It is Tuesday, which means I will be working from home. Daylight hits my eyes through a crack in the curtains. I get up, splash water on my face, and move to the kitchen. Finn, my stepson, is making a bagel. The smell of the toaster is in the air. I pour water into the kettle and wait for it to heat. When it is ready, I fill my cup and drop in two tea bags. The morning has the texture of every other morning. Bethanie, my wife, is teaching an online class somewhere in the house. I carry my tea to the loveseat in the living room and pull out my phone.

My mother has texted about a cone collar for Juniper, my sister’s cat, who had surgery yesterday to remove a hair tie from her intestine. I make a mental note to drop the cone off for Juni later. Then I see my brother Alex’s name.

I go still.

It has been more than a year since his name appeared on my phone with a call or message. Every attempt to contact him only met with silence. The last time we had any real back and forth, anything resembling ease between us, was almost five years ago. I went to his house once and he said through the closed door that he didn’t want a confrontation. I stood on his porch and felt the word land wrong and drove home with it.

But his name is on my phone, and I open the message.

He has sent me a link to a YouTube video. Alan Watts. In the End. Watch it sometime. And then: I didn’t forget about you.

I read it again. I didn’t forget about you.

Something loosens in my chest. Something I had been holding without knowing I was holding it. Alex reached out. He thought of me, and he reached out and there is his name on my phone and the words are right there. I let myself feel it, the warmth, the hint of ease, the possibility. Maybe this is the thing that opens a door. Maybe this is how it starts, a link to a video, a small gesture across the distance, and then something more. I sit with it. The morning is quiet and Finn is making a bagel and Bethanie is teaching a class and my brother has not forgotten me.

Then my phone rings.

It is my mother.

I pick up and say hello and her voice is wrong. I have heard it before, that register of anguish, in the years when my father was still in the picture and she cried about things he had done. I haven’t heard it in decades. I know immediately that something is deeply wrong. And then she says it.

“Alex is gone.”

I hear the sounds. I know they are words. I say, “What,” and I mean it, I genuinely mean it. I am asking her to tell me what the sounds mean. Alex is gone. I turn the words over. Alex. Gone. My brother’s name and a word that means away, means absent, means not here, and I am still holding the ease from thirty seconds ago, am still inside the loosened feeling, still in the morning that has the texture of every other morning.

“Gone where?”

She says, “Get over here now. Now!” And her voice breaks on the second now and something in me understands and my body stands up from the loveseat before my mind has agreed to anything. I am moving. I am asking what happened and she says he shot himself and I hear it and I hear it and I hear it and still the meaning does not crack open.

I am moving through the house. I pass Finn in the hallway and he asks what’s happening and I gasp, “My brother.” Just that, my brother, because they are the only words I have. I am calling for Bethanie. I am searching for her and the words come out of me, “He shot himself,” and she says, “Don’t drive,” and I don’t, I let her. I am in the passenger seat, and we are moving, too slowly, and I am trying to breathe.

But I am also still back there. Some part of me is still on the loveseat with the phone in my hand and his name on the screen. I didn’t forget about you. The words are still there in the way that words stay, the warmth still present the way heat rises from a cup of tea left sitting. I am in the car and we are on the freeway and I am heaving air in a way I have never done before, like I have forgotten how, and still some part of me is reading his text for the first time and feeling the loosening and not knowing yet what it cost him to send it, not knowing yet what it meant that he sent it that morning, not knowing what I was receiving when I let myself feel the warmth of it and thought maybe this is how it starts.

My sister calls. I tell her and she screams, “What,” just as I did, the same word, and I know exactly where she is, I know the place she is standing right now where only the sounds have arrived, and I cannot tell her what is waiting on the other side of the word because I am not there yet myself, I am still in the gap, still in the place between gone and what gone means, still grasping the warmth from his message like a wisp of steam.

We pull up to his house. A police officer is arriving at the same moment. I am out on the road before Bethanie has fully stopped her car and my mother is coming out of the wooded area across the street, moving toward the officer, and I run to her and hold her and then I look to my right.

He is lying flat near a large tree.

And there it is, cracking open. Not with a sound, or a word, not with anything my mother said or my sister screamed but because I can see him, because he is there and he is not there, because his body is on the ground in the dirt near a large tree and the morning that had the texture of every other morning is gone now too, simply gone. I am standing in what is left, with my mother in shock and my sister sobbing and the warmth from his text still lingering in the air.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

When I lived in Alaska, in the drifting years of my early twenties, I heard about a cabin somewhere across the bay. It was empty, but the kitchen was stocked, they said. The place had red curtains and a simple table bathed in forest light. The owners left it unlocked. All of this had been prepared for visitors, for strangers. This was the proof I was seeking, what I’d traveled thousands of miles to find—a sign that the world was magical, and giving.

