My notebook is filling up with desert lessons.

There are two deserts, according to Desert Magazine editor Randall Henderson:

1. “A grim wasteland … seen by the stranger speeding along the highway.”
2. “The other Desert—the real Desert—is not for the eyes of the superficial observer, or the fearful soul or the cynic. It is a land, the character of which is hidden except to those who come with friendliness and understanding.”**

** Thank you, Wildsam Desert Southwest field guide vol. 2

Use of “desert” as adjective:

Ex: There’s an “Open” sign on the door but the lights are off every day and the phone just rings and rings. That’s so desert!

Ex: Wanna come to the liquor store with me? No your pajamas are fine, it’s totally desert.

Ex: No one knows what that weird thing is. It’s been here forever, just super desert.

Getting around:

“Up the hill”: Yucca Valley (10 mins.) and Joshua Tree (15 mins.) for grocery stores, vet, yoga, and Del Taco needs.

“Down the hill”: Palm Springs (30 mins.) for great medical care, tiki bars, and just general Palm Springsiness.

Los Angeles and Orange County: 1 hr, 45 mins at best. Stretch of I-10 between our turn-off and Riverside = Idiot Thunderdome.

Post offices in either direction, neither has a self-serve machine. People in line will talk to you about being old, the slowness and unreliability of the postal service, and the way things used to be around here.

Mysteries to be solved:

• What is that dinosaur-like screeching that happens at sunset across the wash every night?
• When will I see that barn owl family living in the burned out house down the road?
• Are the two connected somehow?
• Is that Vietnamese place next to the Big Lots! any good? (I checked…not really.)

Birds in the yard:

• California thrasher
• Broad-tailed & Anna’s Hummingbird in perpetual territory dispute
• Western bluebirds
• Cactus wren, rock wren
• Roadrunner
• Ravens going ha ha ha
• White-crowned and song sparrows
• Scrub jay
• House finches
• Scott’s oriole
• Say’s phoebe
• American goldfinches
• Mourning doves, white-winged doves, doves, doves, doves

Trees in the yard:

• Olive
• White iron eucalyptus
• Mulberry
• Palm falm
• Manzanita
• ???

People I watch for in town:

• An old man with bubblegum-blue hair
• An old woman in the parking lot at Vons in an honest-to-god superhero cape

My relationship to the desert/questions:

I hated it my whole life, because I grew up next to the beach and couldn’t understand why anyone would move away from the water. Away from all that green.

My mother and her friends were so desert. Unpredictable, wild. Yecch, the desert is what I always said. Then 10 years later, in New York, with my mom’s dog dying in my arms from a carefully administered dose of pentobarbitol, I suddenly needed to be here.

Did my mother call me out here to do this? Did her dog’s spirit pass into me? Did hers? I can breathe and think better out here than I have anywhere else. Am I here to remake myself in my mother’s image, if she had felt whole and loved?

Is this what you  want of your daughters?

Desert plants identified so far:

• Mormon tea
• Apricot mallow
• California buckwheat
• Yerba santa
• Cheesebush
• Rabbitbrush
• Desert trumpet
• Creosote
• Cat’s claw acacia
• Desert willow
• Joshua tree
• Burrobush
• Paper bag bush

Favorite sunset picture so far:

Dates:

What are those dried-up, chewy husks I’ve been getting from the supermarket all these years? The dates here are fresh off the palm, the skin breaks and the inside is like frosting. As Joni Mitchell was trying to say, I really don’t know dates at all.

Wallace Stegner:

We simply need to see … wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to the edge and look in. It can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of a geography of hope.  –The Wilderness Letter

he also said:

“You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale.”

Wallace Stegner was so desert.

Two months ago, I was working for one of the world’s largest tech companies, doing something I actually loved and believed in and was pretty good at, with people I liked seeing every day. I had a cozy apartment on the Upper West Side, just like I’d dreamed of when I was a kid, and I would frequently walk to the Lincoln Center and pretend I was Dana in Ghostbusters (had Zuul never shown up and ruined Dana’s pretty awesome life playing in the symphony and sitting in creamy furniture overlooking Central Park).

