So many times I have grabbed this book to write the day’s or week’s events and something has come up to stop me. A lot of time has gone by and so much has happened during August and September to make this a truly full and remarkable summer. Not all has been pleasant. That seems to be the way life is.
— My great-grandmother’s last journal entry, September 26th, 1988.
Imagine a wrestling ring— I’m talking a massive arena, covered in screaming fans waving those foam pointer fingers until the seating merges into a shadowed sea of flickering color. Big glowing jumbotron in the center. No referee. The ring is empty.
Cue the entry music. Cue the flashing lights. The fans shriek with anticipation like ambulances in the night. Here comes our first competitor, YOU’RE FINE SO JUST GET OVER IT. He struts in like a fucking peacock, lit by pyrotechnics and bedecked in gold and red, tossing his hair and smirking. He’s hot shit. He takes off his little satin robe and throws it into the crowd, and the woman who catches it faints. The writing on the back reads: THERE’S NO USE IN GETTING UPSET. The writing on his back, in black marker or greasepaint or something, reads: IT’S REALLY NOT THAT BAD. The writing on his front reads: MISERY IS A CHOICE. We know YOU’RE FINE SO JUST GET OVER IT. We love YOU’RE FINE SO JUST GET OVER IT. YOU’RE FINE SO JUST GET OVER IT is our friend, our good-time guy, our neighbor— he’s doing ads now, you know, beer and insurance and weight loss apps. Once he reaches the ring, he puts himself on parade. His shorts are tiny. His spray tan is horrifically orange. His muscles are huge. He’s flexing them like he’s God, and, well, maybe he is.
There are no lights, no epic songs, and no cheering for our next competitor. He comes through the side door dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, shuffling up the aisle like he doesn’t want to be looked at. His head is down and the hood is pulled low over his eyes. It’s not that he’s new to wrestling, you know, it’s just that he’s lost every round— he’s humiliated and small and that means he’s been effectively beaten into obscurity. He doesn’t take anything off and it doesn’t matter because no one is looking at him. Even YOU’RE FINE SO JUST GET OVER IT is too busy interacting with his hundreds of adoring fans to take notice. And don’t bother thinking that this will give him an advantage, the element of surprise or something, because it won’t. It won’t. Give up. Our next competitor is named I WANT TO LIVE, and nobody is wasting their money betting on him.
I WANT TO LIVE reaches the ring without any tricks or gimmicks. YOU’RE FINE SO JUST GET OVER IT goes through the motions, the ritual squaring up and mocking, and then settles in, ready for the round. The odds don’t look good— even though I WANT TO LIVE gets scrappy once he starts crying, he must be almost 100 pounds lighter than YOU’RE FINE SO JUST GET OVER IT, and he’s shaking like a little dog.
The bell rings. I don’t know what happens next. I guess the match isn’t over.
My mother returns from my grandmother’s house with pilfered gifts. It’s not stealing, you know. It’s how heirlooms work. Once you start losing your memory or get put in a home, your family swarms the things you didn’t take with you— art, jewelry, dishes— and integrates them into their homes, and that’s how you live when you’re dead. Your legacy becomes pearls and vintage ceramics. Lucky you— some people don’t get any legacy at all.
“We should really be grateful,” my mother says. “Since we’re doing it now, we won’t have to clean out her things when she dies.” And we agree, and we say we’re grateful, because we are grateful that we won’t have to deal with my grandmother for any longer at that point.
Animal pelts, purses, half-filled journals, candles, wooden cigar boxes full of trinkets. Everything smells like thick dust and long, still air. Some of the things were my grandmother’s old boyfriend’s— she must have held onto them after he died in 2019. In the heirlooming, we learn that on top of dressing and living like it was the 1880s, he also willingly converted to Catholicism as an adult and was a lifetime member of the NRA, none of which is particularly surprising. I liked going to his house as a kid because I got to sleep in a bear pelt instead of a normal blanket; my parents had some hesitation around their children being in his house because there were dozens of loaded antique guns on the walls. That was always a fun debate. But now he’s dead, and while his siblings took his guns and his money, I’ve got his furs and century-old books and collection of ancient erotica. Cheers, dude.
“How much do you know about our family?” my mother asks me one evening. She’s yellowing from the near-sunset, face turned down into a stack of postcards that date back to 1916.
“I could probably tell you everything I know in about two minutes.” I’m busying my hands with my great-grandmother’s sewing basket from the 1970s, which is now my sewing basket, and it’s an absolute disaster in there— needles are scattered amongst buttons, buttons are scattered amongst spools of thread, spools of thread are scattered amongst strips of unwound Velcro. There’s a few pins sticking out of the flesh of my palm. That’s what I get for sticking my hand in there without looking, I guess.
“Alright, then,” she says, and there’s my go-ahead.
“They settled in Minnesota originally, but Great Gram—”
“Marion,” my mother adds.
“Right. She moved to Alaska with her husband Basil in the 1930s for the fishing, they started having kids—”
My mother proceeds to list the names of my grandmother and her three siblings. I proceed to do a beautiful job at keeping the irritation off my face.
