An object in time travels if and only if the difference between its departure and arrival times, as measured in the surrounding world, does not equal the duration of the journey it undergoes. In this place, the soft grey shawl and my knitting project are on my Anthropologie quilted bed.
After I died and forgot who I was, people kept telling me I was an alcoholic. I couldn’t remember anything else about who I was, and I literally prayed every day that I would die, so drinking quickly became an innate part of what was left of whatever I’d been.
Sometimes—I’m having a memory of one of our living rooms and then I realize it’s just my old living room, in the house I grew up in, in Cupertino.
We didn’t have an ocean view. It didn’t matter. We walked around the green pond. It was small, but it reminded me of us. Not flashy, but quietly there. Some things seem unimportant at first, but they grow on you.
The piece depicts the journey of grieving after losing a loved one, transitioning from an initial support phase filled with gatherings and shared memories to a profound solitude. As friends return to their lives, the narrator struggles with the emptiness, slowly navigating through grief, acceptance, and the struggle to redefine existence without the deceased.