I had my rush-hour subway-to-train commute down pat and alternately adored my fellow New Yorkers and cursed them under my breath. I had a brilliant therapist and a talented, careful chiropractor and a cheap and efficient massage place down the street. I felt safer and stronger than ever in my life. I belonged, at last, and it was to a city that wouldn’t have just anybody.

So naturally I quit my job and moved across the country.

But wait, there’s more! I moved back to the state in which I was born and raised and had a pretty tough time and where lots of painful memories were still lurking everywhere. A place I ran away from 13 years ago.

A year ago, a wise friend introduced me to the notion that the direction in which you move is significant.

In shaman-pagan traditions, the orientation of a place is sacred. Moving from east to south to west and finally to north completes a cycle of birth, maturity, and death. At least death of a kind. Take my journey, for instance: The West is a place of senescence, settling and integrating, adulthood. So of course I had to leave when the bad thing happened; I needed to explode like a supernova. I went South, to Austin, for anger and heat and seeking. Think high noon in the summer you were nineteen. And explode I did. I loved and added more members to my tribe, became a writer, showed my belly and got kicked, then grew some claws.

And then New York City. Sure, this wasn’t all my doing—my husband precipitated the move, but I was so ready to move on. I’ve learned that in the East, you get perspective on your life; you can see your future and know what you must do next. It’s the light of a new day. In the East, I broke down, shook off all the bad old noises and started a new thing. I grew a parent in an unused plot of land where there was only a scared kid hoarding the glowing artifacts of anything good from her life.

I’m not finished growing that parent, lordy lordy no, but I can wake up and take care of myself and be brave enough to hold still and write and know it’s not always good but that’s part of it and that’s how you know you’re working—when it’s not going well and you do it anyway—and forgive myself like a parent forgives a child for hitting the wrong note on the piano. That’s okay, try again, you can do it.

I’m telling you all this because I’m also trying to understand the sudden, strong call to go West. It was completely mystical, the way it rose inside me like a song I couldn’t shake, and the vision grew clearer and the path began to form. I remember first feeling it when we put Chloe down, ended the 17-year love that began yesterday in California. I became obsessed with the southwest, Mexican blankets, cow skulls, Georgia O’Keeffe. I craved the friends and family and landscape that first made me who I am. I listened to America, Cat Stevens, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty. I read old diaries and babbled about my childhood. A vast storm was gathering and ready to take me back to where it all happened. To be closer to my mother and the ocean where half of her ashes are. Our ancestors are said to reside in the West.

I’m afraid I’m giving the impression that these transitions are glorious, self-actualizing events. They’re not. They’re fraught with panic attacks, weeping, paralysis, coping, and self-medicating.

I was in that place a few days ago, when I dropped Nat off at the airport an hour and a half away. I came back to what was to be my new home for the next three months, and felt numb and unmotivated and lost. Why am I here? What the hell did I just do? I cried on the floor and felt very, very afraid. My diaries from the most terrible years of my life leered at me from the shelf where I’d set them up, critical research materials. You haven’t changed, they said, and you never really escaped. We can go ahead and call California one big trigger.

People said I was brave for quitting my job and moving to the desert to write. This wasn’t bravery. Do you want to really know the secret of my “bravery”? It’s deciding to do something and then pretending it isn’t really happening until it’s too late. It’s one part of you—the part that knows what you need to do so you can live with fewer regrets and that believes in you and thinks you deserve a chance—throwing the other part in the back of the car with a Gameboy and saying we’re just going on a little trip.

Maybe that’s all bravery is: looking out the window and playing punch-buggy until you’ve arrived at the place you were afraid to go. And there will be discomfort and tears and self-medicating but you get to the other side of that. The cool thing about doing scary, hard things like moving across the country a few times is that you gain experience. You remember that you will live through it and things will get amazing. It’s like building muscle or writing: it sucks at the time, but after, you’re strong and you’ve written and you barely remember when it sucked and how badly it sucked.

In some ways, that’s what I came out West for: to see how strong I am. To see if the soft, still-forming inner parent I created in a long, cold winter back East can bake into something sturdy and reliable under the California sun. If I can stand, my second-made self, in the place where I was first made,  and tell the stories of that making. If there is still a palm-lined river in the canyon near where I am writing this, the river where we scattered the other half of her ashes 13 years ago, and if the river will remember who I am and welcome me home.

