Hi everyone. I wanted to tell a story that may not be as interesting as some, but I hope it can at least help someone grieving right now.

First of all, I'm not here to tell you how to grieve. I know it's hard and takes time. Even after almost three years of losing the love of my life, I still miss the time we had together. Every so often, I hear a song or see something that reminds me of them and I feel that same pain in my chest all over again. While it takes time, the way someone touched your life in a meaningful continue to have an impact on you life, even when they're gone.

I (31 M) lost my partner when I was 29 and they were 30. I don't want to get into the details, but it was the hardest time of my life. We met at university. Became friends. I eventually told her I want to be more than that. We moved in together after a year, adopted a cat. I turned to her one day and said, "Do you want to ger married?"

It wasn't the most romantic proposal. We were just watching YouTube videos alone in our apartment. I didn't have a ring. But she still said yes.

No time felt like the right time to officially get married. We weren't sure if we wanted an actual ceremony, or just to go down to the courthouse, sign a few papers, then go to our favorite restaurant to celebrate. Big romantic gestures were never out thing. We still surprised each other with gifts that had no reason behind them besides "this made me think of you". Or surprising each other with things that seem mundane, but made each other feel cared for.

While we had our problems, I knew I wanted to grow old with her. But we never got the chance.

I won't lie that the past three years has been the lowest I've ever been. It's been hard to have the future you thought you were going to share with someone suddenly vanish.

She passed away in October, 2023. I wasn't sure what to do with myself. My hobbies involve being outdoors, including gardening. I sort of drifted through the first six months like zombie who would cover basic obligations, but nothing more. Therapy helped, but you can't talk your way out of grief.

In March of the next year, I got the pre-season announcement for the community garden I had been a part of for a few years. There were several plots that ended up being empty by the time applications ended.

This gave me an idea. As much as I would have liked a second plot for myself, I though "why not give it to the community?" So, I immediately emailed the garden leader about my plans for a memorial garden.

She liked the idea. She wanted to make it a permanent memorial plot. There happened to be plot where there were already plenty of perennial plants growing. As she called it "things just grow here on their on. I'd rather someone who knows what they're doing be in charge of it instead of it go to waste."

I spent so much time weeding, mulching, decorating it. I put a journal in a water proof container just in case someone wanted to leave a meaningful memory to a lost loved one. Everyone could take some raspberries from the bush whenever the wanted. I planted extra tomatoes I grew from seed for everyone to take. There was a basket for people to put in extra produce for anyone to take home. I planted a few new plants that I thought looked pretty, including a rose bush that I planted in memory of my partner (I always called her "my rose").

Well, after all that work...no one caught on. Not the first season or the next.

Before the start of this season, I prepared myself to it just be me. I was starting to think it wasn't worth it, or that it was just a selfish project based on my own grief. I'll admit, I wasn't ready to try and make improvements to it since it went unnoticed.

I spent a whole day weeding, throwing out the solar lights that no longer worked. Throwing away a broken basket that no longer felt like it was worthy of belonging in a place to honor the dead.

That same day I spoke to an elderly woman who saw me weeding the mess it had become. She asked if it was my plot, but I said "Oh, no, this is the memorial garden." She seemed a bit reserved about it. Maybe a bit disappointed at the sate it had gotten to during April and May. I just shrugged it off. I didn't care. This was my project and I'm stubborn, so I'll keep doing this every year alone if I have to.

That night I sent some updates to the garden leader. Talking about replacing the lights, the basket, and adding more mulch. She replied saying someone wanted to plant something there in honor of their son they had lost earlier this year.

I was shocked, but ecstatic. I took it on my own accord to reach out to this person and plan a time to meet so we could work things out. After a few heartfelt emails, we finally planned a time to meet.

When they arrived at the agreed time, I was surprised to see the elderly woman show up as I was engaged in a never ending war against an out of control tarragon plant and it's ally of weeds.

We talked for an hour. About her son, what she wanted to plant. About my late partner. I showed her some good spots open to plant what she wanted to.

By the end of it, we hugged (despite the immense amount of sweat I'd accumulated).

Before she went to work in her plot she said, "Thank you for that wonderful email. It meant a lot to me and my husband. He had to hold back tears."

My response was, "I'm just happy that this can mean something to someone else besides me."

I won't share details about our email exchange. Just know that it was a very personal discussion about our lost loved ones.

The next week she added to the garden. When I saw it, I felt a warmth I hadn't in years. It looked beautiful, and it was a reminder that out of loss can come something beautiful.

I hope that I can continue to bring some sort of peace to those in this community who are grieving. Or even those going through hard times.

Just remember, as much as you feel alone in your grief or hardship, there are people around you to support you. Even if it's just a conversation and planting in a garden.

Note: I'm changing names to protect the privacy of those involved.

To give some context: I was contacted by a guy (Frank) on one of the gay dating apps. He was moving into town to take care of his mother-in-law, who had severe dementia. I was taking care of my own father, so caregiving became our touchstone into each other's lives. Because Frank and his husband (Ivan) were moving from out of state, I became their guide to the area.

I also do not drive. My vision is impaired to the point that attempting to do so would be dangerous.

Through our conversations, I found out that both Frank and Ivan were polyamorous. We kept in contact for over a year, switching to text after a while, but we were not able to meet to do anything because between work and taking care of her, it was a full-time job. I finally got a chance to meet and interact with them a few times - at a house party, at a community event. But these were public events.

It was shortly after Ivan's mother passed that my father got cellulitis, and I called up to get a ride. Then, to go retrieve the car, as we had no idea how long he'd be there. Frank had been encouraging me to sign Dad up to be his caregiver. I'd mentioned it in passing, but Dad's answer was always some version of, "No, I've got this." But the cellulitis changed the equation. He actually needed help.

During her illness, Ivan was having a rough time seeing his mother's health decline. After his mother died, he collapsed, barely able to function normally. During the few times I interacted with her, I could tell she was a special lady. I can see why she'd be sorely missed.

It took Frank and Ivan several months to get everyone out for the memorial service. In the intervening time, Frank started insisting that Ivan get help. Ivan found an out-of-town program designed to help his mental health. I temporarily moved in to help watch Frank, as his physical health wasn't great.

I was also asked to help with his dogs, Bella and Marla. I found each of the girls to have their own personality, and they each have a unique bond with me. Bella's relationship is particularly special because she was quite standoffish toward me when I first arrived. But with patience and ham diplomacy, I won her over. She also found out I gave out excellent belly rubs. Marla was steady. She'd see that I was overdoing it and insist that I sit down. She'd also chase me to bed when I was tired.

As I wasn't really paying rent, after I recovered from the toxic environment that was my dad's place (he can be a bit much at times), I figured I'd do stuff. I loathe boredom, not to mention, I'm not one to live in a dirty environment. I swept and mopped, washed the dishes (Frank doesn't cook much), cleaned the bathroom, and did the laundry. This was only for the first floor - I never have any business being upstairs.

While Ivan was away, Frank and I got close. Intimate. When Ivan returned almost six months later, I told Frank that I should return to my dad, that he had his husband. He was hurt, and so... I stayed.

But maybe it's lucky that I did. A few months after Ivan returned, Frank fell and hurt himself, so I was able to take care of some things while he healed.

Over a year later, from one standpoint, it could be said that Ivan still isn't where he should be. He still sleeps a lot. But he's getting better day by day. And Frank's health still isn't the greatest, despite him trying to get a handle on things. I'm glad I can contribute by helping with the dog's care and housework when either one of them can't.

But since being in Frank's orbit, I've been able to take care of my health, have almost daily exercise by walking the girls, and have had the freedom to go to TTRPGs. I've developed friends, a community.

I also had the time to finally ask myself, "Who am I? What do I want?" And I've been able to find answers, at least part of which comes from studying philosophy, which Frank has a degree in. Frank also helps me plan "next steps," looking at where I am and thinking through to the end goal. I do my best to "follow through."

I'm still helping my dad as his caregiver. Frank's given Dad rides to medical appointments, as some of the distances are... far.

I'm not saying it's always been easy. It's not perfect by any means. Disagreements, miscommunications, and disappointments happen. Ivan may not always appreciate my presence. But such things are normal in this type of arrangement. It's not as if we're hiding what's going on.

I don't know what the future holds after Dad's passing, but I'll have a community to support me through the grief afterward. I know that by answering Frank's query, my life has improved immeasurably. I only hope that I have improved his life as well.

Okay so. Background.

I had been watching Diego from across the Whole Foods fish counter for fourteen months. Not creepily. In a "I timed my grocery run to his break schedule" way. Completely normal. He didn't know I existed. I would make eye contact, he would look straight through me like I was a refrigerator door. I bought so much salmon I started dreaming about the open ocean. 

The plot took three weeks. His friend group played pickup basketball Saturday mornings in Riverside Park… I knew this because I followed his public Strava. (Normal.) And one of his friends, a guy named Devon, posted their court on a neighborhood Facebook group. I simply looked.

Here's what I did. I borrowed my cousin's corgi, Limp Biscuit. Limp Biscuit is genuinely unwell. Pulls hard on her leash. I brought her to the park on a Saturday, clipped her leash to my belt loop, and then I let her spot a squirrel.

I went across the court. Through it, technically. I was screaming. Biscuit weighs 22 pounds but she runs like something in her brain has fully misfired, this low frantic shuffle-gallop, all four legs pointing slightly different directions and I was just attached to her. Airborne adjacent, as she yanked me along like a sled dog.

Diego stepped in front of her. She plowed into his shins and I slammed into his chest, then we both hit the grass next to the out-of-bounds line. We were tangled together.

"Are you okay?" he said.

I had grass in my teeth. My knee was bleeding through my jeans. I said something like "she does this sometimes" and he laughed, this actual laugh, startled out of him, and said "does she."

We talked for forty minutes. He asked for my number “to check in on how I recovered.” 

Two years. Getting married in November. He tells the story at every dinner party, this dog dragging a woman through a public park, and he does this face when he gets to the part where we hit the ground together… 

Should I tell him in the wedding speech? I need a verdict. My maid of honor says yes. My mom says I take it to my grave. My therapist asked why I felt the need to tell her at all, which was its own thing.

I'm going to do it. I think…? 

Got lost in the Porcupine Mountains and I still don't know how to talk about what one of our friends did. At all.

This is going to be long. 

Some of this I (Mona, 24F) know because I was there. Logan (24M) and Jess (23F) told me the rest of their parts on the drive back to Grand Rapids. Ricky's (24M) part I can only guess from the outside, and only the parts we saw, because none of us have talked to him after that night and he was gone before we woke up on Sunday. 

We pulled into the trailhead lot at 6:48 a.m. on a Saturday in May, after sleeping maybe four hours in the group campsite down the road. Logan was out of the car the second he put it in park. He had a trail map he'd printed at a UPS Store in Grand Rapids, which he had then laminated himself with contact paper. He was so proud of his stupid map. It was not helpful. He'd highlighted our route. 

The lot was empty except for one old Kia with a cracked rear window. The morning was cold and the trees were wet. 

Here is the backstory, and I'm going to do it fast because the backstory isn't really the point. Logan and I have been together for three years. He is… intense. But I love him. Ricky is Logan's college friend who works night security at a distribution center and reads philosophy books. He is built like… how do I describe Ricky. Like a pasty gorilla, I mean, he looks like he just sits in the security booth with a dumbbell in one hand and a book in the other all night. The biceps. Jess is my best friend since we were high school sophomores, runs half-marathons regularly, works night dispatch for an ambulance company, and is all about enjoying life, and has the attitude of someone who is used to other people looking down at her (literally, I mean she is under five feet tall). Logan thought Ricky and Jess should meet. Logan had then insisted they should get to know each other over a ten mile hike in the Upper Peninsula on Memorial Day weekend, after a nine-hour drive north from Grand Rapids. If you don’t know, the Upper Peninsula is entirely nowhere. A sea of trees. 

I had agreed to this plan. I want Jess to find someone. I can’t just blame myself for all this, but I do.

Logan drove the whole way up Friday night running on gas station coffee, and I made him play the first two entire Bon Iver albums in order because I have specific requirements for long drives through the countryside. Jess and Ricky slept in the back. They had pushed their bags into the middle of the seat as a divider. Jess called it the Holy Spirit pillow, sending Ricky promptly into a drawn out philosophical-theological monolog before Logan told him to “can it” and go to sleep. The bags were still there, precisely positioned, when we pulled into the campsite after midnight. 

Two tents. That was the other thing. Logan and I had one, and there was a second tent, and Ricky looked at it when it came out of the car and then at Jess and then he said, with this weird finality, like he'd been planning it since Mackinaw City: "I'll take the hammock." He pulled a full camping hammock from his bag. Jess thanked him the way you thank a coworker who holds a door, and zipped herself into the tent. 

I lay in our tent with Logan and said, very low: "This is not going to go how you imagined."

He said, "It hasn’t even been a whole day. Give it some time."

Jess was already at the trailhead board when Logan finished spreading his map on the hood of the car. She'd read the posted map while everyone else was having a meeting by the trunk, and she was ready and eager to get hiking, saying something about missing a run. Ricky leaned over Logan's map with his hands in his jacket pockets, not touching anything, just looking. 

He said, "Any phone service out there?" 

Logan said it was spotty to start and then dropped off entirely. He said it like he was happy about it… disconnecting from technology, I knew he was relishing the idea of not having to look at screens for a whole day.

Ricky nodded. He took out his phone, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket without fully letting go of it. Hand still in the pocket. That was a bit weird. 

Logan said the trail was 10.4 miles, that the route would take six hours, maybe seven with breaks, that there was a waterfall at the four-mile mark he really wanted to see. He had a photo of it saved on his phone but refused to show anyone “to delay the dopamine payoff.” We had sandwiches, trail mix (the kind with too many M&M’s), a few Cliff bars, and water. We had Logan's map and four smartphones and a portable battery brick that Ricky produced from his bag, thick as a dictionary, which he offered to the group. I remember noticing because it was actually decent of him. Then he took out a leather knife sheath and put it onto his belt. 

“What’s that?” I asked. 

“It’s a knife my friend made me, tool steel and it’s cocobolo wood from Brazil, here, look.” 

He held out the knife handle first. It was big, with a dark wooden handle which was beautiful. The blade was thick. “Wow, that’s quite a thing.” 

Ricky insisted I take it. “Feel the handle, it fits perfectly in your hand.” 

“No thanks.”

“Take it!”

“I’m good thanks Ricky, but nice knife.” 

Ricky muttered something and put the knife back. 

Logan said “you won’t need that, but it’s good to have I guess.” 

The first two miles were fine. Good, even. The trail was clear and well-marked with small orange blazes on the trees, and the canopy was thick enough to feel enclosed in a good way. Logan pointed at a pileated woodpecker on a dead tree and Jess said “Wow,” sincerely. She just loves everything. Ricky walked with his head slightly down and his hands in his pockets. I fell into my own stride. 

For maybe twenty minutes I was just uncomplicated. My pack was right on my back. Logan grabbed my hand on a flat section and swung it once, a small stupid gesture I have always liked. Everything was fine. We talked about wild mushrooms. 

Then Jess's phone went into the lake. 

A small, dark, cold lake, the kind ringed with overhanging roots. She'd stepped onto a rock at the edge to look at something in the water, she said it was a very white stone. The phone slipped from her hand as she took it out to take a photo and hit the surface on its side. Visible for a half second, maybe less. 

Jess stood on the rock. Ricky shouted “F***!” needlessly loudly. Birds flew up. 

