2:30am

    I am not someone who’s prone to panicking. In fact, a large part of my job is remaining calm in the midst of other people’s chaos, but last night I woke up suddenly twice, shaking with my heart beating as though I had been running for miles ,and then struggled to calm down. The cats, being opportunists, used it as an opportunity to extort more food rather than                 soothe me and the ambien I rarely take had wandered off somewhere. 

    The air blowing in through the window, shockingly cold after days of sizzling heat, helped my waking mind clear and I realized that, without looking at the date, my mind was repeating a too-late warning: ten years ago tomorrow evening your life will be irretrievably shattered, like the bedroom windowpane giving way to her fist, which then withdrew, bleeding, before she ran out into the night.

    She survived that, and she survived the night they called me from the ICU and told me to hurry in case I missed her battered soul as it made its escape. She survived the weeks of sitting at a beige plastic table while I, who had always been able to understand her without words, struggled to follow her tangled mind. She survived the state hospital, where Dad and I made our way through crowds of semi-wild turkeys to get to the building where she was learning about Buddhism behind heavy locked doors.  On it went, and on and on, ERs and ambulances, psych wards and charcoal and stitches, so many times I couldn’t number them now. 

    But she painted a little sign, framed it in white wood and set it on my mantelpiece: “there is in me an invincible summer.” And I wishfully believed it, believed she would keep on surviving. Her mother, who knew her the best, didn’t. When I called her to say she was gone she told me, “I have been waiting for this call for thirty years.”

     I know so well what it feels like to be clinging to a mossy, slippery rock in a rushing river of pain and how easy it is to let go and be swept away. Somehow I thought you would hold on, that my love would be your anchor.

     And then we came unmoored.