Party idea: we all get together and figure out what this gnawing, awful dybbuk inside of me wants so that we can help it and it can go on its way.

Sophia has not, in fact, come home, which I am trying not to let alarm me (anxiety/panic is a feedback loop, asserts this Australian doctor whose audiobook I’m now listening to). However, I did pick up a copy of O Magazine at JFK and it gave me the strength to get on the jet. She appears on the cover with a lion. I wish I could just Photoshop my fears, too.

I shook so badly on the way to the airport Wednesday morning that I would have canceled my flight (and gone with Nat the next day), but the thought of being in NYC feeling like that for one more hour got me out of the car.

Fun fact about my flight anxiety: For many of us, it’s not about the plane; it’s about going crazy on the plane. This time I was near-catatonic with exhaustion from the three days of anxiety, so I was kind of like, “Fuck it. Crash then.” Turbulence felt like a mother’s gentle rocking.

---

Winter is not Austin’s best look. We land in the rural flatlands outside the city, damp and ochre. I feel the first signs of lift in my shoulders, radiating through my neck. Home, I think. Even when I’m well, I get the same feeling when we hover over the sprawling suburbia of Southern California, lined by its forever-sparkling blue ocean, coming back to the land in which I was born and raised. So I have made myself two homes. Like the wealthy overachiever who grew up in poverty.

Could New York ever feel like home? I’m not ready for that thought yet. With its blue buildings and blue nights and grey skies, with its monuments. The memory of going crazy in the NYPL—how that architectural triumph is sullied for me, at least until I get my sense of humor back. All those high rooftops and balconies. The wheels touch down and I think I will run for miles without seeing a single skyscraper. They open the cabin door and the humidity wraps around me, even in its winter grey, the airport is filled with the languid and the 10-gallon-hatted.

I eat my first meal in days, a P. Terry’s veggie burger. Is this me getting better? At dinner that night, where I barely choke down some salad and cheese, everyone talks to me about medication. Am I needlessly hurting myself? Or am I being patient and waiting to be shown something? Wine helps. I am careful not to get drunk: who knows where that will swing me.

I snuggle in bed with my close friend. We talk about each other’s lives. We play Farmville side by side and watch 30 Rock. If I weren’t busy fixating on the small relief I feel, and noticing every shiver that still passes through me, I’d be thinking, I will stay right here. This is what my soul is telling me to do. Okay, I do think it.

Nat arrives the next day, and after a traumatic 90-minute experience with Dollar (I’ll spare you the Yelp review. Just never do business with them. They hate you.) we go to see our friends’ new baby. Their new house is awesome; it’s everything my Brooklyn apartment is not—spacious, bright, airy. His parents, with whom I spent a delightful Thanksgiving in New Orleans, are there and they are the most parenty parents who ever parented. My friends cook and fuss and fret over their new family, their new purpose in life. When no one is looking, I go in the bathroom to cry.

The next day, Nat and I drive out west past the hills and juniper of Central Texas, cross into the Edwards Plateau where it’s horizon-to-horizon mesquite and short-cotton fields. I’ve been crying the whole drive. I want to come back, I tell him. Please don’t make me do that, he says. We are quiet for most of the three-hour drive so we can each see if we have the strength to do what the other one needs.

The cotton is bundled and capped with bright pink plastic. It looks like we’ve merged into some Pop artist’s painting of a yellow Texas farm in the winter, dotted with giant nigiri. I have a flash through my heart that I love this idea, may paint it when I get home. This, I think to myself, this is what Normal Erin feels like. This impulse to create, to express, is still in there somewhere. I have been so unkind to myself to ignore it. Will it come back if I promise to honor it? Please, will it?

---

We must allow ourselves to be devastated, driven to the edge, shown the long fall, the shredding rocks on the way down, if we are to get serious about change. I’ve been lazy, I’ve neglected myself, I’ve remembered only how to survive. I shut down all my creative impulses. Any swelling of desire to write, to draw, I immediately pricked with a pin. My parents enrolled me in ballet at six because my cousin and my best friend were going—it seemed the thing to do. But someone stopped taking me someday and I never threw a fit. Not that I remember. I never said, But I love it and everyone else gets to do it. Same with the violin. With afterschool drama.