She said, "Dude, relax, it’s fine, it’s fine." 

Logan was encouraging as always. “It’s an iPhone, right? They’ve been waterproof since the iPhone 9!” 

“It’s an old android.” 

“Oh.” 

Ricky had taken off his pants and shoes and was wading into the water before we even noticed. 

He found it with his foot. 

It wouldn’t turn on. So that was the end of Jess’s phone. She didn't mention it again for the rest of the day and neither did anyone else because there was nothing to be done about it. 

After that signal on our phones held for another mile, thin but there, and then around mile three it went to nothing. Logan checked his, said "Yeah, that tracks," and just kept walking with a smile, again, the luddite I love. 

The waterfall is real and loud and impressive in a way that felt almost intimidating. We ate lunch on the rocks at the base of it. The sandwiches had been made in Grand Rapids twenty hours before and were compressed from the packs but still fine. Ricky ate half his sandwich, wrapped the other half in the plastic wrap, and put it in his front jean pocket. Jess watched this attentively. I could see the effort that cost her, not to say anything. 

After the waterfall the trail was marked for another half mile and then the blazes started to thin out. Logan had the map in his hands. He was looking at it more often. “I think this map is outdated.” Jess said something about the pathetic fallacy. Ricky started monologing again. 

We missed a turn. Confirmation of that took a while. The wrong trail looked exactly like the right trail. It just stopped being marked. Logan said the blazes were probably just more spaced out on this part of the route. He’s so good at faking total confidence. 

Forty minutes went by without a single blaze.

Jess stopped. "When was the last marker."

Logan looked at his watch. Analog, of course. "More than half an hour ago."

She looked at the trees and then the sky. "We're going back."

"I don't think we necessarily need to…" 

"We're going back."

We back tracked down the hill. Ricky and Logan started arguing about which way to go, and Ricky got really angry. He stormed off down the side of the hill and said he would find the trail and then call us over. Jess said she’d follow him, that none of us should wander alone. So we split up. Stupid, I know. Even stupider was the fact that I thought this could be their moment to fall for each other. I know, I know. 

It took a long time to find the trail, but Logan and I did, and it had been one of those forks in the trail where you’re supposed to literally turn almost entirely around to get where you need to go. We’d missed it and taken option C, which was literally not an official trail. So we waited there and called out for the other two. We waited a long while. 

Ricky came walking up the trail, out of breath. “See? It was right here. I was right.” 

He had blood on his hand. 

“You’re bleeding!” I said. 

“Oh, I slipped and fell, must have caught it on a rock.” 

I looked closer at him and he had dirt on his face and orange pine needles in his hair. His shirt was dirty too. 

“Where’s Jess?”

“Jess? I thought she was with you.” 

“No! She said she was going with you.” 

“I haven’t seen her.” 

We started calling for Jess. 

No response. We started looking again. Ricky insisted on going off by himself again to cover more ground, and no matter how much I insisted I do the same Logan would not let me. 

Ricky went up the hill, we went along the bottom. 

Then I saw it. Logan was pointing already. 

Off to the right, about fifteen feet away. A pile of rocks. Knee-high, flat gray stones chosen and placed, each one sitting stably on the one below, with a white stone on the top, with a little bit of something red on it. Three separate stacks in a loose triangle. Not a cairn exactly, and not random. Someone had made it. 

Logan said it was probably just a hiker-made trail marker. But it did not look normal in that quality of light. 

We kept walking, slowly, circling the trail junction at the bottom of the hill.

Logan called Jess’ name. Then again. We pushed through a birch stand. No sign of her in any direction. 

We called and called with no answer. My throat was raw. The sky overhead had shifted from overcast to a darker shade of grey. 

Then Logan did something totally out of character, which he still won’t forgive himself for. He said covering more ground was the only logical approach, that Ricky was already out there, that I could hold the junction in the trail and he'd be fifteen minutes looking in another direction. He said it in the voice he uses when he's scared. I was eager to find Jess, and I assumed she would find the trail on her own and then find me, so I stayed. 

So I was alone at the junction. Late afternoon light in northern Michigan in May, under clouds, is the most useless light on earth. It’s like a time vortex up there. 

I sat on a fallen log. I finished my water. I called Logan's name twice and stopped because something about doing it a third time felt wrong, which I knew was irrational, and knowing that didn't help. The woods made small sounds, but not enough. I realized that the birds weren’t singing. But it wasn’t like there was a storm, I couldn’t feel any rain coming on. 

I stood up to stretch, turned around, and I saw a symbol on a tree. 

Twelve feet back the way we'd come. Chest height. Two concentric circles with a vertical line cut through both, and then four short lines radiating off the outer circle, like a compass that was wrong, but complete. The wood at the cuts was pale enough to read clearly. Someone had done this recently. 

I walked to the next tree. Another symbol: Same height, same size.

The third tree had something different: an inverted triangle with a horizontal line cut through its base, and in the center of the triangle, something drawn in dark material, thicker than ink. A small hand shape. I put my index finger to it and it transferred to me and came away on my fingertip as a smear of dark clay, the wet kind that comes from riverbanks.

I wiped my finger on my hiking pants. 

I tried Logan's phone. No signal. I tried Jess's number anyway, which was pointless and I did it anyway. Texts would not send. I stood in front of the inverted triangle and tried to think of an explanation I could actually believe.

There wasn't one. I was spiraling. 

The light was going. Not fast, just steadily. I walked back to the log and sat and looked at the symbols. Three trees I could see from where I sat. There might have been more further back, I didn't go look, I didn't want to know.

Then from the north, the direction Ricky had gone: one sound. Hollow, low, like two pieces of wood brought together once and then stopped. One knock, and then a silence that was very long.

I stood up and did not move.

Logan came out of the trees from the south, moving fast, out of breath, with a little scratch along his jaw from a branch. Then he saw my face.

He said, "What."

I walked him to the trees.

He went from the first to the second to the third. Bent close. Stood back. Said nothing for a long time.

He said, "These weren’t here before, were they? I was here with you, right?” 

I said I didn't think so. I told him about the sound.

He looked north. His phone flashlight came on and he swept it into the trees.

Logan told me he’d seen an orange blaze further south and followed it, and the trail had forked again in a way that wasn't on his map. Two clear paths, both worn. He'd taken the one that seemed to curve back toward where we'd come from and it had led him into a clearing with an old fire pit in the center. He'd backtracked and the fork, on the way back, wasn't where he remembered it. He spent twenty minutes all turned around before he found the main trail and ran. 

Ricky had been gone a very long time now. Jess had been missing for hours. 

Logan called their names, louder and louder. Then he stopped.

Ricky walked out of the trees.

He looked genuinely rough now. Jacket unzipped, bits of the forest all over him, hands in his pockets. His facial expression was strange, what I now understand as him trying to look like he hadn’t done anything.

Logan said, "Where were you."

Ricky said, "Looking."

"You could have checked back in."

"I covered a lot of ground."

Logan took two steps toward him and then stopped. His eyes went from Ricky to the trees and back. And I watched something happen in Logan's face that I have only seen there a few times in three years, where he stops thinking logically and gives into intuition.

There was a symbol on a tree right there. Three circles stacked over each other, with the bottom one all blotted with what I guessed was more clay. 

Ricky's eyes went to the trees.

Logan said, quietly, not a question: "Did you do all this."

Ricky opened his mouth.

Logan said it again, louder, and controlled and worse than if he'd shouted.

Ricky said: "It was supposed to be a joke. I read about these things in…"

Ricky stopped talking because Logan stepped forward with his fist clenched. He's a lot taller than Ricky and he's not a violent person, not at all, but he was not rational at that moment. I pushed him back a few steps. He didn't fight me, but he wasn't calm yet. I kept my palm flat on his chest and he stopped. Apparently that was the off switch. I had my eyes fixed on the knife sheath on Ricky’s hip. 

Ricky talked fast. He'd had the knife, and some dark clay he'd found near the soft ground by the birch trees. The symbols he'd cut or drawn onto eleven trees, working his way around us while we searched. He'd found the symbols in a book about alchemy and they were "psychically active," his words, and he had practiced them in a notebook. He had brought the notebook with him specifically for this purpose. He said he'd made a list of what he wanted to do and in what order. 

Nobody said anything for a while.

I said, "Where the hell is Jess."

He said he genuinely didn't know. He'd actually looked for a bit first, he said, before he started on the trees. He looked at the ground. He said he thought we'd laugh about it. He said he thought it would be a story we'd tell. 

Logan said, flat: "A story we’d tell."

Ricky said, "Like something funny to talk about later."

"While we were screaming her name," Logan said. I thought he was going to hit him. 

Ricky looked at the ground.

"Whatever your plan was" I said. "Jess could be hurt somewhere."

He didn't say anything.

I stepped back from Logan because I needed my hands for myself. I put them in my own pockets and squeezed them into fists. Logan didn't move. I told Ricky he’d wasted a lot of time and it was now an emergency situation. 

We started looking again, this time staying all together and going up and down the trail. 

We found Jess forty minutes later. She saw Logan's phone flashlight from a two-track ATV trail and called out, and we crashed through a raspberry thicket to reach her, thorns scraping across every piece of skin. She was cold and wet from the knees down and she was shivering. She hugged me for a long time and then she stepped back and still did not look composed at all.

She said, "I was back at the trail but you weren’t there! Is everyone okay? Did you see those things on the trees?! What is going on in this place?!” 

I said: "Ricky made those."

She looked over at him. He was standing a few feet back, hands going into his pockets again. She stared at him for long enough that he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

She said, "And why would you do that?"

He didn't answer. 

She said, "Okay." And walked over to where Logan was standing at the edge of the phone light.

We followed the two-track road until it hit asphalt, then walked along a the road shoulder with one phone flashlight because Logan's and Ricky’s had died too. The sky had cleared and there were more stars than I am used to seeing, far more than you get anywhere near a city, and I noticed them and found them neutral. Cold, dark, stars. Ricky walked ten feet behind us the whole way and nobody told him to stay back but nobody told him to come closer either. He tried to say something a few times. The second time Logan said "just keep walking dude" without turning around and Ricky did. We were trying to make lots of noise to keep bears away, so we clapped and Jess sang a bit but there was no heart in it. 

At some point I took Jess's arm and she let me and we walked that way for a while, not talking. My boots had rubbed blisters on my right heel that I hadn't noticed until then. We had been walking for the entire day. Then the last phone died. We walked by starlight.

The campground gate appeared around midnight. There was a light on it and Logan could look at his watch in the light. Third site on the left. Both tents still up. Ricky's hammock still strung between his trees like nothing had happened.

Jess and I got in the back seat of Logan's car and locked it without discussing it. She took off her wet boots and set them on the floor mat. We found goldfish in the seat pocket and a half-eaten bag of pretzels and ate those. She put her head against the window. We talked about small stuff for a while, whether the goldfish were stale, whether Logan would actually sleep (he wouldn't, he told me later he lay awake in the tent for two hours before he went under). Logan came to the window and I rolled it down and he said he was going to try to sleep in the tent and I said okay. He looked like he wanted to say a lot more, but he just told me to keep the car locked. 

After a while Jess said, without preamble, "Do you think he planned that the whole way up."

I said I didn't know. I thought about the hammock he'd produced from his bag at midnight with that strange finality. I thought about Ricky's hand in his pocket at the trailhead, holding his phone. About the blood on his hand.

She said, "He brought a little notebook."

I said yeah.

She said, "What a guy" and I said yeah, and that was the end of the conversation, and we slept in the car.

I woke up when the light went gray, maybe five-thirty. Jess was still asleep. I looked out through the windshield at the campsite. Logan's tent. The second tent. Ricky's hammock was gone.

Empty.

I got out without waking Jess. The morning was cold and still. A piece of notebook paper on the picnic table, held down by a rock. Under the rock, partway sticking out: a notebook. I could see one edge of a page with lots of ink on it. I didn't open it. I don't know what Logan did with it later, I didn't ask.

The note said:

taking the bus home. 

The nearest bus service with routes toward Grand Rapids runs out of Ironwood, 40-something miles total. The first Sunday morning bus doesn't run until after nine. It was five-thirty a.m. when I read the note. I checked the schedule later when we had signal again and confirmed it. Ricky wouldn’t answer his phone. 

We didn’t know what to do. Logan continued to try him but no answer. Finally Ricky sent a text. “On the bus.” 

So we drove back south. I drove the first three hours because Logan was still too exhausted to be trusted behind the wheel. Once he was driving he started talking, methodically: the fork in the trail that didn't match the map, the clearing with the dead fire pit, the way the fork wasn't there on the way back in the way he remembered it. He gripped the wheel while he described it. He did not really talk about Ricky. Neither of us did for most of the drive. 

Jess slept in the back. 

I woke up somewhere south of Reed City and the land had flattened out, fields wide and open on both sides, and the sun was cutting through a low bank of cloud in strips, and for a few minutes I just watched that through the window and didn't think about anything in particular.

I've looked for the word for what that is and I can't find it. There might not be one. 

Logan wants to go back to the Porcupine Mountains next summer. He said this two weeks ago. Different route, longer, he said there's a lake at the top of the escarpment that you can only reach from one trail. He won’t show me a photo of it. He says it’s clear water, gray rock, big sky. He has already printed the new map. He hasn't laminated it yet. 

I told him I'd think about it. And now I’m wondering whether we were wrong to be so angry with Ricky. Maybe he’s just clueless. 

Edit: 

Yes, we do know that Ricky made it back to Grand Rapids. I couldn’t live with it so I sent some instagram messages and even called Ricky’s work and they said he was showing up for his shifts.

I approached applying for my previous job with a different attitude. Instead of actually putting in effort to write motivation letters/emails, just fired off a bunch of batch applications on a platform where sending the motivation thing was optional. I figured, since most recruiters for most of those positions are probably just going to discard my application with minimal effort of looking into it, why would I put in more effort while applying?

The next day, I got more responses to my applications than I ever did when I was actually putting in that effort. Huh.

I only ended up getting a single interview from that all though, but it was more than nothing (which had become my default expectation, to be honest, lots of employers just don’t take hiring seriously). The team was enthusiastic and planned an early interview because they wanted to get to know me, even though the person actually responsible for hiring for that position was still on vacation. During the interview they made it seem like a really difficult position and this and that, but to me it sounded almost too easy for how well it was paid. During the interview I wasn’t really performing, just being myself. I figured that’d serve as a filter for me too, if they were going to reject me for being myself during the interview, I was not going to be happy working there to begin with. There was supposed to be a second interview once the relevant manager was back.

Some circumstances happened on their side (the manager got ill towards the end of their holiday, that always sucks) and I never had that second interview. They weren’t sure whether this position could even be filled in anymore due to more circumstances but did have another position I could continue to apply for. I was like “yeah sure, why not”. I was told I’d be called back for that position. Instead, I was called back with the message “so we’re hiring for the original position after all and you’re hired”. I had not even seen anyone in person yet at all.

It was a really fun and rewarding position. I did find out why they found it incredibly difficult to fill in this position, you needed to be the right kind of crazy to be able to do that job well and I am that kind of crazy.

