adyaalcalde

[adyaalcalde]

“No use in going.”

June 24th, 2025

Untitled Alaskan Creek, Capital Expressway Flea Market 2017 Lot, Nullbrook Found Media Archive.

Chastised for using the formal “usted,” and conjugating my verbs to her in the third person singular, I cannot rightly refer to Marina as “Mrs. Vasquez,” though it seems impolite to introduce her informally. We are friends, she corrected me once, reaching out with both her hands to grasp one of mine, then to retract one and swat me with it: a gentle but insistent chastisement. I’d seen Marina just once before she would become a fixture in my life, hobbling—as she is inclined toward hobbling—down Royal in the mid-afternoon (probably, I now know, on her way to the Rouse’s Market on the corner of Saint Peter). She was strikingly beautiful, her (I’ve since learned, not infrequently treated) blonde hair held back behind her ears with a headband and coming to a single rounded curl at the very bottom, the ends brushed inward rather than out. That day, she wore a blue and white striped dress, a brown leather belt fastened at the waist in a silver buckle, and pristine, still-white tennis shoes. She wore bright pink lipstick, in a shade and hue I had replicated in my wardrobe nowhere. She had seemed young, vital. 

I recall an awareness of migration within me: my appreciation of her beautify deliberately and conscientiously moving toward action. I meant not only to note her, but to tell her I had. In spite of myself, by the time it had taken me to vault my inhibitions—my reticence in speaking to strangers (even in kindness, even to little old ladies), my fear of coming off somehow as disingenuous—she had long made her way down the street, and to catch up with her again would mean tracking backward: moving away from the house again in the direction I’d just come from. I seem to recall—strangely, but perhaps fatedly—being alone, as I seldom was in the incipient weeks after my move to New Orleans. I seem also to believe I had something in hand ushering me back to the house (possibly a grocery bag, but not un-probably a melting cup of an exorbitantly priced apple sorbet). Whatever it was, I felt the combined circumstances of my first encounter with her had stacked particularly against me, and I’d missed my opportunity to put words to her in the moment they’d come up. I turned away feeling the weight of the unbestowed compliment—pedestrian as it may have seemed—heavy upon my conscious. It seemed vital to me she knew she’d turned my head, and I was sorry not to have managed to say so. 

I found myself excited, if not completely surprised to see her again soon after. Mia, Ellum Mariko, and I had gone out one morning to a patisserie on Ursulines apparently frequented by Nancy when she’d lived in the house I was in the process of settling into, only to find Marina ahead of us in line. Having ordered her brioche royale: the largest, and with the most rum-plump raisins visible between the seams of the rolled pastry; a “skinny latte” from a place which pointedly did not carry 2% milk; and two croissants to go (an almond and a blueberry, packaged in both the larger of the two available brown bags and a white plastic handle bag) she turned from the counter and—at the sight of Ellum—began to coo. She asked her name and age, which Ellum answered with only mild prompting, holding an exuberant THREE out to the woman on the fingers of her hand. She was adorable, she said, and as it turned out, she had a gift for her. Setting her purse on the table closest to the counter, she began to rifle through its contents until she uncovered what she’d been looking for, pulling from its depths a tube of pink Revlon, blunted at the end from use. For your dolls, she specified, leaning down to hand the lipstick to her, seemingly aware it would be a little on the odd side, or else unhygienic, to suggest Ellum use it herself. Ellum, being both three and herself, did, of course, use it anyway, and the next day traveled on the Number 8 bus line to Music Box Village with a mouth like a little highlighter. 

June, eight months later, finds Marina half-public, her tiny body bird-thin and sandwiched between the door and its frame as she stands in the threshold of her apartment building. She tells select passersby (those very few women she sizes up as petite enough to fit into her clothing) that the items in the plastic tub just there on the sidewalk are all free. They are her things, she explains, which she cannot take with her back to Columbia. She is moving at the end of the week. Or is it two weeks? She will provide either figure in turn, equally convinced of the truth of both statements when she speaks them. (It becomes increasingly difficult for her to displace the air, and the body she once occupied unconsciously now predominates among her chief-most concerns. Walking through the world these days is like trying to run chest-deep in water.) She comes downstairs increasingly not to say hello, but to tell me she’s lost her keys; to ask Tam to carry small bags of groceries up for her; to ask me to help her get to the bathroom. Most of the button downs are Jaegar—dry clean only, or hand-wash and lay flat to dry—which she’ll tell you is an English brand, regardless of whether or not you ask. The collared shirts are Brooks Brothers: remnants of her tenure there, when her employee discount dissolved fifty percent of the tag price and the garments were sold to her untaxed. When I see her, she reaches out both her arthritic hands to clasp one of mine between them, telling me she’s still looking for a scarf for me: her parting gift. (That I have two Limoges boxes at home she’s almost certainly forgotten she’s also insisted on giving me as parting gifts, one with the $145— sticker tag still pressed into the bottom of the hand-painted porcelain, is incidental. That I plan to leave them here is similarly unimportant. Ugly and ostensibly expensive, they are in company among Nancy’s pervasive, shelf-cluttering trinkets.) Her hands around mine remind me of the trunk of the Sycamore planted in the schoolyard of Homer Plessy, knotting itself around the iron fence posts lining the sidewalk down Saint Philip. Her fingers are gnarled, burling, and in comparison to my own seem irrefutably, overpoweringly organic. I once wondered aloud if she might take to some craft, perhaps needlework, imagining it might occupy her time and tensions. Jenny rebuked the thought immediately. Have you seen her hands?

Her new accommodations in Columbia will set her daughter Patty back ten thousand dollars a month: this the cost of twenty-four hour medical care, room, board, and planned community: group activities and movie nights. I find it difficult to picture her somewhere as aseptic as where I imagine it is she’s going. What will become of the French memo board hung beside her four post bed? The prayer cards tucked into the crossed ribbon? The dresser beside the threshold leading into her kitchen is lined with bottles of French perfume: gifts from Maurice from Christmases stretching back into the decade before I was born, none of which have been emptied sufficiently to be allowed on a plane. Whispering to me beside the water station, Peter tells me she’s lived in her apartment for twenty-five years: a figure with all the markings of an approximation. She seems to have been there forever: is as much a fixture as the crown molding blurring the line of separation between the wall and ceiling in the parlor below her apartment. When last I stepped foot in her room, she didn’t let me go out again without giving me a blue sweater (an impromptu gift, plucked directly from the top of a clean pile of folded laundry,) a crucifix on a string of pearls, and a folding Japanese clutch to keep it in. Even as evidence of her evacuation begins to crowd the sidewalk, a yellow legal pad note reading FREE in her niece’s handwriting stuffed between coats to keep it from rising in the wind and vanishing down the street, I struggle to conceive of her room truly, fully emptying. I cannot seem to imagine my life without her, cannot imagine hers without me. 

Just the other day, as she was leaving, she turned back toward me after having faced away. Come over here, she said. Let me give you a hug. It had once occurred to me she was the only person who kissed me anymore. For a time, it seemed she was the only person who would indefinitely. I often came apart from her with Revlon Super Lustrous #805 “Candied Rose” high up on my cheekbone; “Coralberry” #674 on my fingertips after timidly rubbing the mark away... Cradling my face in her hands, she looked at me that afternoon with her smile reaching to wrinkle the skin beside her eyes. She moved her left hand off my cheek and through the ends of my newly cut hair. You look younger, she said, the same comment she had made to me about it yesterday. She laughed at the face I made, my perpetual face. What does your boyfriend think? She asked. Then I laughed. That new fact had been told to her in confidence: a brazen admittance when she’d first seen my haircut and sighed, forlornly, saying she only wished I had a boyfriend to admire it. I’d been standing by the window, and turned myself out from the sun to cast a look at her. Maybe I do, I’d said—provocative, sly. Well, maybe I don’t. Either way, it hadn’t been a quip I’d anticipated lasting in her memory. Months of spelling, saying, and having my name repeated to her by others when she became embarrassed to continue asking me for it had failed to cement it in her mind, a fact she disguised by introducing me always as her dear friend. To her repeated questions about whether I was Catholic, I had told her my family had practiced Buddhism: the gentlest but most insistent rebuke I could find without betraying my revulsion at what was not, but seemed (to me) an accusation. It had been—apparently—a response which in no way kept her from giving me prayer cards, rosaries, and once, a hefty, sterling silver crucifix the size of my palm. I’d imagined my proclamation about a possible boyfriend might slip her mind as easily. That it hadn’t amused me, but, in reflection, did not really surprise. How like her it was. And how like me, too. I don’t know, I finally admitted. He’s in Zagreb... She nodded, apparently satisfied with the absence of an answer. I have been there, she said. Croatia? I asked to confirm, a little surprised. Her gaze had drifted up and away from me, drawing to a point high in the air. The question went unanswered, though one of her hands remained, trembling, on my cheek. In another moment, she had pulled her focus back to my face from where it had hovered somewhere, suspended, over my shoulder. You have to show me a picture sometime, she concluded, and let me go. 

The months we’ve known each other have been embroiled with secret arrangements. Her caretaker, Michael, seems perpetually stood at the threshold of the door: he on the sidewalk and in the sunshine and Kristen inside, leaning out, both her feet planted firmly on the mat. She seems always to be in the middle of telling him in her serious, hushed tones, about Marina’s latest attack which he, as usual, was neither present to see or stop. Jenny reaches out to a family friend to get Patty’s phone number, then tells her she’ll report her to the state for neglect unless something changes in Marina’s circumstances soon. Marina is scheduled to travel to Atlanta for a wedding, then to spend a week alongside her daughter and grandchildren for a visit. They send her back, alone, a week early, ensconced in the back seat of a hired car. The panic attacks grow more frequent, and she seems increasingly agitated. Jenny tells Patty if the situation isn’t resolved in another week, she’ll begin paperwork. Arrangements are promptly and somewhat unceremoniously made for her move home. Visiting for the first time without his head bowed in shame, Michael comes to tell us so, and we are continually reassured her two sisters will visit her (though Marina insists she has only one). We are asked not to mention the date of departure to her. She is alone for another week, and three times descends the apartment stairs in tears, having locked herself out, wanting someone to go with her to the bathroom, feeling so terrified of the oncoming summer thunderstorm tears come down her cheeks before the rain even begins to fall. Another call is made. Her niece arrives to stay with her. We see them together once, then see only glimpses of the niece, whose name we were possibly never told. Marina only puts her head in the door to say hello these days; to let me know she’s looking for a scarf for me; to tell me she likes my dress. She is led away by the elbow.

When she learned she’d be (I resist using the phrase “sent off”) departing, she came to me with tears glistening behind her glasses. Holding my hand in both of hers, as was becoming her regular posture when standing with me, she asked me to say a prayer for her. What else was left to do? The ticket had been purchased, the room secured. I knew so; she didn’t. That evening, I fumbled putting my hands together. I’d gathered myself together—always perceiving my personhood not as filling up my body, but as a ball of twine unspooled in the room I occupy—and tried to focus my thoughts. I made a concerted effort to banish my own life’s concerns and attend to hers, as though some narrowing of thought might concentrate the hope I was intending to put forward, and make it—inexplicably—more likely to be granted. I considered the feeling of my hands pressed together, over-washed that day and dry. I thought hard about what to say; thought hard about whether or not to say it aloud, wondering if it were stronger, undistilled, if I thought it instead. And how was I to put words to what I wanted for her? What I was wishing for on her behalf, because she’d entreated me? I knew she wanted me to pray for her to stay, but I couldn’t do so, even faithlessly. As God cut a tributary through her, a similar river ran in me, and could not betray myself by putting words to something only she wanted. I had told her I’d pray for her, yes, because she’d asked me to, but I could not speak or think without sincerity, or without deliberation. I ended up forming some undirected message of goodwill on her behalf. Where I hoped it might travel to, or who or what I imagined might have heard it was imprecise. Indeterminate. I directed my thoughts in her direction, and meditated on the specific ways I wanted her to feel happy, and well taken care of. I hoped she would meet new friends, and see her family often. I found myself thinking that I hoped she would bear the transition with grace. Previous entreaties from her had given me occasion to wonder about the ethics of outsourcing prayers. I seemed to believe, for no decent reason, there was a heightened efficacy in a practicing Catholic saying a prayer on her behalf, rather than I. It seemed the kinship would befit her. I knew (just) one I imagined asking, though never considered truly reaching out to him. Even my badly done atheist’s prayer, said to no one, was put forth with more feeling than a similar prayer might have been by someone who didn’t know her, even, I thought, if they did have a direct relationship with the God they both, ostensibly, believed in. Still, I cannot help but imagine my words and the feeling that fueled them gathering dust in some cosmic jar, or lingering as a flashing red dot on God's great answering machine, unheard, un-listened to: my incredulity marking my prayer as the lowest possible priority in all wish-granting operations. 

And yet, perhaps the business of the prayer was not to pull taut a line between me and God—to draw fiber between us like spider silk—but (more meaningfully, in my opinion) to connect Marina and I. I owe her a debt of gratitude for her own extensions, I know. It had been her, after all, who recognized the change in my face that one terrible Wednesday morning in March: she who had only to glance at me to see through the veneer; to understand something had gone horribly wrong. I’ll remember for the rest of my life the expression on her face when she walked to me, her arms already opening, and the relief welling up my throat when she didn’t ask me any questions. I hadn’t wanted to forget what she’d said, and wrote her words down on a slip of scrap paper. They seem now, when revisited, too simple to have warranted recording, but having arrived at a moment of injury, were to me a tourniquet over a frightening hemorrhage. God is with you, baby. You have angels watching over you. For the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like for those words to mean something substantive, something veritable. I felt my life was collapsing around me. In the dark, infant hours of that morning, I’d stood—hideous—in the shower until the water ran cold. In the back house, the washing machine was already laundering the clothes I’d had on. Later, when it occurred to me I would never wear them again, I threw away both the trousers and blouse, though the latter had belonged to Kyoko, and broke my heart to part with. I washed my hair once, then twice, finding I persisted in feeling insufficiently clean. I realize now I must have been crying that whole time: crying for however long it took me to fall asleep. When I woke up, I resolved to say nothing, but Marina had seen it in me anyway, that sharp change, and offered to me the single thing in the world she had to give. I will say a prayer for you, baby, she'd promised me. And yes, I believed there were angels abounding. I'd had one clutching my hand. 

Whispering from of the corner of his mouth, Peter will tell you he doesn’t believe she’ll last long in Columbia. A few months at most, he says, maybe a year. His mother-in-law, going back to Vietnam after decades in the States, had been that way. The thought is one anyone familiar with hospice care doesn’t need explained to them. We know cognitive decline occurs with more rapidity in hospital rooms for example, even for brief medical forays, and even without firsthand experience, it comes as no surprise that anyone with dementia fares better in familiar surroundings, at the home they’ve known before they began needing to write out the names of new acquaintances on paper. It is a gift these days to die in one’s own bed. A final dignity, and always (always) the culmination of long work done by others on that person’s behalf. 

I once followed Marina up the stairs with my hand held out just behind her back. She took them half a step at a time: putting one foot up on the next stair then joining it with the other, not wanting to be unbalanced for more than the fraction of a second which was absolutely necessary. In the unventilated stairwell, her laborious breathing echoed up into the vaulted ceiling. She’d been dizzy that day. Nauseated. What else could I do but mind her? Be the body behind her if she wavered: steadfast and present, though she didn’t know my name. 

She didn’t need to. It no longer mattered. 

I had prayed she’d be comfortable.

[adyaalcalde]

“Jesus, where do I start?”

