BooksIWouldHaveToldMySisterAbout

so I’m finishing rewatching the good place and it’s good, I knew it would be

I just wasn’t ready

i really can’t thank you michael schur enough for all the good tv stories you’ve shared over the years, please don’t turn out to be secretly terrible, I’m really tired and I love your tv so much

but the thing is, thing is, I actually hate it, hate this ending

I hate that these characters get eternity to have enough with each other

enough that they feel like they can move on – the time enough to do that

I didn’t get that

you didn’t get that

how is that fair

it’s not it’s not it’s not it’s not it’s fucking not and I hate it

I’m still here. I don’t know what happens next. I thought I would, I thought we would always be connected, and this emptiness is killing me. I don’t know how to find you here

and i hate it, i hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it

and I can imagine anything, and everything, and none of it matters anymore

I miss you so much

I hate how this world exists without you

Discuss...

there are every day things, mundane human things, that I think about replacing,

as they break down, because that is the way of life and capitalism, how long is the thing good for, is that all that really matters, is it worthwhile to still hold on to it,

but when it comes to memories, i understand that greed and possessive grasp so much,

how to hold on to the parts of you that are left, solely in the moments

around me on the day to day

strange flavors things to taste, new versions of things compressed into the familiar

i sold your car – where you driven us everywhere, and watched them take it away,

then

old toothbrushes, the last bathroom towels, finishing the ibprofen bottle that was there when you still were

the pizza cutter we used religiously even after it fell apart

do i keep the water-soaked tent, or the ballet barre, the breadmaker, the ancient cold brew machine

here I am sleeping under your comforter every night, it’s smooth and soothing, and Jenny is glad to have it, I can tell

I can’t watch the second season of the submarine lesbians, or another round of loki, or finish several or start a new series

without thinking of you, and the fact that while I can guess, of course I can guess,

perhaps predict,

what your response would be, but I’d never have it 100%

never

and I wouldn’t change that, but I would change you

being back if I could. it’s not fair that magic exists in stories

and then falls away, failing you, when you grow up

if i cannot use magic and find the way to bring you back, I am truly lost. and I know that, it’s only for other people I keep keeping on.

there are good things, there are, I watch some shows, I listen to some songs, i pet the cats and I think of you, and how you would be proud of these small moments,

but I am not whole. and I am tired of pretending that I have any semblance of belief in the future

how can i, with you so faraway

in the end, I think about how I will keep my animals safe – that is all that is left

and i’d love to be dramatic and quote something but I flipped through a paperback of Fahreinheit 451 the other day, and then got furiously emotional over the introduction being written by NG. he is everywhere, and I hate it. and yet, I would give anything for that to be worst news event of the last three years. how shitty is that?

and I don’t want to end on that note, dwelling on yet another brilliant writer, who turned out to be such a disappointing piece of garbage. I was going to find a screenhot or a quote or something, and this is what I end up with:

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

Fahreinheit 451, after all

Discuss...

These are things I want to do in winter. Stay in bed until the sun is up. Gaze out the window with less purpose than a cat. There are no birds I’m watching, it’s just time passing by. When it snows, the air is clear and dark and crisp, and I watch the falling snow and think of nothing at all.

Read Icelandic fiction. I need to go over what I’ve already bought in previous years so I don’t buy duplicates. You and I both know this can happen very easily. I can’t remember if I lent Miss Iceland to E, or if I got it back, or not. I don’t remember seeing it when I alphabetized all my fiction. Mine, yours, ours. I still don’t know how to pronounce the author’s name correctly, but I like reading it across a page. Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. In another life, I would have liked translating books, I think. Trying to figure out how to convey the author’s meaning as best I can in another language altogether. I wish you’d gotten a chance to read The Centre.

Write in my journal. You’d think this one would be easy, but it’s already the twelfth and it hasn’t happened yet. Even snippets of the day elude me at the end of it. But there are things I want to remember, even if they are small. Perhaps this evening I will try again.

Walk endlessly in the snow. It makes everything feel like another world, and I want to stay in that still and quiet world as long as I can.

Things I do not want to do in winter: wash the dishes. Vacuum all the dust that’s collecting in the corners again. Be in this new year without you.

Discuss...

The new Peter Swanson book starts with one character planning on killing another character by pushing them down the Exorcist steps, and I’m like can’t I catch a fucking break? But I do not want a break from you, and if death is part of that now, then it just is.

I have settled into this feeling, however I’m feeling, not quite numb. Not quite disassociated. Not quite anything really.

Perhaps there is nothing left to feel, except to revisit familiar favorites. The way a cat tucks their head into the curve of your palm. How it feels to see another dawn, after the night has passed, and I am still here for another day.