I got hold of a map, drawn in pencil. In the roadless interior, beyond any paths, sat the X that showed the location of the cabin. It lay on the far side of a stream, several miles inland. A water taxi dropped me off on the beach at the nearest access point, and I set off along the trail, going east. I came to a glacial river, blue with silt, the crossing nothing more than a rope and pulley system with a dangling swingset seat. Water churned eons below my legs. 

On the other side, the trail narrowed. No hikers appeared through the trees—no voices or flashes of colored jackets. I turned off the trail at the marked stream, passed near bear scat as I followed the bank inland toward the next landmark on the map, a Y-shaped tree. When I found the tree, I pulled on my waders. The forest was silent. A shiver ran up my back. I felt that I was not alone. In the middle of the stream, ice-cold water up to my hips, something brushed against me. I looked down to see the brown-and-gold rocks on the streambed resolve into salmon hovering at the depth of my knees, making a tapestry under clear water.

On the other side of the stream, where the map said the cabin would be, I found nothing but a sparse grove of trees growing up from untouched ground. 

When I waded back across the stream and followed the water toward the ocean, I noticed silver ribbons draped over the roots of the trees along the bank. I realized they were the husks of salmon. What a feast, a banquet table for the bears, I thought, and as I rounded each bend of the stream I worried I’d surprise one, who’d look at me, open-jawed, and charge—I was an interloper; a giant, crashing guest in a place so vast, so intricate, I could only begin to glimpse its edges with my dim and shifting human sight. 

After hiking back to the beach, I slept in the lean-to. When morning came, I sat on a driftwood log half-buried in the sand a few feet from the tideline. The bay was flat, almost forbidding in the early light. I felt that I’d made a mistake in journeying here alone. But then three seals appeared, their heads bobbing above the waves. They looked at me, their expressions curious, observant, as if they recognized me as a fellow wanderer, poised between sea and land, one place and another.

In the end, I was gone a day, a night, and a day. But I never forgot what it felt like to stand in that slow-moving water, scores of salmon so still around me, having traveled back to their birthplace to wait for death. Eventually I’d leave Alaska, move back to the Lower 48, shuck off the stubborn bite of loneliness that had spurred me to travel halfway around the globe, so far from where I’d sprung up to start with. 

A life emerges and then dissolves back through the belly of the bear, but I clung tight to the kernel of heat, of warmth, that made me. It would take many years to learn from the salmon hovering in my memory, their faces and flanks whitened and gray, loose, decomposing, as if it were easy to go back where they came from.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

He was your first real boyfriend—the type you kiss on the curb of a church parking lot. The type you don’t really like all that much but you’re eleven and reading romance novels earlier than you probably should and you’re eager for the moment where fairy tale meets reality, a high you’ll continue to chase into your twenties with the same disappointing outcome you once experienced on the curb of a church parking lot.

And he looks stable, full of promise. Nice home. Nice family. Plays football. Loves to fish. Eats dinner every night. They go to church and you like church, though they arrive as a set and you an unsupervised drop-off. And maybe you do not like church in the spiritual way of complete devotion, but you love having somewhere free to go and something free to do. You were never all that picky. You survive on crumbs to the point where one day, an eating disorder will make a blessing out of poverty. You expect and crave nothing. Your standards will stay low for too long, always coming up short and measuring well below the max height of a well-maintained Ohio lawn: eight to twelve inches. That’s an innuendo, by the way. You always worry no one will get it.

He doesn’t, and he’s literally a thirteen-year-old boy. He can’t grasp his science courses, and he’s certainly not grasping you in any substantial way. But it’s not his fault, not really. Young and dumb. Besides, he’s not the protagonist.

It was actually his mother you remember best, she was the inciting incident. When he cried over the phone to you, an indication he may have felt this was more than just something to do, he revealed how he was downtrodden because his mother believed you were distracting him from football. You thought it rather silly. First that she would say something like that to someone obviously not cut out for a football career and second that he would cry about it—you’ve always been a bit callous.

You brush off his mother’s comment. You don’t think too much about it. Why the fuck would you let something so small ruin the rest of your day? The rest of your week? The rest of your something to do?

She wore blue, that mother of his, when you met her for the first time in the church basement during a Sunday school service—or what you now call “affordable childcare.” Blue sweater, blue jeans, white sneakers with blue accents. Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue. It was the kind of color that made your stomach churn, like the ocean’s depths or the inside of a day-old bruise. You expected she’d adore you the same way your own parents and teachers did, the way they beamed when you entered a room. You’re a rule follower. You like direction. You like reading. You like manners. You’re blonde. Adults have so much to love about you.