May 5th, 2025

Turkish black tea, May 5th, 2025, 10:51 AM.

It is a little too late in the day to be typing. I’ve unplugged the dehumidifier in the living room for the first time since perhaps January in service of vacuuming up the white threads of Mazie’s coarse hair remaining behind it, scattered over the softwood and accumulating in room corners, and to clean the machine’s filter, leaving the house silent enough to hear the ticking of the missing second hand on the clock above the kitchen table. The remaining minute and hour hands—broken—do not click forward when sixty ticks have amassed, and in fact, if I stare at them long enough, seem at irregular instances to move backward. It is always approximately 6:30 in the kitchen, though through the sets of front doors and out on the street, it is nine minutes past eleven in the morning. I have spent much of my waking hours today—my first alone since March 9th—cleaning the floors: variously sweeping, mopping, and vacuuming the cavernous spaces between the wood boards. I am ridding my house of the evidence of visitors. 

I live in a Four Bay Creole Cottage¹ built, probably, in the late 1700s, when New Orleans was still under Spanish rule. Seated where I am at the kitchen table, the wind whipping through the street outside is not so much discernable as chilling. I frequently think it is not so much a house as a stable. Not so much a house as the skeletal frame of a house, conceiving of the walls around me as functionally absent, so little do they seem to keep the outside out. Dust, smoke, exhaust from passing cars, incessant humidity, and the sweet-sick smell of weed pick inside through the gaps between the doors and their jambs, and through the numerous holes in the windows, which are cracked in the corners where the panes meet their muntins. Smelling the street while standing at the stove: the urine, the vomit, the absence of both at the insistence, each morning, of the refreshingly artificial lemon-fresh of IV waste’s cleaning solution, I find myself imagining the air as tendrilous: its thin, curling fingers prying through exterior fissures and pouring inside where—as gas expanding to fill a chamber—the stench impregnates the mist of molecules between the rafters and floorboards.

The house ca. 1940s, in a negative lent by Richard Koch (though possibly not photographed by him). Image courtesy of the Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

When my mother visited in mid-March, she observed me sweeping the fallen leaves from the front patio for perhaps the second or third time since she’d arrived and remarked that my work here reminded her of that gentleman with the boulder. I’d thought the same thing earlier that year, when the tree had been dropping fleshy drupes rather than leaves. I had spent four hours in the courtyard early one morning, my back mottled by the sunlight through the leaves, sweeping the black-violet fruit, inedible, into piles I would later scoop into four heaving lawn-waste-grade trash bags. I’d been kept up the previous night by a sound I suspected were the pittering feet of mice in the attic, but turned out, as I discovered upon getting out of bed the next day, had really been the sound of dropping clusters of fruit hitting the water heater closet and roof above my room. When I’d finally finished sweeping, I looked around the courtyard as one would a battlefield emptied of enemies. I was elated, victorious. Back in the house later I would find the right sleeve of my Iowa sweatshirt stained brown where the rusting handle of the outdoor broom had braced against the inside of my arm. I took it as evidence of my labor. I hoped it would come out in the wash. In the evening, freshly showered and returning to my room, I passed by the back window and from the corner of my eye discerned a strange darkness over the red brick. I turned my head and found, with horror, the ground re-carpeted in foliage. It was impossible to tell—save for the stack of trash bags leaning against Rick’s house, waiting to be shuttled onto the street that evening for collection sometime, nebulously, in the early morning—that I’d swept at all. I’d been sorely mistaken in having seen myself as some kind of champion over the incessant mess; wrong to have imagined I might have staved off the will of the land I’d come to live on. I began to understand the complaints of neighbors about the tree, which Rick had passed onto me incredulously before he’d returned home to California. Gary had once offered not only to pay for its removal, but also had promised to tack on an additional sum for Rick as a de-facto beneficiary, understanding he would be mourning its loss. Rick had refused it with vehemence, somewhat obviously, but I wondered for the first time whether he was wrong to have done so, in spite of the tree’s apparent service as a windbreak during hurricane season. Was the security from storm damage really so great as to warrant the work it demanded? Did Rick really spend as much time sweeping as I just had, each year, knowing the work wouldn’t last a full day? I knew he did, and felt all the smaller by our shared exertions. The next day I swept again, but did not feel triumphant when I’d finished.

Rick’s back courtyard, June 1982.

There are no times I feel so pointedly ill at ease as I do cleaning the house, this house, my house. The floorboards, which had for decades been waxed and buffed, react badly to water, and hundreds of years of little droplets (proof of washed but undried hands) fan out from the entryways to the bathrooms, diminishing the farther one moves into the house. The gaps between the boards have become increasingly wide as the wood has gradually been worn down and away, leaving in place of themselves long, running pits in which dust, dirt, bits of insects, hundreds of sewing needles, and a number of white-glass-headed pins have sequestered themselves over the years. When I moved in in November, I detached the telescoping tube of Rick’s Rotovac and dragged the maw of its hose over those spaces, urging years of sloughed skin cells into the collection bag. Kneeling on the floor, looking over the crevices from directly above, I watched the dust shift toward the mouth of the vacuum as I pushed it forward. In an instant the gaps went from full—the space between the boards a grey-white color, and grout-like as it was flush to the floor—to a deeper, richer black as they were cleared of debris. Rick would say later it wasn’t something anyone had ever thought to do, which I shuddered to imagine the implications of. The house I spent the longest continuous years of my childhood in had boasted Brazilian tigerwood floors, the pieces of which had been carved with interlocking notches such that one laid alongside another latched under and slightly within its neighbor. The seams in my mother’s floor thus allow for periodic, seasonal expansion and contraction while simultaneously excusing themselves from the cavern-creation this house has undergone. On my knees in the living room, on my knees in the kitchen, and on my knees with my face to the floor, running the vacuum under Nancy’s bed frame, I considered the sudden particularity of my desires, which were voiced to me unbidden, unconsciously, with the clarity of a ringing bell. I want to live in a house with jointed floorboards; I want tile on my kitchen counter. 

This is all to say I live in a house which is somewhat pointedly nonhermetic. The things others take for granted as barriers (windows, by god, for example) in my house are at best semi-permeable, and at worst riddled with exposing cracks and holes. A lifelong advocate for welcoming the wild in: dreaming of standing vases large enough to hold whole branches of cherry blossoms as though they were cut flowers, carrying bundles of sticks over my shoulder hoping for their scent to play company to me inside… I find myself suddenly face to face with the unintended consequences of my endorsements. I didn’t mean the endless dirt. I didn’t foresee myself sweeping the kitchen and front bedroom every day, attempting to keep the incredible quantity of settling dust at bay. I feel no conflict would arise in me if the world entered my home on my terms, when beckoned, but then... wasn’t it true anyone who hoped to establish parameters within which it could operate fundamentally misunderstood the world? I considered the possibility of my hypocrisy: my having become a bad naturalist in pursuit of a degree in a science I'd once been enraptured by not blindly, but certainly without specialization.

At heart, I must admit have never been a person with long standing ambitions. My goals have been largely scholastic, and thus have been limited in their lifespan to a short number of years. I have sought and gained access to particular institutions ferried on those hopes, and have variously accepted or declined my invitation to them as my moods have vacillated. I coveted nothing—and in fact believe I have worked toward nothing with as much dedication—as I did my International Baccalaureate Diploma, but since receiving it have felt my interest in goals as particular and definite diminish considerably. The years in service of earning my Bachelors degrees chipped gradually away at my interest in them, and by the time I received them, I felt they represented very little. I’d learned less in college than I ever could have anticipated, and wondered—for long months after graduating—if I’d really made the grand mistake I suspected I had when I declined scholarship offers elsewhere to save money by remaining in-state. Perhaps I would have felt differently in Swarthmore; in San Francisco… perhaps I would not. For a time, I believed a graduate program would straighten the iron bend running through me, but after receiving permission to attend a graduate level class as an undergraduate student, I did so, and was summarily disabused of the notion. 

With nowhere else available for me to turn and look toward, my hopes for the future begin to gather in the space between the floorboards. They are as regular and domestic as dust, and settle over my life as easily. In Louisiana, I have been invited to acquaint myself with resolute certainties, and it is here that I am encountering those features of life I hope not to carry with me into what remains of it. Here, the great wooden shutters in front of our four sets of front doors remain steadfastly bolted shut, reducing the light that might otherwise flood into the front bedroom and kitchen by half. Their closure is completely necessary: a deterrent against uninvited entry in a place where people will (and indeed have) come into the house through any opening left even slightly or temporarily ajar. But on those rare occasions I’ve opened them—always in the daytime, never leaving the room with them still unlatched—I feel the space transformed; widened. I realize at once I’ve been starved for something so ordinary and fundamental the recognition of its absence in my life arrives with the full weight and force of an oncoming train.

I’d like a little more sunlight.

I want nothing as profoundly as I want to live in a house so small it is easily cleaned. In place of the slot in the door here—in which my postal carrier regularly leaves envelopes half-pushed in, creasing in the center and available for anyone passing by to take—I'd like a post-mounted mailbox: its attendant red flag pushed down in indication of collection. I want soil in the garden I don't have to be concerned about growing root vegetables in. I want a stove with working back burners. I want a hook by the door I can hang my coat on, and another, beside it, where you can hang yours.

¹ From the Vieux Carré Virtual Library, a Creole Cottage 4-Bay is “a one to one-and-a-half-story residence that is two to five-bays wide, two rooms deep, has a rear loggia flanked by cabinets on either side, no interior hallway, and is typically arranged longitudinally with a hipped or side-gabled roof that parallels the street frontage.” The house’s individual Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Evaluation described the house as a “long, brick-between-posts 1½-story, 4-bay Creole cottage with a high-pitched, hipped roof and detached 2-story kitchen [which] also dates from c. 1821 or perhaps earlier.”

[adyaalcalde]

“I was dreaming of you, with my heart in your hands.”

An open letter to the woman at the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles wearing her old engagement ring again, backward, diamond facing in.

April 24th, 2025*

The author’s last cup of coffee indefinitely. April 21st, 2025, 11:21 AM. 

I remember the early aughts as characterized by an abundance of relatively healthy, usually dairy-based, individual-portion-sized lunch items available in segmented containers. At the time, my mother had been working at ADOT’s Motor Vehicle Division and invariably took her lunch in the breakroom off the hallway through which she and her students passed to perform vehicle inspections. It was below those fluorescent lights, with linoleum on the counters to match the floor, and wearing her quarter-sleeve tops with the first button undone around her neck, that she would eschew the communal microwave perpetually in need of cleaning, fill a cup with the cheapest wholesale drip coffee the state could buy, and eat cottage cheese out of a plastic container with a spoon from home, the raspberry preserves and pecans she’d packaged separately stirred in at the top of the hour. 

At the time she’d been working for the state, my mother and I slept in the same room. Our half of the duplex house on El Parque didn’t necessitate it as other arrangements before or after would—I had my own room behind the carport, which I seem to recall even in spite of the fantastic quilt it boasted (one ball gown stitched into it of raised, pink tulle) I largely deigned to use—and I persisted alongside her uncompromisingly: my reluctance (perhaps my fear) to sleep alone showing both a somewhat concerningly infantile dependence on her as well as my own disinclination toward being around myself. In the mornings, I was invariably woken up by the sound of ricocheting water spraying the shower walls in the master bathroom, the jets making a dull thrumming near the head. After her shower, my mother floated out from the room surrounded by billowing clouds of steam: her hair wrapped in a towel and piled on her head, her makeup, a single shade of powder at its heaviest, not yet done. She put her shoes on and gathered her purse in whatever low light lept from the bathroom into her open closet, and I fell back asleep again each morning listening to the wood tray scraping the interior of her dresser as she pushed the drawers back in at an angle. My mother drove to work before the sun rose, frequently leaving me with a faint lipstick print on my baby-fat-plump cheek, and I had another hour to sleep before my brother would finally shuffle through the door to tell me—having snoozed his own alarm twice—I had to hurry to dress and have breakfast if I wanted to get to school on time. Once, a neighbor’s mother would hold my face in one cold hand, her spindling, vein-blue fingers pressing softly into my jaw, turning my head slightly but insistently toward the light. I must have glimmered, faintly, in Revlon. Somebody must love you, she said. I’d noticed the mark in the mirror earlier and, finding it somewhat classically romantic, had refused to wipe it off. I felt branded: made proof. It was my mama, persisting in the room with me long after she’d really gone. The old woman had wiped a thumb below my eye in the way anyone who has ever been charged with taking care of a child loves to wipe clean their face (their own presentability a reflection of your attentiveness toward them) and the formerly distinct mark smudged under her finger into a red-tinted blush. 

Ellum, April 14th, 2025, 8:00 AM.

Walking in her wake years after she’d disturbed the water, the exertions of my life are increasingly made in my mother’s image. This month, I found it impossible to go work in the morning without first brushing the sleep-tousled curls away from Ellum’s face, leaning back over the bed I was leaving her to sleep in awhile longer, and kissing her. I hoped, faintly, for the persistence of my little red lipstick mark on her fat cheek, perhaps undiscovered or unconsidered, and departed imagining her going about the day either not knowing or not minding that anyone who encountered her understood she was keenly loved. For the first time in my adult life, my hair is at a length at which I can wear it like my mother's, and so do. There were years working at Cline’s Special Collections and Archives when I would find myself feeling she and I were similarly composed in the world, each of us—impossibly, against the insistence of chronological time—somehow and at the same moment stooped slightly over reading material on our de facto lunch breaks: she, in 2004, with her paperback; I with the June edition of 1970’s Esquire Magazine¹ on a tab of the Internet Archive. On the second floor of the library, sequestered in an individual cubicle in the Silent Study section, I embodied her as a functional proxy. Turning pieces of white chocolate and graham cracker crumbles into key lime Chobani, I felt older than I ever had—independent and responsible—and understood my sense of composure as a product of my newfound conscientiousness about eating as a brace for work. The Chobani Flip, in the world of the segmented, dairy-based snack, had been somewhat famously released in 2013, and was evidence in its resemblance to my mother’s cottage cheese lunches of a mundane, domestic variety of mindfulness: my grand effort to dispel my penchant for eating only in the evenings, at home, after returning from campus, in favor of getting through the day somewhat more energetically. Between my usually over-full schedule of classes and new job, I was spending more dedicated, active time on campus than I ever had before, and had begun to note the sharp decline in my ability to pay attention in my lectures (though, notably, I remained unfailingly bright eyed in the closed stacks) as the day wound on. Finding my lethargy impossible to abide by, I’d taken to carrying around Clif Bars and packing little sandwiches beside my books and water bottle in the mornings, often alongside a small bunch of rinsed grapes, which felt reminiscent of the contents of my lunchboxes at the same period of time my alarm had been the squealing of water pipes as my mother had turned the faucet a room away… 

The stories she brought home in the evenings were seldom remarkable. Her work was rote: methodical and somewhat numbing in its repetition. She gave instruction, which I recall primarily because she bought candies for her students: little treats to toss at them in reward for answering a question correctly. (My own sweet tooth, incorrigible, insisted I spirit more than the occasional Midgee Tootsie Roll from the stash kept on hand at home.) She inspected vehicles, and took her students to junkyards during the week to practice locating components on different makes and models. She knew where to find VIN numbers on hundreds of cars and motorcycles, rolling backward from the present to those manufactured decades before she’d been born. I remember almost nothing she told me about her work at the time—the brief glimpses I got of her in the mornings, hair curling in the warm humidity, took up more space in my memory than my imagination of her career, which was comparatively remote to me—save her description of this woman. 