“Right. Basil started raping his daughters—” she has nothing to say to that, just a sharp exhale— “and then he and my great-uncle were the only boat that survived the Good Friday tsunami in 1964. Nana watched her basketball coach and his sons die when the wave wiped out the town, my great-uncle became an alcoholic, Nana met Papa when he came up from Texas—”
“Our family has a whole graveyard back in Texas, you know,” my mother says.
“Right,” I say, because I do know. “Your siblings and you were born, you bounced from town to town because he was a State Trooper, and once Basil died, everyone eventually moved down south to Washington. And that’s pretty much it.”
She sighs. Says nothing. Opens her mouth, then says nothing again. The papers in her hands— she’s moved onto some indiscernible pile of photos and random newspaper articles— turn, very briefly, into a magician’s deck of cards. I’m thinking of rabbits and hats. I’m thinking of the uncleaned rabbit skull I found in a locked chest half an hour ago, rotting flesh still sticking to the inside of the sockets. It could have been worse. I’m just glad the rest of the rabbit wasn’t in there, too.
We work in silence for the next few minutes— knives, garish vintage crosses, earrings, a hat from the 1940s made of beaver fur— until she pulls out a strip of newspaper and starts talking again. The light has pushed the old man pictured on her side of the paper through to me, across the table.
“It’s his eulogy— it’s Basil’s, from the 80s,” she says. His reflected face, half obscured by the ink on the back of the page, is indistinguishable. “One of the people quoted in here says that ‘he was the kind of guy that you got to know, whether you wanted to or not’.” She looks up at me and scoffs all funny-like, trying to make a joke out of it. The downward twitch of her mouth betrays her. And it is kind of funny, actually, because Depeche Mode was right about God having a sick sense of humor. Dozens of boats leave. The only one that comes home is manned by abusive men. Men who wrote nice postcards and were beloved members of their communities and beat their wives, amongst other sins. Only one boat comes back and half the women on my mother’s side flinch at loud noises. Hilarious.
“Oh, that’s very much eulogy speak for fucking bastard,” I say.
She makes an aborted gesture to either push the eulogy away or bring it closer, then sighs again. “I wish eulogies were honest. I wish they just talked about it. I hate that we can’t speak ill of the dead, I just think that— Jesus.” She looks up at me, eyes on fire. “Fucking bastard.”
“Fuck him.” I say it as a peace offering. She breathes it in for a second, then just shakes her head, turning back to the table.
Military medals, picture frames, figurines, mirrors, charms depicting St. Dymphna. Another pin sticks its way into my hand. I quietly pull it out and put it with the other ones. I don’t think it hurts, but I wouldn’t know.
You want to know my favorite fantasy? This is my favorite fantasy: I pack up all my things in the middle of the night and leave without telling anyone. Just completely vanish off the face of the planet overnight. Gone. Fucked off. I’ll go be a waitress in some middle of nowhere town, and I’ll be a completely new person. I’m not that worried about it, but it’s probably my only chance to be good, or at least to perform goodness to a level that I find acceptable. Maybe I’ll even be sweet. And I know I’m not alone in dreaming about disappearing, but it’s one of those dreams that sits next to your heart like a secret or a baby, and that makes it feel like it’s the most unique and precious thing in the world.
I think about dreams and I think about making dreams real— the effort, the willpower, the drive. I know I have a unique talent for ruthlessness. I know that once I start, I can keep going forever. And it’s kind of humiliating, you know? To have a dream. To have to admit to wanting something. It’s probably going to kill me, but that’s alright, because I’m going to end up dying either way. All roads lead to death. I speak in short sentences because I’m hesitant to throw my weight behind something that could fall through, but at some point, I’m going to have to do something. If going out doesn’t kill me, staying in will, so I have to do something.
Now, I’m not saying I’m going to up and disappear, as much as I’d like to. I’ve just decided it might be nice to have a life. As it turns out, that’s a dangerous decision to make. I go through my books and discard all the ones I won’t touch. I finally take the bags of donations that have been sitting in the back of my closet to the Goodwill. New things from my grandmother’s hoard make their way in— a chest with a lock, candelabras, pearl earrings— and I get rid of things to balance it out, and then I get rid of a few more things just because I can. I read Neruda and think about love, and I think that love might be nice. I dream about love. I dream of cutting enough excess off to be able to fit my entire life into a car. It won’t happen right now, but I can’t rule it out. If I ruled it out, I would lose my dream, and that means I wouldn’t have anything to protect my heart. And that would kill me.
Instead of counting sheep, I mentally pack the car— two boxes of books maximum, one box of stuffed animals I can’t bear to part with, just a backpack for all my beauty supplies because I don’t really have much of that. I don’t know how the wrestling match is going. We’re a round down; it’s not looking great for I WANT TO LIVE. But I do— I do want to live.
I put down a bet. If I lose, it’ll kill me. Let’s see how many stars are smashed in the pool.1
I absolutely love how you write and tell a story. Your words are almost explosive with descriptions, so vivid I can TRULY see it in my head. You’re very skilled, I could read absolutely anything you wrote ❤️
every piece of yours i read i go 'wow..that was the greatest' .. you're fantastic. always a treat lee <3