The air in New York City in April is full of chalky ash as I am shuffling down 6th avenue, towards Broadway. I carry you in my arms in your overpriced, decorative urn. I stop to check that it is still sealed, that it hasn't shifted open on our journey towards Times Square. You loved it here when you were alive. You used to talk about the winter you went ice skating with your sister in Rockefeller Square beneath the flags of the world. I check to make sure that you are not the source of this infernal perdition I am breathing in, while all around me, rivulets of pedestrians rush past me seemingly unaware.

There is so much ash already, gusting past us in doleful zephyrs, that I could open it here and no one would notice. You would dapple the side of the buildings towering over my head until they shimmered with your golden essence.

Then I would truly be alone, like an empty jewelry box as the wind hand grinds to a halt and the music stops. In my dreams I cannot clearly see your face. It's a blur. It fills me with anxiety and a panic, the fear of losing your image, and often I wake up disoriented, panting, fighting against the dull throb of a medicated sleep. I am losing all of my memories of us as each day slips into the next and there is nothing I can do about it.

By contrast this city, like a shoal, is made of nothing but memories. They form a great lattice piled one on top of the next into the simulacrum of a double helix, the memories of every living soul who has laughed and loved and mourned and shed bitter tears in these famous streets, yet all I can see are the sad ones. Each of them is more sorrowful than the next. Each of them is a mirror, echoing my own loss in new and unexpected ways. Every time I think I cannot be roused from this torpid numbness some fresh trigger catches me with its jellyfish sting in my chest.

And what precisely is the function of memory if not to surprise and inform?

A large man in a leather trench coat eating a pretzel smothered in mustard steps out into the street in front of me and disappears into a cloud of steam pumped up from somewhere beneath us, a myriad of tunnels and forgotten paths sharply descending into the beating heart of the underworld.

What is the function of memory if not to resurrect that which is lost, to remind us of all that has been taken from us, to remind us, through these deep and irreparable psychic wounds, that we are still here, that we are still alive?

The pain of my loss is a gift. It is a constant reminder that will not heal.

This is my life now, blending into this foreign city whose ashes cover us all, whether it's September or not. Caught up in the crush of this indelible and vibrant throng, we are breathing each other in. One way or another, we are absorbing one another, over and over, until the taste of warm cigarettes pouring up from the grates and past us, the taste of this enduring crematorium pouring up to the tallest spires and arches of the glass cathedrals of commerce around us, pouring up and off into a once oceanic blue sky, becomes the taste of everything.

Everything tastes like the remnants of a vacated phoenix's nest.

I wander lost in the newness of these streets, the acrid tang of my newborn grief staining my tongue black. My eyes are as wide with wonder as Dante's must have been descending into Inferno.

The world here is a poem, a grave and important and unspoken Kaddish, an empty cup, or any other sad metaphor you want to paint over it.

The world here is malleable. It is what you want it to be, what you expect it to be, and nothing more.

The world here is that gray place of mourning between factory steam, sunless days, worn denim, and that place where they come to worship the Patron Saint of opportunities lost, just out of reach, of hope abandoned, neglected until it is was beyond the scope of possibility and then sorely grieved.

So many people flock to this city in search of a new beginning. For me it is not the place I have come to start over, to incinerate the broken life I once possessed and arise from the flames reborn. For me, it is a purgatory, a penance for a crime I did not commit.

Everything in this world touches me, the rivers of moving people on the streets, the fetid wind blowing papers and refuse and exotic and rancid smells, the streets and buildings I am crushed against by this mass of transient humanity, but I am still disconnected from this world in spite of its efforts to claim me.

A procession of wayward souls passes through me, straight through my fallow breasts, the damned, like an irrepressible torrent that drenches my soul in its wanton dolor, touching only that which matters most in me, the guttering spark of my existence.

I am alone in this deluge of foreigners, people with names I cannot ever correctly pronounce, people who might be dead at any moment or return to far away places or disappear into thin air and vanish like the man in front of me.

The streets have no memories of their own to hold on to, so they absorb ours, slowly, sapping them away from us. Millions of once guarded confessions and secrets and regrets shift like sand beneath our ignorant feet, slipping one into the next, like the future and the past and the present.

