EMILY: Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

She looks toward the STAGE MANAGER and asks abruptly, through her tears.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No.

Pause.

The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.

Our Town. Act III. Thornton Wilder.

PRIOR: But still. Still.

Bless me anyway.

I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.

I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse, but…You see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate, but…Bless me anyway. I want more life.

Angels in America. Part Two: Perestroika. Act V “Heaven, I’m in Heaven.” Tony Kushner.

*

I. To Mom. To Dad. To my sisters.

I know I don’t know how much I love you. If I knew, if I really knew, it would be impossible for me to go to school out here on this dream coast, chasing aspirations through old brick buildings, ivy weaving in and out of this labyrinth. This place is certifiable esteem, history books bound in cow’s smoothed skin, hallways built by back-bent slaves. This place is critical thought, full meals at the swipe of a card, discussions and dissertations. It is arts, liberated. It is intellectual freedom. It is nothing. This place is nothing for the girl who has everything. I know I don’t know that you are already everything for me. If I knew, if I really knew, I could not squander these four years here. If I knew, I could not want more, chase more as I do, put you on hold as though you will be around forever.

I have not lost so many people close to me. Not like some. Not like most. As a kid, sometimes I would imagine my mother dying. I would picture my elementary school finding out. Whispering in the hallways. I imagined wearing black. Exploding into puddles of tears. Collapsing into a teacher’s arms in front of bewildered classmates. I imagined collecting the world’s sorrow.

Some people in my fortunate position still have such imaginings. I am older now, and I don’t. I don’t wonder. There are people I love who are stalked by the shadows of the dead, or whose hearts are carved with their shapes. I can’t fully understand how they ache, and I never want to. I can imagine it too well. My heartache for them, an impossible fraction of what they endure, is enough for me to know that what I have deserves to be embraced urgently.

I often encounter people who don’t know, who don’t feel the weight of everything we’ve got. I meet artists wishing for the inspiration brought forth by incredible pain. I say only fools wish for incredible pain. I am too grateful. I love too practically. Please live forever.

I had a dream once. It ended in fevers and a collapsing into sobs. I dreamed my baby sister had died. In some kind of violence, the only kind that could take her young breath from her. I was there. I lived it. I felt it. The phone call. The folding of my heart upon itself. The scream. I could never. Please live forever.

It is impossible to know. To know how much we have. Only the dead know.

But I can come close. I can try. All we can do is try. The point is not to reach full understanding but to at least try. That is the only way to live, I think—loving people with inadequate gratitude.

II. To my friends. To strangers. To streetlights, blinking at night, casting green and red shadows on wet asphalt. To corner stores. To diasporas. To silver rain falling sideways. To bread, rising and golden. To crooked murals on the walls of public elementary schools. To confectioners. To itchy pine trees. To air, cold like menthol in my lungs, in. out. One after the other. Not forever like I wish, but for now.

some days i just fall in
fatuated again
with this absurd place

for which i left the warm womb
it didn’t snow in there
as it does now on my bare shoulders

but now i don’t mind shivering here
bones shaking on themselves
singing we’re here we’re here we’re here

III. To __

Our voices filtered funny through the phone, we say softly, “If you need to go, go.” It is almost laughable how much we say this. I am so demonstrably ready to let you leave me if you are so called, it almost sounds like I want you to. In truth, this preparedness, twisted and perverse, is my way of letting you know how much I actually want to lock you away with me for: ever, myself, and safekeeping. But I like you too much. And so I offer to let you go, over and over. This is what we do.

We are worst-case-scenario people: If I die. If we don’t work out. If you need to leave.

What we mean is: Never die. I hope this works out forever. Don’t leave.

Isn’t it true, though? It’s as Emily says in Our Town, which I read when I was thirteen and unraveling. Who really knows the value of anything? I don’t want to wait until you are gone to know. So I remind myself every day that you could be gone. This is my way of remembering.

My knees wrapped around your waist, our tongues searching for each other urgently as oxygen. I am holding your fucking perfect face in my hands. You ask me why I am shaking my head. It is because I wish we were not both writers; there are so many cliches I want to say to you.

Those three words have become a contract, a deflation, an end, a box. I think I would rather keep them on the edge of my mouth than let them spill over to you. I like restraint; it keeps me moving toward you, and I never want to arrive. Maybe I never want to know that I have you so that I’ll never lose you. I don’t want to own you, wrap those words around you, claim you. If you need to go, go.

Being with you is a kind of pain. It is cross-country phone calls, twilight train rides, video chats, mail. It is brief oases in Manhattan before our lives reclaim us again. It is unraveling me.

But I just want more of it. I just want more.