But she looked you up and down, those thin, mulberry lips forming a tight line of disappointment, her gaze on your abdomen for what felt like a little too long. You could see disgust in the crinkle of her nose. She says, “You can’t be dating her, she’s far too small to bear children. Her hips won’t be wide enough.”

You are fresh into your eleventh year of existence. You have yet to even bleed. Her words sink into your stomach, settling somewhere low and quiet, far below the surface. You feel sick with experience, blue around the gills, and you wonder if, for a girl, there’s really a difference between breathing and drowning.

You carry the event home and the women closest to you laugh at the story, telling you not to think too much about it. Your sister calls her stupid, your mother calls her a crazy bitch. When you’re alone though, you call her right. You look in the mirror, “They are too small.” And while one could argue you still had time to develop, they’d be wrong. You remain 4’11’’ and his mother remains right.

And a few years along the way, when you’ve moved on and moved away and your time is no longer spent in church basements, that boy becomes a teen dad. You’re not surprised. Dodged that bullet.

For years, you tell the story as some audacious humorous anecdote. Just another thing some stupid, crazy bitch said to you. But you never forget the disgust of not meeting her feminine expectation. An expectation you never thought much of until someone forgets to laugh when you recall the story in a university classroom. Until someone says, “That’s not really funny.” Until another voice chimes in, “I don’t know what I’d do if someone said that to my daughter.” And all you can think at the time is, Damn, me neither.

But that doesn’t stop you from laughing and telling it again because now all you can think is Why the fuck was she wearing so much blue?

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

when you are fat in middle school, your doctors tell you to join a sport. when you get cut from softball for never having played softball—every soft lob whipping past your swinging bat and racing heart, every careless toss slipping through your borrowed glove—your teachers tell you to run cross country. when you get bullied out of cross country, your parents tell you to walk. so you walk. you tell yourself you’re cute, that deep down, the cuteness of you that no one sees is worth everything, and you tape a black satin bow to a black plastic headband and wear it to remind yourself. 

you don’t have a phone, but you’re just in your neighborhood, the same old neighborhood where the same old people live. the adults tell you to be positive, so you walk, crunching sun-baked leaves, slipping fingers through the scaly fronds of cypresses lining the yard of a girl who used to be your friend. cold shadows spear onto the crumbling asphalt like teeth, and the din of your thoughts obscures the crackling of tires. 

a boxy brown car rolls to a stop beside you. you pause, curious. you are a girl scout, trained to listen and help. the window sinks down into the door. cigarette smoke wafts out.

he’s college age, brown hair, varsity jacket, tired eyes. he doesn’t say hi or i’m looking for… or can you give me directions to... he asks, do you want a ride? 

the upholstery is red leather, cracked but clean, no crushed soda cans or crumpled fast food wrappers. just a blanket folded in the backseat. you take far too long to think, to wonder how you look to him, to scramble for a reason not to get in the car—the car of the only person who has ever, maybe, probably-not-even hit on you. yes, you want to get traumatized on red leather; yes, you want the touch of the hand that adjusts his side mirror too nonchalantly and the vein standing out on the back of that hand and the blood inside that vein; yes, you regret it immediately when you shake your head.

where do you live? he asks. you point beyond the cypresses at your once-friend’s house. she is thin and cute and never home. she has a boyfriend.

leaning an elbow out the car’s window, he frowns, disappointed, even pitiful. or perhaps that’s your reflection in the flake of the car’s paint, and he’s just reading your lie back to you, waiting for you to realize: this will be your only chance. a stranger in an old car at dusk. a scratchy blanket and nicotine-stained fingers and whatever violence he wants to enact on you, whatever cruelty, whatever pretend love. this is your chance, while you still hold the barest possibility that you are or ever were cute. no one actually thinks you’ll get any prettier; they make you try because they can’t stand to look at you. 

so you don’t want a ride? he confirms, and you try to convince yourself his impatience is tenderness. 

no, you say, and rush up your once-friend’s driveway, your black satin bow slipping. you stumble into a crouch in the drainage rocks behind her house, and it falls. you grab it and hold it to your heaving chest. it was supposed to make you cute; it worked in the worst way possible. 

he sits there for a moment, tapping his steering wheel. he knows you’re lying. you know you’re missing your chance. if he gets out of the car and grabs you, drags you by your frizzy hair, you both know you’ll surrender.

the car squeaks as he pulls away. tears press against your eyelids. perhaps they’ll say you’re making progress, that your miniscule reluctance to be kidnapped is indicative of self-esteem, or bravery, or whatever other basic virtue they like to pretend pumps through the chambers of your preposterous heart. in reality, the only argument you can find against running back into the road, bow in hand, is this: whatever he wanted to do to you, you didn’t even deserve that.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Whenever someone asks Where do you get your fashion inspiration from? without hesitating, I say, My momma.