The worst thing has already happened, I say, and this is true. But is it really strange to discover that hard as it was to lose you, is that the reality of living without you is worse because it simply carries on. There is always another day, and it is always without you.

The start of a new year looms once again. Should I make resolutions? Should I make lists? Should I read a little further to find out what happens next?

How is it another year has come and gone. It could have been yesterday, the morning I woke to find you gone. I know why I detest bright summer days. It’s not rocket science to know that I feel closer to you in the gray.

Discuss...

I’m reading the new Abigail Dean book. Not the second one which was published in February.

Why, you ask, haven’t I read that one already? We’ve been waiting a while, after all.

A variety of reasons, I suppose. Even though set in England it involved a school shooting and I wasn’t really in the mood for that at the time. And you weren’t there to talk to about it.

No, this is her third book. And yes I will go back and read the other one when I’m done, as I remember how much I enjoy her prose and the people in her books who manage to survive terrible things and go on. Am I one of them now? Have I survived?

I intend to reread Girl A after that, even though knowing the end is more devastating now. But now I am jealous of it too, having the ghost of someone you love there, speaking to you as they always did.

This is one of those days where I sit and stare out the window at the changing leaves and it seems impossible that you are no longer in this world. Tree of heaven, blue skies, nothingness.

There is nothing profound to say. I miss you.

Discuss...

August is counting down. After the last few cool days, the temperature is rising again. I long for it to be autumn, real autumn. I want to jump forward in time. I want to stay here, in the space where my grief is excusable. It’s that time of the year again. She’s always like this then.

I finish one book and reach for another. (I know, I know, that’s every day.) But sometimes it’s survival, and sometimes it’s pleasurable escape.

I have three interlibrary loans out at the moment. A December Tale (Marilyn Sachs I’ve never read), A Home With Aunt Florry (another Charlene Joy Talbot) and Pauline (Margaret Storey, with a good Victor Ambrus cover, even though it’s covered up by the ILL label.)

I finished The Queen of the Damned last night around midnight and I predict I will start The Body Thief before the weekend is done, but we’ll see.

There’s no wrong way to grieve (yes, yes I know) but at times I wish I could maximize my grief. Cry straight through for three days, get it all out from where it resides in my chest, heavy and light at the same time.

I worry about forgetting things. I look at pictures and realize I never knew the story behind them, and now you’re not there to ask.

I give first library cards to children with varying degrees of excitement and think of all those summer days and Sunday afternoons spent in libraries. How often I would go to the library if I didn’t work there? A question I’ve asked myself over the years, and yet never been able to answer because I’ve always worked at a library. I count up the time, and apparently it’s been twenty-two years. I remember after the interview I went home and fell into one of those deep summer naps, that only ended when Mom woke me up to tell the manager was on the phone, yes I had gotten the job. I’m sorry you had to leave the library to make space for me. In another life (that endless refrain) are we both still working there? Do we share an apartment or even a small house, possibly possible in that part of the Midwest. Do we have even more cats? Do we long and dream of brightly lit cities and spaces that will feel like home someday? Are you alive there?

Would that be worth it to you, alive, but still trapped in Missouri? I don’t know. I think I know, but not for certain.

As for me, I am glad I live in this city you chose by chance and friendship, that I walk to work past train tracks and empty lots filled with green, all the dogs out for their morning news, hipster coffeeshops and small parks where people sit out of the sun, basking in the shade and waiting for autumn.

I can see the moon from my bedroom window, and maybe that’s all I need to know I am home.

Last finished: The Queen of the Damned

Currently reading: The Garnett Girls – Georgina Moore / We Like the Night Life – Rachel Koller Croft

Discuss...

…launched in 1994, is named after Astrid Lindgren. The payload is named after the characters Pippi, Emil and Mio. It was piggybacked on a Russian satellite, named Tsikada and a US communications satellite (FAISAT) and launched from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia.

These are new things to me, as possibly they are to you too.

I could tell you that I miss you, but you already know that.

Cosmodrome is a great word. Also aerospace. Makes me think of the Aero candy bar, that bubbly deliciously light chocolate that melted so easily on your tongue. I don’t remember if it on my first or second trip to England that I tasted one.

It’s the last hour of work, and I read through a website about Astrid Lindgren’s life, making notes of quotes and bits I liked. Quotes I would have read to you later when we were both home.

Things like: “A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy”.

and ‘Astrid describes herself how it felt to read as a child: “It was something that engaged your entire being, all your senses, sight, smell and touch, more intense than any other event in your whole existence as a child.” A new book was “something almost unbearably wonderful”.’

as well as ‘The school library was full of books and Astrid practically read them all. “I had such a terrible pent-up love of reading that it’s almost strange that when I finally got hold of books I didn’t read myself into the grave.’”