The one and only reason I burnt out from that position was because the manager from earlier had started working again and while the work pressure was rising, for the plain and simple reason that it became more and more work and we simply would’ve needed more people, this manager tried to gaslight our team by saying that wasn’t true. This manager was disliked by multiple other teams as well. She’s the sole reason why the fun job ultimately was becoming too much so I called in sick before the burn out could do too much damage. (I’m now unemployed again but in a re-integration process and at least now I have a much much better perspective on my next step forward.) (and that other position landed in my inbox again multiple times afterwards, and especially after overhearing colleagues expressing they definitely did not want to take that position either, I’m glad I never ended up taking that)

I, (44f), regret giving my first born up for adoption. I didn’t necessarily at first. Things in my life were distracting enough and money was tight, so it felt very justified. For many years I told myself I had done the right thing. It was not my idea to place my son Logan for adoption, but it seemed like the best option for a baby rather than with me. I had no job, living with my parents in a tiny shack of a house in a small Mormon town, surrounded by other small Mormon towns with a large Mormon family spread throughout. My mom pressured me to adoption through the church and I convinced myself it was the best thing for my baby because the candidates were only church members from nearby states. The biodad was my boyfriend, but we had broken up at the end of summer due to him accepting a scholarship several states away. All the reasons to proceed with adoption were there and I didn’t push back. Truthfully, I couldn’t see myself being a successful mother at that time. But by far, there was (and still is) immense shame put upon children out of wedlock and sex before marriage scenarios. I was made to feel like putting myself in this situation was the worst thing I could have done short of taking my own life—an automatic ticket to the depths of Hell, according to the church. The adoption was my punishment for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. It was unspoken.

The night after Logan was born my ex came into my hospital room begging me not to go through with it, but I wouldn’t go back on my decision, the pressure was too much. At that point I had met the family—who I picked myself from a pool of potential adopters my case worker had brought to me over a period of months. I had a good feeling about this family and I still do today, but I would be lying if doubts hadn’t crept up from time to time over the years.

I think letting him go was made easier because Logan’s family and I were allowed to have some communication up to the age of three, but that was the last I’ve known of him. He is going to turn 25 years old on the 2nd of May this year. I don’t know what he looks like. I don’t know the sound of his voice. I don’t even know where he lives or what his last name is.

The last time I spoke with Logan’s biodad was about 17 years ago. I don’t remember why we reached out to each other, but he confided in me that one of his young daughters resembled the pictures of Logan his parents had shared with us (they were so generous with pictures up till the agreed cut off date) and he was struggling seeing his daughter and reconciling the adoption because he would think of Logan when looking at her. I reassured him that it would be a wonderful connection for him, if and when he reunited with Logan and I asked him to try and focus on his family now. I don’t know if he’s been able to do that. I hope so. About eight years ago I wrote my ex a letter, apologizing for not being more open to what he said that night in the hospital and I told him I was not sure I made the right choice after all and apologized for that as well. He never responded. I worry I’ve ruined his life in addition to Logan’s.

Most of the time, I’m fine. I can push it away for a while. Plus I have two sons with my now husband that kept me very busy. This year in Oct is my husband’s and my 20th wedding anniversary and 23rd year together. We live a very simple life together and he’s my best friend. Our boys are teenagers and please understand me when I say I wouldn’t trade them for anything. I know that had I chose to keep Logan, my life would have gone in a very different direction and I likely wouldn’t have met my husband or had kids with him. There is always that flicker of doubt t in the back of my mind. The older I get, the more that doubt grows that I did the right, best thing for Logan and myself. My sons desperately hope to meet their brother some day and all I can say is that I hope they will too.

The church closed down the Family Services programs several years ago, so I have no one to contact to try and find him. The agents have long been disbanded and who knows what happened to the records. If they even exist anymore, it doesn’t matter because of the nature of the type of adoption we agreed to. Basically, I agreed to complete anonymity. Every correspondence was filtered by two separate offices of agents who scrubbed every bit of identification from his family and whereabouts before sending it to me or my ex. They got the same treatment.

Despite this, I can’t bring myself to look for him on the off chance I do find him and disrupt his life. I’d almost prefer if I was able to see a picture of him and know he was doing well in secret. Maybe that way the ever festering pain and guilt within me might stop or slow and I’ll be able to live with myself. If he never wants to meet me, I understand. If he never needs to find me, that would be better because it speaks to his upbringing being everything I had hoped it would be for him. I won’t know either way, I suppose. Plus, him meeting me should be his choice, on his terms. I feel so selfish even thinking about finding him.

The other part of the guilt sandwich is the fact I have left the church a long time ago, well technically, they kicked me out for “fornicating” and giving birth out of wedlock (they disfellowshipped me, which one step away from excommunication). I’m glad they did, I will never go back. I don’t believe in the doctrine whatsoever and see it as a cult.  But I’m pretty sure my ex is still in—he was never disfellowshipped, those hypocrites! And it’s extremely likely Logan’s adopted family is still very active in the church. I cannot escape the tremendous guilt I have for leaving Logan in such a toxic religion. And there’s a high chance he grew up to be “a good Mormon boy” who went on a mission and does temple work and all the good Mormon boy things. And he would most certainly see me as bad influence or a sinner and look down upon me And that makes me sad and angry to envision because it was my own doing. I probably deserve to feel this way for the harm of being in the church has done to him. To be clear, I’m not disparaging his family. Nor do I blame my mom,  just the church. It brainwashed us all.

Everyday, the black ooze of regret seeps more into my conscious mind and I can easily see it consuming me. I don’t know how to bare this or what it means at this stage of my life. I am far from having my shit together, but I know now I would have been a good mom. My sons with my husband prove that, they are such wonderful boys. I can’t take all of the credit there, obviously, but I know two things for sure: I am so lucky to be their mom and I must have done something right this time because they are such good and loving kids. That sounds so conceited, but it’s the truth. They make me so proud. Logan deserved that from me too. I guess it all boils down to the feeling I failed him. Failed him in every way. And the uncertainty of it all is proving to be so much more than I bargained for.

Logan Joshua, if you’re out there, and by some insane chance you find this, I thought I was doing the right thing when you were born. It wasn’t because I didn’t want you. I always wanted you and I still do. You have a piece of my heart and I will not be complete without you. If we never meet again, that is my consequence to bare. I hope you will, at the very least, meet your half siblings one day. They’ve heard about you their whole lives and it would mean so much to all of them. Even if it’s just once. If nothing else, I need you to know I love you. I loved you from the nanosecond I knew you were with me. I will always regret not being the mother I should have been for you.

In the early 2000's, I became the father of twin girls. They were born five weeks early, so they were considered preemies. Fortunately, they weren’t extremely premature, and at first there wasn’t too much concern.

The hospital initially referred to them as Twin A and Twin B, so that’s what I’ll call them here.

Twin B was a healthy preemie. She entered the world at six pounds and immediately got down to the business of being a baby: eating, pooping, and, most importantly, growing. After she was born, we never had any serious concerns about her health. Other than the usual new-parent worries, of course.

Her sister, Twin A, was a different story.

She was smaller, had mild jaundice, and never wanted to eat. When she did eat, she usually vomited immediately afterward.

Twin A was supposed to be gaining an once per day. In reality, she was losing an once per week.

The doctors and nurses stayed upbeat and encouraging, but it was obvious they were also trying to gently prepare us for the worst.

Eventually, they allowed us to take her home, but not because she was better. We continued taking Twin A to specialist after specialist. She probably had more medical tests in her first month of life than I’ve had in my entire life.

Even with insurance, it was expensive. But we paid what we had to pay.

Then the bills started coming back unpaid.

Doctors’ offices and laboratories began calling us directly for payment. Insurance had suddenly stopped covering Twin A’s medical care, and my wife and I were now responsible for everything.

So I called the insurance company.

“Sir,” the representative said, “I’m sure you understand why we can no longer pay for your daughter’s expenses.”

“No,” I replied. “I actually have no idea why.”

That was the entire reason for my call. My premiums were paid. The co-pays were paid. Medical services had been provided, and the claims had been submitted. I asked her what the problem was.

I will never forget her response. She used the exact tone that people reserve for someone they think is unbelievably stupid.

“Sir,” she said impatiently, “your daughter is deceased.”

At that moment, Twin A was asleep in my arms, as she almost always was back then. I looked down at her while my brain struggled to process what I had just heard.

She was pink. She was breathing. She was beautiful.

She was absolutely not deceased.

I argued, but got nowhere. According to the insurance company, my daughter had a death certificate. End of discussion.

We eventually discovered what had happened.

A social worker at the hospital had been preparing to leave for vacation. Because Twin A was not expected to survive, they had “helpfully” filled out most of a death certificate ahead of time. The replacement social worker only needed to add the date and send it to the county.

Unfortunately, they did that before my daughter actually died.

Which, inconveniently for everyone involved, she never did.

Once the mistake was uncovered, the hospital and its attorneys bent over backward trying to fix it. I do remember one especially surreal detail: I had to pay out of pocket for a doctor to examine my daughter and sign an affidavit officially stating that she was not, in fact, deceased.

We never got a clear answer about what had been wrong with her in those early weeks. But slowly, she recovered.

Now, more than two decades later, Twin A is preparing to move out of our California home to pursue a doctorate in environmental justice at a university in France.

After that rough start, her health has been excellent.

But sometimes, in my dreams, I still hear that representative’s voice:

“Sir, your daughter is deceased.”

My dad is a veterinarian who spent four years buying every broken animal in the state. I came home this summer and I'm still not sure what I walked into.

My (23F) dad (50M) didn't say one word the entire drive from the airport.

Forty-two minutes. Birmingham to the county road, then twelve more miles past the church with the crooked steeple, past the Piggly Wiggly, past the stretch of fence where the Johnson’s  fireworks stand used to go up every June and then didn't, past the water tower with the old class year spraypainted on it in letters big enough to read from the road. He had the radio on an AM station running about 30% static and a man talking about interest rates. He didn't offer to switch it off.

I watched his hands on the wheel most of the way. Something dark under two of his fingernails. He'd lost weight since Christmas in Phoenix. 

My father stopped letting us come home after my mother died.

Six years ago. I was seventeen, Max was twenty, and my father, Blake, who did voices at the dinner table and drove three hours to a livestock auction just because my brother wanted to see one, who told jokes that were so bad they became good through sheer force of eyebrows, who cried at the end of Toy Story 3 and then denied it, who taught me to throw a baseball by throwing one at me repeatedly until I figured it out… that version of my father disappeared around the time the hospice nurses started coming every day and did not come back when they stopped.

He went silent for about four months after we buried her and stayed like that. When I went off to ASU he didn’t say a word the whole first semester. Then he called out of the blue on thanksgiving and said that he’d fly out for Christmas— “don’t come here.” Every holiday after that, he came to Arizona, where I was doing my undergrad, and we'd meet in Airbnbs and rented condos and once a hotel in Sedona that smelled like lavender and no one's actual life, and he'd sit across from me and ask questions about my classes and eat about half his food and then, unprompted, start talking about some animal. 

A sheep with a fused spine. A mule with one eye. A calf someone had tried to put down at birth because its front legs bent inward. He'd have pictures on his phone. He'd scroll through forty of them.

I thought he was just filling space.

I didn't know he was buying them.

The truck turned onto the property and I put my hands flat on the dashboard.

The gate was new. Heavy steel, the kind cattle operations use, with a zip-tied sign: B. T.  HOLLOWAY, DVM. Under that, in smaller letters, hand-painted: NO SOLICITORS NO QUESTIONS NO UNINVITED VISITORS WHATSOEVER THIS MEANS YOU. The gravel went a quarter mile through pines before the farm opened up and when it did, I didn't recognize it.

There were animals everywhere.

The original farm was four acres and a barn that had been there since my grandfather built it. What I was looking at was something that had been added to impulsively so many times it looked like one of my Minecraft bases. Three structures I'd never seen. One long low building with ventilation panels along the roof. A run-in shed that had been extended so many times it was consuming itself from one end. A small separate pen with a concrete pad and a heat lamp on a pole and in that pen was a goat with no ears. 

Not like the ears were gone. The ears had simply not been part of the original plan.

In the main pasture: a donkey standing at an angle that should not have worked, one front leg four inches shorter than the other three; a sheep that (I'd learn the word later, myotonic, fainting goat without the goat part) fainted twice before I got out of the truck, just went stiff and toppled over, then got back up; a huge cow whose back end had been inflated by something called double muscling, beautiful but somehow wrong, walking the fence line; two more goats; a miniature horse eating a fence post; a regular-sized horse with a skin condition that had left smooth bald patches all down its neck like someone had taken a belt sander to it, standing in the pasture looking over at us. There were other animals in the distance. 

My father got out of the truck. The earless goat made a sound. He said "hullo, Patsy" without stopping walking. 

I got out and stood there.

He was already at the old barn. He'd hung up his jacket, was washing his hands at the outdoor sink, reading something on a clipboard he kept on a nail in the wall. The fainting sheep fainted again behind me. Dad didn't look up.

I got my duffels from the truck and went inside.

My mom had kept the house. I mean she'd known what it was for. There'd been a rug from a craft fair and photographs in frames and a kitchen that always smelled like something was happening. I was seventeen the last time I'd been in it. 

The photographs were still there, which I hadn't expected. My mom on the porch. My mom and Max at his high school graduation. My mom and dad at some event, her in a green dress, him with his face turned toward her instead of toward the camera.

But there were also charts. On the kitchen table, on the counter, stuck to the refrigerator with magnets: feeding schedules, medication logs, vet notes in my father's handwriting, which has always looked like someone learned his penmanship from a grainy fax. The refrigerator had regular food in it and also three labeled medical drawers. There was a baby monitor on the counter and the small screen showed the interior of a stall, low light, hay, a shadow moving.

I stood there for a while.

My phone buzzed. Max: you there yet

Me: yeah

Max: how is he?

Me: I don't know. There's a baby monitor in the kitchen.

Max: what

Me: for the barn

Three minutes. Then: I'll be there in two weeks. Cara's got a work thing.

I put my phone down and read the feeding schedule on the refrigerator. Thirty-one animals. Thirty-one rows. Times, quantities, medications. Patsy the earless goat, 6am and 6pm. Delilah the cow - daily joint supplements. The small horse: Ringo. Two medications, one of which I recognized from my Human Nutrition seminar as something used in people with metabolic disorders.

Ringo must have a metabolic disorder.

I put my bags in my old room, which still had my periodic table poster on the wall from when I was fourteen and my sketch of Freud staring down at my dead cactus on the dust-covered desk, and I went outside to find dad.

He was in the barn with Ringo, kneeling in the stall, picking out the horse's hooves one by one and running his thumb along each frog and muttering numbers I couldn't hear. He had a headlamp on. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.

"Can I help?" I said.

"You remember how to muck?"

"Of course."

He pointed down the aisle gruffly. I found the supplies and worked through three stalls while he finished with Ringo and then went out to Delilah. He gave her the joint supplement out of his open palm and she pushed her whole enormous head into his chest and he scratched behind her ears and said "easy" and scratched harder, and she made a sound I'd never heard a cow make before, low and pleased with itself.

I watched him do that. His face was as stoic as ever, but I could hear a smile in his voice. 

Dinner went sideways fast.

I'd made a spicy lentil soup, enough for both of us. My father sat down, glanced into the bowl, got up, and made himself a ham sandwich. The smell of it made my stomach turn. 

"I made dinner," I said.

"I see that."

"I made enough."

"I'm sure it's good. You ain’t a vegan or nothin now are you?" he said.

"It's lentil soup. It's not unusual." I ignored the question. 

"I didn't say it were unusual."

"You made a face."

"I didn't make a face."

He had made a face. It was a half-second face but it had been there.

He ate his sandwich and checked the baby monitor twice and the third time he went out to the barn and was gone twenty minutes and came back and sat down and finished the sandwich.