She had been working beside my mother for some time at that point: long enough for the cursory, banal office conversation to have revealed, although not explicitly, that she was not married and didn’t have children: this basal information the kind one gets because no spouse or children had been mentioned, as they are when you have them. She rented tapes from Blockbuster, and on occasion even selected one my mother had also seen. She read a little, but not well, and seemed to cart the same novel around for ages: always reading and re-reading the same page in the breakroom chair on her lunch hour, unable to pull her attention from the quiet conversation by the percolator to the printed dialogue in front of her. It was difficult to follow who was saying what. She hadn’t yet been to RigaTony’s, but would check it out, sometime, on my mother’s recommendation of a good place to get Italian: a question she’d asked mostly to pass the time. 

She came to work one morning with a band over her left ring finger. Low dome. Silver alloyed with 7½ percent copper. Though she was not the type to wear rings, the addition to her daily dress went unnoticed, or perhaps noted but not commented on, either deliberately or out of apathy. It had clearly, at some point, been finished in bright white, but had long since burnished, been nicked and scratched. My mother asked about it after about a week had passed without her offering an explanation of her own. In my conception of the story, I imagine my mother's head emerging from behind the hush-walled cubicle board separating their desks, the grey in her hair still rare enough to discern individual strands. I can hardly account for how I think she must have broached the subject, not being a particularly prying person. (For a time I imagined her—uncharacteristically—opening the interaction with a cliché and unabashed “psst!”) Regardless of how my mother may have posed the question: if it had come up more organically in another conversation or been the out-of-the blue product of a week of curiosity I'd pictured it as, when she was eventually asked about the ring, the woman looked down at her hand without the usual enthusiasm. She twisted the band to reveal a diamond punctuating the sterling: small, certainly, but cathedral set. She told my mother she had recently been re-engaged to her ex-husband; that it was not the kind of arrangement which warranted broadcasting; that my mother was the first to know.

Notes to self, undated, early April. "And doesn't she recognize the sensation of pain that comes with reopening herself to him, and to the world, but extension? One thinks of chest wounds—air in contact with spaces it would[n't]—if nothing were wrong—have reason to touch. -> 'You're under the weather.' -> I need to taste basalt. Rock bottom. And then maybe... mining corridors. MISC APRIL -> And did you sleep alone for a year—troubled sleeps? Did you tell him you loved him—aloud—as if he could hear you—in... -> My one wild & precious thing."

I’ve long conceived of my lived experience as analogous to a two-person interplay. In letters to friends, in journals, in long talks with Nico sitting on top of the brick wall separating my childhood home’s backyard from the street, I’ve described myself as continually lurching toward then checking my excitements and impulses. I feel I am at once a stern parent and her unguarded child, always and simultaneously barrelling somewhere heedlessly and unbidden and pulling myself back by the shirt collar; whispering some tempering admonishment into my own ear. What I present this woman—an incarnation of myself—as saying when explaining the feeling changes slightly in its specific warning, but never its timbre or temperament. It is always a hiss, just above a whisper, always spoken with the certainty of someone who knows better: be polite; behave; be careful. I have lived my life abiding by steadfast rules with no clear consequences. What did it matter if I defaulted on my resolutions? What did it mean for me to make exceptions; to arrange caveats for myself? When I said I would abstain from drinking, I considered it as amended by an invisible asterisk. *Except if Ethan visits. When I said I would write a page each day, I deliberately did not specify which kind, thinking I could more easily fill a page in my journal by hand than I could type one, single spaced, in 11 pt Times New Roman and still—technically speaking—meet the criteria I’d established for measuring the success of my new routine. I have always invented ways to cheat, and I have always and also remained within the uncrossable borders of the rules. 

Having become the variety of woman given to renunciations, April saw the addition of two resolutions to my previous list written in March. I declared a moratorium on non-essential spending (read: anything except paying utility bills, for groceries, and for a not-yet-completed, handmade salt cellar I’ve inadvertently commissioned) until June 23rd. I told myself, additionally, I would stop drinking caffeine. Why? Jenny asked, affronted, when I mentioned I was “off” the stimulant. I didn’t know why, exactly, save that I felt I’d become a utilitarian coffee drinker at work: relying on the medium roast to quell my moods or suppress my headaches when, before, coffee had been a rarity in my life, a last-ditch fix-all reserved for witching hour excursions to Denny’s with Ethan when I was at my lowest. I told her I didn’t want to be dependent on anything. That, she understood, she said, but she liked me when I’d had espresso. I considered this. I added that I wanted to see if I could do it, I supposed. Well, we all know you can do it, she said—derisive, turning away from me—so why don’t you just have some anyway? Though touched by her resolute faith in my self-control, should I need to employ it, as well as her apparent amusement about my energetic periods following a usually ill-advised mid-day drink, it would not occur to me until a few minutes shy of 6:20 this morning that I may have taken my efforts to restrain myself too far. Though easily my least healthy vice, coffee drinking was a generally tame habit to nurse. I wondered if the caffeine I ingested at intervals as irregular as they were was actually so gripping a force in my life to have warranted its complete severance. I’d experienced no longing to speak of since “quitting,” and wondered if I was trying to punish myself; if I’d begun to view my inflicted privations and my subsequent endurance of them as noble, rather than as neutral decisions about my health and diet. Was my self-conception inherently childish? Immature? Was the order I seemed always to be scrambling to impose evidence of my distrust in myself? I didn’t know. I fastened two snaps at the waist of my dress and buckled my belt over them. In the kitchen, I flipped the switch on the kettle, made, and drank a cup of sencha. I felt no different than I had on mornings prior. I had braced myself for the physical press of disappointment in my chest, even over something I understood as a mild and truthfully inconsequential failure. I'd anticipated feeling shame. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything, including relief or enjoyment.

April has seen me contradict myself endlessly. I have variously betrayed my own faith in myself beyond renunciations of the subtle minutiae of my life: beyond caffeine, beyond pocket money. As spring gives way to summer—my plants taking greedy root in the soil outside—I find myself comparatively untethered: unprepared for the coming days of high wind, heavy rain, and blistering heat. It is to her, now, that I turn in search of kinship: that nameless woman with her ring the wrong way, the diamond on her finger digging persistently into the callus of her hand. It is she I have conjured from my memory, and she who has taken up residence in my mind as my prime concern.

I want to know if it lasted. I want to know if you were right the first time.

¹ Read William Humphrey’s “The Sex Life of the Salmon is Brief and Terrible” on page 62 here.  * written partly before and on this date, but completed on April 29th, 2025.

[adyaalcalde]

“It’s kind of weird, right?” “Good weird.”

March 24th, 2025

Self portrait of the artist in the window glass of Beckham's Bookshop, March 21st, 2025, 5:21 PM.

On December the 10th of 2023—before moving from the south to the north side of Flagstaff’s (West) Aspen Avenue—I took down two pieces of lined paper that had been taped up beside the mirror in my temporary bedroom. At the bottom of the Salt River Valley in January of that same year, I’d written “Proof of God on Earth” in the great white top margin of the first sheet, intending to maintain some record of the awe I would suffer in the oncoming months. A twin list (“Things That Are the Devil”) appeared shortly thereafter—evidence of my inability to restrain myself from what I have recently learned is my somewhat characteristic disdain for most things—and each grew haphazardly up until that inexplicable point when I felt they had become suddenly complete. Since titling them, the first list had grown twenty-five items deep; the second: seventeen. The items on each appeared not in order of relevance or rank, but rather had been recorded as they occurred or revealed themselves to me. Returning in 2025 to those lists, which demonstrate my first prolonged foray into list-making as a serious occupation, I find it difficult to recall the impetus for including particular items and excluding others. Some, such as the Erlenmeyer flask, are there comprehensibly. (2023 had brought forth my first substantial time spent in a chemistry laboratory and with that, my first acid/base titrations, in which the flasks were used. The work itself was painstaking and required careful precision: less than a drop of titrant released from the burette clipped over the vessel was enough to over-titrate the analyte and warranted beginning the entire lab again. Restarting, in turn, required washing and drying one’s glassware, reassembling the equipment, including a usually unbalanced stand; burette and burette clip; and a hot plate, as well as remaking the titrant and analyte solutions. The quantity of analyte available—being derived from a small flask of an unknown powdered compound we were tasked with identifying—was exceedingly limited. This difficulty was additionally intensified by the short time we had allotted in the lab each week, and compounded by the anxiety and strife of being made to share a lab bench with Antonio. The glassware, however, I found miraculous. Our instructor told us she frequently absconded with variously sized Erlenmeyer flasks to employ as vases.) Other items, such as the cervical cap, which I admit here openly I have never employed firsthand, have become mysterious to me in the intervening years. Why precisely it was on my mind, I cannot say with certainty, though I can venture a guess. I recall at one point including a certain peer’s name on the Devil list, then erasing it, possibly because I felt the person it belonged to was not truly devilish, but more probably because I felt the inclusion of anyone on it betrayed some hazily-conceived aesthetic of the list itself.

It perhaps goes without saying, or is evidenced by the list, that I am not a religious person, and the Biblical figures in the titles were invoked as stand-in symbols for things I thought were extraordinary and nefarious, respectively. The lists are reproduced in full below and presented without further comment.

Proof of God on Earth list reads as follows: 1. decaf coffee, 2. caffine [sic], 3. excedrin, 4. corn husker's lotion, 5. the miracle of banana bread, 6. the scent of white rice, 7. Eric Carle, 8. candied fennel seeds, 9. jordan almonds, 10. refridgeration [sic] technology, 11. technicolor, 12. a decent ballpoint pen, 13. redundant coding for amino acids, 14. seed arils, 15. wool, 16. gut microflora, 17. the shallot, 18. bread tabs, 19. wood smoke, 20. nausea, 21. riptides, 22. the erlenmeyer flask, 23. lonliness [sic], 24. the great plains, and 25. the endocrine system. Things That are the Devil list reads as follows: 1. fruit teas, 2. bob dylan's wreched [sic] voice, 3. low waisted hiking pants, 4. Keurigs, 5. Pinterest, 6. treadmills, 7. "deep-dish" pies (without bottom crust), 8. advertizing [sic], 9. airports, 10. all "mug cakes", 11. twist pens, 12. cervical caps, 13. touchscreens; 14. the organ (instrument); 15. snickerdoodles, 16. automatic sensing clothes washing machines, and 17. crowds.

The week of March 14th saw me finishing Not-Knowing, a collection of essays, interviews, and other writings from Donald Barthelme (compiled and arranged by Kim Herzinger, who also edited The Teachings of Don B.) Within it, Barthelme is frequently cited for his production of lists, a characteristic feature of his writing which functioned variously to disassemble intricacies of his plots; to isolate and thus emphasize particular objects, characters, situations; to space items equally apart from one another; to ask his readers to evaluate them firstly as individual items then, afterward, as items contextualized by their surroundings and peers. “They… provide stability in what is often a volatile environment,” Barthelme said of his lists, “something to tie to, like an almanac or a telephone book.” On the 27th of March, I would write the (below) note on the function of the list. As Bathelme spoke of the list as an almanac: a touchstone to (re)visit during moments of uncertainty, I also conceived of the list, fundamentally, as a (perhaps false, but glorious) means of establishing order. Although that order is somewhat arbitrary, or may be, the list serves variously to itemize a larger whole; to describe intricately and particularly; to make discreet (finite) the contiguous. 

As I considered how I wanted to arrange this month’s post, I found myself writing a list of ideas in the (borrowed) stenographer’s notebook (which has come to be) specially reserved for drafting these blog posts. I considered answering Doctor Arthur Aron’s 36 questions, developed in 1997, which he and his peers at Stony Brook College believed facilitated the development of intimacy; a study which has been inaccurately (and unfortunately, because it does the research a disservice) represented as describing an exercise “leading [resolutely] to love.” I considered the ironic admonishment I’d received as a member of Suzanne Holguin’s middle school Humanities class: we were not to supply antonyms when asked for the definition of a word. (Something was not not something else.) What was it I defined myself against? I wrote a list: Woman without father. Woman without children. Unmarried woman. What did I define myself toward? Woman with library. Woman with journals. Employed woman. I considered writing a schedule: logging my activity at a particular time each hour for a day to show how it was I spent my time, which I felt would best illustrate my priorities, my habits, my idiosyncrasies. I considered whether I should endeavor to make those notes on a day I was working, which while perhaps making for a less interesting piece of writing, would more accurately reflect how I spent a considerable percentage of my waking time, or if I should write it on one of my days off. I considered Scott Madine’s advice to our Honors Economics class in sophomore year of high school: if you want to know someone well, have them supply a copy of their bank statement on your first date. For years after hearing it, I'd envisioned a couple seated silently together at RigaTony's on Warner, each of them with their glasses on, looking over the other's printed statement with the scrutiny others around them studied the description of the Penne Rosa on their menus. Nothing shows who you are as does what you spend your money on, he said. I considered the various ways I had represented myself in illustrations over the years. Compiling a selection of self portraits, I noticed I seemed to depict myself often resting my head in my hands.

Turning my focus to self-representation in my "creative" work, I considered how I'd represented myself in writing: wondering if it were possible to compile a list of every description I'd made of myself in recent years. How did I write about myself in letters to friends? In my journal? Speaking to Mieko about this as we walked down Charters together this month, I said I suspected I was harsher—more critical of myself—in my journal, and somewhat more facecious in letters, when it was often my intention to make light of what I'd been up to. It would be interesting, she said, to see how two would compare. To see, so succinctly, how I appraised myself.

At this, the end of this month, I have finally succeeded in making a choice, and have elected, ultimately, to begin this post by making note of my deliberations: to discuss drafting, and the list as a friend to the editor, to the planner, to the forgetful, and to the woman trying her best to be mindful of the world she has now lived in for twenty two complete years. The following lists are intended to answer, incrementally, two fundamental questions I posed to myself in March, this month of burgeonings: who are you? and what do you want?

List one is by and large the most substantial: a selection of (characterizing) "I" statements written in letters to my dear friend Anahi since August of 2023, interspersed with variously relevant and irrelevant notate bene. The second is a list of my aims. The third, a list of my resolutions for this year. The fourth, a list of things I wanted for my twenty third birthday, two of three of which I received. The fifth and final is a list (compiled since January) of what I feel will be at the forefront of 2025, including a sticky-note addition—written half-asleep after leaping awake in the middle of the night on the bedside notepad reserved for that purpose—referring specifically to shungiku, the bitter herb of the chrysanthemum leaf, rather than my disposition.

I:

“—may be cartographically challenged in a way which resists rectification.”

“—’m a pin cushion.”

“—’ll die stupid.”

“—’m starting to get the bigger picture. I’m trying to be less fucking mean all the time.”

“—know I should be ashamed of myself, and am.”

“—tend to persist… when I perhaps should not.”

“—’ve been sitting here in this cubicle since August, trying to hold this thermos at such an angle that when I’m pouring out this watery coffee, it doesn’t glug, and disturb the only other student on this floor.”

“—fit in well there.”

“—may be doing more harm to him than he’ll ever admit to me.”

“—am old and tired.”

“—’m easy. Earth girls are easy.”

“—can’t help it.”

“—am getting super accustomed to just… wildly debasing myself all the time.”

“—lag behind.”

“—am too old for this.”

“—don’t know what to do with someone who doesn’t want anything from me.”

“—seem to be on a quest to prove what an ass I can make out of myself, and am doing a hell of a job.”

“—’ve become intolerable. (I’ve become more intolerable.)”

“—didn’t know they made graph paper that wasn’t five squares per inch. They shouldn’t.”