Why did you leave me? I am so lost without you Jonathan'�

The world here is full of spirits and I cannot always distinguish the living from those who have passed on. Constantly I see someone that looks like you, just ahead of me, but when he turns his face is not the one I peered over so many untold hours while you slept unaware.

This cannot be, and yet, it is. The pain in my chest tells me that it's so. I will never see you again.

The pretzel lover emerges from the cloud as the light turns, a bright yellow taxi swerving around him with its horn blaring. Perched on his head is a hat I didn't recall him having before.


*** *** ***

I came to the Big Apple from Waterford, Connecticut by way of Los Angeles, California. I came to New York City as the widow of Jonathan Sanders, whose greatest feat in life was to star in a national commercial for mouthwash before being struck by a car and killed on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood.

The accident occurred during our honeymoon, when death was the furthest thing from either of our minds. We were still dreaming up the life we would share together. We were vibrant, ebullient, and invincible then.

If you've ever watched corporate news, even for a few minutes, even in passing while waiting for a delayed flight, you've probably seen him. It's not glamorous shilling mouthwash, but nationals pay well. I still get checks for his thirty-second performance, not that I need it. Always so well organized, so neat and clean and put together, Jonathan purchased life insurance the day before we were married.

I wish he could have enjoyed our honeymoon.

I wish I would have known that we would only be together once as husband and wife, lying entwined, the heat of our naked bodies creating a line of sweat beads that trickled down between us, wetting the sheets.

I wish I could have been with him when he died. A stranger in an ambulance held his hand while the world ended for him instead of me. The police told me he never regained consciousness.

My heart did not stop beating.

The clock on the wall kept ticking.

Jonathan did not visit me in my sleep that night, although I can still see him, if I want to, up to a hundred times a day, depending on which channel I'm watching.

When he first began to fade from my memories, the crisp details of his bushy, unkempt eyebrows and the crook of his pearly white smile, I used to run to the television and frantically flip channels searching for him.

After the first month of living with the set turned on and the volume off, of waiting for his sweet face to come on, a mocking and insincere digital phantasm, I unplugged the television and covered it with a white sheet. It stood there immobile as a tombstone.

Strange how easily I've come to accept this most unacceptable thing, that this man whom I have loved since the moment our eyes first met, this tender and energetic man, who bore my heart beating within his chest, has been ripped out of my life and that I will never feel him again.

The hardest part is not just the loss of his touch, but the false memory of him I cannot fight off, that creeps slowly into my recollection of him like blood poisoning, petrifying itself into the official version of what our lives were like.

The hardest part is bearing the silence when I am alone at night, which is why I moved to a place that is never silent, that never sleeps, that never ceases to move. I live in Chelsea, if you can call this living.

I am having a difficult time understanding that you are not here, Jonathan, and switching tenses. I find myself talking to you more and more out of fear more than loneliness. You are slipping away from me one tiny detail at a time, like a handful of sand running through my fingers faster as I squeeze to hold onto it.

You are alive in me, for now.

You were born in Waterford. It's where we met.

We have known each other since high school.

We are the kind of 'sweethearts' people often discuss, mythically or with flagrant disdain and pessimism.

We have been dating since I was sixteen.

Our wedding took place at your father's farm in Hartford but our honeymoon was in Venice Beach, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the guesthouse of your crazy mother, who claims she fled the terrors of her marriage bed and relocated to live with a gentrified yoga instructor near brackish air.

Your mother is fond of telling me that she was reborn from the ashes of her failed marriage, sparked by the fires of his cruelty. Her body, she will casually say while squeezing orange juice over the kitchen sink, was her resistance against his tyranny. Her refusal to provide him satisfaction with it, to resist her own temptation by providing self-release, she delightedly coos, was tantamount to Gandhi teaching Indians how to make salt.

It's a story she's told quite a few times.

Your parents separated, Jonathan, when you were only four and your father has never remarried.

Your father maintains that your mother is the only woman he is capable of truly loving, even if she herself is unable to receive the most precious gift a poor farmer like him has to offer.