Accepting what happens to us and just going with the flow is how the child survives. Accepting what happens to us is how, as an adult, you end up looking at the life you wanted as if it is on a parallel track, above or beside you, never crossing paths with the one you’re on.

Jumping the track will hurt. It will hurt us to our bones. People will see you hurt and will want you to medicate. You seem ill, and maybe you are. You think maybe you’ve been a fool to be afraid of drugs, all along. You think if you were on drugs maybe you would have been on the track that is the life you wanted. You think, no, it is a journey. And then someone suggests a thyroid, or an ill-placed tumor. The mind spins. Illness/journey/illness/journey.

You told a friend, a week before the breakdown happened, New York is an asana. How cocky you were then. You went to yoga to remind yourself how to breathe through a difficult pose, how to be still and breathe when your thighs want to give out, when the tendon at your groin burns and makes your heart race, how to imagine you are breathing ease into an Achilles’ Heel you’ve known to be only this flexible your whole life. Transformation is a practice, you thought, almost happily. And a few days later, the nuclear bomb goes off. Transform this, sucker.

---

I am on his family’s couch, my eyes shut, soul-tired from the crying drive. I hear my husband talk about me in the other room. He praises my abilities as a writer, praises my strength. I sit there thinking, I’d like to be whoever this is he’s talking about. And then, Is this how fathers raise sane daughters?

He leaves Austin a day early, letting me be alone with it. The sun comes out when his plane takes off. I spend the day haunting. First, I go to Spiderhouse, the eclectic ramshackle house-turned-yard art café that sold me on the town back in 2003, when I first visited. When I finally made the move in 2005 and was attending a low-res MFA program, I wrote all my stories on this patio, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, or Dylan always playing, and Chloe straining at the leash to greet the other tables. I drank chamomile teas then, because I was having panic attacks at night, all alone in my new little house in this new little city. I took Xanax in those days, to sleep at night. I don’t remember when I felt okay enough to stop, but I know I was vigilant enough to stop as soon as I could. In those days, you could point to why I had panic: I found my mother murdered only a year ago. I left my codependent relationship, dearest friends, and the place of my birth for a state where I knew no one. It was a simple matter of taking care of my dog and getting a job, and becoming who I always wanted to be. Nine years ago, that was. I thought I’d slipped the noose forever.

After the café, I went to meet my pen pal, a poet and essayist. We got juices and walked around Town Lake and talked about how much things have changed; he’s been there since 1993. I told him I complained about change after only being there for 8 years; later, I’d meet up with another friend who lamented changes after being there for 2. I thought, maybe I don’t want to come back here. It’s the fastest-growing city in the country, according to CNN. I am not really a joiner, y’all.

You move to Austin under the illusion that time will stand still there. You think the heat, perhaps, will slow you down, ease your woes, encourage you to take up pottery. And it does, for a while. You take a job as a server at a nice restaurant, use your days off to clean the house, lay around Barton Springs, go plant shopping, work on your garden. But the mind starts to itch, and you begin to wonder if this is really all. Shouldn’t you be getting to work on that book? Oh, but it’s so warm and the hammock holds your weight like a mother, and that book is jagged and seizing, like an iron maiden. Maybe just call a friend instead and go for a hike in the Greenbelt… maybe just sew more pillows.

This is where I went wrong: I let the comfort of Austin overtake me—can you see now why? An anxious soul with PTSD, writing about the traumatic event, all the traumatic events that preceded it. Why would I do that when my friends are so wonderful to have dinner with and can do things on a moment’s notice?

It is from this place that I said, Let’s move to New York City. I need to write, and it’s too nice here for that.

I threw away the home and family I’d built, that I sorely needed. What made me think I would not be punished for that hubris?

It is possible for an act to be both supremely brave and supremely foolish.