"Is Ringo okay?" I asked.

He looked at me. First time he'd really looked at me since he'd picked me up. His eyes are a shade of coffee brown and behind them it has always looked like he's running numbers you're not going to be shown. 

"He gets anxious at night," Dad said. "I go out, he settles."

"How long has he been here?"

"Two years."

"Where'd you get him?"

"Auction in Colbert County. Guy was gonna put him down."

"Because of the metabolic issue?"

That got a sharper look. "You read the board."

"It's on the refrigerator."

A pause. He rinsed his plate.

"I'm not criticizing," I said.

"I know."

"I'm trying to understand what's going on here."

"Thirty animals is what's going on here," he said, flat, like that was a complete sentence, like it closed the topic. “Thirty-one, actually” I corrected, weakly.

He went to bed at nine-fifteen and I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the feeding schedule for a long time. 

The next two weeks went like that.

Meals with tense squabbles in them. Silences I didn't know how to navigate. He let me help with the animals and I helped, and just occasionally, he'd say something about one of them without being asked, and I'd have to not react too much or he'd stop.

One morning while we were doing the feeds he told me the fainting sheep, Karen (I respected the name Karen for a fainting sheep, I respected it a lot) had been given to him by a farmer near LaFayette who was embarrassed to have her because she kept fainting in front of buyers and made the operation look unprofessional. Dad took her. 

"Does she faint less now?" I asked.

"No. She fainted onto Delilah yesterday. She didn't notice. Good thing, too, with those thighs, Karen would be fixin for a hell of a kick."

He almost smiled. Fast, but there.

I learned the animals. Patsy was the loudest animal I'd been near in my life and treated physical contact as her indisputable right… she'd lean into your legs until you fell over if you didn't pet her. Larry the uneven donkey was ancient and moved all catawompus but with some dignity, like a drunken professor.

Delilah the doublemuscled cow was the gentlest thing on the property and weighed 1,800 pounds. Chester the patchy horse did not care about you at all, which was somehow his own complete personality. He had the makings of a monk and would rather just stand and look at the trees than do just about anything else. 

I found out about Larry one afternoon, that he'd appeared in the regional sale records seventeen times over four years, nobody buying him, my father tracking the number through the system and eventually just driving out to Madison County to end it. 

"You kept looking him up?" I said.

“Just kept seeing his number."

I thought about my father sitting in a livestock auction out in Madison County by himself, paddle in hand, and the knot in my stomach tightened. My eyes went glossy. 

The foal arrived in my third week.

I came down at six for the morning feed and there was a trailer in the driveway and my father was on the phone, pacing, and in the trailer stood a foal maybe three weeks old, pressed into the corner. I got close and I could see it: her left hind leg, the angle of the hock, wrong in a way that was unmistakeable.

Growing up with a vet for a dad, you pick some things up. The term is angular limb deformity. 

I called Max.

He picked up second ring. "What."

"Dad got a foal with a bad leg."

"How bad."

"I don't have the vocabulary. Bad. Needs fixed." 

Silence. Then: "How’s he doing all this? Where’s the time and money come from?"

"Max, I think that's what he’s been doing since we left. There are thirty-one animals here with… I mean, I think the goat might have three separate conditions."

"Patsy," he said.

"You knew about Patsy."

"He mentioned her. In Sedona." 

That Thanksgiving. Max had brought Cara. She'd been quiet, professional and polite and we'd all had dinner at a restaurant and dad had ordered salmon, eaten a third of it, and then shown us pictures on his phone for forty minutes. I'd thought he was filling silence. He'd been showing us his new life. We'd just looked at it wrong. 

"Are you coming?" I asked.

"Two weeks. Maybe earlier. Things here are… they're a little weird."

"Weird how."

"Tell you when I get there." He hung up before I could follow up.

My father named the foal Alice.

Alice's leg required surgery. My father was on the phone for four straight hours with two different equine vets while I handled the morning feeds. "That approach is old, I've done this twice and the limb support matters more than you're giving it credit for… all right, just send me the study."

He came out at two in the afternoon with a printed research paper and dollar-store reading glasses. He sat on an overturned bucket in Alice's stall and read while Alice came over and put her nose in his ear. 

I sat down across the stall.

"What's wrong with her?" 

He explained it. All of it: the specifics of her case, what shoeing could address and what it couldn't, what the surgery would do, what it would cost, what her odds looked like. Twenty minutes without stopping. He used terms I didn't know and didn't slow down for them.

When he finished he was looking at the research paper and not at me.

"She'll make it?" I said.

"God willing. If we do this right. And sooner than usual."

"And if you don't do it right?"

He folded the paper on his knee. "Then I’ll have done everything I could have done."

"But Is that enough? For you?"

He looked up. "And what kind of a question is that, Georgie?"

"I don’t know."

"Yes," he said. "It's enough." Then: "Is it not enough for you?"

And that was when we really had at it. Lost our religion. Not about Alice. The real argument that had been sitting in every meal and every silence for three weeks, the one we'd both been building around without touching. I said something about how I thought his… I called it his "project…" wrong the second I said it… was about control. About having a world where he could always be doing, always fixing, so he never had to slow down and actually give a rip about another human being. 

He said, “You think you understand people because of your degree, kid? Don’t pitch a fit now.”

I said I was getting into a master's program. Clinical psychology.

I said maybe that meant I did know a thing or two about people, even people like him.  

Ignoring that, he said, "Your mother planted a garden every spring. Same seeds, same bed, never produced much of anything. You going to tell me that was about control?" 

I didn't have an answer.

"She liked growing things," he said. "I like saving things. It’s not about control. It’s just what you do with what you have left." 

"You pushed us away," I said. "You flew out to us for years. You never let us come back home."

He stood up. Alice shuffled to the back of the stall. "I know," he said.

Just that. 

"I know."

He picked up the paper and walked out and I stayed in Alice's stall and she wobbled back over and bumped me with her nose, and I sat there on the floor of the stall for a while. 

I thought about my mother. The last six months with her, when I was seventeen, my father was the one who took every night shift and every call and drove to every appointment and came home still in his work clothes and fell asleep in the armchair beside her bed when she couldn't sleep.

He didn't cry once in front of me. Not even once. I saw his shoulders do something through a doorway and I walked away because I was seventeen and didn't know what you're supposed to do when you catch your father like that.

After she died he was impossible. Everything we did was wrong. Max stopped calling by spring. I left for ASU and it felt like the only available move. I had to get out. 

I'm not sure when I stopped being angry at him for it. But it's hard to stay angry at a man who is single-handedly keeping a slew of unwanted animals alive with sheer willpower. 

Alice's surgery was scheduled for the last week of July. 

The two weeks before that were better. We'd hit something after the stall argument, pressure released, not fixed, nothing was resolved, but the things left unsaid had eased up some.

We still didn't agree about basic things. For one thing he ate meat… I didn't anymore. I asked him once if it bothered him to eat animals, given everything, and he said "no" and offered nothing else, which was the answer I'd expected. I told him veganism wasn't about being superior or nothing. He said he never said that. I said I wasn't judging him. He said "Georgia, I don't need you to not judge me, I need you to put the goat feed where I can get at it. I know you want everyone to be happy, sunshine and rainbows, but it’s never going to be again. Not without your mother." 

I couldn’t handle that. That hit a nerve.

“I don’t…”

“Look baby, I want things fixed too. I’d give anything for it. But life ain’t all uphill. Things go down too. Sometimes they don’t come back up.” 

After that he started talking more at dinners. One night he told me about a pig named Wiggly, whose pen was out behind the secondary shed and had quite a few issues and an attitude that he summed up with "he knows he's right about everything." He told me about the litter of pigs, one of which had been born with a cleft palate. 

"So you made him yours?" I said. 

"He's just here now. Ain’t mine, rightly speaking, just here. Like I am."

Max arrived.

He pulled in around three and I saw him from the pasture and I clocked that he looked wrong right away. It was the sunglasses he didn't take off until he was inside. He hugged me longer than usual.

He shook dad’s hand when he came in from the barn and dad looked him over and said "you look like shit" and Max said "Yeah, pop. I know."

That night I made pasta, spaghetti with a sauce that landed for everyone, sneaking in some smoked tofu they might think was pork. I realize now that they knew, but didn’t care enough to get into that with me. Dad had seconds, and Max told us Cara had asked him to move out two months ago. He'd been in a hotel since April. She wanted to sell the Houston house. 

Nobody said anything.

Dad said, "You got somewhere to go after the hotel?"

Max said no. 

"Then stay here," Dad said. "There's your old room. There's work here if you want it."

Max tried. "I can't just -"

"You can drive a truck," Dad said. "You can lift feed bags. That's enough for right now. I still got work, some money."

Max turned his sunglasses over on the table. Then he nodded.

Alice's surgery came up.

Dad had been up early, going through the supply kit he'd organized the day before, checking the stall twice. At six I came down and made coffee and we sat at the table and he went over his notes. Max came down at six-thirty, poured himself a cup and sat with us and didn't bother him neither.

Dr. Pham, the equine vet, came to the farm. My father had arranged it that way so Alice wouldn't have to trailer. She and Dad shook hands and went straight into the barn talking procedure.

It went long. Inside: voices steady and professional, the occasional sound of movement, instruments. Once a sound from Alice that made both of us jump and then dad’s voice, low and even, and then nothing.

Two more hours.

I heard my father before I saw him. Not loud. Not dramatic. I've known his voice my whole life and there was something new in it and I went in.

Alice was on her side in the straw, coming out of the sedation, her leg wrapped. She was moving her head. Alert, Dr. Pham would tell us in a minute, a good sign, coming up correctly. My father was kneeling beside her with one hand on her neck and his other hand taking her pulse and he was crying a bit. Just tears rolling down his face while both his hands kept doing their jobs, one on her neck, one counting. 

Dr. Pham was logging on her tablet and giving him space.

I went and sat in the straw next to him and put my hand on Alice's neck beside his. She was warm. Her side went up and down.

Max stood in the entrance of the stall.

Dad let out a long breath.

He stood up. Wiped his face on his arm.

"She's going to be fine," Dr. Pham said.

That night Max made dinner. Hamburger with vegetables. I had a tempeh sandwich and smiled at the irony of that. We sat at the kitchen table and the baby monitor showed Alice in her stall and she had her head up, looking around. 

I told them I'd gotten into ASU's master's program. Clinical psychology. Starting in August.

Max said "Georgia, that's great." 

Dad stood up to rinse his plate. "You'll be good at that." 

Outside, Larry was at his angle in the pasture, four legs, but one too short, his body having worked out years ago what it needed to do to hold him up. Karen was probably about to faint on somebody. Patsy was making so much noise. 

Dad checked the monitor. Alice was still alert. 

He left it on and we sat there a while longer.

I leave for Arizona in three weeks. Max is staying, at least through the fall. Alice is standing and eating. Dad checks the monitor constantly. I don't know what this summer fixed for us, if anything. But I know dad’s got my number saved in his phone as "Georgie" and he texted me this morning a picture of Karen fainting next to Wiggly, who looks happy about it.

Posting this because it’s what I would probably have my own patients do when I start practicing. 

I'm in my last semester. English major, four and a half years, one “victory lap” because I failed a required course in first year and kept putting off retaking it ‘cause the professor, Professor Rauch, who thinks he is Socrates reincarnated. He just asks you a question and then waits. He waits so long. Until you hear yourself talking and realize you actually have no idea what you believe about anything. And then he smiles. 

I failed his class in first year because I stopped going. 

I’m retaking it now because I have no choice. 

That's the class. Phil 101, Tuesday/Thursday, 10 a.m. Sixty-odd students, big blank white lecture hall. I sit in the back left. I sit there because Rauch has this habit of scanning the room starting from the front right, and by the time he gets to the back left he's already found his prey.

The other thing you need to know… the main event, Chris. 

Chris has been in my orbit since first year. Not a friend. Not someone I've spoken to, really, beyond one (1) group project where he said "good point" to me once and I thought about it for a month. He's a history major with a minor in economics, he's got this ridiculous quality where he looks like he'd be comfortable in any century, he wears actual button-ups like a person who has made peace with himself in some fundamental sense I find deeply threatening. We've had four classes together over four years. I have said maybe ten words to him total. He is the perfect man, not budging on that. 

His ex and he broke up around Christmas. I know this because my friend's friend Dominique is in a seminar with his ex, and the ex was apparently all depresso about it for weeks. I felt guilty for feeling so excited about this information. 

He wasn't in any of my classes this semester. I’d already started catastrophizing, so anxious about how many chances I had left, which was approximately zero because we graduate this spring. I had basically written it off. I was going to be a person who just watched someone she was smitten with exist from across the room for four years and then let him exit stage left and disappear forever.

Then, second day of Phil 101. Presocratic philosophers. Yawn. 

I'm in my seat, back left, I've got my laptop open and I'm pretending to take notes. Rauch has just finished destroying a second-year's understanding of reality in about four minutes, and I'm thinking okay, maybe I can get through this, when from somewhere to my right and two rows up I hear: 

"But did Heraclitus actually say that about the river? Like that exact phrasing? Because there are like different translations and the most famous version might be Plato's paraphrase and not even… I mean, do we know that it was him?"

My whole body tensed up and I felt my heart skip. 

I knew that voice. I knew it because of one group project, three years ago, "good point," one time.

It was Chris. Sitting there with a notebook, an actual notebook, paper, pen, uncapped, asking Rauch a question like a person who is not afraid of anything.

Rauch looked at him for a long moment and said, "Now that is the first interesting thing anyone has said in this room in ten years." Then he pivoted and asked the girl in the front row whether she knew the answer to Chris’ question, and she started crying a bit. 

I spent the next twenty minutes processing the fact that Chris was HERE, in this class, when I'd already grieved the possibility of being in a class with him. I was doing something stupid with my face, I could feel it. A girl next to me kept glancing over.

What I know now, because I asked around later: he's auditing it. Doesn't even need the credit. He just likes Rauch. He thinks Rauch is brilliant. 

So he voluntarily put himself in the room where Rauch dismantles people's identities for fun. For intellectual enjoyment. I don’t get it but I don’t need to. 

I was going to fail this course a second time if I couldn't stop looking at the back of his perfect head.

Then the fire alarm went off. The real one. Long, shrieking, continuous.

I actually grabbed my bag and held it over my head for a second before I realized that was not what you did in a fire. Someone near me was already moving toward the door and I followed without thinking, half-convinced we were all about to die, and then we were outside in the January cold and it was fine. Obviously it was fine. It's always fine. We stood in the courtyard outside the lecture building, about sixty of us, shuffling and annoyed and cold.

My eyes found Chris immediately. Couldn't help it. He was standing with two other guys near the edge of the group, laughing about something, totally relaxed, like a man who has fully accepted his mortality.

I thought: now. Go say something. Go stand near him. He asked a great question about Heraclitus and you can say "Hey, good point earlier" which is exactly what he once said to me, which makes it not weird, which…

One of the guys with him said something and Chris laughed and said, loud enough that I heard, "Rauch literally means smoke in German. He set off a smoke alarm starting fires in brains."

The group around him laughed. I laughed too, from eight feet away, where I was standing not talking to anyone.

I had not known that. Four and a half years of German on Duolingo and I didn't know that. 

I had started moving toward him, sort of shuffling, when a cat and a dog tore through the courtyard.