Wind scatters and earth covers, and those who came before us, those we presume to be wise and bitter, they tell us that time heals all things.

What do they know? How are they any different than we?

Time and distance, for most people that is all that it takes.

I came to New York City with nothing left inside of me but the will to continue, with no plans for a future other than breathing.

I never expected this.


*** *** ***

Ashes to ashes, ampersand, dust to dust.

Jonathan, why did you leave me here, in this corrupt place, to rot without you? How could you leave me so young, in the prime of my life, your beloved, a tender sacrifice to the world on this blood stained alter?

*** *** ***

For as long as I can remember I have understood what makes men tick. It wasn't even something that my mother or a guidance counselor had to explain to me. I was born embedded with a strong sense of self-esteem, a high opinion of myself that served as a translator capable of deciphering the saccharin words desperate men use to cast their spells.

A simple change in the order or intonation of words in a pick-up line can have such volatile effects on the outcome. Men understand this. All they get is that first shot, a small window of time to convey so much in so little.

Women know within seconds of meeting a man whether or not they'd ever fuck him. Men, on the other hand, are not so lucky as to be informed of these decisions.

This is by far the most imprecise of sciences. That's why they stick with proven formulas. That's why they experiment with tried methods but fear to stray too far.

I have heard more pick-up line's as a widow than I ever did in single life.

I have become something of an expert on them.

I am completely immune to them and can therefore study them from an impartial standpoint when they occur, like an anthropologist studies mating patterns in the wild.

Men fascinate and disgust me.

Men will often tell women that they look like a particular celebrity when they are interested in them, sexually speaking. I've been told I look like everyone from Angelina Jolie to Chloe Sauvignoy to the little girl who played Senator Amandala in the new Star Wars movies by horny prospectors since I came to New York. I don't know if they do it intentionally, if they know what they are doing, or if rather they are projecting a sexual fantasy onto the women they desire, trying to make her more like a living breathing doll. I'm not sure there even is a way to know.

A doll is like the opposite of a ghost. It is the pretty and vacant shell that the spirit leaves behind when it has passed out of this world.

I am nearly impervious to these barbed charms. It takes a particular type of woman to allow herself to believe in airy flights of fantasy, and I am not that kind of woman.

Jenny, your twin sister, is one of those women.

Watching her smile and read the instruction card on my flight to New York City reminds me how different the two of you are.

Jenny looks like Barbara Eden. Where once there was a similarity, she has finely tuned the resemblance to the point of an obsessed stalker. She looks like one of the figures from a wax museum come to life. The resemblance is uncanny. She waits for you to notice it and then pretends that she hasn't heard it before in her life. She pretends that she hasn't spent untold hours of her life refining the similarities.

Sometimes it seems inconceivable that you two ever shared a womb, Jonathan, much less the same egg.

These days she wears her hair up in the same high braid ponytail that Barbara Eden wore on I Dream of Jeannie. She also wears a pair of earrings she bought on E-Bay that supposedly belonged once to the actress. I can only imagine how many cheap nightstands at sad airport motels around the country Jenny has set those earrings on. I try not to think about the fat, aging businessmen men she has seductively stripped for then let sweat on her smooth, orange, 'Hollywood Tan' skin.

It's like something off of Craig's List, from the erotic services section.

The back of the ticket jacket, which is firmly gripped in my hands as we taxi towards the runway and my adrenaline spikes, making me acutely aware of everything, boasts of all the wonderful destinations the airline now services across the nation.

I try to rattle off the list in one quick imperforated breath, as if I am a machine for a moment instead of a living, breathing woman in flux, hoping it will calm my nerves: Sea-Tac, Logan, O'Hare, Hartsfield, Kennedy, Newark, Sky Harbor, Wayne County, Dulles, La Guardia, Miami, Boston, LAX. My wind gives and the pipes cease to sing this monotonous and pointless tune. All that is left to think about are Jenny's jovial genitals. If I could I would have strapped your urn into the seat next to me, Jonathan, but that would have meant enduring more than the price of an extra ticket. At least with your twin here I don't have to feel entirely like I am flying alone.

Jenny nods at me as she finishes her speech and heads toward the flight attendant's station to strap down for our ascent.