“—think of nothing but leaving.”

“—am living in a dream world.”

“—can be so sordid.”

“—get the feeling I will be spending a lot of time on this highway.”

“—always read it & am moved to tears.”

“—said I loved nothing better than degenerative novels.”

“—come out of his lectures weeping.”

“—’m being flogged—I feel like—at all possible angles, on all possible sides—by magnificent ideas.”

A resident of the Audubon Insectarium and Entomology Museum (1 Canal Street, New Orleans LA. 70130) climbs over a bit of banana, March 13th, 2025, 2:47 PM.

“—feel so enmeshed in inadequacies. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing—why I got a degree in biology, which I’m now turning my back on—why I persist in marrying, over and over again, my own self-made wallowing—what the fuck I think is going to happen in the next few years of my life. I talk to the grad students at the readings I go to and feel like I ought to turn myself out of doors, load my pockets with stones, and march into the nearest, deepest body of water.” 

“—’m being bombarded by this idea of determinism.” 

“—’ve been thinking a lot about relentlessness.”

“—could feel myself being a bitch.”

“—’m always thinking, if I’ve asked someone to come to something—if I show them some film I like—that they hate it, and me, by extension.”

“—can’t help but be closely engaged, and am so self-important that I think my line-edits should be communicated in full, rather than in summary.”

“—am made of coffee & discussion board posts.”

“—should be lobotomized.”

“—’m the dog.”

“—’m too touched by domesticity.”

“—really ought to know better.”

“—get hopeful + then frustrate myself, unreasonably. I make up situations & get angry about them. I am aware that “my” control over “myself” (as though these are separate) has never—possibly—been so tenuous, but this awareness cannot—DOES not—force me to be reasonable. My comprehension of the fact that I’m fanatic—strung out—isn’t sufficient to reel me back in. I don’t own a lid to put on this. Grease fire, flames crawling up kitchen curtains. Racehorse. Greyhound. I oscillate between being embarrassed and being completely emptied of shame—knowing that anything I feel + act upon I’m helpless to stop. I’m relinquishing responsibility for myself choicelessly. I had a latte at 3:00PM which is probably the wellspring from which this erupted.”

“—digress.”

“—want to go somewhere where things are easy, and warm, and where I know in what cabinet to put each dish, pot, and pan away in.”

“—’ve been thinking obsessively about parenthood.”

“—love sending you junk.”

“—am becoming suspicious of myself & my apparent desires. I think I have seldom made good decisions.”

“—hate workshops.”

“—wonder what the fuck it is I think I’d be doing in Iowa.”

“—’ve long dreamed of compiling a list of such [sucide] notes—but would imagine that would be received as morbid + discourteuous.” 

“—am given to nervousness.” 

“—have been holding one hand up over a thermos-cap cup of coffee, warmed by the steam until the heat becomes unbearable.” 

“—do not write poetry.”

“—am too nervous + stickly + awkward to exist in the world—and I cannot read.”

“—always come back up the mountain with my head on backwards—or on right, and I live backward up here.”

“—want to leave behind a fish—flesh frozen solid.” 

“—hate texting so deeply + earnestly.”

“—went on mumbling incoherently.”

“—have to go write my strongest work now. I will be taking my strongest work to the Post Office tomorrow. When I don’t get in, I & my strongest work are going to Francis Short Pond and drowning in the pond scum.”

“—will never say no to a free ticket to a play.”

“—have a sweet and deeply earnest crush on Bruce Willis.”

“—live & walk around on this planet with unreasonable, untempered expectations, which all evidences against are insufficient to mar. I behave unseriously, not taking into account the hard, uncompromising reality of things. I figure things should be important, and demand & get the scrutiny & careful attention they deserve. (Sometimes, this belief is enough to make it so. And it becomes possible to be moved by the tiniest things. The light coming off the back of a beetle. Steam caught rising into the air above a teacup in ribbons… some days, I don’t leave my room.)”

“—’m just packing a bag.”

“—don’t think photography is an art.”

“—had never eaten a shrimp by the time I’d reached whatever age it was I learned that they were sold with a brown vein of shit still running through their cold bodies, and after that, wasn’t interested in trying one.”

“—distrust any animal adapted to retrograde swimming.”

“—live in terror of people finding the things I concieve of as being moving as plain—trite.” 

“—’m inclined, I know, toward dry writing.” 

“—care almost nothing for the Wabash.”

View of the Mississippi River from Louisiana's East Bank, March 24th, 2025, 9:37 AM.

“—wish he’d stayed in New York.”

“—wish I hadn’t met him.”

“—tell everybody I love them too much, & get things stuck in my teeth pointed out to me in restaurants. & this is life.”

“—was mummified by grief.”

“—am the kind of person who is inordinately amused by [table settings.]”

“—distrust him for introducing himself as a poet.”

“—had a second edition copy of Doctor Spock’s The Common Sense Guide to Baby and Child Care in my bag then.” 

“—present this without commentary, trusting you to see the expression under the mask.”

“—cried (awesome.)”

“—didn’t know why a mudroom was called a mudroom until I visited the Riordan Mansion.” 

“—wasn’t going to volunteer anything.”

“—make a concerted effort to fold myself into the gap between the wall and the baseboard.”

“—am sorry—and I love him—and I don’t know how to act.”

“—’m saying sometimes his sweetness is slate-clearing.” 

“—will go on loving everyone in a direction they cannot quite grasp.”

“—’ve not come from grasslands, really.”

“—read a poem which was about trout.”

“—don’t gain anything from hearing classmates mispronounce ‘peregrine.’”

“—don’t get it.”

“—resent being asked to slow down.”

“—was wearing a tee shirt. I looked like an idiot.”

“—was crying, or between crying.”

“—had nothing to offer anybody and I didn’t understand biochemistry.”

“—woke up disturbed by their surreal calm.”

“—wondered for a moment where Fish and Game had gotten the fish from.” 

“—’ve never been someone who much cared for dogs.”

“—’ve been on this “audacity” kick.” 

“—am mean and expect much from people.”

“—say nothing without a frame.” 

“—am writing fuck all and I suck.”

“—just want sweet corn at roadside stands.”

“—think I laughed a lot in a way he found hard to contend with.”

“—look around the room to find something to slam my head against.”

“—think Submittable is fucking stupid.”

“—am adverse to buying new books.”

“—love [stoneware] knee-jerkingly.”

“—know I am prone to odd placements of commas.”

“—cannot be brief.”

“—don’t remember anything.”

“—am considering how large the township of Morning Sun could be.”

“—would like to live in a house without a doorbell.”

“—have no gift for brevity, & I am not Lydia Davis!”

“—have a great affection for long stories where nothing happens.”

“—am continually fantasizing about apt space, and ownership… would like to have my own space to arrange, and am endlessly jealous of friends with apartments.”

“—am deeply, deeply guilty of being withholding—excluding important context (particularly in nonfiction) that I am either deliberately being elusive about, skirting around something unpleasant, or trusting certain readers to understand. In fiction, I hide eggs for myself in the brome grass. Gabriel Menapance reads Gibran because my parents love him. His parents worked at General Electric because my (paternal) grandparents met there. I write long, tangential sections about orthotic shoes because I’ve been invested in the musculoskeletal system too much lately. Nothing is free of associations.”

“—feel like an emergent cicada.” 

“—gave myself haircuts such that I might look like Mister Spock.”

“—am imagining immaculate citations.”

“—have written a list of demands that I will go downstairs with tomorrow.”

“—am good at nothing, it seems, save burning bridges.”

“—wonder if I will ever be able to live with someone I like—or if I will like forever someone I live with… I know there are always days when you find yourself suddenly, inexplicably irritable—or I have such days—but I seldom feel this annoyance is baseless, or comes from nowhere. Always if someone had only done something (or not done something) I would not be annoyed. I cannot tell if I am characteristically, by disposition, temperamental or not.”

“—am always—perhaps only—thinking about living arrangements—dreaming of what I could do if only I had control over a space—if all the utensils were my selections—if the windows were opened at the time I liked.”

“—could kill him.”

“—am bitching, or writing about the WEATHER, which I love to do.” 

“—was so moved by his crummy little lecture videos.” 

“—am still waiting for the mail to come.”

“—am religiously devoted to the snapshot—the hint of difference—showing snippets of what it is that makes up my day.” 

“—am also going to digitize all the photos of GERALD ‘JERRY’ RICHARD, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT of the HISTORIC ROUTE 66 ASSOCIATION OF ARIZONA who died in a TERRIBLE PLANE CRASH in CENSUS DESIGNATED BAGDAD THIRTY YEARS BEFORE I WAS BORN because I have a CRUSH on him.”

Jerry Richard and Johnny Lott at a meeting of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona's Fun Run Committee.

“—wanted to be a shepherd.” 

“—’m bringing a thermos of coffee and sandwiches.”

“—have an idea for a story I’m not writing.” 

“—cry at breakfast.”

“—love [Tomoko] for leagues and fathoms.”

Tomoko, Marc, and Phil Simpson in Morning Sun, Iowa, February 1957.

“—will run to the corner Mary’s Ace Hardware twenty or thirty times.”

“—think of the sweet ponderosa-sap scent in the air.” 

“—write as a function of notably terrible memory—the urgency and the detail in my (nonfiction) writing is a desperate desire to record & collect data I know I would not be able to save & access otherwise." 

“—’ve never written a love letter in my life, for example, which I could re-read and not be embarrassed by for its paleness in comparison to the feeling that motivated it."

“—say things (to men (in particular)) I should never say to anyone, and then get confused when they act on a sense of kinship and proximity to me I don’t feel.” 

“—’m without a good barometer.” 

“—can’t help but draw parallels.”

“—am completely incapable of doing anything worthwhile save in fiction.” 

“—’ve done a lot of stewing about it but no writing at all.”

“—’d say we got just shy of a foot of snow, but then I might be gazing at drifts.”

“—imagined a vague dusting that would melt on contact.”

“—’d have given anything—all the other days of my life—to be standing under that pinecone.” 

NB: The pinecone in question refers to the New Years tradition, since 1999, of lowering a pinecone statue from the balcony of the Weatherford Hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona at midnight to celebrate and welcome the oncoming year. I attended this as 2022 passed into 2023, on my own, and as 2023 passed into 2024, with Lauren Montana. Photo: Weatherford Hotel Flagstaff Facebook Page: "118 years ago this month, John Weatherford started construction on what is now today's oldest, continuously operating hotel in Arizona, right in the heart and soul of Flagstaff. Come celebrate with us!" February 24th, 2017.

“—was dust-muddled my whole life, and in a way I didn’t understand until leaving it, deeply, deeply Arizonan.” 

“—’ve not found the gun.”

“—should give it all up and be a diarist forever.” 

“—want to be [Jose Canseco] for Halloween.”

“—ordered his thesis.” 

NB: "He" is "David Foster Wallace."

“—will never get into grad school—anywhere.” 

“—’ve been oddly of the mind that I am 24, though I am not, and find it difficult to answer correctly when people ask me how old I am.”

Self portrait of the artist writing this post at the kitchen table on her birthday, March 24th, 2025, 10:58 AM.

What are your aims? 

I want to live in a small house. 

Resolutions?

To floss twice daily

To write in my journal daily 

To abstain from drinking

Birthday Wishes? 

Leaf rake

Jonah*

from Hayden

* The Idea Factory, a wooden toy shop near my house, sells among its wares a hand-carved puzzle of a whale with a hidden "Jonah" figure carved inside. Made by Peter B. Chapman, whose wood shop sits amid apple orchards on Virginia's unincorporated Bent Mountain community, the puzzle is taken apart by first separating the obscure "key" piece and then proceeding down from the head to the tail, removing pieces by alternatively sliding and lifting them. On the 25th of March, when Mieko could no longer interject that it was my birthday, and I was thus barred for paying for anything, I bought myself a ten inch mahogany puzzle, which resides now beside the zoology section of my bookshelves, recently reorganized in accordance to the Library of Congress' 21 category classification system.

Anticipations?

2025 list reads: doorstop literature; the essay; the FOOTNOTE; aggregate fruits; accepting the inevitable ingestion of soil; transcription; posture; the incantatory (236); going too far; gratitude; nonfiction*; *the essay; continued prevarication...; and bitterness.

I spent much of this month gardening. Enzo’s aberrant snow had variously killed or damaged a significant percentage of the remaining vegetation in both Rick’s courtyard and mine, effectively providing a new, albeit frost-blackened slate for my continuous work on the house(s) to extend to. My first thought sowed two packages of wildflower seed from Mary’s Ace Hardware on Rampart into the sunniest raised plots beyond the back door, and subsequent plans involved the half hour walk to Harold’s (Indoor and Outdoor) Plants in the Bywater, where I learned customers were encouraged to use their old planting trays for transporting large orders more easily, and thus carried home those first ten small herbs and fruit starters in a great, celled tray balanced on my hip: a method immeasurably preferable to the plastic-lined Rouses’s bag I’d brought to stack them in. In the weeks since then I’ve carried home something like three additional ten or twelve celled trays, as well as a massive hanging pot of rosemary, a bay leaf tree, and a gallon pot of climbing jasmine. Tilling well-compacted soil, digging holes, and pinching labyrinthine, leaf-miner-damaged leaves from my Florida tomatoes, I listened to Lyle Lovett’s The Road to Ensenada, Step Inside This House, and My Baby Don’t Tolerate (eschewing temporarily those songs off Pontiac and I Love Everybody, the two albums of his I know front to back and through again.) In springtime, the beginning of my own personal new year and the time for planting annuals, I dreamed of love as he’d written it, thinking with each reiteration of “who loves you better than I?” of the only person I ever think of while listening to love songs. I planted French tarragon, curled parsley, and English thyme in the window box below the guest bathroom. I planted at least twelve tomatoes, but possibly up to fifteen; nasturtiums below the bathroom window; at least four varieties of mint; marigolds by the doorways; snap peas beside the fountain; chamomile; bunching onions; chives, basil (both Thai and sweet); and cilantro. I considered unblocking his phone number, feeling there was no world in which he wouldn't call on my birthday, against reason. Among the flowers set in rows beside the railroad tracks, I looked for but did not find sweet alyssum. Scrubbing my nails clean and dirtying the sink basin, I considered with frequency the somewhat cliché insistence, attributed (probably inaccurately) to Aubrey Hepburn, that to plant a garden is to garner faith in the future. I lived—for a time—wild with implacable hope.

Early in March of 2023, Hayden had written of meeting new people as a dance, implying something of the charade in the formation of acquaintanceship: a relationship resulting from the reenactment of a tested-and-true formula. In an essay I would become first and trepidatiously besotted with him over, he argued one’s birthplace was the “most profound” of all “standard pieces of first date information.” In his case, his hometown was somewhat uniquely representative of the person he’d become. In mine, it seemed less so. (That I would fracture his somewhat casual anticipations—“You hand each other your names, your likes, the bits of your history you deem cheap enough to give away…”—was a point of later surprise. As he loved to remind me, the first time I’d ever had a moment to sit with him in his dorm room, I spinning in small arcs in his university-supplied desk chair and he on his bed, the closed door variously behind and beside me, depending on how far I’d turned, enclosing us in a space where we were at once and for the first time, alone—I would tell him I planned somewhat summarily to kill myself if I ever was diagnosed with the same condition my father had. The admittance had been spurred by some question he posed to me about my parents, in response to which I must have said something like, “I’m going to try to say this quickly.” Though I recall little about his reaction to the statement at the time, subsequent conversations served to set roots well between us.) Nevertheless, I was moved (as I was inclined toward being moved) by his fervor, and his baseless insistencies. Reflecting on his self-definition this month, I considered those inquiries I would define as “most profound,” landing on the similarly standard characterizing questions, albeit ones definitively inappropriate as pieces of first date information (being too intimate in their domesticity to pose to someone you are just beginning to know): 

 How do you take your coffee? and,

How do you like your eggs in the morning?