A California girl who ran away to Texas then ran away to New York. A solar-powered being with a lifetime of barely dealt-with anxiety leaves everything she knows and trusts and loves—and everyone who loved her back—to go to a place so cold, so isolating, that it would re-traumatize her inward, where (she thought) the writing gets done. But she underestimates winter, four to five months of grey skies and heavy-coat chill. The claustrophobia of snow. Your insignificance is lit up by it.

Didn’t Joan Didion, the consummate California girl move here? She said she got homesick in 1988 and went back to L.A. She said, “It took a year to ‘get L.A.’ and once I got it, I didn’t want to be there anymore.” She said L.A. has no reason to be there, and neither do you.

And here I am in the inevitable city. The city built by chance, geography, and tragedy, like me. Why don’t we get along? This city does not care if I leave, but my husband does. And I can’t trust my impulses. Maybe it is a tumor. Or maybe I have simply had too much. But I am in this asana, and you know what they say: if I can get well here I’ll get well (clap clap) anywhere.

It is not yet 7:30 on a Thursday night, and I am in my pajamas, brewing a cup of chamomile. Chamomile is the flower of defiance. It says, I live in New York City, am not 90, and don’t have children, and I’m still staying in. I’m even using the big mug. I’m gonna sit right here and sip on this motherfucker all night long.

I was going to attend a reading (Doing Things); at a popular local bar (Where the People Are) by two women who are memoirists and work at literary magazines (Experiencing What I Want to Do/What I Care About). So it meets all three of my life objectives, which I use to help me make decisions about leaving the house. But I have a good reason for canceling my own tenuous (I was never really going to go, was I?) plans: I have freelance work to do! Fulfilling, challenging freelance work that will pay me actual money to practice my craft, which, let’s face it, is in serious danger of reinventing itself as binge-watching “Bojack Horseman” on Netflix (the best thing on television right now go watch it oh my god what is wrong with you put this down and watch it) and repeating back to the hipsters outside my window their own stupid, uptalky sentences. I am sorry that I literally just do not care?

But the thing about writing is, like Dorothy Parker said (and every subsequent writer who quoted her when writing their own writing books), I hate writing; I love having written.

It’s a painful, demoralizing, upsetting, tooth-grindy, ulcer-making, lonely, rotten activity that thrusts my shoulders to my ears, makes the inner critic go into full-on gleeful spite karaoke, and probably doesn’t matter to anyone anywhere. The thing is, if I don’t do it, the voice in my head drives me batshit crazy. Believe me, I’ve tried not to do it. Which is also what every writing teacher and writing book says to do. Don’t write unless you absolutely can’t do anything else.

I don’t take that to mean “Don’t write unless you can’t be a seamstress, maitre’d, shrimper, or veterinarian”—because I could be all those things, for as long as I’ve held down any copywriting or editing job, surely. But even then, the call to write is one I can’t ignore for long without becoming an irascible and unhappy husk. Which is what I’m afraid I’m turning into. I am constantly editing and revisiting my old work, but the last time I wrote anything new, from scratch…? Can I even do it anymore? Stupid husk!

Part of my calcifying process has involved avoiding this blog. Even verbally abusing it. Blog. You sound like something that comes out of a face by accident. Blog. Horrible people have blogs. Like that insufferable narcissist Julie Whatever from Julie and Julia, who even the delightful Amy Adams couldn’t make tolerable. And I’m an asshole for having a blog. Somehow, all my friends with blogs are amazing and I love them and am thrilled whenever they update it, because it’s like getting truth-drunk with them somewhere. But mine will be miserable, tedious, and loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong-winded.

The last time I posted something here, aside from the couple of extemporaneous poems inspired by my Stygian daily commute (except the Styx delivered you unto Hades, where an eternity of interesting problems were thrown at you; all that waited for me across the Hudson was Newark—no more, oh rapture!), I was facing something I felt I could not endure unless I wrote it out first. It was the primal wail that came from years of grief, trauma, love, and fear, hurling itself into the wind as part of my tiny human struggle against death. The last thing I wanted to say before sun exploded. Writing teachers (and, again, those damned books) are fond of asserting that work written from anything less than that is not worth the paper its printed on. Which, when a certain type of person (me, in my late 20s) hears it, inspires a punk rock art monster fever high that makes you beat your chest and look for babies to devour whole, etc. But with age, you begin to realize that no one else is holding themselves (or writers, generally) to that standard. If they were, there’d be a fraction of the books published. And you just can’t survive that level of trauma on a constant basis. I mean, can you? Can I? Am I surviving it now?