We are in a cylindrical metal tube preparing to be hurled into the air at six hundred miles per hour. My knuckles turn white as I continue to grip my ticket and take shallow breathes.

Jenny calls me a lot now that you are dead. We talk about everything. She likes to tease that she might end up in Vegas when she's done with the airlines, a celebrity impersonator or a drag queen. She's a bit melodramatic but, since she was never this nice to me when you were still alive Jonathan, I'm willing to put up with it.

'It'd be a lot safer since the big. Nine. One. One,'� she tells me, another little prepared speech of hers, but I can tell right away that it is a lie. 'One of these camel jockey's is going to kidnap me and take me back to his desert kingdom so that the Sheik of Brunei can have his very own genie.'�

I don't bother to tell her that he's actually a Sultan or how much he is rumored to pay to watch sex encounters with celebrities and porn stars. I don't want to give her any ideas.

I like Jenny, because somewhere underneath all that Joe Blasco makeup and pomp, somewhere beneath her paraffin wax personality and six Sea Breeze's at the bar, there is girl who knows she was never the one that anyone wanted to spend the rest of their lives with, and she's adapted to it, learned to use it to her advantage.

Jenny is the Friday night fuck guys fight to go home from the bar with and regret waking up to in the morning when her makeup is smeared onto their pillow.

Jenny is a survivor, a remnant of a sexual fantasy desperately clinging to life in an excremental culture where women like her are entirely disposable. She gets it, whether she knows all the big words or not, and she deals with it. Instead of taking up arms and railing against the unfairness of the system, instead of immersing herself in a brittle world of semiotics and denial that feminists hail as progress, she has re-invented herself and defied their traditional rules of classification.

Jenny is a fantasy facilitator. That's where her true sense of purpose comes in. It's just what she happens to be good at.

I only wish I could take as well to my new role as widow, which seems to have the suffocating powers of being wrapped in gauze and buried alive. I know how the Pharaoh's mistress feels in those terrifying ancient rumors, being sealed in with her deceased king. That is a feeling Jenny will never have to endure.

Water cleanses but fire redeems. It has always been this way.

I take the card on the seat in front of me and read it over and over as the nose of the plane lifts off the ground and we take flight.

In the event of an emergency you will notice a slight change in cabin pressure that will result in your oxygen mask falling from above you. Please place the mask firmly on yourself and adjust it to comfort before helping others around you.

Often I think about all I have lost in your passing and yet I am still afraid. I am so ashamed. I miss you more than my soul can bear Jonathan. I feel your loss like a dull ache in the very fibers of my being. I bear this weight, but I don't have the courage to kill myself. I'm not even brave enough to let someone else do it for me.

I have to stop doing this.

Forgive me dear Jonathan.


*** *** ***

I am not a great writer. Nothing I write sets me apart from a sea of hungrier and determined writers willing to do anything that is necessary to be discovered.

I have told myself this for years.

Part of the problem is that I lack an authentic, marginalized voice.

It has become my mantra of failure, cocooning me against the pressing desire to document my existence and share it with the world.

If I were telling you about the most embarrassing moments of my discovery that I was a black lesbian growing up in a racist and homophobic environment and being raised by Evangelical Christians who spoke in tongues and didn't approve of literacy, then you might listen to me.

I don't have an ethnic experience to share. My only sin is being born a girl, and never really growing out of it.

If only I could tell you what it felt like the first time I kissed a girl, from the eyes of a sixteen-year-old black lesbian in Bed-Stuy then you might listen to me.

I have no idea what true hardship is. I've lived in America all my life, but never been part of the cultural elite.

If only I understood the pain and suffering and loss of growing up a Native American.

I am not bulimic or anorexic or fucked up in any interesting way.

The truth is, I don't know why someone should care about anything I feel or think or do.

The truth is just a story I tell myself over and over again until it feels real.

And yet, since I can't seem to keep these unruly words inside of me, I still write and hide them. Like all failed artists I am drawn towards writers. I keep hoping that I will stumble upon the perfect story, and that reading it will unlock something in me, and give me new meaning.

