10/6/24

SaschaLeave a comment

I don’t know how to write about anything. I don’t even know who reads this shit. Who even blogs anymore? I don’t know how to put the last few months into words. They’ve been some of the hardest, and most powerful of my life. It’s not like it’s been smooth sailing this year, what with that whole pesky rising authoritarianism and all, but we were doing alright.

Then September hit. We lost a friend. Then the storm came.

10/6/24

I still don’t know how to process it. My home will never be the same again. Nothing will ever be the same again. Every time I look at my oldest pair of Docs, I will remember: pacing around my house all night the night of the storm, waiting. Waiting for the rumble of a mudslide, the crack and crash of a tree falling through the roof. Pulling them on to run out the door as a tense gray dawn broke over the valley through clouds still heavy with rain. Scrambling through ankle deep with neighbors who were once strangers, who I will now forever call friend, to check on our other neighbors. The smell of propane tanks ruptured by rushing floodwaters. Racing back up the hill in fear of an errant spark. The sound of my partner Bex’s panicked voice on the phone. A moment of confusion, trying to comprehend their words over the roar in my ears, wondering if I had raced into the storm too soon, before realizing it was the thunder rumble of adrenaline.

Adrenaline that kept me upright for two days. Trapped on the mountain with dwindling food and water. Filthy. Sweating in the cruel heat of a summer stretched by climate change. Pacing. Waiting for word from friends, from chosen family. Trying to remember if Bex had enough insulin or not. Clawing through the woods with my neighbor, trying to help them find a neighbor overdosing on fentanyl. Slicing my leg open on barbed wire. Trying to keep the cut clean by dousing it with rubbing alcohol in the dark. What it felt like to see Crain and Bex Sunday morning, after they braved 40 miles of ruined roads, swerving a borrowed car around downed power lines and sink holes. The news tricking in about the sheer scope of the devastation, that entire towns in Western North Carolina were gone.

All my nearest and dearest made it through the storm, but each of us knows someone who lost someone. The cold and indifferent hand of death might not have reached down for us, but it touched us all the same

You can smell it in the air down here by the river, the mold blooming in the dust, the acrid smell of industry in the air. Nothing will ever be the same. You can see it in the shell shocked eyes of strangers. You can feel it in the warmth of outstretched hands.

Nothing will ever be the same.

12/25/20

SaschaLeave a comment

Christmas Morning; a dream. I am sitting on the front lawn of a house where my family lived in South Florida for four years when I was a child. A blazing afternoon sun high overhead. It’s hot, but bearable, not summer sweltering, humidity so thick it steals your breath hot. I am an adult, not a child sitting in the grass in front of my childhood home.

Stephanie walks up and I realize I am dreaming.

“Hello,” she smiles.

“Hi,” I say, almost meekly, like the last five years were some terrible dream, less tangible than the crabgrass plucked from memory and subconscious to jab up at my legs through black denim. The woman I once loved, and then hated, and then loved again, like I could never quite make up my mind, is standing in front of me.

“Should you be here?” I ask. “I thought I heard somewhere that you were very sick.”

It is then that I note Stephanie does not, in fact, look very sick. Even with my sitting on the ground, and her standing, she is still tiny, but she was always one of the few people in the world shorter than I am. Her skin looks clear, radiant. She smiles and her teeth are white, not the sallow hall of cracked mirrors reflecting a life hard lived and ruinous decisions they had become in her final years. Her body appears full, and her skin is clear, instead of the pale portrait of self-starvation she had become.

A stirring desire that I am a little ashamed of reminds me that I once found Stephanie very beautiful.

“Oh, I am, honey. I’m so sick. There’s coming back from this one.”

Her smile widens into a laugh, and I remember how many times I watched Steph laugh off life in favor of whatever taste of oblivion she could swallow long enough to forget who she was. I hate her again for half a second. The hate dissolves the moment she opens her mouth to speak again.

“I just thought we should maybe talk before I go.”

“Well, here you are. Let’s talk.”

In the time-honored tradition of our fondest dreams being our cruelest dreams, my perspective shifts. I float, bodiless like a heatwave shimmering off sweltering blacktop. From above, I watch Stephanie and I speak. A soft breeze rustles the grass, the leaves, wisps of clouds traverse the sky, dissipating at the horizon. Stephanie’s and my next words, our last words are lost to the wind. We speak, but I can’t hear what we say.

I only hope we spoke of softer things, at last.

“I’ve gotta go now, Sascha.”

“Goodbye Stephanie. I wish this story had a different ending, but I hope some of the love I have held for you over the years gets to accompany you to wherever you’re going.”

“Bye Sascha. I hope so too. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take this Pepsi.”

I realize there is a can of Pepsi sitting in front of the tree I used to climb as a little boy.

I laugh, “Sure Stephanie. You can have that can of Pepsi. I have no idea why it’s there. Dreams, huh?”

We embrace one more time, and our lips touch for a ghost of a second. All the lost warmth of cold and dead years floods through my lips through my body, and all is forgiven.

I watched Stephanie walk down the street until her form faded from sight.

Into her death.

I woke up to a strange, snow-covered city and a pillow wet with tears.