And, boy, you best believe it. See, my momma knows fabrics. She knows a pattern when she sees one. She travels up and down a rack, the hangers click click a-clicking. She knows when this don’t go with that. She knows a good deal when she sees one. She knows what goes.

See, it’s like this: We’re at JCPenney,  looking for my first homecoming dress. Nothing’s quite right at fourteen; my hair’s too frizzy, and stringy, and my god is that a pimple on my nose? But in between me trying on a seafoam dress and a frilly thing that itches, my momma tries on a pair of navy blue pants. Dang, she says, turning, I look good. Now, everyone says I look like my momma. And when she dances in the mirror, wiggling her butt to a pop song, a little glow lights in my chest. A tiny firefly who knows how to dance. I hold up the next dress, swaying to the music. I look good, I think.

See, you better believe my momma looks good. She’s cute-girl short with curly hair and a mouth that laughs. She’s got pretty hands and nice legs and when she looks at you, that’s what matters. She wears sailor stripes, bright shoes, a silky scarf. She’s got wide-pocket pants, heeled boots, pointy church-shoes. She likes long dresses, silver hoops, navy blue, and perfume that smells like nighttime flowers.

I’ve been away from home for years now, my own closet and shoes and way of walking through the thrift store, hangers clicking softly. When I’m back at my apartment, I catch a glimpse in the green mirror over the couch and think, I look good. I FaceTime my momma to show her what I got today. When I pan the camera to where I have the shirt laid out, she laughs and laughs. What? I ask. Hold on, let me show you, she says. She walks to her closet and pulls out the same shirt, a blue-striped button-up.

Trust us to buy the same thing three states away. It’s like her body is my body, looking good. Like I’ve always known I come from somewhere beautiful. Like we’re both fireflies, lit up, dancing to the same song.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Three facts. One: when researchers leave a man alone in a room for fifteen minutes, with a button they can press in order to shock themselves, two-thirds will—bzzt—press the button. Two: while I was a music composition major, I took a psychology class where I learned about the button-pressing experiment. Three, the most important: I have never played the viola in my life. 

My brother, Luke, played the viola in school. But he never let me touch it. One December, he let me hold a fiberglass ornament his religious ed teacher had gifted him. I gave in to an overwhelming urge to—bzzt—squeeze it until it shattered. Another time, he got an action figure inspired by the hit animated TV show Gargoyles, which had a grappling hook attached to Goliath’s gun by string. I can still hear my mother, my father, and my brother all screaming, “no, Zach, no, stop it, don’t do it, Zachary John,” as my scissor-wielding hand advanced under its own will toward that string and—snip—ruined that toy. Bzzt. Bzzt bzzt bzzt.

I don’t have to tell you that I was the younger brother, or that after that birthday I always got a present on Luke’s birthday. I also do not have to tell you that I belong to the shock-button-pressing two-thirds of the male population. But I do have to tell you that I never, ever in my life, not even once for fun, have ever touched a viola—let alone played one. I respected that boundary.

I had no choice. Because Luke kept his viola locked in its case and, no, he apparently did not hide the key under the keyboard of the computer he and my dad built, on the shelf stuffed with the monumental paperbacks I couldn’t get through, or under his stack of All-State viola certificates of achievement going back to the third grade. 

I have played other instruments. The cello for a semester. But it was very heavy and the freshman dorm RA kept commenting on the noise, reminding me that dogs, no matter how sick they were, were not allowed in campus housing. I played the piano. The trombone. Even the guitar. But never the viola, even once I got to college.

Why does that matter? Because for one of my classes I had to compose a solo piece for the instrument of my choice. Did I choose the guitar, the piano, the cello, or the trombone? No. I chose the viola.

Bzzt.

This composition class was traditionally reserved for seniors and I was seventeen. My classmates could all buy liquor. They smoked weed in their off-campus apartments. Mike’s band had a tour lined up for that summer. Kirsten already had a gig writing music for HBO. Tyler and Carson were gonna move to LA that summer and then figure it out. They were the coolest people I had ever met and I’d never felt more like a dweeb. My professor, Doug, had shoulder-tapped me to join the class. In his cruel and off-hand way, he said he didn’t think I could do it and that was why he wanted me to take it. He enjoyed proving himself right.