Writing is like an ancient and forgotten religion to me, dating back to cuneiform, whose customs and practices we are wholly rediscovering. It is immutable and true, this expression, as simple and undeniable as algebra.

I know if you were here Jonathan that you would tell me all I have to do is believe in myself.

Part of the problem is that it's hard to write about your childhood in any accurate sense when you can't remember anything before the age of six or seven. Floating images come to mind of what it felt like to be a child, but they are almost always mixed with things I've seen on television, from sitcom families. I don't always know if the memory I am experiencing really happened to me or to some fictional character. Sometimes, in my mind, my father looks just like the spitting image of Mr. Brady.

I took the job first and foremost to keep myself occupied, because I loved reading, but also because I was still searching for some kind of redemption. I didn't need to work after the insurance check came in. I didn't need to do anything, except maintain basic human functions, which I was struggling to do. I could have easily lived in Central Park West. I could have spent my days looking out at the park all day long, popping Xanax and counting backwards from a hundred down to zero, as my therapist suggested I do for anxiety. I could have spent my days loaded watching television, waiting for you to appear like a wraith, looming larger than life at me in Spectravision from my enormous flat screen plasma.

As an assistant reader to a famous literary agent in New York City, I do not have time to think about my life prior to living in New York City. I cannot read everything that is given to me in a single day. Most of it is unsolicited but some of the manuscripts come from other obscure agencies in Canada. Most of the translations come from dead writers in Eastern Europe and Bosnia. It is just not humanly possible to read them all.

I am searching for my grail.

A series of unrelated thoughts pop into my head, non sequitur, as I climb onto C, arms filled with slush pile manuscripts full of stories that go nowhere, a mask of sleep still draped across my face and dragging my features down with it. I can smell the Hudson like it's contaminating my sinuses with its dull, distant roar.

Time does not exist here anymore.

The popcorn at the theatre in SoHo smells like gasoline.

Flowers are beautiful because they die.

Nothing I have to say to seems relevant anymore.

There is nothing I can tell anyone that will change the fact that one day they are going to die and that all of this, this living, is a poor attempt at distracting themselves from it.

The truth is that lately the slush pile has been echoing my life more than I want to admit. I've actually grown scared of it. I don't know what to make of it anymore. Trapped in my office on the thirty-first floor, a drab and cramped space, I have begun to see snippets of my life that never happened, showing up in the slush pile. I can detect aspects of conversations that we once had, Jonathan, both real and imagined, pouring out in the seemingly innocuous exchanges between other character's dialogues. I can taste you beneath the adjectives, the way my tongue once ran over your soft skin in the dark.

I know you are in there, in the millions of unrelated sentences, coalescing, drowning in all that black ink, my perfect doppelganger, but I can't reach you. The pile is deep. It is a living, breathing entity that I wade through but which never gets any smaller.

Where do all of these uninvited stories come from?

They come from writer's conferences in Hawaii, workshops in Des Moines, and convalescent homes in Milwaukee.

They come from MFA graduates looking for work in Alaska while they retool novels they outlined in Iowa, creative writing instructors trapped in inner city high schools, and former military personnel, trapped in dead-end civilian jobs or facing the long years of retirement and life with a spouse who's virtually a stranger to them.

They come from bored, rich housewives with no children and liberal arts degrees with unfaithful husbands.

Stacks of dirty paper arrive in worn manila envelopes, aging nicotine yellow before my tired and throbbing eyes. Each one of them cries out to me and I read them all. I make notes in the margins. I remove their self-addressed stamped envelopes, the handwriting so carefully and legibly scratched into them. I fill each with a standard rejection letter and drop it in the outgoing mail slot.

I lay their hopes and fears to rest.

This is the life that I have chosen for myself, my penance for not being there when you died Jonathan. Every one of these writers needs something special from me. Every one of them wants me to listen and validate their lives. Every one of them wants me to set them free by acknowledging the universality of their pain and suffering.

Feed me. Touch me. Heal me. Pardon me.

The manuscripts are confessions of lives misspent, recollections of painful loss that can never be reconciled, cliché ridden testimonies to the dark and disgusting fantasies they harbor in the innermost parts of their withered souls.

I read them all. I owe them that. I owe myself that.

