It’s Not Over Yet

Memories, Resurrections & Feeding Ducks

I almost forgot to tell you everything. Maybe memory is a resurrection.
I don't know how it happened, but I do know when.

During one of my many attempts to settle, to achieve normalcy — to go home again.

I had just turned thirty, which felt devastatingly ancient to me somehow.
I felt this creeping sense of urgency — like life was a party happening in the next room and I was already too late to be cool walking in.

I didn’t understand exactly how I’d ended up where I was.
I had just moved in with my boyfriend into his tiny one-bedroom apartment, dragging along my gigantic goldendoodle, Sawyer.
It took two weeks and one snowstorm before I knew we needed to leave.
Even then, I told myself we were simply "taking the next step," moving back to where we grew up.
Something I had always sworn I would never do — but by then, I had conveniently forgotten why.

I have always wanted to go home again. I just never remember that "home" is the first place that taught me how to

Whether in Florida or Oregon, Ohio or New York we were always leaving. And then for years we were always high. terribly high. The singular constant. It somehow felt better than the previous ten years where everyone had been drunk, swiping at their noses.
If any of it sounds glamaorous or spark-of-genius, desert visionary kind of way it was not. It was less than painting soup cans at this point.
It was just depression come back home to roost. In this sluggish, muted, I can almost see who I used to be way. Sometimes I felt creative, but mostly, I just felt depressed.

And then somehow, ten years passed — faster than even one had in the previous thirty. It wasn’t writer’s block anymore.It was emptier than that.

For the first time in my life, the words weren’t there. They didn’t swirl around my head like invisible dictation, demanding to be caught and put down.

They were replaced with something heavier and far less romantic: The daily exhaustion of trying to be what other people thought I should be. Of trading creativity for normalcy.

Of handing over magic for something cheap and brittle, like bad plastic jewelry or a poem I can’t recite properly. Where is that ring I lost? That girl I loved? That person I used to be? I didn’t know how to find her or save her, I didn’t even know that was she was me.

That’s when it all went wrong. I dumped the boyfriend. I moved back in with my parents. I got a job working retail, selling lipstick under fluorescent lights that buzzed like dying locusts.

If it wasn’t hell, it was at least purgatory.

I felt like Tony Soprano, mid-waist in a pool, feeding ducks. It is so much easier to feed the birds than think of everyone I know who has decide. The birds dont ask the last time you heard their voice, they dont know sometimes people sound the best before they do the worst. I can’t blame them.

Everything blurred.

Fade to black.
Fade to me, moving again.

Back to Oregon, because I decided I couldn’t afford New York and the dog needed space. We love to talk about space on the West Coast. As if wide open fields will fix whatever’s caving in your chest.

I started working in film again. I started nannying a two-hundred-pound pig on the side — (which isn’t a metaphor, but at this point, maybe it should be).

The pandemic hit, and for a little while, I did write again. It is easy to write when the world is ending.
With urgency. With fever. It felt like I was digging myself out of a grave with my bare hands until suddenly that became too literal. Because then the dog died. I woke up and he was next to me dead. The dog died.

Even nows three years later I keep my linguistic distance with that sentence, I do not say that Sawyer died even though I have made sure to tell you- the reader, his name. The dog instead. Anonymous, vague. Something everything goes through. It is easier this way. Distant.The dog died, the writing stopped too, right with his heart on my bedroom floor. The music gone next.

The guy I am dating during all of this cheats on me constantly but I am in love with him anyway. The closest grief can come to being a lobotomy.

My inbox is full of messages that say “Hey Girlie,” with some confession or warning but for me it kind of feels like penance. For most of 2021, I dont think I deserve anything. I think being 36 sounds fake, I think that maybe the world ended in 2012. My friends look at me seriously and say things like “Daniela, dont talk like that.” I want to be a brat- I want to say “Youre lucky I still talk at all”

And whatever fragile version of me that had managed to survive up until then —she ghosted, no note left behind. Once again a shell in her boyfriend’s basement bedroom. Not measuring life by the light that gets in it but the anguish that comes with it.

The basement bedroom was better than my room, where it happened.
I stayed in the room where his body had been for several days, breathing the same stale air, willing the world to make sense again.
Eventually, a box of ashes came back to me.
A neat little package for an unbearable truth.

How could I write about this world, or any world, anymore?
How could I find the words when all I could taste was loss?

I had never been that sad in my life. There were just these tiny cracks still, these sparks of light. I tried to ignore them for a while and then I let them come out in other ways. If I couldn’t write maybe I could talk, if I couldn’t talk maybe I could do put words on pictures and they’d start to come back.

and they did becauee buried somewhere deep in that madness,
under the broken furniture of my heart,
there was this tiny, flickering light.
A stubborn, absurd little ember that refused to go out.

It was so small that I thought it’d be gone when I moved my eyes, but then I heard it- then I heard it not a whisper but a scream.

Everything is not over. Not yet

I almost forgot to tell you that.