Someone (possibly me) once described being human as the messy result of wanting things that directly conflict with each other. (Okay, it was me. I found the old note. I hope you’ll still respect it.)

This is what I want:  to make great art.

This is what I want: to be happy.

I can’t sustain the level of desperate urgency required to make great art. But you know what? Despite all evidence to the contrary, I know people can do both—I know several of them personally, and that small glimpse into their unicorny lives means everything to me. Without it, I wouldn’t know it’s even possible, or what it looks like.

I think I know how to do it, too. Make great art and not be suffering in order to do it. I know from Cheryl Strayed’s chapter “Write Like a Motherfucker” in her Tiny, Beautiful Things (which I listen to each day when I walk to the L, as a meditation). I know from Dani Shapiro’s wonderful, reassuring and empowering Still Writing. I know from older manifestos, from Stephen King’s On Writing to Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.”

It’s this: you get down on the ground, you get real humble, you let go of your expectations of yourself, you shut out what you think people will say about it (good or bad), and give yourself room. It was never helpful for me to read things like “trust yourself!” I can’t get that far. After all, lots of terrible and boring people trust themselves. I have to not think about that at all, prepare to suck, and, as Bob would do, Baby step to the blank page. Baby step through the first sentence. Baby step through the second one….

It’s like that thing EL Doctorow said that, again, EVERY WRITING BOOK EVER has quoted:

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I’m putting this here as a baby step: I think I know the framework that my memoir has been looking for. The one I can’t write another word without. I’m afraid of saying this out loud because it might be a stupid idea that fails miserably after several months of working with it. But it’s the first time I’ve thought about the memoir—half of which is languishing as a bunch of 1’s and 0’s in the same cloud where JLaw’s nudie pics live–with anything other than dread and sadness since 2009.

So I’m getting on the floor again. It does not escape me that several of my blog posts have, over the years, been about this balance between happiness and devastation, about paralysis by self-aggrandizement. This time, I’m not crying. I’m not hopeless. I‘m not roasting a chicken to avoid the work. I’m getting on the floor to go about my business, which is the business of making the best art I can. The rest is not my business.

from http://hooplaha.com/2014/01/how-to-take-a-more-flattering-portrait/

In the right photo, the model is moving his jaw slightly forward, eliminating the multiple-chins effect.

He’s also slightly bringing his lower eyelids up (a trick called “squinching”), making his gaze a little more soft, yet piercing at the same time.

 

Nailed it.

 

.

Dear Mom,

I just called my husband at work to ask if he can take Saturday off so we can put Chloe to sleep. The vet gave me a few times she is available to come to our apartment and do it. I chose Saturday at 12:30.

At first she said she could come tomorrow afternoon, and I said, “But that’s tomorrow.”

And Friday is Friday. And Saturday is Saturday. Which day is the right one?

Which day is the right day to lay her body on my lap and kiss her goodbye and try to be calm for her as they give her one last sleep and then stop her heart? Which day will be best to hand her limp body to a stranger, follow her psychically to the crematorium, and try not to imagine her carcass—of which I know the weight on my chest, how the heart murmur flutters under my hand, in which places it is damp and cold and where it is dry and warm, where it has crusted with the bumps and ulcers of old age, where the fur has worn away and where it is still soft and lush, exactly like it was when she was 6 months old and we rode home together from the shelter in my boyfriend’s van, me an impulsive and stoned 19-year-old giddy with conviction that this was the perfect gift for you, my newly single mother, all alone in that house in south L.A., in chat rooms, spilling wine on yourself and on the verge of once again loving and nurturing another loser, and who would wind up giving this dog magical abilities and who would take her to work and on road trips and to the beach and let her run free without a leash, which drove me nuts but you both were free creatures and I couldn’t control anything until you were suddenly gone and the dog was missing and I prayed to Whatever was listening that if Chloe showed up I would forgive Whatever, and then the call came from the police and she and I threw our bodies against the cage bars until they were opened and we kissed each other and cried and I swore to never let anything happen to her and to love her with all my heart until the world spun in reverse and I could make everything that ever went wrong for you right—try not to imagine that body burning to ash?