They push the characters around on the page in listless circles. They force them to act out the tiny and inconsequential details of the most harrowing parts of their lives. I know they want more than my acceptance of their writing. They want me to exculpate their sins. They want me to forgive them and tell them it will be okay so that they can die in peace.

The girl who worked her before me was named Sharon. I am told she was meticulously clean. She prided herself on keeping things on track. She was a Rhodes Scholar once and had graduated with honors and gone on to get an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch before turning away from her quiet stories about the small life she had spent growing up on the farm. She went off in search of the next great American writer.

She wanted to give something back to literature, something she didn't feel she had in her.

She was looking to resurrect the pagan gods of this archaic and unbridled lust.

She had steeled her resolve to find only the best and most pure new voices, to reinvent the word itself, to drink fire and with it, redemption.

She had very shiny blonde hair they say.

The pile practically ate her alive. She unraveled within the first few weeks. She threw herself out the window. They've since put in grates that don't open all the way.

Sharon left behind a small stash of airplane bottles full of liquor in her desk drawer. I will never know whether they were of any use to her or if she even drank at all.

I toast to her honor as I dig into the pile every afternoon as I return from lunch. It's become kind of a ritual. Most of my nights I spend combing through this mess. Most of my nights I swim in a sea of expensive prescription drugs with forgettable names. Every morning when I arrive there are a hundred more unsolicited manuscripts.

They come from Skokie, from Laramie, from Gunnison.

They come from Lebanon Tennessee, from Paris Texas, from Berlin New Hampshire.

Somewhere in them I know I will find what I am ultimately looking for.

Sharon was driven by different demons than I am. Sharon was trying to create something in this world, to discover something immutable and hold it up and worship it. Sharon was trying to transcend mortality with another persons' words and thoughts and memories.

Sharon failed.

You have to find a great work within the pile to escape this fate.

You have to dig into it and search with all of your heart.

You have to believe that somewhere underneath all the stories about being inappropriately touched as a child by your priest, all the stories about being rejected by your family for admitting you are a homosexual and fleeing to the big city only to be taken under by crystal and unprotected PNP sex parties and catching AIDS and going home broken, all the stories about people killing their puppy dog and lying about it, underneath all of that is one simple, well-written story with a strong narrative voice that people can relate to.

You have to find something that is Oprah good.

I am not building a life. I am deconstructing one. I am looking for proof of life after death, for something immutable, but no matter how deep I trudge into the dark woods of someone else's subconscious, I keep finding my lost memories coming back. I can't even tell which ones are artificial anymore.

I can't sleep right without you, Jonathan.

During the days I stay distracted but late at night it bleeds through from someplace inside, these terrible thoughts and fears, the emptiness eating everything, the memory of your soft skin and warm breath on my back while I dreamed.

I used to have such beautiful and vivid dreams.

I stay up, night after night reading. I could be in clubs, true, meeting new men to replace you. I could be having sex with anonymous men in tiny apartments that smell like rotting food and listening to them afterwards as they described their hopes and dreams for the future.

I could care, again, about another human being, if I could just get past you and learn to let you go.

I feel a bitter longing well up inside of me at the thought that I am slowly becoming a useless and hollow shell, a living and breathing doll, filled with only white noise where once a virulent and recalcitrant heart beat.

I look into other men's eyes and find you there, staring back at me with your silent accusations Jonathan, all of my parroted back at me.

I am insulated inside this nest of terrible mistakes, bad punctuations and shitty grammar. I am drowning under the weight of one pathetic tale after another, each equally sad and prosaic and forgettable. I am dreaming of discovering a shining new writer who will elevate my spirit and thrill my senses with their sweeping descriptions, their careless use of adjectives, their sheer brilliance, only now I wonder if I will know them when I see them. I wonder if all of this bad reading hasn't in some way dulled my senses, if it hasn't infected me.

Hands don't shake like leaves on a tree.

Hearts don't skip beats.

Eyes don't flash.

There is no other way to gesticulate than wildly.

The slush pile is the cliché graveyard; and I am living in it, the way some people live inside of virtual reality constructs on the Internet.