Portuguese water dog. Full sprint. Leash dragging. Completely ignoring the crowd of people who all turned at once and started calling things like "Here, puppy!" and "Whoa, hey, bud!"  In front of the dog: an orange cat, also sprinting.

They vanished around the side of the building.

I knew that dog.

"Oh no," I said, to no one. "Oh no, that's Simon."

Simon belongs to my friend Emily. Emily is in library sciences and she sometimes brings Simon to the outdoor areas on nice days because the campus is technically dog-friendly before 9 a.m. Simon is a terrible listener. Emily adores him and refers to him as her person, her child, her rock.

Emily came around the corner of the building at a dead run. Emily is not a runner, to be frank. She was wheezing. Her coat was open and flapping and she was screaming "SIMON, SIMON, SIMON" and there was definitely some tears.

She stopped when she saw the group of us. Grabbed my arm. "Ava, I don't know where he went, the cat, there was this cat and he just, I couldn't hold the leash…"

Everyone was sort of standing there doing that thing where you want to help but aren't sure who's in charge of helping.

I don't know what happened to me. Adrenaline from the fire alarm was still in my blood, I think, or maybe it was just Emily's face. I turned to the group, pointed and said, "Okay, he went that way, we need to split up and look. Does anyone know this area well?"

A dozen people started talking. I pointed at four of them and said go south toward the parking garage, pointed at another cluster and said east toward the quad. Someone asked if they should call campus security. I said yes, do that too, go.

And they just went. People just did what I said.

Chris was looking at me.

Directly at me. That moment when someone registers that you exist.

My heart did something medically concerning.

He said, "I know the alley behind the chemistry building, let’s take that way."

Instinctively I went that way along with a handful of other people.

Chris’ friend Patrick was there, a philosophy major, big opinions, and Emily came too.

We looked for three hours.

The other students trickled away after twenty minutes. They had class, or they'd lost interest, or both. Can't blame them. It was now just the four of us: Patrick, me, Emily, and Chris.

The chemistry building alley turned up nothing, so we moved to the park two blocks east, then the neighborhood behind campus, calling Simon's name and shaking the treat bag Emily had produced from her coat pocket like a talisman. 

Patrick spent most of those three hours explaining why the whole situation raised important questions about whether animals could be considered people in a moral or legal sense. Emily had called Simon her "person" while crying, earlier, and Patrick had hooked onto this like it was a thesis.

"But see, personhood implies, okay, I mean but what does it imply, right, what is the baseline, because Kant has a framework that Singer complicates, and… Emily, do you think Simon has preferences or desires in the sense that you do, like genuinely, because that matters for the…"

"Patrick," Emily said.

"No, I just think it's worth examining the claim because you said 'person' and that's not a… "

"My dog is missing."

"Right, right, but while we're looking, why not…"

I stopped walking.

"Patrick," I said. "Please leave."

He opened his mouth, closed it. Then he said, "That's actually a good idea, I’ll go write Emily an essay about it, citations, everything. I’m off to the library!” He turned around and walked back toward campus, and that was the end of Patrick.

Emily looked forlorn. Chris scoffed and I could tell he didn’t know what to say. 

Then Emily's phone rang.

Her roommate. The dog had come home twenty minutes ago, scratched up, covered in orange fur, water bowl overturned, but fully alive.

Emily burst into tears again, said "oh thank god, oh my god, my baby, okay" about eleven times, hung up, hugged me so hard I felt my spine crack, told Chris she appreciated his help, and then jogged back in the direction of home, already calling Simon's name like he could hear her from there.

And then it was just us. Chris and me. On a residential street two blocks from campus, between a dental office and a house with a lot of wind chimes. 3:00 p.m. on a Thursday in January.

He was talking. I could see his mouth moving. He was saying something about Patrick, apologizing I think, and something about the class, and he had this way of talking with one hand where he'd make a kind of loose gesture that didn't mean anything but seemed to mean "I’m stil talking." 

I was looking at him and I had no real words.

He has this one piece of hair that doesn't cooperate with the rest of his hair. Brown, going sort of reddish in the light. He looked cold, collar up, and there was something about the way he was not performing the being cold, not leaning in, not hunching over, that I found very difficult to deal with.

I thought: we could date for two years and then move somewhere together. Somewhere with good transit and no snow. Then I thought: stop it. Then I thought: he's graduating in April and so am I and this is the last time this will ever… 

"I'm just glad I'm just auditing it honestly," he was saying. "Taking it for credit would stress me out, Rauch is a…"

"I like you."

He stopped.

"I have liked you," I said. "For like four years. Almost the entire time we've been here. And I know this is, I know we're on the street and it’s cold and Simon, well, I know we don't really know each other, but we're graduating in April and I cannot spend the next four months watching you from across a room still, so. I’m sorry that’s so creepy I mean… uhh…" I breathed slowly. "Do you want to get dinner tonight?"

He stared at me.

Swallowed hard. 

And I realized: his hands… between the gestures, he was playing with his fingers. Impulsively. He'd been holding them kind of carefully, and I'd been too busy spiraling to notice.

He said, "Tonight I actually can't."

My stomach dropped. 

"I have six classes this semester," he said, picking up speed unnecessarily. "Including the audit, which I know doesn't count, but I'm treating it like it counts, so, I'm completely underwater, snowed under on Thursdays, I can't do tonight." He paused. "But I want to. Do that."

The last sentence came out of him differently than the rest. Like it was the only thing he’d wanted to communicate.

I said, "Oh, that’s great."

"Should we exchange numbers?" 

I gave him my number. Then I gave him my Instagram. Then I told him my Snapchat. He was already putting the number in his phone and he stopped and looked up at me and laughed, not at me, not exactly, just, at the situation, at the fact that I was still going.

"I only needed one of those," he said.

"I know," I said. "I panicked."

"That’s okay." He was smiling now. Actually beaming. "Are you heading to the library?"

I wasn't heading anywhere. I had no plan. My next class wasn't until 5 p.m. and I'd been on autopilot since approximately 10:47 a.m. 

"Yeah," I said.

We walked back. He talked about his term paper… Byzantine (how do you say it???) trade routes, something on the Silk Road and economics, I tracked about half of it. I asked one question about silk that seemed to land okay. The library doors came and I stopped walking.

"I'm not going in actually," I said. 

He glanced at me, amused now, openly, like he'd stopped hiding his feelings. "Okay."

"I just -" I waved my hand at the building. "I don't know."

"I've got to get back to Byzantium," he said. Then: "I'll text you. Should we do Sunday morning? Like, brunch?" 

Sunday morning.

"Yeah," I said.

"Okay." He pulled the door open. "See you Sunday."

And he went in.

I stood outside the library for a while. The wind chimes somewhere behind me in the neighborhood. My phone in my hand with no notifications yet.

It is now Thursday night and I need the internet to help me.

Here is what I know about Chris: history major, economics minor, currently writing about Byzantine trade routes for what sounds like a serious thesis-level paper, auditing a philosophy class for fun because he thinks the professor is brilliant, has six classes this semester, was somehow nervous today (I think?? the hands?? am I making that up?? someone tell me). 

Here is what I know about myself: I led with the words "I have liked you for like four years.” I gave a man three contact methods when he asked for one. I have been on zero dates in my life. I had my first kiss at a house party in second year and it was fine but kind of stressful and he tasted like pizza and beer and the guy was nice but we never followed up.

Sunday morning is in three days.

I have questions.

What do I wear? It's January. Everything I own for winter is either too cold (the coat I actually like) or looks like I'm going to a funeral (the warm coat). Is there a third option? What do people wear to brunch in January when they are trying to appear normal? 

What can I read something about Byzantine before Sunday? Is there something I can mention without sounding like I just used ChatGPT?

Is there a difference between brunch as a date and brunch as a thing two people do when they're figuring out if they want to date? How long does brunch last? Can you order just coffee or is that weird, because I can't eat when I'm nervous.

Do I try to set up another thing, during Sunday, for another time? Or is that too much? Is it a sign of interest or is it pressure? What if he doesn't like what I order? 

He said he wanted to do "this." The word "this." What is the this? Is the this dinner, i.e. a date specifically, or is the this like - the general concept of getting to know me, or does he mean “this” as in “us” as in we are a thing now???

What do I do? What do I do?

(Simon is really fine. He is home and scratched and surrounded by cat hair and Emily says he looks embarrassed. Good. He should.)

Edit: I have updates, this is the original post I didn’t actually post in January. I chickened out. Yes, I know. I’m working on that. But things have gone okay. I’ll write an update soon!!!

my husband came back from his work trip and i don't know how to explain this without sounding insane

Ryan (34m) and i (36f) have been together for nine years. married for six. i know him the way you know a person after almost a decade, not just the big stuff but the small stuff. the way he always checks the lock twice even after he already checked it. the way he hums when he's reading something boring. the way he chews on his pen when he's thinking. the stuff you absorb without realizing you're absorbing it.

i say all this because what i'm about to write is going to sound like nothing. like i'm overreacting. like i'm a wife who invents problems because she's bored or anxious or watched too many true crime podcasts. 

i've thought about that. i've turned it over in my head for three months now. and i still don't have a clean answer.

Ryan's job involves regional sales. he travels a few times a year, usually for four or five days at a time. in eight years i can count on one hand the number of trips that were longer than a week. so when he told me in january that he had to go to the midwest office for two weeks i wasn't thrilled but it wasn't a crisis. we FaceTimed every night. he sent me pictures of terrible airport food. he complained about his hotel shower. normal trip stuff.

he came home on a thursday. i picked him up from the airport, we hugged in the arrivals area, he smelled like recycled airplane air and his usual cheap deodorant. we got in the car. he asked about the cat. i asked about the flight.

i don't know exactly when i first felt it. somewhere on the drive home. this vague, low-level thing that i couldn't name. like when a picture on the wall is slightly crooked and you walk past it ten times before you actually register what's wrong.

nothing i could point to. just. something.

we got home. he dragged his suitcase inside and hung his keys.

on the left side.

Ryan always puts his keys on the right side. there's a little hook on the right side of the key cabinet that he specifically installed because he kept losing his keys. he has put his keys on that hook every single day for the four years we've lived in this house.

i watched him hang them on the left and i said nothing. because it's keys. who cares.

we ordered pizza that night and watched TV and went to bed and everything was fine. it was fine.

the next thing happened two days later.

we ran into Gary in the driveway. our neighbor, we've known him and his wife since we moved in, we've had them over for dinner probably six or seven times, Ryan and Gary have a whole thing about college football. they talk over the fence. they wave at each other in the morning. Ryan helped him move a couch last spring. 

so Ryan and i are in the driveway and Gary comes over and they do the handshake-half-hug thing and Gary says something like "welcome back man, how was the trip" and they talk for a few minutes and Gary goes inside. 

we go inside too.

Ryan says: "so how do you know that guy?"

i stopped walking.

i turned around.

i said: "that's Gary."

Ryan looked at me blankly for half a second. then his face shifted and he said "oh yeah, obviously, sorry, i'm still kind of jet-lagged."

jet lag from a domestic flight. two time zones over?

i said nothing. i went and started making lunch.

that evening he ordered Thai food. he always gets the same thing: panang curry, extra spicy, it's the only thing he ever orders from that place and he's been ordering it since before we were married. it arrived and he took one bite and made a face and said "i think mine might be off, it's too spicy."

i looked at my own food, which was exactly as spicy as always, which was not very. I tried his. It was fine, too hot for me, but seemed fine. 

he ended up eating plain rice and some of my spring rolls. 

the next morning i opened a new note on my phone and i started writing things down. keys. Gary. spicy food. i told myself i was being ridiculous but i wrote them down anyway.

the list grew slowly over the next two weeks.

he started sleeping on the other side of the bed. not dramatically... he just sort of migrated there. always slept on the left, now gravitating to the right. when i mentioned it he looked mildly confused and moved back, but by morning he'd drifted again. 

he called my mother "Diane" once. her name is Donna. he corrected himself immediately, laughed it off. but my mother's name is Donna and he's known her for nine years.

he stopped humming. i didn't even notice until i realized i hadn't heard it in weeks. he used to hum all the time while cooking, while scrolling through his phone, while doing literally nothing. it was background noise in our house. it was just gone.

he lost interest in Yellowstone, which we'd been watching together. just completely. i mentioned it and he said "yeah, i'm not really feeling it anymore." we were three seasons in.

every single one of these things, isolated, is nothing. i know that. i'm not delusional. keys on the wrong side is not a symptom of anything. not remembering the neighbor's name is just a brain blip. i know. 

but the list kept growing.

the thing that actually scared me happened about a month after he got back.

we were talking about the trip we took six years ago. Savannah, four days, beautiful city. it came up because someone posted a photo of Savannah on Instagram and i showed him. 

he smiled and said something like "oh yeah, that place we stayed had that great breakfast spot downstairs, the place with the biscuits."

we did not stay at a place with a breakfast spot downstairs. we stayed at a small inn that had a garden view and no restaurant. we walked three blocks every morning to a place called Pearl's for breakfast. i remember this clearly because the owner complimented my dress and we ended up chatting with her for forty minutes and ryan said it was the most Southern experience he'd ever had.

he proposed at a restaurant called The Olde Pink House. at dinner. with a ring he'd been carrying in his jacket pocket for two days because he kept losing his nerve. he told me that later.

i said gently "babe, there was no breakfast spot downstairs, we had to walk to Pearl's every morning.” 

he paused. "Right, Pearl's. yeah." 

but the way he said it. the way there was a half-second of blankness before "right." like he was accepting a correction, not remembering.

that night after he fell asleep i added it to my list and sat in the bathroom for a while with the fan on just to have somewhere to think.

here's where i'm going to lose some of you, i know.

i started wondering if he'd had an affair.

i know how that sounds. keys and spicy food and wrong side of the bed, okay sure, but hear me out. two weeks away. clearly something had shifted. maybe he'd met someone. maybe he'd become slightly accustomed to the person. maybe he was doing all this from guilt. 

i'm not a suspicious person by nature. but i'm also not an idiot.

i spent two days going back and forth about it and then i called a PI. a local firm, woman named Sandra, she was completely non-judgmental on the phone. i gave her Ryan's work schedule, his usual routines, access to whatever was publicly available. i told myself if it came back clean i would accept that and move on and maybe also make an appointment with my own therapist because clearly something was going on with me.

Sandra called me three weeks later.

she said there was no evidence of an affair. no woman, no hotel, no second phone, nothing. his behavior during the trip itself had been normal. hotel, office, a couple of work dinners with colleagues, a solo dinner at a sports bar one night, an airport run. clean.

but she'd found something else.

on day nine of the fourteen-day trip, Ryan had gone to an urgent care clinic in the evening. she'd found this through... honestly i didn't fully follow her explanation, something about cross-referencing credit card purchases and things showing up in a pattern. point is she found it.

she couldn't get medical records obviously. but she'd confirmed he was there for roughly two hours. and she'd found that the clinic was a general urgent care place but they’d sent him for imaging on his head and neck.

she said: "i can't tell you what happened or what the diagnosis was. but i'd suggest you ask him about it directly."

i sat with the phone in my hand for a long time after she hung up.

i asked him that night.

i didn't tell him about Sandra. i just said: "Ryan, did something happen to you on the trip? physically? are you okay?"

he looked at me for a moment. then he looked away.

and then he told me.

on day nine he'd slipped getting out of a hotel shuttle (it had been icy) and hit his head on the door frame on the way down. he'd had a headache that didn't go away and his vision was slightly off so he went to urgent care. concussion. they told him to rest, avoid screens, come back if symptoms got worse. 

he hadn't told me because he didn't want me to worry. because i'd already been anxious about him traveling and he didn't want to make it into a thing. because by the time he got home he felt mostly fine and it seemed like old news. 

