[720] Nowadays

Daniel's dad is dying. We lean against his truck beneath a warmth that's misplaced in early March. He traces each regression back to childhood, like height marks etched into a doorframe, measuring how much he's grown only to find himself, up against a wall, standing in the same place.

"Never fucking changes, does it?"

I don't know.

A good data point is how Sue described seeing my aunt’s body when she called last May. I liked it then. Sure, this was before I knew what I know now, before Chattanooga became reconnaissance, but there was an appeal to death as fact instead of grief. The house never cooled that summer. Chocolate left atop the kitchen counter melted by mid-afternoon and fruit bruised too quickly to eat. We put the good Argentinian wine in the fridge and spoiled it anyway.

Leaving for Maine was an escape from the heat, but also a comfort. It's my special place, which feels childish, I know, and it is. I'm giddy over blueberry-stained fingers, and I can see the universe from cliffs plunging into diamond-glutted water. One summer, Maine gave me a friend who'd hum Enya as we walked along the coast. It was there, along the same stretch, that my brother called. Suicide isn't a word you expect to hear in a place like that.

God, he was angry.

The next day I called the hospital from a small town halfway between Bar Harbor and Portland, and I didn't even recognize your voice.

Sarah says you can mix bad red wine with Diet Coke. Three twenty-five for the cheapest bottle and a quarter for a can was all you'd need in college. One of those nights, Michael and I first stepped onto the detached plywood excuse of a balcony; it sagged under our weight. Stars from the diluted wine, and stars in the exposed sky above us, and the silly thought that three fifty bought all this magic. Nowadays, Sarah is in Idaho with a house and a dog and Michael is in Japan with a dream, or is it the other way around, or is there a difference?

When I was eleven, I asked my grandpa if he believed in God. He looked at me, slightly amused, cheeks ruddy with wine, a small smile tugging at his lips. Belied by expression, all he said was yes, and I felt betrayed – in the way a child might extend a hand and receive a slap. Years later, walking across a soccer field, he would apologize for the real betrayal. Nowadays, his smile is missing a tooth and sometimes I squint just hard enough that I don't have to remember him without it.

Nowadays, motherhood is a lump in my throat. I'm choking it down on a summer evening, nearly nine o'clock, irritated by the sun's continued presence. Lucas does an impression of Mamdani across the table and, in a flurry of pigeons and passersby, I forget to react. He talks about organizing, about housing, about the kind of future that can apparently be built if enough people decide to build it. What's that Maggie Smith poem? I open a book entitled AI Reimagined and instinctively flip for a dedication page. To whom? Please, tell me for whom.

This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Just last night, I found C a y m u s hurriedly scrawled on a post-it in your nightstand, the bottle I once told you I’d buy when an accomplishment of mine warranted the indulgence. I forgot I’d mentioned it and it broke my heart that you cared to remember.

The bottle never mattered.

I don't want to carry out the journaling exercises my therapist tasked me with. I feel out of thoughts, or maybe trapped in the same ones. If I inspect the cycle, is it a way out or a way to get your head caught between the spokes? The visual of the latter makes me laugh and I wonder what that says about me.

Maybe this piece sucks, or maybe it doesn't convey what I want, or is there a difference? I tell Douglas and he offers to read it. I stall, saying I'll send it once more complete, but I won't, and I don't. Instead, I send it to Daniel. After all, his dad is dying. After all, Sarah says you can mix bad red wine with Diet Coke.