On what day do you end a ten-year blood oath?

After you had Chloe for a few months, you called me in a panic. Chloe was missing, had jumped from the open window of your car while you were in the bank. In spite of my rage and worry, I drove you around town for two days until we found the dog in a Taoist church parking lot, unharmed and happy as you please. When I was 20, another phone call: Chloe is listing and stumbling. And an immediate call back: it’s okay, don’t come down. We think she ate a pot brownie. I’m 21: Chloe stepped on broken glass and I can’t afford a vet. Can I bum $100 for stitches? I’m 23: Chloe was bitten by a rattlesnake, but she’s fine. They gave her anti-venom and we’re picking her up tomorrow.

To the untrained ear this might sounds like bad parenting. No offense. But listen to me, I’m another creature raised by you: it was one animal respecting another animal’s joie de vivre. Emotional license, you used to say to me, when we fought. “I gave you emotional license! I never told you what you could and couldn’t think or feel.” Chloe traveled, met children and jazz musicians, played in the surf, rolled in mud, got taken to bars (and thrown out of them, with you), slept on a human bed, ate boiled chicken and rice. Mom, the measure of your love wasn’t worry and restriction. It was pleasure.

You’d hate the way she looks now, this long, thin caramel-colored body with its jutting shoulders and spine—but she looks peaceful swallowed up by the down comforter we’ve indulged her in. Every now and then she shudders, as she has for about a year, at first seldomly and now frequently. She flinches, too, violent facial seizures that chatter her teeth. She paces at night, gives this heartbreaking whinny. She groans, reluctant to lie down, stiff and stumbling with the pain of arthritis, confusion. We tried anti-senility drugs, but she still docks herself into tight corners and can’t back out of them. She is mostly blind and deaf. Pain meds? Valium? And what then? This isn’t the dog you knew. She’s 100.

It just occurred to me that you left her when she was around 50, your age. A couple of wild, middle-aged ladies. Thelma and Louise. Can you imagine being 100? Do you blame me for making this choice?

There are four Greenie bones left. She loves her Greenies. On Saturday I’ll give her two.

What about this case of dog food—it’s good stuff, expensive. Grain-free, hand-cooked by virgins in a cathedral in Paris, I don’t know. I just can’t cook chicken and rice each week, like you did. I’m selfish and I’m lazy and I never had children and I don’t have your hands.

There are six cans left, and Saturday is two dinners away. Should I instead give her a hot dog? A warm one, bun and all? Or I’ll make her a meatloaf. I’ll give her a can of tuna—the kind with sodium. Anything you want, my love. She flinches so hard her teeth chatter, then she whimpers.

There has to be another way out of here besides loss. Loss, again. Also, it’s not my right. It’s not my call. It’s your call, and you’re gone and I have to pull the trigger on my own. And suddenly I look over this long expanse of time and I’m embarrassed. Did I really think I could make this dog live forever? Did I really think that I could reverse the turning of the Earth? Did I think that by loving Chloe enough I could undo all of your tragedies, one by one, until you were undead and we had all the time in the world again?

How long after she started feeling pain and misery did I keep this dog alive, waiting for the miracle to come?

After you died, almost ten years ago (really?), I held Chloe and thought about the eventual end of her life. We were fresh from scattering your ashes in the Pacific. In those days I was finding meaning all over the place, tying up cosmic loose ends—making oaths. I’ll write a book was one promise. Another was this: when it was time for Chloe to pass, whenever that would be, I would whisper in her ear, Go find Mom. I would bring her ashes to you, off the coast of Dana Point, and make right what once went wrong. Put back together what violence had torn apart.

But that was when we were young and glorious and nothing could touch us—when there were no Saturdays at 12:30, only tomorrows stretched out as far as you could see.

Mom, if you’re anywhere you can feel this, go to the Eastern Gate on Saturday and meet your dog.