You are the reason I cannot leave, Jonathan. Buried underneath all of these layers, you effervesce and then dissipate, over and over and over. You are my evidence of something greater, of life after death, and I cannot leave until I find you and we get to say goodbye.

I cannot leave until you forgive me and kiss my forehead.

I cannot leave until you tell me that it everything is fine, that I'm overreacting as usual, that this will all make sense one day.

I cannot leave until you reveal yourself to me fully, until you rise to the surface of all this blank ink and hope and despair.

I will find you in their first kisses, Jonathan, no matter how sentimental and homogenized and dull their voice are.

I will find you in their childhood bedrooms singing great lullabies and stealing glances from across rooms, and growing old and dying together after lives of great hardship.

I will find you in between what is and what should never be.

I will find you, even if I have to pick this pen up and write you into the pile myself.

I cannot tell you how much I miss and love you, Jonathan.

Words are simply not enough.

*** *** ***

Ashes to ashes, ampersand, dust to dust.

Who would have dreamed that our story, dearest Jonathan, was the one that I was looking for all along?

Nine weeks on the top of the New York Times best sellers list and it still doesn't feel real.

Nine months it took me to birth this tale and bury you, carrying you from coast to coast and now I am finally laying you to rest, near the ocean where you died, the briny air that last filled your lungs. I am finally ready to leave this nest of fire and be reborn.

You have shown me the way.


*** *** ***

The air in Malibu in April is full of Monarch butterflies, like a surreal landscape out of a fantasy novel or the screensaver on a high definition monitor.

I am driving through the canyon and the sky is an incomplete puzzle of dark and brooding clouds with patches of sunlight piercing through them.
In my mind I can remember the spills of rain that plagued the last few weeks, as if Los Angeles had a broken heart, as if the city itself was mourning, but now they have lifted.

In my mind I can remember the tale of the Fischer King.

In my mind I can remember the insouciant way you used to smile on sunny days, as if you didn't have a care in the world, as if you planned on staying eternally young, trapped in the moment like an insect captured at the peak of its fragile existence in amber immobile or a pet of an indulgent immortal.

I am no longer afraid of these memories, no longer afraid to recollect the good as well as the bad moments. They are as fleeting as shadows being chased away by the dawning of a new day. They have become a prism of my new hope. They can only hurt me if I try to hold on to them instead of letting them baptize me like rainwater, instead of letting them wash over and through me.

I have been as faithful as Penelope despite knowing you were never coming back.

I have learned so much from you Jonathan, both in life and in death.

The sun eagerly beats down onto the cracked blacktop of the highway as I wind in and out of tunnels, steeping upward towards craggy tops anointed with sandy peaks. The unexpected rain has left the hillsides looking supernaturally green and vivid.

My agent at William Morris has negotiated the film rights to my novel, the story of us. He has a nice office on Wilshire near Rodeo Drive. Our lives are worth over six figures. They tell me I will even have a say over who plays me and I'm thinking that Sigorney Weaver would be perfect, if she's willing to grow her hair down to her ass or get extensions.

I catch sight of the first one, a flash of creamy orange and gold flapping by like a living leaf. All around me Monarch butterflies are winging in the cold wind and not just in one concentration; they are spread out, on every stretch of the landscape.

They are not a simulation. They are real.

Watching them fills me with a profound and unexpected joy, far greater than anything I've ever experienced in my adult life. It's the same feeling I used to get as a child during the long nights of an Indian summer. They head south, fighting against the bursts of cold air, fighting their way to a new life deep within the warm heart of Mexico.

And as I reach the top of the canyon pass I can see the ocean, so big and inviting and forgiving. The ocean exists past human memory. It is eternal, like the memory of your smile.

I open up the container and the first of your ashes begin to stir into a cloud, the wind whipping around the convertible and carrying you as a fine dust over the leather upholstery. I lift you up over my head with my free hand and tilt the container until you pour out in a stream, a ribbon of gray that swirls out into the scratchy green hills along the spiny ridge separating one world from the next.

I will live for you Jonathan.

The Monarchs fill the convertible as I come descend towards the sparkling sea. I watch them fight to retake their positions in the sky.

And now, I will live for myself.

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