In March of 2025 I am newly twenty-three and so green to the world there's still dirt behind my ears. I drink my coffee black, like my eggs over easy, with flour tortillas, and—in spite of any effort made to explain myself articulately—know with resolution nobody knows me like my baby.

[adyaalcalde]

"And I ain’t got nothing to say..."

March 4th, 2024*

Night view of a Mardi Gras parade, "326L" stamped in black ink on verso, gelatin silver print, 3.25 x 4.5 inches. Historic New Orleans Collection. https://catalog.hnoc.org/web/arena/search#/entity/thnoc-archive/2022.0080.18/mardi-gras-parade

9:44 AM on Mardi Gras Day met me on a wrought iron bench on the Riverwalk, the curls in my hair emphatically combed out by twenty-six-mile-an-hour winds carried hard and fast over the Mississippi. I’d hoped to get some thoughtful writing done and, not wanting to cart around my latest Moleskine (nearly full and annoyingly triangular now, as I’d taped so much into it) I stapled together a few pages of lined paper to write on before I left the house. I then stuck those pages inside the stenographer’s notebook I’d been keeping notes for essays in, reserving the stenographer’s notebook for prompts and notes and the pages for my long-form responses to them. Having expected the chill, I was in slacks and a button up, leaving the dress, string of big white beads, and shawl I’d set out—planned to wear to James’ party in the afternoon—back on the hanger at home. I crossed the streetcar tracks without stopping, canting my head to the side to find only a single distant car in sight, its headlights turned down low in the daytime. 

I was thrilled to find myself almost entirely alone, the throng that had filled the Riverwalk the previous day apparently migrated westward toward Charters, Royal, Bourbon… one figure was just discernible to my left: a man with his back to the river—bracing against the wind—his hands cupped around the flame of a lighter. He had clearly stopped to light a cigarette, his bicycle between his legs and sloping to the right. When he’d lit it, he rode away, and was far enough when he departed for the smoke-scent not to reach me. I watched an RTA ferry cross from the West Bank. Another, shortly after, left from the east. 

The previous day, the walk was sardined: necessitating the crab-like contortions of crowd-walking so endemic to concerts, intermissions... I variously hunched and threw back my shoulders to avoid contact with the people rushing by, moving both sideways and with enough rapidity to warrant a quiet pride in my conformations… I’d not been so much as grazed by the fabric of anyone’s clothing, much more made contact with anyone’s body, all afternoon. I’d gone walking hoping only to get out of my house for a moment, feeling keenly and strangely the absence of people in the first half of my day off (a dearth I was usually grateful for) and needing, imperatively, to ameliorate it. 

Women walked past me with glitter covering their chests, their shirts invariably balled and wrinkling in their fists, no one having had the foresight to bring a large purse to Lundi Gras. Blocks later, walking vaguely in the direction of home, I would discover the stands ostensibly providing the service: men with red Radio Flyers wheeled up against the corners of buildings at any given intersection, effectively blocking pedestrian traffic from both directions. In the basin of their wagons, cellophane packages of variously colored glitter were stapled in rows—perhaps six across and eight down—onto the tri-fold poster boards used in elementary school Science Fair Exhibitions. Brushes half-stiff with Elmer’s Washable School Glue were submerged in murky plastic cups half-full of water, and handwritten signage with crude illustrations informed would-be patrons of the upcharge associated with selecting a different color for the nipple and the areola (albeit, predictably, not using the word “areola.”) The most lavish in the crowd thus boasted breasts like targets: purple, green, and gold radiating outward until the concentric circles met the curtains of plastic beads hanging from their necks. 

Watching a recycling barge trudge slowly upstream, pushing a massive metal container against the current, it occurs to me there is nothing I can write about Mardi Gras that in any way contributes to its reception; nothing I can put forth that hasn’t been better articulated by staff members of the Historic New Orleans Collection, for example. I shiver once more, having chilled myself thoroughly, and stand to go home. 

At 12:37PM that same day, a tornado watch would serve as an impetus to clutch at James’ shirtsleeve. I held the notification up to him, and he peered at it through the eye holes cut into his sequined mask. “Killjoy,” he’d call me, turning back to face the crowd sprawling below him. His partygoers bunched together in a seemingly legless throng, so tightly packed together they appeared from the balcony to disappear variously at the waist, sternum, or shoulders. Their collective gaze tilted upward, but canted obviously and excitedly to the left, where they watched a striptease performed beside us. We stood amid the cords the band had just left behind, James recording the party from above in a sweep of his camera; I knowing I would imminently be going home. 

* edited March 10th, 2025 and March 18th, 2025

[adyaalcalde]

“I smell blossoms and the trees are bare.”

February 24th, 2025

The very first worm I've had the pleasure of encountering here in New Orleans, moving through the soil on February 17th, 2024, 1:20 PM.

Walking back from Bruce’s a little after 9:30, I imagined for a moment swinging off Saint Philip and heading north, first—on Royal—against, then—on Ursulines—along the flow of traffic. Days earlier, when the thought of dropping by had first crossed my mind, I’d pictured a guard at the gate of James’ house, looking down the bridge of a knuckle-crooked nose at would-be partygoers, asking skeptically for a password in exchange for their admittance. I had walked to work in the mornings imagining what I might say if questioned: I was there to bartend; I was not there to bartend, though I’d been asked to bartend; I was looking for James. I imagined the invocation of his name as a sufficient verification of our acquaintance, though at that point, I couldn't supply his surname if asked. I didn’t know which house was his, actually. My mind invariably ceased wandering when I passed over the threshold, switching in an instant to a mode of thought reserved for the workplace in its efficiency and pith. I said good morning to Peter. I clocked in. 

I’d not been invited, expressly, though James had apparently gone lengths¹ to implore Kristen to encourage me to attend. He’d asked her if she'd be a team player. She mispronounced Epstein when she relayed her sentiments about the extension²; an allusion I found alarmingly exaggerated and suspected to be somewhat tremulously-founded, given my own abating faith in the proximity with which she followed the news. I played host to the fantasy yet, either in spite or possibly because of her protestations. I could just say hello… nothing hurting in saying hello, certainly. 

I stepped off the pavement in front of MRB, walking on new Super Bowl asphalt in deference to the line crowding the sidewalk. Stickers, bookmarks, pamphlets, and other Krewe du Vieux ephemera (rubber chickens; novelty condoms) piled against the curb, intentionally discarded or dropped mistakenly, one couldn’t tell. Nearing 10 o’clock—on Charters—it was the last time the idea of stopping in would present itself as possible. I’d buttoned my wool coat to the collar and held my head down against the wind. My hand clutched around my keys in my pocket, a fist formed over a chain boasting a bottle opener from Jack Rabbit Trading Post; a gold “pee pee” charm (good luck, from my first trip to Louisiana in 2014); a single gate key; and a yellow tag with my phone number written on it. Saint Philip, and I above it, crossed Royal, then Bourbon. By the time I passed the Postal Emporium I let the notion go; having suddenly realized I’d passed his house without making up my mind as to whether or not I wanted to see it and wouldn’t, now, be going back. Standing in the low light of the kitchen, I unbuttoned my coat and hung it by the shoulders on the back of a kitchen chair. I turned my dress up over my head as I walked to the bathroom and, waiting for the chill to run from the water, peeled off my stockings. Stepping into the shower for the second time that day, wanting more to warm up than needing to wash, I was thinking of him, somewhere vaguely west of me. I wondered what position he was standing in at that very moment; if he was standing at all. 

James—devilishly—had come back the day after we’d spoken about him. Peter, Jenny, and I had cloistered together in a rare, idle moment, posing questions as to whether each of us believed he went in for American football, and if so, what particular aspect of it held the most probable intrigue for him. Jenny had begun the discussion, asking if we found it strange he—not one to miss a party—hadn’t returned for the oncoming Super Bowl. Peter dismissed the possibility of his returning outright. They don’t play football [where he’s from³]. I suggested, thoughtfully, he might be interested in the cheerleaders. When I spotted him the following day, I screwed my face up in an exaggeration of my surprise: jaw dropped; eyes wide. I may have pointed. When he saw me, he leapt. 

My revelation came in the night: the ebb of time between seeing him for the first time, again, and the second. I present without comment and only minor revisions a bit of writing from February 13th, 2025, 6:19 PM: 

It occurs to me, mid-[redacted] [that] it does not behoove me to be as mean as I am to James, who I seem to be treating offhandedly reflexively; having seen the others do [the same]. Everything I’ve ever said to him has been unserious teasing, and (on his part) well borne, but ultimately unnecessary. It occurs to me he’s never [once] responded in kind; never volleyed. The third to last time I saw him, I checked a watch I was not wearing and greeted him with “good afternoon!” Oh, he said, bracing for a probable onslaught. Is this an inappropriate time? Was he allowed to be here? My eyes widened in exaggerated shock. I was just acknowledging the hour, I said, my hands flat out in front of my chest, palms facing him. He was smiling, slightly embarrassed, realization dawning over his silly face. He asked if we couldn’t just start over. We could. Anytime. Good afternoon, he said. Good afternoon, I repeated. You’re looking beautiful today, as always. He was looking past me, eyes cast far above my head. 

When I would see him—as I’d hoped to—the day following Krewe du Vieux, he would begin his conversation with me not with a hello, but a question about what book it was I’d read instead of going to his party. 

Answer, Adya: Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon. (And I hadn’t been enjoying it either.) 

Alternative Answer, Adya: Actually… 

Sheepishly, I told him I had, in fact, gone to a party the previous night. But (anticipating a performance of betrayal) I’d left early enough that I was virtually home by 9:30, which I couldn’t have done had I been bartending until eleven… and… 

Response, James, eyebrows much higher than usual: You cheated on me!

Adya, clearly having practiced this in the shower, pleased the conversation was going as plotted: Honestly, I did consider stopping by… but I will say—for the record—you did not actually invite me, but extended an offer of employment I was under-qualified to have taken, and—

James, stammering, beloved: It was open door! 

Adya, not mentioning the imagined bouncer: I felt it would be completely audacious for me to invite myself into someone’s home. I know it’s not a particularly French Quarter attitude, and one you may not understand, but—

James: Audacious! 

I am moved on a near daily basis by his slight declarations of fidelity; his reference to me as “you big reader, you” in apparent earnestness; by his explicit pronouncement of his crush on me, which, once admitted, I neither managed to comment on or look him in the eye again after saying. On the 23rd, I dreamed of him cast as a neighbor in Arcadia, carrying boxes into my parents’ new-old house under the canopy of the densely wooded yard. James sun-dappled, barely visible save in the spots of sunlight eeking their way between the foliage. James obliging, sweet, patient. In my journal, I would write that I remembered him “in the beginning and in the end.” Having spotted us milling around a moving truck, he had availed himself to us, and in the afternoon helped unpack. In the evening, my mother and her husband were hosting a housewarming party. Guests swarmed around stacks of boxes picking canapés off paper plates, relishing in dimmed overhead lighting: no lamps yet reassembled and plugged in. I remember and wrote of my surprise about James’ continued presence in the house, seated on a stool at the kitchen island, chatting idly with my mother’s friends. He was welcome, of course, but I found it hard to imagine how anything as pedestrian as this appealed to him; couldn’t conceive save for his purported affection for me, why he—so typically inclined toward the thrilling, I knew—would stay. But stay he did: never once appearing uncomfortable or self-isolating, never seeking me out as a touchstone, his sole acquaintance in a house full of strangers. I left him alone for a long time, wandering through corridors which so much resembled the ones I’d slunk through as a child in Arcadia, when my mother and I had lived in a room in her friend’s house after my parents had separated. When I returned, having effectively treated him as I dreaded he might have treated me at his own party—left alone to make small talk with an unfamiliar crowd getting gradually drunker—I found myself stunned by his patience, his willingness to sit among these people who made up my life. It seemed it was all in service to me: his quietude, his friendliness. I remember my silent deliberation as it became time for him to depart: the internal sensation of instability as the tiny scale in me weighed the risks and benefits of what I was moving to do. I reached for him, laced my arms around his neck. My gratitude: a first, strange hug. There was a moment of pause before I felt his hands on me in return, his surprise receding into acquiescence. 

My waking occupation has become putting teeth to what it is about him precisely that intrigues me. I am trying to understand how I can reconcile what I’ve been told about him and how he behaves with me, trying to categorize what I believe has been accurately reported and what I can reasonably doubt, dismiss, or disregard completely. Like testing a pearl, the question of authenticity is answered in the mouth. Opening a door for him late on Wednesday, threatening (jokingly?) to beat him with a broom (“I might like that,” he forewarns) he tells me he never gets to see me after hours. It’s almost magical, he says. I, ever articulate, wordlessly train my eyes at a spot of dirt on the floor, trying hard to wrestle the wide grin spreading over my face into a grimace. 

¹ He knew I liked to be in bed by nine o’clock, he said. He knew all I did was read, but Chris, for his part, liked Megan, James had texted Kristen. And I like Adya. Among other comments and requests, Kristen told me he’d asked her if she couldn’t find out some more information about my whole "thing": let him know what kind of books it was I read, for example. In my usual penchant for giving everyone (and lately, him in particular) more credit than they deserve, I imagined he must have meant to read them, and thus engineer a common ground upon which to stand relative to me: to manufacture, artificially but with enthusiasm, some basis for spirited conversation. I’d been re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest then, and laughed—laughed—when she mentioned it to me, not being capable of imagining his reading it were I promised to him upon completion. I told Kristen I’d supply a comprehension test. A few multiple choice questions and a short response. She suggested he’d take it with headphones in, having an assistant whisper the answers to him from across the street. Later, Mia would dismiss this possibility outright. He’s going to buy you a book, she said, flatly. I was at once ashamed the thought hadn’t occurred to me. Of course, it was the easier thing to do, but I’d so relished the possibility of his expending a grand effort, imagining his struggling to flip the hundreds of pages between text and endnote, reading the description of each production of James O. Incandenza’s filmography… that he might hypothetically have opted for a gift instead disturbed me. Flirting with me has always been a torturous process, and I have worked to ensure that; tolerated nothing less than pains taken on my behalf as evidence of interest.  Didn’t he read? I asked him once. He listened to audiobooks. That’s cheating, I said. It is not! He insisted. Is too. 

² Per Kristen, who had worked James’ parties before (accepting five hundred dollars in cash at the end of the night—one hundred per hour—in exchange for her ostensible pulchritude as she poured champagne) the parties (depending on one’s perspective, either devolved or) evolved steadily and evenly into an orgy, which began promptly at 11:00 PM, at which time the waitstaff (Kristen included) was officially dismissed, and unofficially invited to remain there and participate in. It reportedly took place, to my concern, in the pool.  Kristen claimed never to have engaged, and noted her refusal seemed not to have been taken in stride. “He ices you out,” she says, heavy emphasis on her sibilant, drawing the sound out between her teeth. It’s clear he wants more, and when he begins to understand he won’t get it from you, you stop getting asked to “bartend”. She felt distinctly uncomfortable being put in a position to encourage other women to attend, and had decided not to respond to his messages. It was better to never go, she said. Better not to open yourself to his scorn. (She did not use the word “scorn”.) When he himself asked me to come, he began, “speaking of parties—” transitioning with his usual fluidity from a subject I no longer remember, “we’re still one bartender short for tomorrow night…” I muttered something about inexperience, asked if I looked like I knew the first thing about mixing drinks. It’s just pouring champagne! He reassured me. Gaze like the sun. Heavy, dizzying, intense. All the more reason, I managed, you don't need me to do it. He didn't insist, and I was at once relieved and disappointed. 