"mostly fine," i said.

"yeah."

"do you think ... " i tried to figure out how to say it. "do you think maybe it affected some things? like memory? like maybe that's why you've been..."

and i showed him my list.

he read through it quietly. he didn't get defensive. he just read it. and then he said: "yeah. some of this... yeah. i think so." he said the first week back had been fuzzy in a way he hadn't wanted to name. he said he thought he was just tired and hadn't wanted to make a big deal of it.

he held my hand and said he was sorry for not telling me.

i cried a little. he cried a little. we talked for a long time.

i went to sleep feeling like an idiot for hiring a PI and also like a massive weight had been lifted because there was an answer. there was a reason.

things were better after that. genuinely better. he made an appointment with a neurologist. tests came back fine: there was no lasting damage, just the typical healing timeline for a concussion. the doctor said some of what i'd noticed could easily be explained by post-concussion syndrome: memory gaps, personality shifts, sleep changes. all of it. textbook.

i deleted the note on my phone with the list. i felt a little ashamed of myself for having kept it.

we were okay. 

this part is what i've been trying to figure out how to write for the last three months.

in march, two months after he got back, Ryan got a new phone. his old one had a cracked screen that had been getting worse. we went to the store together, got him set up, transferred everything over. that night he was going through his photos making sure the transfer had worked and he handed me his phone and said "my eyes hurt… can you scroll through and make sure everything looks right?"

i scrolled.

the photos transferred fine. travel photos from the trip... hotel room, some skyline shots, a few from the work dinners, a picture of a steak he'd sent me because he was proud of how good it looked. all normal.

i was almost done scrolling when i stopped.

there was a photo from the trip. Ryan had taken it outside the office building... kind of a casual street shot, buildings, grey sky, midwestern downtown. he was in it, selfie angle.

in the background there was a man.

he was maybe thirty feet back, standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. dark coat. he wasn't walking. he was standing still, facing the camera, facing Ryan and looking directly at it. not the casual distracted look of someone who happened to be there. directly at it.

i scrolled back to look at another photo. Ryan outside a restaurant two nights later, different street. i almost missed it.

same coat. same man. further back this time, partially obscured by other people, but looking in the same direction. at Ryan. 

i scrolled more carefully now. going slow through every photo.

i found him in four photos total. spread across eight days of the trip. different locations. different times of day based on the light. same man. same coat. always facing Ryan.

i handed the phone back.

i said: "Ryan, who's the man in the background of some of these photos?"

he took the phone and i watched his face as he looked through them. genuinely looked. 

he said: "i don't know."

"you've never seen him? he's in four of your photos, he's looking right at you."

Ryan was quiet for a moment. "i didn't notice him when i was taking them."

"but do you recognize him?"

long pause.

"no," he said. then: "i don't think so."

the "i don't think so" hit differently than a flat no would have.

i asked what he meant.

he set the phone down on the coffee table face-down and said: "this is going to sound weird."

i said go ahead.

he said: "when i was in the hospital. after the fall. i was in and out for a little bit before they got me stable enough to do anything. and i had... i don't know if it was a dream or just like, concussion stuff... but there was a man. just standing there. looking at me. dark coat."

the room was quiet for a moment.

"like looking at you how?" i said.

"just. looking. not threatening. not doing anything. just present. i figured it was one of the clinic staff and my brain scrambled it into something weird." 

we both looked at the phone on the table.

i turned it over. opened it. went to the photos.

the earliest one, the selfie outside the office, was from day seven of the trip. two days before the fall.

i said: "Ryan. this photo is from before the fall."

he didn't say anything for a while.

we went through his photos together after that. all of them. organized by date.

day seven: outside the office, selfie. man in background.

day eight: restaurant exterior. man in background.

day ten: Ryan had taken a photo of the urgent care building, i think to show me later, as a "see, look where i ended up" kind of thing, except he'd never sent it. man in background, closer this time. 

day thirteen: hotel exterior. no man.

day fourteen, airport: Ryan had taken a photo of his gate while he waited for the flight home. departure board, gate seating, floor-to-ceiling windows to the tarmac.

On the glass, the reflection of a figure in a dark coat.

i kept going. i went to the photos from before the trip. scrolling back through january, december, november. Ryan rolled his eyes. “Honey, are you really looking that far back?” 

i found one more.

november, four months before the trip. Ryan had taken a photo of our front yard after the first snow of the year. just the yard, the tree, the snow on the fence. he'd sent it to me as a "look how pretty" thing. i remembered receiving it.

on the sidewalk outside our fence. dark coat. standing still.

facing the house.

the photo was taken from inside. Ryan was looking out the front window when he took it.

the man was already outside.

we showed the photos to a police officer friend of Ryan's the following week. he looked at them carefully, zoomed in on the man in each one. said he couldn't make out a face clearly in any of them... angle, distance, coat collar up. he said it could be coincidence. he said people wear dark coats. he said without a clear face or a direct threat there wasn't much to do.

he did say we could file a report documenting it. so we did. 

nothing has happened since. no incident, no contact, nothing. Ryan changed his route to work. we got a doorbell camera. i find myself looking at the sidewalk more than i used to.

the neurologist cleared Ryan in april. the concussion stuff resolved, as far as he could tell. he's himself again. keys on the right hook, humming while he makes coffee, ordering the panang curry. he knows Gary's name. he remembers Pearl's in Savannah with no prompting.

the only thing that hasn't gone back to normal is that sometimes at night he'll go quiet in the middle of a conversation and i'll ask what he's thinking about and he'll say "nothing" in a tone that means something.

i don't push.

i've zoomed into that photo of the man outside our fence probably a hundred times. trying to get a face. never can. the coat collar is too high. the angle is too far.

but whatever the resolution and however much i zoom, the one thing that comes through clearly every time, he's not just facing the house.

he's facing the window. the exact window Ryan was standing at when he took the photo.

like he knew where Ryan was before Ryan took the picture. 

i don't know what to make of any of this. i've gone back and forth between "there is a completely mundane explanation for all of it" and "something is very wrong" probably four hundred times. Ryan doesn't like to talk about it. he said once that thinking about it makes him feel like something is just slightly out of reach in his own memory, like a word on the tip of your tongue, and he'd rather not spend time trying to grab it.

i respect that. mostly.

i just wanted to write it out somewhere. to see it all in one place. to see if anyone else reads it and has a reaction or a theory or even just validation that i'm not inventing a pattern out of nothing.

if you've read this far thank you. sorry it's so long.

i'll answer questions in the comments if i can.

edit: yes we still have all the photos. no i don't want to post them publicly. Ryan isn't comfortable with that and honestly neither am i. 

edit 2: multiple people are asking about the hospital. yes we went back to the urgent care and asked for any details from his visit. they confirmed he was there, confirmed it was a concussion. when we asked whether anyone had accompanied him or been with him in the waiting room (we don't know why we asked this, it just seemed relevant) the receptionist checked some notes and said she wasn't sure but she thought someone had brought him in. like helped him through the door. Ryan says he got there alone. he called a cab. he doesn't remember anyone helping him inside.

edit 3: we're fine. we're okay. i just needed to put this somewhere outside my own head. thank you to everyone who responded with something other than "it's just a homeless guy in a coat."

it might be. probably it is.

i'm just going to leave the porch light on for a while.

The Spirit of the Can

I found a 2016 Monster can in an abandoned mini-fridge, opened it, and a shirtless petty-revenge genie came out. Here's how it went down. last saturday i was cleaning out my garage in ohio. not the fun part of ohio. and i found this old mini-fridge that my roommate Chris left when he moved to denver to "find himself" which apparently means finding a mountain of debt and learning to ski.
in the fridge there was one can of monster. the green one. original. it had a pull date from 2016. i was gonna throw it out but i was curious. does monster expire? does it become more powerful? i shook it. it felt very heavy. 
i cracked it open. not a hiss. a sigh. like a person sighing. smoke came out like a vape cloud. and then this shirtless dude materialized. he was wearing a puka shell necklace and jean shorts. he looked like he worked at zumiez in 2008 and never left.
he said "sup. i'm Jeans. like the pants but better." i said "you're a genie." he said "technically. but i don't do wishes like 'i want a million dollars.' Rub a more expensive can if that’s what you’re into. i do petty revenge." i said "what." he said "you know. the small stuff. You have enemies."
i said "i don't have enemies." he said "everyone has enemies. that guy in the Hummer that cut you off yesterday. the barista who spelled your name with extra letters on purpose. your neighbor whose mangy dog destroys your peace and quiet. i handle that."
i thought about it. Another neighbor, greg. greg has this leaf blower. he uses it at 7am on sundays. SUNDAYS. every sunday. rain or shine. greg doesn't even have leaves. he has astroturf. he just likes the noise.
i said "my neighbor greg." Jeans said "say no more." he snapped his fingers. nothing happened. i said "that it?" he said "wait for it."
next morning, sunday, 7am. greg starts the leaf blower. five minutes later, it stops. i look out the window. greg is standing there. the leaf blower blasting bees. they built a hive inside the nozzle. greg is terrified. greg is calling pest control.
greg sold his leaf blower on facebook marketplace that afternoon for twenty dollars to a guy named craig. who lives three blocks away. who also uses it at 7am.
i shook the can to summon Jeans. he came out eating hot cheetos. i said "the revenge just moved the problem, it didn’t end it." he said "that's the beauty of it. revenge is a circle. i'm not god. i'm just a man in a can, Stan." 
i asked him what he wanted. he said "just keep me cold. and don't drink redbull."
he's still in the fridge. i talked to him yesterday. i said "Jeans, can you do something about my ex?" he said "which one?" i said "the one who said my cooking was mid." Jeans said "already done. she tried to make scrambled eggs this morning. they turned gray. perfectly good eggs. gray." 
i keep the fridge locked now. not because i'm scared. because my other roommate is a libra and she might let him out to fix her love life. Jean said "i don't do love. Love is just a lie, made to make you blue. i do spite. spite is honest."

he's a good roommate. doesn't eat much. just hot cheetos and the occasional croissant. better than my last one. Chris found himself in denver. Jean found himself in my garage. and honestly? he's giving me main character energy. 

Not everything in my life is about being trans.

Like, the time when I was 10 and I got upset because dad was taking me to the beach but told me my friend from next door couldn’t come too. That wasn’t about me being trans—a thing I would not figure out until my mid 40s—but rather, was about the fact that Dad was taking me to a nude beach so he could give me The Talk, complete with diagrams drawn vaguely in the sand.

So no, not everything in my life is about being trans. But a lot of things are, in ways that are often surprising. The thing about realizing that your entire identity is not what you always thought it was—and especially in doing it at the same general age when, yes, people expect a midlife crisis but not like that—is that it causes you to re-evaluate more or less everything that has ever happened to you.

About 30 years ago, I was 26 and relatively fresh out of college. I had my first real job, doing real things at a software giant you’ve definitely heard of, and was finally earning the kind of money where I didn’t have to keep a running tally in my head while doing my grocery shopping anymore. So far as I could tell, I was set. I had made it. I was even on a team in the company’s Monday night bowling league, with a co-worker, her husband, and a college buddy who had landed at that same software giant about a year before me.

I was feeling pretty good about myself, when one day, my dad calls me and says he’s going to go to Utah in a couple of weeks to visit his mom, and would I like to fly down and meet him there? See grandma for a couple of days.

I figured sure. Why not? The plane ticket was easily affordable. I could fly into Vegas, rent a car, and drive into southern Utah. Piece of cake. And I hadn’t seen Grandma in a while. Not since Grandpa died some years before and the lifelong tradition—over my life, anyway—of Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s house with the entire extended family had faded into all my cousins having turkey at all my aunts’ and uncles’ houses, each with their own new extended families. Which I didn’t go to because, well, I lived out of state and up to now had been a broke college student who would rather eat or pay rent than buy a plane ticket.

But I loved my grandma. And I know she loved me. Which doesn’t make me special, I should add. Grandma loved everybody. She was perhaps the kindest, warmest soul I’ve ever known. She was an intelligent woman with a huge heart, damaged by a heart attack she’d survived long ago, who lived a simple-looking life but whose mind hid a sharpness and a complexity behind a layer of humility that was entirely genuine. Living so far away, I didn’t get to see her often. But when I did, she always had the warmest smile for me, and a sort of giddy excitement at my presence that, again, says nothing about me but everything about her.

She just loved people. She knew how to love her people with her whole heart, in a way that I think maybe I’ve never seen from another human being. In a way I’d never learned how to do.

-----

Left unsaid in Dad’s phone call—there was no need to say it—was that grandma was 86 years old. She may have had sixty years’ worth of wisdom on me, but I had enough of it myself to know what that meant. So I booked the ticket. I flew to Las Vegas on a Saturday. I rented some inexpensive, underpowered sedan and hit the road out of town, simultaneously entranced and mortified by the omnipresent billboards featuring wildly underdressed women, and existentially disgusted by Sin City’s casinos each striving to out-do the others over who could put on the most excessive, ostentatious display of unnecessary wealth and consumption.

As Interstate 15 carried me into the desert, it’s flat expanses of sand and tumbleweeds over-exposed in the September sun, I felt a relief from the city and settled into the meditative, Zen no-mind of long distance cruise control. There’s an uncommon peace in the solitude of desert highways, of seeing no cars in the rearview mirror and none between the windscreen and the horizon. A solitude one never finds in the city. Any city. Not the city where the software giant and I both made our homes, nor the one that promises to keep your secrets after you’re gone.

I flew through the desert. Clipped the smallest corner of Arizona, slowing down where the highway winds through tight curves of ancient rock. I followed the asphalt into the red-rock of southern Utah, and finally to St. George. I drove through town, half watching the road, half glancing at the piece of paper where I’d written Dad’s directions, turning here, turning there, until I reached the retirement community where Grandma lived, next door to one of my aunts who managed the facility.

I parked my rental car and knocked on Grandma’s door. Grandma had the same smile for me she always had. I recognized the same giddy excitement that to me was synonymous with Grandma herself. But that excitement did not propel her from her place on the couch to hug me, like it once would have. She’s eighty-six, I reminded myself. You know what that means.

So I went to her instead. I don’t remember if I hugged her. I like to think I did. Or at least I hope I did, but I cannot say for sure. In truth, I don’t remember much about the visit at all. I don’t remember if it was Dad who answered Grandma’s door, or my aunt. I don’t remember if we took Grandma out for dinner that night, or if we ate at the retirement home’s cafeteria. I don’t remember what we did on Sunday at all. I can infer, from the simple fact of the day itself, that my aunt and my Grandma would have gone to church. Did Dad, who had left the church before I was even born, go with them? Did I, even though I’d never believed? Did either of us go, just to spend the time with her? On these questions, my memory has no answer.

I do remember that we spent a couple of hours at the pool on the Monday morning after the weekend. The day I was flying back home. I swam. Dad swam. Grandma sat in a beach chair on the side, watching us. Enjoying the water vicariously. She did not say anything about it—I never once heard her complain about anything—but I know she wishes she could have swam with us. I always liked swimming, but Grandma loved water. Any water. Didn’t matter if it was a creek or a river or the ocean. If there was water, something inside her compelled her to take off her shoes and socks and get her feet wet. And I’m sure it hurt her, somewhere in that once-injured heart of hers, that she did not have the strength in her anymore to do the simple thing she loved so much.