I toiled on that piece, but probably not as long as I should have considering it would determine whether I could shove an A in Doug’s face, whether HBO would ever hire me, or my band could ever go on tour, whether I could ever hack it in LA.

And I really did want to impress Doug. He was teaching us about the greats of atonality that semester. You know—household names. Bartok, Schoenberg, Eisler. Those guys who composed songs that sound like math theorems. Of course, they wrote using tone rows such as in Webern’s Variations for Orchestra which I know I don’t have to tell you he derived from three tetrachords, all of which give it a unity in motif and chord. I wanted him to hear I got it.

“You can compose it in a key,” Doug reminded me. “Any key. C… G… F-sharp.”

We were listening to a computer play the latest draft of my piece. It sounded like the computer had dropped its simulation-viola on a cat.

“It’s… esoteric,” I explained to Doug. “See, I created a tone row, that—”

“No, I know,” Doug squeezed the sheet music so hard it crinkled. 

So I revised it. And the next week Doug became very preoccupied with his combover, and his glasses, and his breathing, as we listened to the computer perform what can only be described as surgery on the cat the computer had previously abused. “Can a… viola even play these notes?” he asked.

“Oh. Yes,” I said. Bzzt. That hadn’t even occurred to me.

Professionals were coming in to perform our pieces before my next one-on-one with Doug. Even if he could talk me out of writing a solo for an instrument no one really writes solos for, or at least to write for an instrument I played, it was too late to write anything good. 

The night before, I devoured my final meal in the dining hall. Scrambled eggs, cookies, cheeseburgers, fries. All as fast as I could. I was seeking sensation. I had felt this way before: in the parking lot of St Mary’s of the Lake Church, for instance.

Put Luke’s fiberglass stocking-shaped ornament into your hand. It’s cool to the touch. It’s lighter than you expected. How strong is it? You want to know. It’s not like you want to be in pain, but how strong is the shock of that little red button? You want to know. And your religious ed teacher didn’t give you an ornament, even though you–mostly–sat still in class for once. You watch the ornament in your hand become a billion little pieces. Just because you squeezed it. And you had to squeeze it harder than you expected.  And now you know. 

And then there’s another feeling. I don’t know the word for it. It’s full of shock, and horror, and permanence. Because you can’t just go back into the rectory and get your brother another ornament, and you can’t unpress the button, and you can’t go back in time and just write a damn piece for piano like you know you could do decently, even if it had no key, and you can’t stop eating the dining hall cookies.

That night at dinner I was having the epiphany I was trying not to have: My greatest defeats have all come by my own hand. And this was about to be one of them. Luke would not ever press the shock button. The button-shock researchers concluded that people will push the button to avoid being alone with their thoughts. Thoughts like these. They wrote, “Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”

It would have been nothing for me to write a piece for piano, or guitar. It would have been something for me to write one that Luke heard and went, “wow.” I chose the viola because, even if he wanted to, Luke would not push the button. He wouldn’t crush the ornament, or snip the string on Goliath’s grappling gun. I chose the viola because I was sorry he was such a nice, patient brother and I was always so lousy and I had no better idea how to say that.

The next day, the violist introduced my piece last. He said, “And then there’s… this one.” He had ashy hair, an ashy goatee, and dark glasses he apparently pushed up to his brow when he was exasperated. “Who wrote this?” 

Doug pointed at me. A lot of spite in the way he twisted his hand and flicked his finger out at me. But I was ten years away, looking around my living room at the shreds of wrapping paper and Goliath’s severed string in my brother’s hands.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

It feels time to share the pandemic story no one asked for. 

Other single women learned to bake sourdough. Some learned French. Some learned to make perfect little ice cubes with flowers frozen inside so they could host dinner parties for no one. But not me. I was busy becoming the most feral version of myself: a woman alone in her apartment ordering massive quantities of crab. 

At first, I tried to resist. Tried to cling to the kind of polish I had worn like armor in an office of men, the performance of composure that kept me from seeming too much, too strange, too hungry. I remember my boss, Greg, saying on a Zoom call at the beginning of lockdown, “I hope all you single people are using this time to pick up a new skill. Maybe a language or an instrument.” 

No, Greg, I’m not. All at once, I let go of the unspoken expectation to be the lady of the office and plunged headfirst into the delicate, delicious language of crab. Every Friday night after work, while the majority of our all-male team shut their laptops and wandered back down the hall to their families, I shut mine and entered a battlefield of my own making. I pulled the blinds closed. Removed my bra. Removed my pants. Stood alone in a tank top and underpants microwaving butter until it exploded all over the microwave like some divine, salty baptism. 