³ I would learn later he had a somewhat more organic penchant for rugby, which he played when he was younger. Though he has since relegated himself to the sidelines, and is apparently satisfied as a spectator, Jenny claimed he once came in “dressed like a rugby player.” He denied this: he was wearing paraphernalia for a certain team, in true sporting fashion, and demonstrating his support of their efforts sartorially. I clarified: so there were no knee pads involved? He asked: would you like there to be? Had I the complexion for it, I might have blushed. 

[adyaalcalde]

“The days I don’t want to kill myself are extraordinary. Deep Bass.”

February 4th, 2025

Kitchen scene on my day off: banana bread with walnuts and dark chocolate pieces; measuring spoons; a dollar and sixty four cents in change from Matassa's; and a cup of sencha green tea (gift from Tam). February 4th, 2025, 3:06 PM.

I’ve been rooting around in Rick’s shit. 

What can I say? 

When I moved into this great big house in New Orleans, heaving massive plastic tubs of cooking ware and cardboard boxes upon boxes upon boxes of paperbacks over the steep front stoop, through the French doors endemic to the Quarter, Mia knew it was coming, and said as much to Rick over the dinner table one evening. Everyone knew there was a gun hidden somewhere on the second floor of the back house, and Mia and I knew a specter incarnation of it hung over my head in the same way halos tangle in tresses of angel hair: characteristically, and casting a distinct slant of light over the countenance. The concern she voiced, which at home in Tempe had been met with a disturbed silence by our mother, here, in Rick, raised a laugh. “You gonna kill yourself, girlie?” he asked me, incredulity high in his spirited voice. Probably, yeah! Sometime. Jury’s out on when. I’ll say, simply, this is an issue I seem to have a different position on than others. Although my thoughts about the ethics and implications of suicide are more carefully considered than I suggest in my (admittedly cavalier) public discussion of them, I am seldom given credit for (what I feel is) the obvious deliberation informing my stance. Some believe I am being short-sighted, others, that I am inconsiderate. Some (like my sister) apparently believe it’s a personal slight: a demonstration of my ignorance and/or disregard of the degree and intensity of their love for me. It is not. 

Frankly, I am aware that no one wants to hear about suicide, least of all one oncoming, or presented as inevitable. For most everyone, open discussion about suicide is taboo, and for those who do not plan on killing themselves, the topic can be seen as variously distasteful, morbid, or unthinkable. I respect that discomfort, which I realize arises for a variety of complex and interlocking reasons, a significant one being—I believe—a distinctly American perturbation with death itself, a phenomena which owes its origins to the increasingly clinical, sanitized practice of relocating end-of-life care to hospitals and other such out-of-home facilities… but that’s another essay¹. Though it’s not an attitude I share (and in fact believe is somewhat conceited and unserious) I do generally make efforts to act in response to it, and limit discussions of suicide to those I feel can speak about it with some developed sense of objectivity.

Suffice it to say my relationship with life has—by virtue of my [private] experiences—significantly deviated from what appears to be a standard attitude. The boiling point is this: I believe I have the right and responsibility to decide how, when, and in what circumstance my life ends. I believe this is no one’s business but my own, and that any efforts to prevent or discourage me from thinking this way are intolerable encroachments onto the front-lawn of my autonomy. 

So—I’ve been more or less looking for the gun. The search arises, somewhat, out of an unadorned curiosity, rather than ideation or intent. I want to know where it is he’s put it. Under what folded shirt. In what drawer. It is also—somewhat—motivated by a desire for use.

In the last month, I have felt my usual depression metastasize in me, taking up wild but not unprecedented swaths of territory in the periphery of my life. Ruminations about methods fill my idle time: washing flecks of pesto and bright olive oil from bowls in the sink, I stand amid an invisible crowd of comments made over the course of my life, all of them milling in the thick humidity. My mother once told me, after having discovered the body of a neighbor who hung himself, that she found the act of leaving your corpse "for" someone to be repugnant, encumbering, and audacious. She perceived (that particular) suicide as spiteful, inherently migrating trauma from the subject onto an unwitting observer. Though harsh, I understood what she meant. If it were her, she said, if ever she was diagnosed with some degenerative, chronic illness (like the dementia then-presently afflicting my great aunt, who she was charged individually with taking care of) she would drive out into the desert and shoot herself. Firstly, the gun presents a rapidity and certainty no overdose or slit-wrist can guarantee. Secondly, she added somewhat cheerfully (proud of the thoroughness of her plan) she could then be “picked clean” by vultures, and if discovered would be so as a less-offensive appearing skeleton. At the time, she and I had laughed at this in a macabre sort of glee. Someone else had told me once he planned to kill himself, painlessly, in a tent he’d fill with the noxious gas from a camping cooking stove. I, who had never once in my life loved anyone more acutely as I did him, then, questioned what I perceived as his probably misguided belief in the hermetic enclosure of his camping equipment, which he did not appreciate. Stacking wooden cutting boards upright against the backsplash, I attempted to determine what position I would have to contort my body into within a trash bin such that, if I shot myself in it, the lid would not go flying up and expose what remained of my body to onlooking pedestrians. Perhaps if I aimed through the temple, sideways, rather than up through the mouth? I could disappear completely: slumped into a pile at the bottom of the bin, and be lifted away in the bruise-colored hours of the early morning. No one might be made to encounter me. No one would be made to be hurt, or disturbed. I scrubbed parmesan from the tines of a dinner fork. 

To say that suicide is a part of my life is an understatement and a misrepresentation. It encompasses: contextualizing and tempering my attitudes, inclinations, behaviors, and plans for the future. I also, oxymoronically, believe this is not a very big deal. I am a debilitatingly hopeful person: to such an extent that rejections (both personal and professional) usually baffle me. I believe, incredibly, that “things” will somehow work out for everyone: that there is no possibility of an eventuality that is not, somehow, “okay.” This suspicion does not by any means lessen the intensity of the personal horror I harbor as I slouch around my house, or keep me from tugging on trick-drawers in Rick’s cabinetry, but it does run alongside it. 

At Matassa’s Market this morning, a note on bright orange, lined stationary had been taped to inside of the front door. “CASH ONLY” the print read, obviously Sharpie, obviously owing to Cox’s internet outages we’d had in the Quarter this week. I’d folded two five dollar bills into my pocket before leaving the house, and was grateful for them as I walked in without pause, not needing to return home to collect them. Having discovered they either were sold out of or didn’t carry chocolate chips, I put two extra large, dark chocolate Hershey bars at the counter beside the cashier, where he looked down at them approvingly. “Two chocolate bars…” he said, turning away from me to ring them up. I read the text on his tee shirt. “Getting your serotonin levels up,” he then added, barely audible behind the plexiglass separator between us and with his head turned the other way. It took me a moment to understand what he’d said. Was I? I certainly needed it. I gaily told him I was baking it into banana bread, and when I got home considered how weird it would be to bring him a slice. I’d stepped from the store’s stoop blind with happiness, dumb with joy. I’d started baking that morning in an attempt to shake off the sense of futility I’d been unable to squirm my way out from under all day yesterday. I’d gone to bed weeping about nothing in particular, heart wrenched and nose clogged like an inconsolable child. In a few quiet words, he’d embossed my day with a sense of—Community? Simplicity? Levity?—I’d been in dear need of. I unwrapped a bar of chocolate and chopped half of it into rough pieces, folding it and a pile of walnuts into the yellow batter I’d left behind on the table as I'd run to the market. I was indebted to him. To everybody. To anyone who’d ever spoken to me kindly. I thought of the suicide note (purportedly) left behind by a man who pitched himself over the Golden Gate, which read he was walking to the bridge, and if one person smiled at him on the way, he wouldn’t jump.

What I mean is that it’s entirely possible to be completely in love with the world and to be, also, suicidal; that these conditions are perceived as being mutually exclusive does them both an injustice. In the words of Jeremi Sensky, spoken from his hospital bed, “I love everybody. Everybody.” This, a sentiment put forth in spite of the horror he’d survived, but also because of it. 

There are no days I don’t want to kill myself. Admitting this makes it possible for me to live: to face the facts of my presence on Earth with resolution and purpose. This seems impossible to comprehend for some people, concerned friends or family members who imagine one good day is enough to knock the lifetime disposition. Surely you can’t want to kill yourself today? After that sunset? After all those perfect hours in the snow; in the pool; at the state fair, standing stories below the spinning Chair-O-Planes? What they fail to comprehend is the length and magnitude of my decision. Nothing dispels it. Nothing can. Good days are just that: flat and plain even in their goodness. But, of course, some still thrum with deep bass. Some days, the minutes of deliberation wondering if it’s worth it to go out and buy the chocolate chips the recipe calls for (which you could have sworn you had before you started baking) resolve in favor of the affirmative. Some days, you persist—stupid—in the baking aisle, crouching for the second time to scour the shelves for Tollhouse pieces that are pretty obviously not there. Some days you remember—when you walk to the candy aisle resolved to buy an obligate Rolo or something, just so you don’t have to do the awkward business of leaving this understocked convenience store empty handed—that you can replace semi-sweet chocolate chips with dark chocolate pieces. Some days you can willfully misinterpret the man at the counter, who is probably making some bizarre, veiled overture about aphrodisiacs to you, and take his words as a blinking neon sign. Despair is over, if you want it!

Some days there’s banana bread, and you can put off your death for another evening.

¹ Read an excellent, tangential essay from USA Today about the State of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act written by a (beloved) peer of mine, Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick, who I had the unique pleasure of meeting and dancing with in a graduate class on writing in/on grasslands last year: Making Peace with Dying: How Death Doulas in Oregon Help Terminally Ill Die on Their Own Terms.

[adyaalcalde]

"I walk with you."

January 24th, 2025*

Winter Storm Enzo in the window of 901 Canal Street, on the corner of Canal and Dauphine. January 21st, 2025, 9:43 AM.

The incarnation of my father I can summon best is of him lit only slightly, in profile, by the lamp mounted on the sliver of wall between Max’s room and mine. In my memory he is perched perpetually on the edge of my bed, immediately after concluding his nightly rendition of Paul Simon’s “Father and Daughter” as a de-facto lullaby; a ritual that had begun before my mind held water and continued into my early teens. He is always just leaving, and if I listen closely I can hear the sound of his sandal on the concrete floor, moving to go. 

In the years after he left I spent days at a time weeding photos from albums and boxes, meticulously scanning the ones I was throwing away on the flatbed built into the family printer. The act of preserving digital copies served as a means to make private the portion of my life he had occupied alongside me. It was impossible, now, for any friend to uncover them; impossible for me to be accused of sentimentality. In discarding the prints, I was effecting a shift in the visible narrative of my life: making an effort to erase from my early childhood the presence that would no longer occupy the oncoming years. While I was not precisely intending to suggest he had never been present, I was (although perhaps not consciously) attempting to muddle the strength of his parenthood. If my records could suggest his absence from birthday parties, from family weddings and dinners, it seemed they could foreshadow the condition's movement into permanence. The act of selection presented the miraculous possibility of making his departure comprehensible. In removing him, it seemed as if I could retroactively brace myself—at three years old, four—for the blow I’d just incurred. 

In my personal archives, my father slowly became more print than flesh. I cannot, now, so much remember the summer vacations spent in New Jersey’s Ocean City as I do the sight of him in the viewfinder, standing calf-deep in the surf. Though I can’t remember the day he held styrofoam blocks (almost certainly insulating waste from some mail-delivered contraption) up in the air for my sister and I to kick, trying to make the white foam on the patio the wood board at a martial arts tournament, I can see him crouched beside the picket fence separating the concrete from the patches of grass in the yard, and Tiana and I in our matching pajamas before him. In any other form I try to conjure him, his body assumes the position it was captured in by photographs. He is smiling or else making faces, his cheeks swelled with air and his eyes bulging in an exaggerated playfulness. In all other scenes save this one, he is frozen in place by the flash.

Baggage claim at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, circa 2005.

At the edge of my bed, in my single clear memory sharpened only by its repetition, it could easily be any night of my young life. A glass of water is making rings on the shelf beside my bed, and the cheap slats below my mattress creak under his weight. My exchange for his motility in this scene is the absence of his face, obscured completely in the darkness. In my mind, one sense must necessarily dim, and I trade the sight of him for his smell, and the sound of his voice. My father’s words flow imprecisely from his direction, his face made expressionless in the nighttime. In the years of my life we spent together, he told me many times—as he is saying now—that it is impossible to lose anyone completely. Even when death suspended their rights to visitors, they could meet you, sometime, in the country of your dreams. It was within the borders of that incipient nation he rediscovered his own largely absent father, Jerome, in the middle years of his own life. When he himself was gone, my father always said, I could in turn visit him there. 

My father and his father, circa 1975.

A self-described “amateur oneirologist,” my father’s life was built about signpost dreams. In a sketchbook he’d carried with him through Italy in June of 1988, he recorded alongside his renderings of architecture and sketchy, blockish sunbathers a log of his dreams. Discussions of dreaming fill even his waking entries, as (between clipped descriptions of activity, often “shopping,” “golf,” et cetera…) he writes about dreams like other men write of fish. September 12th was, he writes, a “good night to get back in the dream game.” On the 7th(“?”) of the same month, he wrote he had hoped “to catch at least 1 dream tonight.” Additional entries describe his waking compulsion to “reality check:” to pause for a moment during the day and concentrate on manifesting a desire. To produce from the mind a long-lost friend. To raise the dead. To be swimming in some other sea, perhaps the world over. Though his exertions necessarily failed while he was awake, the practice was led in service of developing a habit. Ultimately, he hypothesized, the checks would confer upon him the ability to dream lucidly: while in a dream, to recognize he was dreaming, and thus change the conditions of his experience at will. To raise the dead. To swim.

Two unfortunate qualities I’ve inherited from my father are his penchant for understatement and his superstitiousness. In my childhood he restrainedly but consistently described the first woman he’d been married to as a “practice wife,” a term I had understood to mean he’d entered with her into a staged, pre-arranged domestic partnership. As practice spouses, they would have learned from one another how to cohabitate successfully: how to temper grating idiosyncrasies while maintaining individuality; how to remain respectful of and kind to someone in constant and close proximity to you. I pictured a manicured lawn. White sunlight streaming through open windows like liquid. The term conjured a manufactured serenity, and it never entered my mind they might have loved each other. It was not impossible, actually, they’d in fact had an agent of some sort who visited periodically to sit with them in their front room, filling in bubbles on clip-board secured forms in accordance to their responses to his questions. I imagined a proffered cup of coffee cooling on a saucer of the same color: their house the variety (unlike ours) filled with dishware that matched. I imagined a sort of graduation at the end, when they divorced. I thought they might have shook hands. I don’t know his first wife’s given name, though I must have been aware of it, somehow, before. I’d seen at least one photo of her, which I had cut up in my teenage years; preserving the irregular x-acto edge rectangle of my father’s face and torso in a posed Sears studio portrait, as I thought he’d looked particularly handsome in it—the way your parents do as captured in a youth you played no part in—but thought displaying the photo intact was somewhat bizarre. I seem to suspect it was something beginning with “A” and Italian. Andrea. Angela. What I do recall is that my father changed his surname to hers (whatever that might have been) in what he described as—and it was understood he still believed indeed was—a subversive, anti-establishment resistance to traditional roles in marriage. The union must not have lasted very long, though I can’t venture a guess as to its duration. I mean, firstly, that my father tended toward dismissal in conversations about his past: brushing massive swaths of his life under the proverbial rug whenever his nosy children hunted for dust bunnies. Secondly, he appraised his time on Earth as a de-facto experiment: in his resistance to discussing their attendant emotions, his experiences were reduced to raw data, which he could then mine for some conclusive, essential lesson. Everything itself all at once meant nothing and yet signified: pointed to something greater. His studies of dreams were motivated by a combination of these somewhat oxymoronic qualities—his indifference and his faith. 

