First Day

The moment I found out that Karen died: I sat in the morning at my desk in the study upstairs; the room is painted thickly sky-blue; the gray morning light seeped in; a barrage of emails with spooky subject lines piled up on screen; the kids bashed around downstairs and my t-shirt still smelled like pancakes. A grievous error has been made. I don’t think they have that right. Do you mean this to go to me? Things went prickly at the edges. There was an awful lot of snot and spit and it was hard to catch up breathing. Gretchen was screaming and kept saying ‘no’. I’ve never liked what I look like when I cry. No, not so much.

We didn’t really know what to do and the thing is, we still don’t really know what to do. As the quotidian blur pushes the first wave of sorrow back and out and away, I dislike more and more how grimly and grotesquely it fades, and yet something else calcifies into a nasty clot of sharp cruelty. To absurdly mix metaphors, I feel like asphalt kidney stones are snagging the ghosty high wires that I imagine broadcasting back and forth throughout my body. Especially in my spine, right between T12 and L1, I think. It hurts and I am sad and this vicious mean grief is stuck and sticky. Yeah, right: fading and failing as well as tenacious and brute. I don’t just go back to that moment I found out Karen died, but all kinds of other moments: unstuck in time like a film chock full of bad jump cuts. Stuck and unstuck. In the slog of hours and days that passed after finding out about the impact, the street, the neighborhood, the car, the crime, the police chase, the shopping bags—each goddamn thing—I compulsively returned over and over to the computer and its inexhaustible news items, Facebook messages, maps, photos, emails et cetera. Correspondingly, I am going to give it a go here. This is what I’ll do, at least for awhile. This blog will be a work in progress, and a temporary one. My sights are set very low. But thinking out loud, letting others in on it, sharing what little I have with Karen’s generous, amazing, and good circle of friends, and giving some solid shape to the transitory and now—more than ever—irrevocable parts of my long past as Karen’s friend, as we turned into who we are, will be a step, a budge, a move.