Maybe if there’d been other women at work, I would have joined the office-sanctioned arts-and-crafts Slack channel or the pandemic French club. Maybe I’d have learned to conjugate verbs instead of deconstruct crustaceans. With other women, I might have shared the strange, silent weight of being alone, trading jokes or small comforts in a group instead of inventing my own rituals in the dark. I am so glad that I didn’t. I learned to wield scissors like a surgeon. I learned to eat crab like it was survival. Like I was Tom Hanks in Castaway, celebrating his first hot meal of roasted crab in his cave, Wilson by his side. I had spent years making myself small at work—well-fed on meetings and deadlines, but starving for something that was only mine. I realized then that no one else was going to nurture that version of me back to life.

I bought special crab scissors. Having grown up in an Asian household, I already knew the power of kitchen scissors for meat, but I had leveled up. I could slice clean through a thick crab shell like I was defusing a bomb. My hands smelled permanently like ocean brine and melted butter. I didn’t care. 

I tried it all. Boxes arrived from Alaska, from Maine, from Maryland. I developed a loyalty to my crustaceans of choice. Dungeness for sweetness. King for drama. Soft shell for nights when I felt delicate and raw.

 The pandemic was long. There were many lonely nights. There was always more crab. 

This was not a hobby. This was a spiritual awakening. I was the kind of lonely you have to be to change. Each shell I splintered was another layer of polish breaking off, the shiny performance that once made me safe in a room full of men. But the safety was theirs, never mine. What I had left was hunger.

And still—so many stories from lockdown center around parenting struggles, and I believe every one. But single solitude was its own kind of strange, silent ache. No one saw it. No one talked about it. People made it sound like we were the lucky ones, spared the weight of homeschooling and partnerships and noise. But I was invisible. And that invisibility cracked something. I wasn’t eating crab in underpants because it was decadent. I was doing it because it was the closest thing I could find to celebration, to comfort, to proof that I could still treat myself like someone worth feeding. 

At the time, I was working full-time with men who clung to the office until the bitter end. In California, where lockdown was serious, university departments had already been urged to go remote, but mine refused until the governor’s official stay-at-home order left them no choice. The men scoffed at the threat, surfed off Campus Point Beach between meetings, and emailed impassioned essays about “returning to in-person collaboration.” 

I remember sitting in our silent office the day before we were finally sent home, looking around and wondering why no one else felt like we were on the edge of something. They wanted to go back to what felt like a deeply male version of domestication—out of the house, back with their buddies at work. But I was already gone. Already halfway to the sea. 

It all culminated the following summer when I went to Maine for a writing retreat. The final dinner was lobster. The supposed prize of the sea. I sat next to a kosher professor who nibbled politely on broccoli. Another woman beside me tried lobster for the first time. Wide-eyed. Hesitant. 

“It’s fine,” I told her, cracking my claws like I was some kind of grizzled, all-knowing seaperson, Quint from Jaws reborn. “But honestly? Crab is better.” 

They looked at me like I’d said something scandalous. And maybe I had. 

The next day, I ordered a lobster roll from a local favorite. And for old times’ sake, I got a crab roll too. No contest. 

Was it wrong to spend my pandemic lockdown sampling the crustaceans of the sea instead of bettering myself? I did not learn French. I did not take up embroidery. I did not write the next great American novel. Instead, I was a woman working hard. Hustling for crab. 

Once, in a weekly phone call with Greg, I licked a bit of crab off the end of a butter knife. The delighted slurping noise I made shocked us both. I thought I was caught until Greg urged me not to cry, reminded me we would be back in the office soon. “Totally,” I fake sniffled. 

And then I hung up, stripped back down to my crab-eating uniform, sharpened my scissors, and got back to the real work. 

Now, a few years post-pandemic, I walk past ice-packed snow crab in crowded grocery store seafood sections and feel something close to a heart tug. Lockdown was, for me, a return to whatever the hell I was supposed to be but had buried so deep down I’d forgotten—feral, free, eating crab while watching YouTube. No longer the girl at work in heeled booties and an array of buttoned-up jackets. Finally, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. As alone as a person could be, I was unashamedly myself. Just feeding the creature who needed feeding.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

April 2023

I am still married. 

My husband is elsewhere. 

My children sleep in their beds. 

I ready the house and myself for when they wake. I am the center of a seesaw and I keep the balance. I cook, clean, plan, arrange, manage, and listen. I hope my labor is efficient enough that it will be forgotten, that my family will be unburdened by daily domestic stresses. I hold the middle. I hold still. 

Stillness can be a kind of death. 

I tell myself joy cannot exist without misery. True joy, like faith, like love, is proven by its disappearance. A heart must be carved by suffering to be filled with the full power of joy. 

I know this with my brain. It has been some time since I’ve felt such passions with my body. 