Snow over the French Quarter, as seen from the second story window of Rick's room, January 21st, 2025, 9:02 AM.

On my inaugural telephone call of the new year, I stood at the base of a stained glass mural rising like the moon up the side of a Catholic church in Wupatki. I was speaking hurriedly, against the preternaturally rapid decline of my cell battery, and asking my mother if she would drive the near three hours distance between us and pick me up. The sun was actively vanishing over the horizon, leaving the sky a discordant, hopeful orange. I was aware my call to her would be the last I could make; aware of the enormity of the favor I was asking. As I made an attempt to swallow the rising bolus of anxiety in my throat, the streetlamps came on violently, having been lit altogether and at once, dappling the brown evening with sudden spots. I distinctly recall flinching at them. After I’d hung up, I looked down the street in hopes of finding someplace nearby to sit, knowing the moment my phone died, my distance from town (as well as my bereftness of a cable and adapter) would make me completely unreachable and I (thus) needed to remain close to where I’d told her to look for me. Near the street, I found a bench haloed by a streetlamp, and as I settled over it, the temperature lurched downward as though collapsing in the seat alongside me. My jaw had inadvertently clenched to keep my teeth from chattering, though the shrill cold had already worked between my molars. I felt everything deeply: my multifold regret (over having stepped off the bus in the first place, over asking my mom to collect me); the sudden cold; my usual complement of sorrow. I knew it would be a long time until she got there, just as surely as I knew she would come. 

Not minutes earlier, I had been returning home from a trip to the North on a bus-bench seat. Seated closest to the window, I had made an effort to hold my body away from Michel, seated beside me and in the center: conscientiously keeping my thigh from resting against his. Aiden sat farthest from me on the opposite end of the bench where his long, spindly legs—which could not have fit straight in front of him without entering half a foot into the withered foam of the seat in front of us—sprawled like windfall into the aisle. Michel’s arm, once crossing the seat-back at the bend of his elbow, his hand tapping with a performed idleness on the brown pleather back side of the seat behind my head, seemed somehow—in increments—to have rolled over the incline and snaked over my shoulders. The tips of his fingers rested at the center of my bicep. They had gone on drumming. At first, I had shrugged him away, content to dismiss the contact as accidental though it was plainly not. I leaned forward and turned toward the window. His hand promptly dropped, and his arm sandwiched itself low in the chasm I’d opened between my back and the seat. His hand on my hip; nightmare: the sensations were indistinguishable. It was raining outside, and in the blue cast of the window, the drops ran into each other like river tributaries: combining and separating again in accordance to the wind and the dirt. I felt him rescind his arm. In another moment, it was back again. At a certain point, my silence and willful obliviousness met their tolerance threshold. 

I had gone to bed that very evening thinking of the many hands laid on me as encroachments, as counting coups on my boundaries: in my refigured attic of a bedroom in Flagstaff, the clammy grip of a research partner that had seized my hand as I’d spoken animatedly about my concept for our presentation, how I could mirror the delivery of George Whitefield’s revival sermons when we moved into the section about rhetoric in The Great Awakening; my recognition of the strange, abrupt darkening of the room as a friend leaned his face suddenly toward me in his living room, obscuring the lamp behind him as his body took up huge swaths of what had moments ago been empty space my periphery; the perpetual fingers of virtual strangers: former classmates and friends-of-friends grasping at me in Bandoleros on the slow, rainy nights when Ethan and I deigned to go out for karaoke. I had sat there, rigor-mortis stiff on the edge of a barstool, focusing all my energy on listening to Craig sing Incubus’ “Drive” in the adjacent room while looking vacantly down at the hand on my thigh. I’d been thinking, I can’t believe I didn’t wear stockings. I’d been thinking of Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers in Alfred E. Green’s 1933 Baby Face, burning her own leg with hot coffee as she poured a full cup over the wandering hand of Ed Sipple. Later, having walked to the bar to tell Ethan I was leaving, I would hear the bartender—who he’d gone out with the previous night—tell him he (meaning he, the hulking shape in the corner I’d walked out from under, who claimed, somewhat lamely, he "got handsy when [he got] drunk") should “just buy her a beer.” I remember my revulsion, as if to her this was clockwork. As if a pint was a fair exchange for sex. As if my following him home was mechanical: an obliging thing to do. I remember Ethan’s emphatic response, shouted above the music. “He already did!” So what?

I walked home. 

In retrospect, my neutrality in the circumstances above defies explanation. Distance from them has in no way clarified an understanding of my silences, or what it was in me that did not so much acquiesce to the contact but did make it distinctly impossible to put any words to my interior, articulate plea for it to “stop.” Twice I managed a particularly forceful overcompensation for what was possibly timidity but more probably some convoluted sense of worthlessness, and, with a steadiness I did not feel, said with incredulous contempt: I’m not doing this with you. Emphasis on the object. But even those rebuffs did not sever the attempts as I believed they would. In the first case, the young man would grab me again not minutes later, completely disregarding both my obvious discomfort and what I’d felt was a clear-stated position. In the second, I (foolishly) stayed and made an attempt to explain myself, finding it intolerable to imagine his thinking I believed we should be together, then back-pedaled when that entanglement was imminent in a performance of coyness, or disinclination to appear over-eager. It was imperative he understood I didn’t want him (them, respectively); that whatever signals he'd interpreted as affection had been misread. Both times, I was playing into a nonnegotiable, unbudging futility. My explanation of disinterest was either interpreted as nervousness or frigidity (which it seemed they felt they could shake out of me if only they were persistent in their contact and attentions) or otherwise was outright ignored. Regardless, in another week, they’d invariably lurch toward me again. 

All I can muster now is the assumption that whatever variety of cowardice it was that inhibited me in those situations propelled me, oppositely, into the waiting arms of the doomed relationship I retreated into for want of comfort or, when that ceased, want of having someone around who I never doubted would stop—anything—when I asked him to. I had begun to feel hounded, and the foxhole I understood then as solace, manifest, and which promised safety from harm, appeared months after the fact as it really was: a hole in the dirt to hide in.

To say: there was a moment, on the bus, when I turned from the window, away from my commitment to pretending nothing was happening, and toward Michel. When I told him to take his fucking hand off me. Because the crowning achievement of my months of fear was met with a mild huff of indignant laughter, and because Aiden (the shared friend who bridged the acquaintanceship between us) had hardly lifted his head in recognition of what I'd intended as a shocking outburst, I got off the bus, preferring to be left in the dwindling light at Wupatki than to be rested on a second longer.

In all my righteousness, I could well have walked home. It would be third, a Friday, when I arrived, but the distance (some two hundred miles) seemed secondary to my resolve.

The night boiled into early morning in the sky above Wupatki.

Walking to Rick's in the unprecedented snow, January 21st, 2025, 8:56 AM.

Early in the morning on the first of January, James let me know he’d been thinking of me (as he’d promised to) when the year of the unburned goat rolled over into the next. He had been sequestered in a dark booth in the corner of his cabaret club du jour. And, he’d wanted to know, had I been where I’d promised to be? 

I had. On a plastic-coated metal bench, I had been waiting for the sun to rise over Arizona. I’d been shivering in the pre-dawn, watching the barely distinguishable bodies of fruit bats speckle the sky, visible only where they blotted out the stars. I’d been asleep in a room with fourteen foot ceilings, under a mortised roof held together by wood pegs. I’d been deaf to the ululations of police sirens pouring from Bourbon.

Thus far, January has opened the blossoms of improbable yellow roses on the street, placed upright against the buildings in mourning and solidarity: resplendent and sweet-smelling in defiance of the cold. The City of New Orleans, and I within her, have walked into this new year trepidatiously, solemnly, bearing in mind the people of our past and acknowledging their absence. So too have we been dreaming, however unimpressively, of things to come. The hope of courage. The sun rising.

* edited for length on February 9th, 2025

[adyaalcalde]

"I hate you some. I hate you some; I love you some."

December 24th, 2024

Fog over and between the trees lining the road into New Orleans, November 10th, 2024, 7:01 AM.

At the bottom of a page-long list of notes written (point-by-point) in response to a letter I’d written her, a dear friend of mine recently wrote despite her self-described “inability” to refrain from saying what she thought, she was beginning to learn—at her workplace—to keep choice attitudes, secrets, and phobias closer to her chest. “And that’s something I admire about you,” a coworker had told her. She was not being taciturn, but neither had she volunteered herself for the social surgical table. In refraining from offering dissectable remarks, the life she led beyond the parking lot had not been crowbar-pried into. I was reminded of this on a nameless day this week, or perhaps the last, when my boss had tossed a comment over his shoulder as I was walking quickly behind him. “You’re just like me,” he said. “A banana.” I must have appeared confused by the statement. He clarified:

Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. 

His intention had obviously been to commend himself and I for a shared assimilation: a process he valued to such an extent his perspective had warped, convincing him the same condition in others was universally prized. Despite this and as a matter of course, the remark cut with efficiency to a soft, sore part of me. Bruised orange. Brown spot on green apple.

I have written ad nauseam the perpetual condition of the mixed individual is not to be divided, but to be made to experience division, not being recognized as belonging completely to whichever disparate cultures they hail from. Mine is not a unique experience. So few dappled lives are. The selfsame something that makes this fact makes it humbling. I have nothing to say about a feeling of schism derived from my mixed heritage that has not been said with greater artistry and articulation by legions of essayists before me. What small ruminations I might offer which do not echo decades of the same repeated sentiment would take the form of anecdotes, the central morals of which are hardly the point I want to make.

[adyaalcalde]

"Get your kicks on Route 66!"

November 9th, 2024

Adya Alcalde beside the sign representing the midpoint of United States Highway 66 in Adrian, Texas, November 9th, 2024, 9:59 AM.

Mineola Highway toward Tyler, Texas, November 9th, 2024, 8:03 PM.

[adyaalcalde]

“Ain't it just like a friend of mine? To hit me from behind...”

November 7th, 2024*

Interstate 40 through Flagstaff, Arizona. November 7th, 2024, approximatley 11:45 AM.

The morning I left, Ethan texted from Flagstaff to say the snow coming down was building on the drifts yet uncleared and unmelted from the previous night’s storm. He was two and a half hours away then, with every moment between him and I compounding the severity of the morning’s blizzard. In a few short weeks at home, the possibility of travel being impeded by winter weather conditions had become as remote a possibility to me as it was to Ward, who was driving. In the valley, I had adopted the lower altitude’s mentality: its predilection for presupposition and confidence. It, and thus I, had been warm, and I’d forgotten everything useful to me when I was no longer required to shovel a path down the stairs and to the sidewalk just to force down the red, frozen, upright arm of my mailbox flag. 

Clinging to the vestiges of my separation from Ward—and to a greater extent—home, I took an admittedly smug satisfaction in relaying the secondhand weather report to him¹. I suspected he hadn’t checked the forecast before we were underway. Moreover, I suspected he’d not checked it before packing. Made secure by the fact of my moving, I felt distinctly comfortable in my small (admittedly petty) sense of superiority. (To say, I was insulated from incident by my possession of my every possessions: it mattered not that I hadn’t expressly packed for cold weather, which I hadn’t. There was nothing I might need which I couldn’t dig out of a box from the trailer hitched to the car.)

Our first sight of snow was of that which persisted only in the shade of the pines and the shadows cast by the Jersey barriers dividing traffic up the mountain. We were still miles outside of Kachina Village, where I’d stayed when first searching for somewhere to live in Flagstaff proper at the onset of my junior year. We’d not yet passed Denis Arp’s apiary, reachable only by a forest service road jutting outward from Mountainaire, where he’d once decanted spots of honey samples into a jar lid for me to dip my finger into. We’d not yet crossed Lake Mary Road, over which I’d spent many a night walking the hour home at two or three in the morning, cold and miserable and grateful for nothing in the wide world save my wool socks. Blue-white patches of ice clung fast to the cool places, their borders scalloped and notched by the wind and the sunshine.

Mount Humphreys peeked at us coming on, one slanted eye cast above the treeline for only moments before dipping below it again. A great cloud of oncoming snow obscured its top-most peak, making its rocky middle portion alone—oddly—the first glimpse of the mountain we had. Even fogged, even disappearing into the great white curtain hung over the ether, the swell I felt as it emerged before us could well have sent the car swerving had I been the one with my hands on the wheel. The excitement I’d felt setting out after such a long delay in Phoenix had lasted only until the first hour of the drive, after which point it ebbed steadily into trepidation. My panic did not rise so much as hover: lodging itself uncomfortably at the base of my throat such that it could all at once keep a weight on my chest and the sensation of choking at the Plendar gap. The thought of driving through town presented too many possible injuries. Even in a snowstorm, it was possible to see someone I’d hoped not to²; and though I was protected by the anonymity enclosure in a vehicle affords everyone, I felt nonetheless timorous. I was driving at the tail end of a year of frailty.

Leaning in toward me over the granite countertop at the Bernasconi household, Rosey had told me before I’d gone that she didn’t believe I was yet through with Flagstaff. This place, she said, had a way of getting in you, and those who departed from it often found their way back. Sometimes (she seemed to suggest) even in spite of themselves. At the time, I had smiled at her. Maybe, I said, wishing not to appear impolite by contradicting her, or rebuffing the place she had long ago deliberately chosen as her home. I was—myself—desperate to leave; clawing; too far flung out on the hopelessness of my own inventions to reason with. I was in love and not in love, and finding my dual residence in those oxymoronic states ruinous. I imagined it would be a long time before I could pass through town without associations jumping like fish from the architecture. Here is where he parked his car the night he came back. Here is where he picked me up under the shoulders, where I held him under the lamplight and waited for him to pry my arms away, as I was helpless to remove them myself. Here is where it ended. Here is where it began again, and here, where it began again a second time. Here is where he told me that, and here is where I believed him. I imagined what I would say about it in ten years, or twenty, returning to visit with someone who hadn’t known me then. I pictured, deliciously, the sight of grey hair tied into a bun at my neck: imagined how my own body would look in glances from the driver’s seat as I, much older, hung my arms out the passenger’s side window. I’d say I went to school here once, a long time ago. I'd not elaborate. After hazy, wobbling years of shame and resentment, I imagined a freedom so complete from my present period of heartbreak that to this driver, this dream-lover, the announcement would be news. 

At the sight of the mountain and for the very first time, I understood Rosey with keenness and clarity. For a moment, I divorced my conception of Flagstaff as synonymous with the my memory of relationship I had started and ended (thrice) within it, and celebrated the particular Northern slant to the clean air in its own fine right. 

