I remember climbing onto our parents’ roof Christmas Eve Day to smoke a cigar and watch the trees. We could do that again, after the pandemic. Not to re-create a moment—just knowing we could. The being able to. We’ll see each other again for Christmas, I’m sure.
The day I left, I could have sat in your back yard for an hour with beer and the spring wind and your roommates. We could have talked about other long drives, ones we’ve done together, like our twelve-hour sprint back from Mt. Shasta just in time for Mother’s Day, reeking of mountain sweat and damp wool. I could have said goodbye.
I didn’t mind Donald Trump so much three and a half years ago, on that day my friend’s dad went to the hospital with a strep infection in his heart, while over in Seattle, my friend and I sat in front of the television and watched the map turn red. My friend’s dad was already hooked up to a monitor when he had the heart attack.
Michigan went for Trump. Wisconsin, Trump. Pennsylvania, Trump.
We didn’t know if my friend’s dad would survive the night, so we watched the news and refreshed 538, The New York Times, and Politico, and that evening, because my friend’s dad might have been about to die, the election made me feel better about things.
After a few pregnancy scares earlier in life, I got a handle on birth control. I don’t have much skin in the abortion game these days.
I still care about it, of course. It’s living and dying, or at least living. I’m not sure where life begins. The science surpasses my long-forgotten high school classes and my single, lab-less BIO 123, and that’s what so much of this comes down to, isn’t it? Are we killing people?
Assembled entirely from two weeks of subject lines found in the spam folder of info@stlukesrenton.org.
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Get ready and poke your lady until sun rises!
You can show your girl who’s the best driller on Earth!
Do you know how to turn a girl on?
Thunder in your bed, solidity in your bone-ons!
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Set your libido level to maximum!
“There are more upstairs,” she said. “The line might be shorter,” so I abandoned the ten-person backlog only to find an even bigger wait on the second floor, but it was too late to go back. Bladder-bloated conference-goers kept flowing out of the arena. I claimed a spot at the end of what looked like the shortest line, where one man and a dozen or so women waited ahead of me.
The university’s dusty scarlet signs had proclaimed the downstairs bathrooms to be admit-one, any-gender-any-time affairs. But the bathrooms on this floor, which handled the blackwater of thousands of spectators at any given event, required the efficiency of stalls. Relief en masse; pee, flush, repeat. Men and Women plaques normally regulated entry up here, but the conference organizers had covered them with paper printouts: ALL GENDER BATHROOM.
Here in the fermata. Sitting on the couch and watching television. Here in the fermata of our last days, eating microwaved mac and cheese and homemade spinach and strawberry salad, like the two halves of our life for the past five years.
The days ran on like measures, down and up the scales of depression and peacefulness, anxieties and success. We’ve cycled through three houses, twice as many jobs, twice as many girlfriends. Always returning. I don’t know what home means without you.
You don’t care about indents but I’m gonna change that. No I’m not. It’s boring as hell but I like it, probably for the same reason kids make Styrofoam castles and cardboard-and-felt hills for Lord of Rings minifigures—think Warhammer, but more virginy. Those kids should be playing WarGRAMMAR.
I’m ready, five years later, to step past some commitment issues and put down on paper where I’m going. It’s the same direction I’ve been going for the last five years—showing up now and then, depositing paychecks, reading and listening and trying to understand—but I’m doing it officially now, which feels different somehow. I’m not sure why. I’m learning that’s okay.
Even though I don’t know everything about it, or even most things, I’m ready to join the Episcopal Church in ink and paper. I’m committing to following this path as best I can, although I can’t see the turns ahead and everyone disagrees about the map. Or a better way of saying it, since this path began before I discovered the Episcopal Church (and from a different perspective, this path began long before the Anglican Communion ever existed): I’m committing to following this path with the guidance of the Episcopal Church. Certainty in uncertainty.