Everyone’s midlife must feel this way, warm rushing waters frozen over time. Everyone’s marriage must feel this way.

Outside, the daffodils arrive and open, trumpets of sun. An April nor’easter hits New England and the flowers are pummeled by snow.

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April 2024

My husband sleeps downstairs. We tell the children it is because he snores. 

I sleep in the closet. I am following an instinct of my body that I do not understand, an instinct for less: less light, less space, less me. 

I find a therapist who I hope will convince me to stay in my marriage. We spend our sessions discussing my husband’s manic and depressive swings. I do not tell her about the panic attacks or that I am sleeping in the closet. 

On the floor, I reach out and touch the walls on either side of me. 

My body tells me everything I have known is ending. My brain tells me it is all my fault. 

I suffer panic attacks and hide in the bathroom until they abandon me. I quiet my voice by stuffing towels inside my mouth. A violence cracks my heart and there is a thunderous splintering down my arms. A frozen pond becoming undone.

Still, that April is the warmest on record. The tulips arrive early alongside the rabbits. I build a makeshift fence with buckets and empty birdhouses, but the vermin still eat the stalks to the ground.

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April 2025

I am a separated woman—separated from my marriage.

It is Monday after midnight. March has just given way to April Fools. I ready myself for bed inside the nesting apartment I pseudo-share with my husband. He and I switch each night, one of us in the house with our children and the other in this studio apartment. He is here and not here, his life being lived in the alternating space of mine. 

I’ve spent a year thawing, discovering a new self warmed by words and friends and bodies. Desire has been made strange by its absence of love. He, too, has soothed himself with bodies. Even now, we tell each other some truths. 

I fill the apartment with seeds: marigolds, peas, cypress vine, squash. Some sprout after a few days and some take longer. Some never sprout. The sunflowers stand up first and I place them by the window with the shade open. Mornings, I am awoken by a stab of sun. 

That April night, there is a strange scent to the room. I slide into the bed and rub my legs between the sheets. The smell arrives from the pillow. Sweet. Fecund. Vaporous. It is perfume. I turn on the light. I remove the comforter. Lipstick on white sheets. It is a shade more brown than red. It shows me the map of my husband’s most intimate pleasure. Color stains the middle and I imagine rouged lips on engorged flesh. Sweat and secretions soak into fabric, the fabric I have wrapped around my own skin. I try to exhale the perfume from my lungs. I am shocked—not that my husband has a lover, but that he has left the evidence for me to inhabit, a bed made up with dirty sheets. 

The air tolls Over, Over, Over. 

I throw the sheets into the trash. I spend two days crying. Fury and sadness and jealousy quake through me as if these emotions have never before existed. But good erupts through the cracks. There is love and hope and an appreciation for the bellow in my core, a constant message rising through the violent squall. You are not who you were and Let what must come, come.

Stillness, like control, is a grand illusion. I have learned not to trust a sheet of ice. It is truer to be sacrificed to the hungry waters. 

Love and pain stand on opposite ends of a lever. They teeter totter back and forth, up and down, higher and higher until they are launched into the grand churn, that torrent of delights and sorrows and the hot in-betweens, where everything is felt and nothing is clear. 

And finally, I know what it is to be alive.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The concluding sentiment at the family meeting, by which I mean a discussion my parents initiated with me, by which I mean I was told to sit down on the living room couch and listen while they did all the talking, was, Also, boys don’t like overweight girls, a sort of cherry on top of the sundae if you will, but not an actual sundae of course, because that’s the sort of indulgence that landed us here in the first place, a last ditch effort to get the point across after measured pleading and reasoning, a final appeal that would surely break the spell, thereby breaking the motion of hand to mouth, because who doesn’t want to be desired by boys? If they had just mentioned that on day one, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. 

It turns out that the two people who were meant to love me unconditionally had actually been silently taking notes, waiting for the moment when it became clear that they had no choice but to intervene—this extra 15 pounds I was carrying around had officially gotten out of hand, rendering me unappealing, and this is when I learned how truly important it is to always remain cognizant of the opinions of others. 

Armed with this valuable lesson, I headed off to college where I drank whatever cold bottle was placed into my open palm and slept with boys simply because they desired me, never once asking myself if I wanted them in return, and I was careful not to get attached because that’s not what cool girls do. I went to the gym with my roommate, at first simply for something to do, and then after dropping some weight, kept at it because it felt good to be able to share clothes with friends, snapping black bodysuits at the crotch and sliding miniskirts up onto my hips, and when I arrived home for break, my newly slimmed body like a friend I was bringing to meet my parents, I was met with open arms and eager eyes, acutely aware that approval smiles differently, approval hugs longer, approval offers seconds and dessert, approval means keep it up and we’ll all be just fine.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I cradled the tree in its pot for a coworker over Zoom. It’s just like you, she said.