¹ I will say here for the sake of transparency that the knife of separation I drew between home/Flagstaff manifested during our trip as a (somewhat manufactured) distinction between Ward/I. In one nameless restaurant we stopped at (nameless first on account of my forgetting which in particular it was/nameless second on account of its representation of an archetype: this interaction happened multiple times, across multiple states, in multiple restaurants/diners/cafés), Ward boisterously informed our server (as a placement/proxy for all of our servers) we were travelling to Louisiana. I was his daughter, he said, and he was driving me there because I was moving. I held my tongue for much of the trip, knowing anything I might have said in addition or contradiction to him was fundamentally unimportant. I was disinterested in arguing, and unmoved by a desire to start what might have grown into a lengthy or nuanced conversation. I pointedly avoided contact with my compulsion to crawl into the mug of overroasted black coffee I was so often clinging to, and instead tried to school what would usually be an expression of shame or embarrassment on my face into one of tranquil, approaching-medicated neutrality. I did not shake my head, correct, or remind him—accurately—that no one cared, as I might have as a teenager. Our server (many servers) asked where we were coming from. In Joseph City, Jack Rabbit, Sanders, and even into Western New Mexico, he told them we were from Phoenix. (The farther we moved from Arizona, the more likely Ward was to respond with only the state as an answer, trusting a passing familiarity with municipalities to diminish with distance from them.) In one booth, however, or possibly while seated in a set of water-resistant-canvas-upholstered chairs, I opened my mouth to respond to this inevitable, graciously offered but obviously disinterested question from our server before he could answer. He’s from Phoenix, I said. I’m from Flagstaff. Ward laughed in his usual way, raising his white eyebrows in a surefire expression of genuine surprise. Later, in another dining room lit by covered lamps suspended from the ceiling by wires, he would mimic the vehemence of my insistence to yet another member of the waitstaff: She’s from Flagstaff, but I’m from Phoenix. Even later on, he would ask me when I decided this was the truth of my life. I said nothing emotional, offering instead that in the sense I had worked there, voted there, and lived there, nothing was wrong with my claim that I was “from” Flagstaff, which didn’t always need to mean “born in” or “raised in.” I belonged there in a fundamental way I felt I did not in Tempe, Arcadia, Chandler, or Mesa, where I’d lived in turns before moving North. I might perhaps have suggested this sense of belonging was derived from my spending a recognizable adulthood within the borders of Coconino County: because I participated in life independently for the first time (to say, not residing with a family member) and with intentionality (purchasing tickets, making reservations, and otherwise attending events alone which appealed to my interests, rather than being carted somewhere someone else had discovered) when I’d been there. 

² Anecdotally and in fairness, I must say this fear was derived from precedent. The exact situation I would soon be in—driving up Riordan onto Historic Route 66—had in another trip produced the passing sight of the precise person I’d resolved against visiting with, and yet looked for with desperation in every crowd. Flagstaff is simply too small a town to live in for the variety of dysfunctional individual I am, and I had learned on a few noteworthy occasions that it was exceedingly difficult to be myself (read: someone liable to cut relationships off as one would an infected and/or neuropathic limb) when I attended then worked at the University, a community necessarily more enclosed/socially incestuous than the town itself. Walking up the enclosed stairwell onto the second floor of the library, I would pass a young man who had in a dim moment of urgency forced his body over mine. The quiet walk to my desk that followed rang out with the memory of my protestations, which had gone unyielded. Striding quickly enough out of the Orpheum’s bathroom to reclaim my place in the concert-throng, I would run drink-first into the Associate Chair of the English Department, who would mistakenly introduce me to others as the author of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons on Trains (yet unpublished, and yet, unfortunately, unwritten.) Hayden was always on the corner, always turning to look about when I’d text to say I’d seen him. Brown hair honeyed in the sunlight. Wind whipping curls into his clueless fucking face. 

*edited for clarity and length on Sunday, January 5th, 2025.

[adyaalcalde]

“Hey, where you going? Don’t go yet!”

October 24th, 2024 

Joni Mitchell's stage design at the Hollywood Bowl, October 19th, 2024.

The edition of The Pale King Michael Pietsch assembled from David Foster Wallace’s partly completed manuscript is followed by a section entitled “Notes and Asides.” In electing to include (much more to end) the book with the list, Pietsch demonstrates with humility and poignancy the extent to which the work was in progress; allowing Wallace’s remaining questions, aide-memoires; and drafts to speak for themselves on the topic of their half-formation. One is reproduced below. 

“Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.” 

Predictably, the presentation of text in The Pale King had a twofold purpose: providing both narrative and immersion (through format). One section, for example, consisted primarily of a collection of sentences describing a character turning a page. Many times, the same sentence was repeated verbatim, with only the name of the character substituted as they flipped one sheet of paper over another. That same sentence could then have been produced later in the same section, provided the same character turned another page. Other sections are laden with jargon: loaded with initialisms only defined in later pages. Functionally, the repetitious monotony paired with compounding misunderstandings about to what or toward whom any given narrator was referring served to recreate for the audience the same boredom and confusion the examiners might themselves have faced in the line of service. Even incomplete, The Pale King demonstrates the same depth of deliberation endemic to Wallace’s work, effectively dethroning Brief Conversations with Hideous Men as my favorite of his books and, as usual, briefly but profoundly disturbing my state of mind after finishing it. 

Though the majority of the fourteen or so hours I spent hurtling over Interstate 10 this weekend were spent in a simmering anger—my mood of choice since leaving Flagstaff last month—some of them were relegated to the obligatory boredom of the great American road trip. Riddling the roadway’s twin yellow spines were plastic bags and mysterious slabs of drywall I imagined sending particulate geysers of asbestos fiber into the air each time they were passed over by the drivers dutifully suppressing the instinct to swerve upon seeing them. Out beyond the soft shoulders, intermittent stone trading posts (or, more accurately, their few remaining outer walls) boasted unreadable or unparseable spray paint graffiti. After departing from a rest stop where Mieko made note of a summarizing difference between Arizona and California—their memorial signage for Department of Transportation employees killed in the line of service to the state was plastered on the side of a bathroom wall, while ours, at Sunset Point, took the form of a great sundial—I twisted my left arm around the zipper of the cooler in the back seat, digging out the paper box of leftovers from Sherman’s Deli in Palm Springs. The two blue ice packs below the carton had re-solidified the melting butter from the uneaten half of my mother’s english muffin into an unmistakably cornmeal-pocked pat, which at that point had congealed alarmingly close to the last quarter of the best pastrami sandwich I would have the chance to eat indefinitely. 

In spite of the proximity of our two orders combined into the over-full takeout container; the hundred-mark-temperature outside the vehicle; the distinct and nauseating stench of Japanese mothballs emanating from the white, woolen kimono coat hanging in the south-facing window, I felt no particular urgency as I picked at the food. A side of potatoes—brown and grey with some unknown combination of oil, flour, and salt—floundered in the corner, adopting the shape of the ridges of the container they’d been insistently packed into. Whole yellow seeds, puffed and swollen by the beer they soaked in, had defiantly escaped from the mustard binding them to the underside of my sandwich bread and stuck now, sweetly, to the bottom of the container, where the clarity of their separation kept me from missing any morsel of the meal. I’m in love, I thought to myself, literally, and with more earnestness than I felt when using the same phrase in reference to a person. 

Of everything seen, smelled, stepped around in deference to on this trip, it was this sandwich that had meant the most to me. The motel room we’d stayed in, which Mieko had commended for its cleanliness (loudly and repeatedly I might add, very possibly as part of a continuous attempt to reassure me with her vehemence of its possession of the quality) had nonetheless immediately and violently activated the mysophobia I am usually able to suppress, or in some way mitigate. When I had gathered the courage to shower, I did so standing on a soaking washcloth laid on the bathtub basin, keeping my feet from touching the plastic I could not be assured of having been bleached between guests. I had looked with suspicion (and with prejudice, I will admit) upon the woman behind the counter at the 121-year-old Japanese confectionery we’d visited, who didn’t seem to possess any particular accent, much less one which matched the one we’d ordered in. The only star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame I managed to get a decent look at belonged—hilariously—to Matt Damon. I had left Los Angeles in a foul mood: annoyed to have been woken up an hour before the alarm was set to ring out, sorry not to be driving the additional hour to Santa Monica (where United States Highway 66 came to official an end, and which possessed a small, ramshackle, beloved-looking display of Robert “Bob” Waldmire’s artwork, alongside other markers) and immeasurably displeased I hadn’t come across a bookshop of any kind, where, even if it were almost completely charmless, I might have bought some halfway decent postcards on which to proclaim I was “NEVER COMING BACK TO CALIFORNIA!”

Only after two hours of driving did my mood begin to soften. Slowly turning the knob to lower the volume of the Jim Croce track I’d been playing, I asked if we might stop someplace liable to sell postcards. I’d settle for a boutique, I said, not meaning it. Mieko hesitantly suggested Palm Springs, though she hadn’t liked the place when last she’d been.

Beside a Chevron gas pump on the outskirts of town, I abandoned the initial search I’d made of diners, and looked up historic restaurants instead. Less than twenty minutes later, a gentleman was setting two white stoneware mugs of strong coffee down on our table beside a dish of flavored, individual creamers. With two of my fingers held to the mug below its handle, I considered the fleeting surprise of happiness; held in mind the simple lamentable fact of chronology that no one could ever know they were about to drink the best cup of black coffee of their life, or eat the best sandwich, and could thus in no way prepare themselves for it. Until the experience had ended, a complete relishing was impossible. I have lived a life without commemorations, infrequently knowing which kiss to celebrate as the last; wishing in the years following a first meeting that I’d made note of the date I’d met the acquaintance who would become a beloved friend; believing always in the definite start or finish. I wished I had the wisdom or foresight to bear futurity in mind—that I were braced for the oncoming surprises promised to me, regardless of how mundane they might prove to be. 

In the booth beside the kitchen, I watched the waitstaff lean against the walls. Facing forward toward the dining room and patio, I considered how unnerved I might have felt had I been seated in front of, rather than behind them, and thus within their field of view as I ate (my own sandwich was coming slightly apart in my hands, owing to the structural instability of the thin and untoasted, albeit delicious, rye bread it was made of.) I then imagined the neutrality of their gaze, thinking they must be watching sweepingly, and without judgment—looking for glasses to refill or surveying the well oiled machine of their collective service, rather than hunting for the sight of an errant, badly mannered elbow resting on the tabletop. In their fine company, I drank cups of coffee made uncountable by refills, and, in place of the usual fries, ordered a side of sweet coleslaw emerging from a thin white dressing. I considered pie and pastries, but elected ultimately to order a slice of the marionberry cheesecake. We were brought new forks, clean napkins. 

The object of my life for the last two years has been learning to be dissuaded from the impulse to artificially preserve the lifespan of happiness; understanding nothing but wine can be bottled and enjoyed later. Even peering over the rim of my coffee cup invited a quiet panic. What would I do when it emptied? When the bill was paid and it was time to walk off the patio and into the parking lot? What awaited me in Tempe was the boredom I had been ecstatic to flee from Saturday morning, the attentive flatline I couldn’t make jump regardless of what or how much I read, watched, or wrote. In what was unequivocally a simple lunch, Palm Springs had offered a sublime disruption to the droning, monotonous weeks I’d become accustomed to and, until the beginning of November, I was helpless to change. I wanted to live in the ribbon of steam from my coffee tangling in the air. I wanted to stay. To swim in the ice water. To bask in the terrible, sweat-prickling heat of the drought sun. 

We paid the bill. 

Less than a month earlier, I had been 6,500 feet higher and shoving sandwiches and a Thermos of Turkish coffee into a plastic bag reddened with blockish “Thank You”s. On my last night in Flagstaff, Ethan and I had arranged a late-night road trip to Oatman, traveling historic alignments of Route 66 that would take us through Williams, Ash Fork, Seligman, Peach Springs, Truxton, Valentine, Hackberry, Valle Vista, and Kingman (in that order.) We stopped in Seligman at around midnight, and at the Black Cat Bar each ordered the obligate Northern Arizona pint of Tower Station, paying in cash dispensed minutes earlier from the crummy ATM by the bathrooms. Crossing the street, my teeth chattered as I offered an excited, slightly incomprehensible tour of Seligman’s main street, pointing out as I shivered—badly dressed, not imagining it could be cold—what had once been Louise Brown’s Copper Cart, Joe Delgadillo’s grocery, Juan Delgadillo’s Snow Cap Drive In, and what remained Angel and Vilma’s barbershop. We zipped by Burma-Shave signs that gleamed like crimson angels in the headlights, the grin splitting over my face wild with a joy I couldn’t—for all my self consciousness, knowing it wasn’t shared—hope to quell. 

A small green sign with white lettering marked a smattering of little houses barely visible from the road as Valle Vista. I kept my chin against my left shoulder, waiting to see the rest of it. The darkness rolled on in murky waves outside the car, unencumbered in the slightest by any sign of additional residences, businesses, or surface streets. "Was that it?" I asked aloud. "Was what it?" Ethan returned. I slumped in my seat, facing forward again. Out before me, the pitch of the asphalt was only distinguishable from the sky by a peopling of stars starting halfway into the darkness. 

I was thinking I’d talked another molehill into mountainhood. It seemed inconceivable to me Valle Vista might already have been a mile behind us, that we’d gone by so quickly Ethan hadn’t seen it at all. Had that been the place I’d skipped lunch breaks for over a year on behalf of, trying desperately to process and digitize material on? With the unlit windows? I murmured an apology. My suggestion of the drive had been ridiculous, and I couldn’t believe Ethan had agreed to it. He asked me to hold the wheel while he took off his sweatshirt. I took it, feigning calm. “Jesus Christ, Adya,” he said. He took it back. 

On the winding road to Oatman, we stopped near mile marker 30, having driven slowly around the bends to scour the few basal feet of illuminated rockface for a stairwell I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see. Miraculously, I did manage to spot it, and at 3:30 or so that morning, we worked our way carefully up the stone steps to Shaffer Springs.

Angel Delgadillo, Dr. Vincent "Vince" Salmon, Mary "O" Delgadillo Martinez, and Juan Delgadillo (members of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona) at Shaffer Fishbowl Spring along Oatman Road, circa 1994.

Adya Alcalde at Shaffer Fishbowl Spring along Oatman Road, September 14th, 2024, approximately 3:30AM.

Apocryphally, the basin was built by a Works Progress Administration employee named Shaffer between 1930 and 1940. While servicing Gold Road, he is said to have noticed a stream of water etching into the cliffside and followed the spring to its source high in the rock, where it bubbled from a small pore in the pink granite porphyry. The basin he subsequently constructed—made of the same indigenous rock and sealed with concrete—was filled with goldfish and snails in subsequent years by Kingman and Oatman residents to keep the inevitable algae at bay. It was nicknamed “Goldfish Bowl Spring” accordingly. This, rather than Oatman per say, had been what I'd wanted to see before moving. I'd wanted to stand where Vince had; wanted to confirm the presence of the goldfish myself (we saw one, though I'll make no statement on its vigor); wanted to twist around the famous hairpin curves I'd spoken of so lovingly and for so long, slowing around each bend in deference to the wild burros.

Discussing the upcoming drive to Louisiana over the phone last month, I'd suggested to Mia we might perhaps take Route 66 through Texas. I figured it would be my last chance to see it for a long time, and doubted, even if I returned later, my memories of the road as archived would be as complete as they were now. There's no way I can drive across the country listening to your music and listening to you talk about history, she said. I thought this was somewhat close-minded, but I understood what she'd meant.

And yet, on the road to Oatman, water sings improbably from cliff walls of pinkish stone.

From boredom, constant bliss in every atom.

[adyaalcalde]

adya alcalde is a japanese-american essayist and fiction writer based in new orleans, louisiana.

read about her work processing archival collections related to united states highway 66 here and here.

find her also on letterboxd, where she infrequently reviews films.