Our childhood was so wonderfully full of books and trips to the library, new books at Christmas. What would we have been if we hadn’t had that? That’s an alternate life I don’t like to think of.

In their later years Astrid and her sisters spoke nearly every day, starting their calls with ‘Death, death, death’, as a way of calling out the most terrible and unavoidable thing, to reckon with death, at the same time as taking the edge of all its sentimentality.”

I still wish for death to be avoidable. You should have been able to avoid it, skipping past it like Elsie Piddock on her fairy hill. You should be out there in the aerospace with all the stars. Maybe you are.

It’s still too far away.

you know this already. I miss you.

Discuss...

It’s the cusp of August. The humidity makes me feel like I’m swimming sluggishly through the summer days, treading murky water to stay afloat. And then there’s the blissfully cool rooms of my apartment where the cats lurk and stay cool. On cooler nights I turn off the AC and open the windows and let them enjoy the scent of the night. Little cats in windows, watching so curiously, the world around them.

It is hard to surrender the nights. The times when I’m when finally home, alone, myself, doing what I choose. Resolved at that point of the day to whatever mood has happened by then. The morning always starts over again. Every single morning I have to claw myself back to civility and level ground and new optimism.

I don’t know how I’m going to get through August. A horrible hot box of memories, every day.

I do know how I’ve been getting through July. IWTV & The Vampire Chronicles have been keeping me going. I have plunged headfirst into loving Lestat, and it’s an extremely pleasurable activity.

I’m trying to remember how much of season one we watched before you died. The first episode?? A few episodes? The whole season? I can’t remember. Mostly I always remember you describing the end of the movie and the way Lestat says, “Oh, Louis, always whining,” with a dramatic flourish of your arm.

Except when I rewatched the movie, I noticed the line was still, not always. I think I prefer your version, or my memory of it.

Anyway, I read the first book and now I am happily enjoying the dramatic, emotional adventures of Lestat in The Vampire Lestat. Trying not to devour it too quickly, but also not wanting to avoid spoilers, as usual. I’m glad there are more books to come. This was the series I needed right now.

Summer is a terrible time to get invested in vampires though. It is far too hot to wear pretty much anything flowing and vampiric. How the heck did they manage it in New Orleans?

….I have just answered my own question, because obviously vampires do not sweat. Do not @ me. That reason alone is enough to accept the Dark Gift, just saying.

We will see how I travel through the August days. Sweaty and sad, probably.

Discuss...

I hate everyone born in August. why should they be out there getting library cards when you’re dead? what right do they have to celebrating? to be here at all?

every day I’m getting further and further away from the last time I heard your laugh.

my therapist once told me the second year was the hardest. now I know what she means. there are other tragedies out there taking up space. the world moves on.

the other night I dreamed of home, and how things used to be. I woke up, grinding my jaw so tightly again like I used to. funny how I didn’t do that when we lived together.

I know what I’m doing, reading thrillers that slip through my mind, books that I don’t die to talk to you about. Even keeping stories at arm’s length. Distractions, but nothing lasts.

I would have had a nice little life if I hadn’t lost you. Never knowing the luster of life with you.

I go to check a word, and the word of the day is elevenses. yes, I know. you’re still there. you can remind me any time. i just wish i could hold you and hear your voice, telling me about anything at all.

August is only three weeks away.

Discuss...

It’s the end of March. Less than three weeks now (by one day) till the tortured poets. Four more months to August. It feels like spring in certain breaths, the freshly rained scent in the air, the damp pavement, little buds slowly opening on trees on my walk to work.

This week has been one of melancholy. I miss you in all the little moments of the day. I want to show you pictures of Jenny, curled up so close to me. I want to stay up late, talking about everything. I want to hear your thoughts, not someone else’s.

Recently I read Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer. It’s about a robot who becomes, well, she becomes essentially. Some parts of it were so frustrating. So many similarities between being a robot and being a woman, and none of them are the good. But her curiosity, her interest in things made my brain spark. That feels like a rare thing these days, and I hate it. I want the spark and I want the follow-through.

I feel like I’m existing in a small blurry cloud with all my senses dialed slightly down. Perhaps this is just how I will experience things now. Still irritated by the screaming kids, still pausing to take pictures of the moon through tree branches. Still eager to start a new book. Just none of it is is completely there. 79%, that feels about right.

When I think of August, it fills me with quiet, aching despair. How does time keep on moving?

I still haven’t finished The Lost Story.

Discuss...