I showed her the swan-necked watering can that held no more than a pint. Don’t overwater it, the lady at the garden store said. 

My coworker didn’t know that the lush, green slope reminded me of the backyard of the house I grew up in, when my legs were so small it took all my breath to run its length past the apple trees to the woods at the other end. How I’d climb up with my siblings to eat apples that swirled green and red. You’ll get sick to your stomach, my dad said. 

The bonsai tree was bright and prickly. Juniperus communis: juniper. Its branches arced over the pot and brushed the moss and stones below in a graceful bow. Green and brown on gray and orange: the colors of 70’s office buildings, like where my dentist was as a child, or where I had started seeing a therapist. They really gave you a raw deal, he used to say.

The moss is what I loved. Stems crisscrossing and hugging as if laying out a pine needle floor. It sprawled over the pot and reached up to embrace the tree trunk. Pleurozium schreberi: sheet moss. It covers forests from Greenland to New Mexico. A website claimed that it helps preserve nutrients and protect tree roots in case of overwatering. Don’t overwater it, the lady at the garden store said.

My first bonsai didn’t have moss. I bought it with the lunch money my parents had given me for a field trip to Quincy Market when I was in seventh grade. Its rocks were jagged, imposing. The tree grew over tranquil desolation. I pictured myself in miniature, walking the dirt along the pot’s edge with a Zen Koan settling in my mind. I can hardly recall it now: the one where a teacher tells a prospective student he can’t learn anything until he’s emptied his cup of tea. 

The browning started at the outer edges. Then it crept inwards. I figured I wasn’t watering it enough. Was that possible? Don’t overwater it, the lady at the garden store said. 

I bought a spritz bottle and misted every three days. Once a week, I used the swan-necked watering can. The moss turned beige and then bleach yellow. I checked a book on bonsai care. Tap water can cause browning. I bought a gallon jug of filtered water and poured it into the pint-size can. The moss shrank from the side of the pot, curling into itself as if clutching a wound. Can I water it with you? my six-year-old asked.

Some stems died alone, others in clumps. Some mornings I’d discover that entire patches had broken off in an act of doomed secession. Each loss a failure: silence from a hiring committee, rejection from a conference, criticism from my thesis advisor. I started spacing out while reading your chapter, he said. They really gave you a raw deal, the therapist would say.

Was there enough sunlight? Too much? I placed it on the side table next to the microwave. Another clump shriveled away. I pushed toys off a shelf in the sunroom and sat it there. The soil around the edges cracked and dried. I moved it to the center of the dining room table. I’d see it whenever my eyes strayed from my laptop during work. The yellows and browns were a blight, an error, a failed sentence, my blood pressure when I went in for a COVID test. Have you been diagnosed with hypertension? the nurse asked. I hadn’t. I’d been avoiding doctors for years. I already knew what they would say. I’d bought bigger clothes once, and then again. I didn’t need to quantify breathless trips up staircases and furtive glances in mirrors. I didn’t control my schedule; I was on company time. After lunch, I’d have to get through hours of meetings, finish budgets, complete at least 10 items on my to-do list or fall behind. I needed a full meal to get through the afternoon, then a snack, and then another. You’ll get sick to your stomach, my dad said.

The moss is supposed to be the easy part! a friend said, laughing. I had asked him for help during one of my six-year-old’s playdates. I called my mom. She brought moss from her backyard the next time she visited. Leucobryum glaucum: pincushion moss. It grows in forests, it pushes up through cracks in sidewalks and roadsides, it can thrive in wet or dry conditions, I couldn’t kill it so long as it would graft onto the soil in the pot. I looked up how to encourage moss growth. Use toothpicks as tent stakes and cover the area in plastic wrap, leaving a hole for air to come in. Spray liberally. Can I water it with you? my six-year-old asked.

The leaves on the juniper tree began to wither. They bleached and turned yellow, like the moss, then fell off. Can I just throw it away? my wife asked. 

I snipped off dead leaves and branches and kept spritzing. Sometimes I’d miss and water droplets would form a cough pattern on the table. It’s winter, I thought. It’s not going to do well when it’s so cold and dry. Maybe I could delay its death for a few months, until April when the rain-filled air could heal it. Maybe it needed only a new season to begin thriving. If only there were time, if it weren’t so broken, if it hadn’t missed its chance at life but could burst out of its pot and scatter kaleidoscopic growth across the table.

OK, I said. Then I made a cup of tea.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson