk to, and spend time with her to try and understand why she’s doing this: she gives me no definite answer, other than “I don’t know”. She claims that she needs to be selfish, and look after herself; that she’s given everything she had to our relationship, and has nothing left; that I don’t know or understand her; that she’s in the midst of an identity crisis; that it’s unfair to me to try and support her through this, that she needs to do it alone. I wrack my brain and soul, looking for every reason, and every problem: I ask more questions, and receive less answers. I offer solutions and alternatives, only to have every single one shot down. She gives me mixed signals: she still loves me, but can’t be with me; she still wants me, but doesn’t want to be with me. That I make her melt with a wink or a smile, that she’ll never forget me, like she’s already gone – then drive ten miles an hour under the limit in the slow lane, buying every second she can have with me.. She wants all of me – the pain, the happiness, and everything in between – but doesn’t want all of us.

What she doesn’t understand is that I am us.

She asks me to comfort her after the memorial service for her grandfather; we take a massive, three-hundred mile road trip through the mountains of Colorado, and up through Laramie, Wyoming. I wouldn’t be anywhere else but at her side. On the trip, I heard an echo in an old train car outside Walden: immortalized inside, I read:

She yells, cries, and accuses me of being all talk, and no action. Of never doing enough to support her, or listen to her. Of not backing up my beliefs or values, of never truly showing her how I felt about her. She punctuates these accusations with sharp thrusts of her index finger into my chest. At one point, I’m told that I didn’t care. I’m told that I never prioritized her. I’m told that she wasn’t as important to me as I was to her. She doesn’t know how sharp those razors are. I suppose she never will.

Oftentimes in the same conversation, I’m told that I’m loved, that I’m wanted, and that she feels better when she’s with me; that she could have seen a life with me, and that I’m the kind of man she’d want to marry. That I’m the most intelligent, caring, and kind person she knows; that she’s my biggest fan, and always will be. She admires how openly and without reservation I am. She tells me never to change. That I’m going to make “some woman” happy someday, as if I ever wanted any other woman than her. I struggle to understand the dissonance of our discussions. I drive myself half-crazy attempting to crawl into her head and see the scenario with her eyes. I feebly try to understand her position as one much like my own when I left for Colorado at sixteen. I can’t – I can’t separate myself from what I want for us, and what is best for her. I spend many mornings driving home from a night at her apartment, unable to keep away from her, sleep deprived; another fruitless attempt to understand and talk about us and wondering if things will change. On many of these drives, I’m fighting with everything I have to keep from blubbering while going down highway 93. I feel used, and what little self-esteem I have left begins to kick up into the air with the dust behind my Toyota.

I lose eight pounds from stress, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and I can’t shake the sensation that I’ve swallowed hot coals, and that the best thing to happen to me in years has walked out of my life. I have nightmares every night, for nearly a month. I try to recover who I was before I met her, and recognize that every part of me is stained – often for the better. I drive home from my favourite cocktail bar, or from a drive to Nederland, screaming at the top of my lungs doing nearly a hundred miles an hour down the highway through the tears. I sob on the phone with my family; I sob in front of my Uncle; I sob in front of my workout group. I dread the repetition of telling our mutual friends and my relatives that the woman they told me I’d be a fool to let go of has gone and walked away.

My hobbies become meaningless, and our photographs together do nothing but remind me of the searing agony I feel in the dark at night and just before dawn in the morning when I wake. I pace the house nearly every day, my head racing so fast it becomes a howling dirge without end. Crying jags come out of nowhere, without explanation or reason. Wounds from my childhood I thought I had roughly stitched together a lifetime ago seep, and my fear, doubt, and loneliness comes crawling through the floorboards.

I’m a failure. I’ve fucked everything up. I don’t feel kind, I don’t feel smart, and I certainly don’t fucking feel like me. I feel repulsive. I’m not sure how the hell I’m supposed to feel at home in my life, when we built that life together. For two months, I’ve become a revenant of myself, and try to pick the pieces back up and join the edges of the puzzle back together.

I burned the boat I came in on when I chose to love her. I knew I’d never be the same going in, and I knew there would be no escape.

Bukowski once said, “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

Bite me, you alcoholic fuck… give me another poem. Preferably one of those you wrote about women. I’ll need to look for a copy of Love is a Dog from Hell next time I’m in the Tattered Cover.

What Did We Learn, Palmer?

In a conversation with my therapist not too long ago, I was sat in my new classroom, before the first week with students, looking around at the freshly decorated walls and the neat empty desks. I had finished the best camping trip of my life in Moab, flown in from North Carolina where I spent some quality time with my sister, and spent numerous days hiking, driving, listening to live music, and a heap of time with my friends. I was anxious about the coming year: everything I’ve accomplished in my career, I’ve done with her at my side. Everything I’ve done, from before graduating college until now, was with the support of both my Aunt and my Uncle, who’ve never ceased to keep a keen eye on me. Just about everything in my recent life has been built around or with the support of my now defunct relationship with my ex, and I relayed to him my fear and self-doubt surrounding maintaining my identity after the loss of her, my Aunt, and much of the naivete I came into the profession with. When I graduated college and went into the field, I was driven, competent, bold, and both knew and trusted myself to meet and overcome anything in my path. Right now, I feel dazed, disoriented, cautious, uncertain, and vulnerable. Old feelings – some of which I haven’t felt since I was sixteen – have returned to the surface, brought out by the abrasion of the last year and six months. Same old, black dog. Same old tricks.

I once described the same feeling to another counselor, a long time ago. From my wrestling days, the feeling I’ve often had before and during massive change in my life: I’m fighting off my back. I’ve been fighting off my back since I was four, and in my life, it’s not often I’ve felt like I’ve truly found my footing. I had a brief period when I was sixteen until I graduated high school and went off to Mines; I had another, after my Dad’s death and a breakup with my high school sweetheart, before I graduated and entered the Noyce Scholars through the University of Northern Colorado. That was the same time I met her. This period extended up until around May of 2020.

Through every one of the crises I’ve traveled, I’ve identified characteristic traits and actions that’ve helped me get on: the importance of showing the love to myself I never quite received when I was young, and giving myself the grace, time, and right to truly feel; the fortune and luck of strong friendship, vulnerability, and shared support with those who know – and want to know – me as I am; and, most certainly the most important, the stubborn, tenacious act of the white knuckle grip. I’ve passed through every challenge in the past, and have come out stronger for it. My experience with my family, with loss, and with my relationships have made me empathetic and kind toward others; my experience of marginalization within my family has taught me the power and essential necessity of knowing and using my voice; my lifelong battle with melancholy and the anxious, despairing thoughts in my head inform and motivate the near-unstoppable determination and grit with which I pursue my interests, my work, and my relationships with others.

Not because of, but in spite of, many of the events of my life I’ve learned to love. Imperfectly – the edges I keep are sometimes too sharp, my words sometimes too jaded and pessimistic. I often joke I’m a bitterly disappointed optimist: the idealistic streak in me that sees the best in others, and the potential in all things, remains bold and alive though often frustrated and disappointed by the realities of experience and memory. I’ll hold tight a little while still.

I haven’t the foggiest what purpose or story I’ll take out of my memories now, sat down in the midst of them. I know not who I’ll be in five years, looking back on this period and what stories I’ll tell and to whom. I can’t find the silver lining, threading my fingers through the past six months – I’m too busy trying to untangle the knots. I do know, however, that there’ll still be the little world I’ve built for myself; there I’ll be, working out the next step, addressing the next hurdle, shoulder to shoulder with the people I’m beyond fortunate enough to still have in my life. There’s a lot of hurt in these last few years. There’s also a hell of a lot of laughter, and more than a little gratitude.