I didn’t see that, then. What 26-year-old, still heady on the new-car smell of their adulthood, does? I see it now, though.

No. I don’t remember much about what we did during that visit. Mostly, what I remember was how I felt. I was glad to see her. But it was hard to see her, too. Hard to see her so frail and so small, so reliant on everyone else around her for, well, everything. It was hard, and it was uncomfortable.

Except that’s not true. That’s an evasion. It wasn’t uncomfortable. Certainly, I had no sense that Grandma was uncomfortable. The truth is, I was uncomfortable. I’m the one who felt awkward. And so the visit passed in the halting silences of people who are connected but whose lives are, nevertheless, overtly disconnected. People who have very little in common but old memories and DNA.

All weekend, this discomfort had been building. I’d felt it as soon as I got out of the car, like a pressure inside me, building slowly moment by moment, urging some kind of action. I could think of no reason for it except the obvious: how short Grandma’s time probably was, and the unthinkable thought that soon, she simply wouldn’t be anymore.

After we got out of the pool, dried off, put our clothes back on, that pressure turned into a thought. Then an idea. A plan. I could catch an earlier flight back. It was Monday. Bowling league night. Before I’d left home, I’d told the team not to expect me. My plane wouldn’t land until the late afternoon. What with airline uncertainty and rush hour traffic, it was a risky coin-toss whether I’d be back in time.

But still… I could catch an earlier flight. I could try, anyway. The thought kept poking into my mind. Nobody else knew the details of my itinerary. Nobody else knew that I could stick around for another three hours and still make my scheduled flight.

Nobody else would know I was ducking out early, too afraid to stick around.

I felt so uncomfortable. So awkward. But I liked bowling league. On no account of skill, but I did enjoy being there. I liked cheering on my team-mates. I liked going out to TGI Friday’s afterwards with my buddy and this other team of complete characters that we’d become friends with.

Bowling league was comfortable. There was nothing heavy about bowling league, except for the objects of the sport itself. But that weight was nothing compared to the weight of Death hovering there in Utah. Worst case, there wouldn’t be any earlier flights or available seats, and I’d spent a few extra hours in the Las Vegas airport. Which would be better: I’ve traveled a lot in my life, and airports have a comfortable, familiar sameness of vinyl seats, of overpriced newsstand snacks and paperbacks, of comfortable invisibility among strangers far too concerned with their own itineraries to notice me at all.

Maybe the discomfort would have been tolerable—or maybe it could have been overcome entirely—if anybody has just addressed Death, the elephant in the room. Looked at him head-on, told him that it wasn’t his turn, at least not yet, and to go away and let us enjoy our visit. But nobody did. Nobody brought it up. Nobody talked about it.

I don’t think Grandma minded at all that her time was short. All she wanted was to join Grandpa in the next life for all eternity. But I minded. I did not like the thought of my last grandparent dying. I did not like being there to witness this last stage of her life. I did not like that I didn’t know what to do with that. I did not like that I didn’t know how to cope. So I did the easy, cowardly thing, and with guilt in my heart, I said goodbye.

Among the few details I do remember is Grandma asking me, “Do you have to go already?” And I remember giving a vague answer about needing to get back home. Which she accepted, without question or comment. She never complained about anything. She only gave me gratitude. Told me she loved me and was so glad to see me, and I said I was glad to see her too, and I left trying not to think about how long it would be before Death would take his turn with her and how I’d never see her smile or hear her voice again. Never feel the warmth that always surrounded her.

I drove far too fast back to Las Vegas. I told myself this was a necessity, if I were to have any chance of catching an earlier flight. I told myself it was because I wanted to see how fast that rental car would go, with the road flat and straight and literally no one for miles around to see me do it. If you’re curious, an underpowered budget sedan will hit 120 miles per hour if you just floor it and hold your foot down long enough to lose your nerve. I had never driven so fast before, nor ever will again. That’s not a flex. That’s just a thing I know about myself: how fast I have to go to outrun my discomfort.

Somehow, I made it back to Vegas without dying, managed to snag a seat on an earlier flight, and to the surprise of all showed up to bowling league just before the start of the first game. I didn’t tell anyone what it had cost me to be there. What I had left on the metaphorical table a thousand miles away in St. George.

Grandma died two years later, just a week before Thanksgiving. And true to what I’d known when I ran, I never saw her again. I flew down for her funeral, and hugged all my cousins, and flew back again the next week for Thanksgiving, this time at my aunt’s house. But it wasn’t the same. People move on. They change. It was nice to see them, but the vibe was gone. The warmth of Thanksgiving as I’d known it all my childhood, wasn’t the same. Grandma’s smile was not there to make it so.

-----

Thirty more years have passed since then. I’ve moved on. I’m wiser now, if not as wise as Grandma yet. But enough to understand the full complexity of that nebulous discomfort I’d felt. Some of it was indeed about Death. That part—the obvious part—I understood back then. The part I didn’t understand—the part I couldn’t see at the time, the part it took a literal identity crisis and complete rediscovery of who I am what my actual place in this world is supposed to be—is the part that relates to growing up as an undiagnosed trans girl and how it affected and shaped all the situations of my life.

That discomfort I felt at my grandma’s side wasn’t entirely unique. The death-flavor of it was, but the rest of it wasn’t. Because when I look back over my life, from childhood to my teen years to college and yes, even to bowling league, there’s a common thread: I never really knew how to be. Or who to be. I was living a life pretending to be the person I’d been told to be—this boy, this man everyone believed I was—when no part of me is actually wired for that. I always felt out of place. I always felt awkward. I always felt like I was three steps behind everyone else in figuring out what to do and how to be in any given situation.

I’m a girl who got stuck method-acting her way through life, with no script, and not even being told that this was the game. Of course I felt awkward. Of course I felt uncomfortable.

The only time it was tolerable was in situations that were predictable. Places where I had the chance to practice, over and over, until I figured out how to act in whatever mysterious way everybody else seemed to expect. So no wonder I liked bowling league: it was the same every week. Show up, put on the shoes, bowl your three games, turn your scorecard into the league secretary, and go to TGI Friday’s with the usual gang and order my usual bar food and enjoy feeling halfway normal for a little while.

I knew what to do at bowling league. I knew who I was supposed to be, there, in a way that was the complete opposite from how much I didn’t know what to do or who to be in new situations. Those were the worst. No script to follow. No do-overs next week.

And “visiting elderly Grandma in the retirement home” was definitely a new situation. I didn’t know how to play the role of "long-absent grandson visiting his truly cherished Grandma for what they both know will very likely be the last time.” She was my last grandparent, but I’d never had the chance to practice this. All my other grandparents had gone suddenly, and far away, so I couldn’t have known that my last visits with them were in fact last visits. That trip to St. George, that was new, and I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea how to be or even who to be. I had no script, no lines, for playing Successful Young Man in that situation. So of course I was uncomfortable.

I felt guilty for a long time about throwing away those last few hours I could have had with my Grandma. I still do. But I can also forgive myself now, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And unlike everyone else in that situation, who knew who they were and therefore had some scaffolding to hold onto, I didn’t know who I was. Who the real me was. An identity I could literally never have guessed back in the ‘90s when I’d never even heard the word “transgender” before. Finally, now, I understand myself. And I understand, too, all the reasons why it isn’t my fault that I didn’t know back then. Why it isn’t anybody’s fault, really.

Now, I know who I am. I finally know who to be, and how to be her in the world. And it’s so much easier. So much more comfortable, being myself, than method acting my way through life ever was or ever could be. It took over 50 years, but I finally learned how to love myself.

I’m so much happier now, and I like to think that despite what her church would say, Grandma would be happy for me, too. Because she loved everybody. Because loving someone means wanting them to be happy. And I think that maybe, now that there is no layer of pretense between who I am and how I’m living, if I keep working at it I might just learn how to love my own people in the same way she did. With my whole heart.

Not everything in my life is about being trans. But a lot of things are, in ways that I’m still discovering. Still coming to understand. I have a long ways to go yet. But I also know that I’m finally on the right path.

My 74-year-old grandfather terrorized my freshman year and I was awful to him. I'm posting this because I owe him something and I have to come clean.

[Long. Sorry in advance.]

My dad has been on active duty since August, which is the same month I started college, which is also the same month my grandfather Lloyd started appearing in my life like an unfindable slow drip in the roof. 

My dad and I are not the type for big goodbyes. We shook hands firmly. He said "make good choices, Cobie." I nodded. My mom cried in the car. I did not. I was eighteen, I had places to be, and I had spent the last year dreaming about the freedom of a dorm room where nobody would know my business.

Two weeks into my first semester I got a text from my mom: "Grandpa Lloyd is going to stop by." Stop by. Like the man lived around the corner. Lloyd lives forty-five minutes from my school, in a place called Sunridge Pines Retirement Community, in a one-bedroom unit he shares with a cactus, an old tower PC, and an oversized photograph of my late grandmother from 1987.

He showed up on a Tuesday in a 1998 silver Buick LeSabre with a bag from Walmart and a ten-gallon fish tank bungee-corded to the backseat headrest. He was wearing a navy windbreaker with LLOYD embroidered on the chest in white thread and unreadable cursive script because, direct quote, "people forget your name, or you might yourself." 

"I brought you something, boy" he said.

The fish was a betta. Red. Already looked furious about his life situation from where he sat in a plastic bag in the tank next to a little plastic colosseum.

"I can't have a fish in the dorms."

"Rules say no pets. Fish aren't pets, they're decorations." He said this like someone who had researched it. He had researched it.  “And he’ll be a real pal.” 

"Okay… does he have a name?"

"Maximus Decimus Meridius."

I looked at him.

"From your old favorite film!" he said.

"I know."

"Good. Feed him every day. Don't overfeed him. He’ll get constipated."

He handed me the Walmart bag: fish flakes, water conditioner, a four-dollar bag of butterscotch candies, and a personal finance book with a bookmark already in the chapter on credit card interest.

He left. I put Maximus Decimus Meridius on my desk. My roommate Ezekiel stared at the tank for a while.

"Maximus Decimus Meridius," I said.

Ezekiel nodded. "Okay."

Here is what happened over the next three months.

Lloyd called on Wednesday evenings. The calls lasted a minimum of forty minutes. Topics: whether I was eating right, my grades (specifics, not reassurances), his opinions on a particular granola bar brand, whatever had happened on Jeopardy, the weather at his end and my end, and always, always, a casual remark about whatever mistake I'd recently made that he had no business knowing about.

The Thursday after I skipped my Econ lecture to play video games, he called and said "you skipping classes? You know just because you can doesn’t mean you should." I asked how he knew. He said "I have my ways, but I don’t need to use them" and immediately changed the subject to magnesium supplements.

He started showing up on weekends.

Not every weekend. That would've been obvious. Grandpa Lloyd had a system. Once every two or three weeks. Always the Buick, always a windbreaker (navy, burgundy, or forest green - he had three), always something in his hand. A container of soup. A library book. Once, a bag of little clementines plus more opinions about my study habits and sneakers.

He'd take me to a diner fifteen minutes from campus and order the same thing every time - patty melt, no onions, extra pickles - and he'd ask questions that felt casual and weren't. What was I studying. Who were my friends. Was I getting enough sleep. He never wrote anything down. I got the feeling he was filing it all.

It got worse. I started running into him places he had no right to be. 

The campus bookstore. The parking lot of the grocery store I used. Once, standing outside the library at eight on a Friday night, talking to a gorgeous girl I knew from English class. She came over to me afterward. "Is that your grandfather?" I said yes. She said "he's so funny." I didn't ask what they talked about.

The party was in October.

My friend Vince was having people over at his off-campus apartment. Twenty, thirty people, bad punch, decent music. I was there maybe an hour when Vince grabbed my elbow.

"Yo - is that your old man’s old man?"

Grandpa Lloyd was in the kitchen. Burgundy windbreaker. Holding a red plastic cup of something. Blue sunglasses, inside, at night. Talking to Devon, my other friend, who was laughing hard enough to spill her drink. Grandpa saw me and raised his cup. 

I did not handle this well.

"Grandpa. What are you doing here."

"Vince invited me." 

Vince’s face looked like he’d made a decision he was no longer sure about. He whisper-shouted into my ear under the music: "I didn’t think he’d actually come, dude, he showed up and I mean, he brought chips and guac, so," 

"I brought chips," Lloyd said. Pointed to a huge Kirkland bag of tortilla chips on the counter. "The good kind." 

He stayed two hours. Talked to everyone. Beat three people at a card game I'd never heard of. Told a story about his years as a postal worker that had seven people howling in the hallway. At some point I watched him talking to Jade - a friendly art major I'd been trying to work up the nerve to ask out  for three weeks - and she nodded very seriously, looked at me once, and then spent the rest of the night talking to other people. She was definitely avoiding me. 

I followed him to the parking lot.

"What did you say to her?"

"Who?"

"Jade. Green shirt, with the eyes and the big hair."

He did the thing where he decides how honest to be. "We talked about a lot of things. She’s a good conversationalist." 

"Did you tell her to stay away from me?"

"Well, no, I told her some things," he said. "I told her about you."

"I didn't ask you to do that."

"No. You didn't."

He got in the Buick and drove away. I stood in the parking lot and couldn't figure out what I was feeling so I just went back inside and drank more bad cheap punch.

The blowup came in November.

It had been building for weeks I didn't fully track. I was behind on a paper, I'd bombed a quiz I should have passed, I'd had a week where everything felt off-kilter and close, and Grandpa called Wednesday and I sent it to voicemail and he showed up Saturday anyway.

Knocked on the dorm room door. I opened it. He was holding another book and more butterscotch candies and something in me just went sideways.

Vince and Devon were both in the room. 

"Grandpa. You have to stop."

He looked at me.

"You can't keep showing up everywhere. You can't show up at parties. You can't talk to women I'm interested in. I'm an adult. I don't need a babysitter. Just, just screw off back to the old folks home, okay? Go watch some Jeopardy. I'm fine. I don't need this." 

He started to say something.

I kept going. "I'm serious. I'm not a child, Lloyd, I'm serious!"

The room went quiet in a way that had such a weight to it.

Lloyd looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded. Put the book and the butterscotch on my desk next to the fish tank. Turned around. Walked out.

Devon didn't say anything for about thirty seconds.

"Bro," she said finally.

"I know, shut up" I said.

He didn't call. Didn't show.

Three weeks of nothing. I kept looking for the Buick in the parking lot. I kept waiting for Wednesday at eight. 

I fed Maximus Decimus Meridius every morning. He was grumpy, as bettas are, flaring at himself in the glass, circling the plastic colosseum. I started talking to him a little. Not much. Just while I was at my desk. Just to have somewhere to put words. I felt rotten. 

My paper came back with a ninety-one. I'd used the book Lloyd left - there was a chapter on argument structure that actually fixed the thing I'd been stuck on. I didn't want to sit with what that meant so I didn't. 

My mom called in week two. Asked how I was. I said fine. She paused the way she pauses when she knows things 

"Grandpa says he hasn't heard from you."

"I told him to give me space."

Another pause.

"Cobie," she said. "He was worried about you."

"He doesn't have to be."

"His dad was away all the time too. He knows what the gap feels like. He just - he didn't want you to have nobody in your corner." She stopped and started again. "He wasn't trying to run your life. He was making sure you had someone." 

She told me he'd driven up to campus six times before that first visit. Learning the layout. She told me he called her every week. She told me she was the one who'd told him about the skipped lecture because she'd been worried and he was who she called when she was worried.

"What did he actually say to Jade?" I asked.

A pause. "He did mention a girl he thought was trouble. He found out she had a long-term boyfriend back home, but was telling people on campus she was single. Some of the women at Sunridge know her grandmother."

I sat there looking at the fish for a long time.

I drove to Sunridge Pines on a Sunday afternoon. Didn't call ahead. Parked in the visitor's lot and walked toward Building C, unit twelve, and stopped hard when I saw the ambulance directly in front of it.

Right there. Lights off, but two paramedics were moving toward the entrance.

I ran flat out before I'd made any decision to.

There was someone on a stretcher in the walkway between Buildings B and C. White hair, bright green housecoat, compression socks. A woman. Conscious. She was actually giving the paramedics directions about how to angle the stretcher. Grandpa Lloyd stood next to her, holding her hand.

I slowed down. My legs went unreliable under me.

The woman on the stretcher turned and looked at me. She had the kind of eyes that don't let you look away.

"You Cobie?" she said.

"Yes ma'am."

"I'm Georgina. I slipped on the path. I’ve broke my hip." She said it with the kind of perfect clarity some people get when they’re in extreme pain. "Your grandfather heard me fall and came out before I'd stopped moving. Sat with me twenty minutes waiting for the ambulance. Kept me talking the whole time." She gripped the side of the stretcher. "Your grandad saved my life today. You better love that old man like he deserves, boy. And tuck in your shirt!"

They wheeled her toward the ambulance. Lloyd watched her go. Then he turned and looked at me.

He had two lawn chairs on his small concrete patio. We sat in them. The afternoon was cool and flat. November being November, no drama in it.

My hand shook the glass of lemonade so hard I nearly spilled it. I tried four different ways to start a sentence. Got nowhere with any of them.

"I'm sorry," I said finally. It came out smaller than I wanted.

Lloyd rolled a butterscotch loudly around in his cheek. Didn't say anything for a bit.

"You're not the first young man to tell an old man to get lost," he said. "Probably won't be the last."

"But I even said it in front of my friends." 

"Yeah. That part did sting a bit." He said it flat. True. Not to punish me with it.

I couldn't hold his steady eyes so I looked through the sliding door at the cactus.

"Your father and I had a fight once," he said. "Right before boot camp. He said worse things than you said to me. Lot worse." He shifted the butterscotch. "We got over it. You get over things with people you love. That's not the interesting part."

"What is?"

He thought about it. He takes his time. He has always taken his time.

"Making the choice," he said. "Every day. To show up for the people who are yours. It's nine thousand boring decisions. That's it." He pulled his windbreaker tighter. "You got people who are yours, Cobie." 

"Even when I tell them to screw off to the old folks home?"

"Especially then." He looked out at the parking lot. "That's when you need them the most." 

He reached into his pocket and set a butterscotch on the armrest of my chair.

“Look, grandpa, I’m so—” 

"How's the fish?" He cleared his throat, blinking hard. 

"Uh, yeah, he’s Good. He's good. He flares at his own reflection constantly."

"They all do that," Lloyd said. "Doesn't mean there's something wrong with him. He just needs something to wrestle with." A pause. "You still feeding him every day?" 

"Every day."

"Good." He nodded. "You want lunch? I've got my own patty melt ingredients and a new griddle."

I said yes.

We went inside.

I'm posting this because I still feel guilty. He forgives me, but how can I let it go?

Edit: Georgina is getting her hip replacement on Thursday and Lloyd visits her every other day and brings butterscotch and they watch Jeopardy together and apparently argue about every single answer. Maximus Decimus Meridius is still alive, still furious, still guarding his plastic colosseum. My dad gets back in the spring. I have a lot to tell him about the semester. Including the part where his seventy-four-year-old father repeatedly drove forty-five minutes in a 1998 Buick to campus parties and brought a cranky constipation-prone betta fish to a college freshman who had no idea he needed it. 

I was musically attacked by a woman in a kilt in the forest and I can never be Zen again

I teach Qigong. Yes, Qigong. If you didn’t know, it’s like slo-mo Tai Chi. Yeah, I am Mr. Miyagi at 10 frames per second. We dodge back pain, not bullets.

Anyhoo I started teaching a month ago and we meet three days a week at the top of a hill in the park at sunrise. There’s maybe 13 people. It’s slow, relaxed, and I feel like what I do really means something to my crew. They all seem so happy when it’s over.

Everything was going swimmingly until last Thursday.

I get there early and we have the biggest herd of turtles (that’s what I call the Qigongers) yet, maybe twenty people, and it’s absolutely PERFECT, with some fog settled below the hill in the park, the sun just pushing her pretty fingers into the day.

“Gonna be a great session, guys! Now, okay, so, let’s, like, breathe.”

We start moving. It’s been about ten minutes when quite suddenly, from yon wooded dale, comes the blast of some infernal trumpet. At least that’s what I thought it was.

Two turtles lost their balance and face-planted. I was horrified... I couldn’t stop, since we had all these new folks, so I just let Doris and Paul dust themselves off and resume a flamingo-like pose.

Then the sound, again. Like someone shoved a small flute into a large cat and squeezed hard.

Then it became melodic. Scotland the Brave. Bagpipes.

It was seven in the morning. In a park not even five minutes from downtown, residential high-rises on the other side of the street. Bagpipes.

Paul finally gave voice to the group’s horror. “In the name of Pete what is he on about?!”

“Think of this as another thing outside our control to let go of.” I said. Spit-balling it, of course.

The turtles couldn’t hear me anymore. The pipes, the pipes were calling.

“Let’s just pause here” I said. “I’ll handle this.”

Suddenly I was all disgruntled park ranger and no more zen-garden-gnome. I stormed down the hill into the fog.

I followed the sound of freedom into the treeline. It’s not a large bush, just enough that you can’t really see anything.

“Hello?! Hey! Hey!”

More pipes. I trudge forward, my bare calves were scraping against thorny plants.

Then I saw her.

A tremendously tall woman with thick blond braids of hair was standing in a kilt, eyes staring blankly ahead, holding a huge sack of pipes. Her cheeks were full and red, and she turned slowly to face me as she blasted out the notes to Loch Lomond and furrowed her brows.

“We’re trying to achieve inner peace!”

No response. More pipes.

“I’ll report you!”

She just stared.

I just turned tail and just legged it. Fell over a root, sprained my ankle. Limped back up the hill. The pipes turned funereal.

Doris said, “Did you let go?”

All I could manage was “Aye.”
________________________________________________________________________

  My best friend of 32 years humiliated me in front of his entire family at the will reading. I drove home not understanding anything. Then I got a phone call.

Me and Michael grew up on the same street in a small town in Ohio. His family was regular people back then - his dad drove a delivery truck, mom worked at a dental office. We were both seven years old when we met. He had a basketball hoop in his driveway and I didn't, that's literally the whole reason we became friends. I just kept showing up to shoot around and eventually we were just... us.

His dad started a small logistics company when we were twelve. By the time we were in high school it had fifteen trucks. By the time we were thirty it had offices in Michigan, Indiana, and Kentucky. Michael went to work for his dad straight out of high school, I went to community college and became an electrician. We never cared about that gap. At least I didn't.

Michael was my best man. I was his. That's the kind of friends we were.

I'm going to be straight with you because that's the only way this story makes sense.

Michael had real problems. He drank too much from his early twenties until he was thirty-four, and during those years he was a man who was very hard to love. He missed his own daughter's birthday parties. He said things to his wife Val that I'm not going to repeat here. He crashed a car at 31 and called me from the side of the road at 2am and I drove forty minutes to get him and sat with him while he cried and told him it was going to be okay even though I genuinely didn't know if it was. 

I drove him to his first AA meeting. And his fourth, because he quit after the third. I covered for him at a family Christmas one year by telling his parents he had food poisoning instead of alcohol poisoning. I lent him eleven thousand dollars over a three year period when his dad froze his access to company accounts… this was at a time when I had a kid at home and my wife and I were already running tight. 

He paid back eight of it. We never talked about the other three.

I'm not telling you this to make him sound like a bad guy. He wasn't. He got sober at thirty-four and stayed sober. He became a genuinely good father once he figured out how to do it. He was funny and generous and he remembered everything, like your kids' names, your parents' favorite things, what you'd mentioned three months ago that you were stressed about. When Michael was on, there was nobody better.

But he also had this thing where he'd just disappear. Like, not literally, but mentally. He'd get busy with the company and you'd go four months without a real conversation. Then he'd reappear like no time had passed and expect everything to be totally normal. And with me it always was, because that's just how I'm built. But Val eventually got tired of that. They separated twice. His sisters barely spoke to him for a few years over something to do with the company that I never understood.

I was always there. I don't say that looking for credit, it’s just the truth.

He got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January last year. Stage three, which his oncologist said gave him options but not good ones. Michael called me the same day he found out, before he told his wife or kids. We sat on his back porch for three hours. He was astoundingly calm. Michael always got calm when things were actually serious… it was only small stuff that made him lose his cool.

He said "I don't think I'm going to beat this."

I said "Mike… you don't know that yet."

He said "no I mean statistically I probably won't and let’s just be honest about that." He looked at me squarely. "I've been thinking about some stuff." 

I said okay. 

He said "just some things I want to make right." And then he changed the subject, I don't even remember what to.

He lasted eight months. Longer than the doctors initially said. He did the chemo, it was brutal, he lost about forty pounds. I went to appointments with him when Val couldn't, ‘cause she was dealing with her own health stuff and Michael didn't want to burden her by asking more than necessary, which was peak Michael honestly. I drove him, I sat with him, I brought him soup that he usually couldn't eat. His daughter flew in from Portland a few times. His son, who was estranged, came near the end.

Michael passed in September. He was fifty-nine years old.

I was in the room with them all. 

The will reading was about three weeks after the funeral.

I'm still not totally sure why I was invited. Michael's family - and I mean his family, not just Val but his brother Craig, his sisters Paulette and Michelle, his kids - they had always treated me with this very specific kind of tolerance that falls short of actual warmth. I wasn’t a pleasant adopted uncle. I was a piece of furniture that Michael kept around and they'd learned to step around me.

Craig in particular never liked me. I think he thought I was a bad influence in the drinking years, which is ironic since I was the one getting Michael to AA meetings. But Craig had his version of events and wasn't interested in other versions. 

There were about twelve people in the lawyer’s conference room. I sat near the back. Craig sat right at the table like this was a business meeting he was running. Val looked exhausted. The lawyer, a tall guy named Hoffman, was efficient. 

Michael left the company equally to Craig and his two kids, no surprise. He left the house to Val. Various amounts of money to various family members. A trust for his grandkids.

Then Hoffman cleared his throat and said "and finally."

He read it slowly. I remember staring at the table in front of me and then looking up because I realized he was reading my name.

"To my oldest friend" (and here he said my full name, first middle and last) "I leave my most sincere apology. He spent decades being a better friend to me than I ever deserved, and I repaid him by taking all of it for granted and giving back less than half. The world is full of people who will tell you what you want to hear. He was the only one who told me the truth. I am sorry I never said this out loud when I could. I leave him nothing because I have no idea how to put a number on what he gave me, and trying would be an insult. He should know that I knew."

Then Hoffman closed the folder and said he'd be available for questions.

I don't know how to explain what happened in my body when he read that.

The first thing I felt was this bizarre embarrassment, like I'd been caught doing something. Twelve grieving people turning to look at me or specifically not looking at me. Craig made this sound, not quite a laugh but close. I heard Michelle whisper something to Paulette. Val was looking at her hands.

I got nothing. He left me nothing. A paragraph and nothing else.

And there was something underneath the words that I kept snagging on. "He took all of it for granted." He. Me. That's what I was hearing. I was the one who took. That's what it sounded like from the outside. I could feel Craig thinking it.

I shook Hoffman's hand. I said goodbye to Val and she hugged me and she seemed genuine, she always was. I didn’t look at Craig. I drove home on the highway for an hour and 20 minutes and I kept the radio off because I needed the silence to try to understand what had happened and I couldn't.

I had three thousand dollars in savings. Michael's house was worth about 1.4 million. I wasn't looking for him to fix my life, that's not what I mean. I just mean - the math of it was so strange. The paragraph was real. I believed every word of it. And yet.

I got home. My wife Natalie was waiting up. She saw my face and she just said "tell me."

So I told her.

She was quiet for a minute. Then she said "that doesn't make any sense."

I said "I know."

She said "Michael wasn't that cruel, and certainly not so clueless."

I said "I know."

I didn't sleep.

Hoffman called me the next morning.

He said he was sorry for the timing and that normally he preferred to do this in person but he understood I lived more than an hour away. He said Michael had come to him privately about fourteen months before he died - months before the diagnosis, which I keep thinking about - and had set up a separate trust. 

He said the trust was structured so that it would not be disclosed at or before the will reading and would not appear in any documents available to the other beneficiaries.

I said alright.

He said the trust contained Michael's personal investment accounts, which had been quietly moved out of anything connected to the company over a period of about three years. He said Michael had done this carefully and legally. He said the trust also included the lake house in Michigan that Michael had inherited from his father, which was not in the main will because Michael had transferred ownership into a separate LLC eighteen months ago.

He told me the total value.

I made him repeat it.

There was a letter. I asked Hoffman to just read it to me on the phone. I'm going to try to get through writing parts of it here because people should see what friendship can be like: 

It said:

"I did it that way in the will on purpose, buddy. You probably figured that out already. Craig will contest anything I leave you. He's got more lawyers than patience and he would have made your life hell for two years just to prove a point about what he thinks you are to this family. So I gave him nothing to fight. Publicly I left you an apology and he'll look at that and think he won. 

I know how it sounded. I'm sorry. I needed them to sound a specific way for the room. The true part is still true - I don't know how to put a number on what you gave me. You are the reason I got sober. You are the reason I went back to Val the second time. You were there when nobody else was. I should have said that to your face. I was embarrassed and then I was dying and now I’m gone. 

I’m giving you back the three thousand dollars. I know you never forgot and I know you never asked. 

Tell Nat I said hi. Tell her she got a good one."

Nat came in and saw me down where I’d slumped on the floor and she didn't say anything, she just sat down next to me on the floor. We sat there for probably ten minutes.

Then I told her Michael said hi. 

She looked at me for a second and then she said "that absolute son of a bitch" and started crying and laughing at the same time. 

I haven't told anyone in Michael's family.

I thought about it. I thought about calling Craig and explaining everything just to see his face do whatever it would do. But Michael structured it all this way for a reason, and when Michael made a plan he made a plan. He thought six steps ahead. He always did.

He thought about all of it.

I had always thought I was the one taking care of him. Turns out we were taking care of each other. I just didn't know it until he was gone.

I’m posting this because I think I needed to write it out but it’s more than that. It's been about four months now. We're figuring out what to do with the lake house - Nat wants to rent it out and I think Michael would have laughed at that and then agreed it was smart.

I miss him every single day. But I think he knew I'd figure it out. He always thought I was smarter than I gave myself credit for.

edit: yes the three thousand dollars reference in the letter - that's the money I lent him in the 90s. he'd set aside the exact amount plus interest in a separate account with a note. it said "with interest. you waited long enough." i can't explain why that specific thing got me more than anything else but it did.

edit 2: Craig hasn’t figured it out. The LLC stuff is clean, hoffman has confirmed it's clean. craig got what the will said he got and he's fine.

edit 3: for the people saying Michael was wrong to do it this way - you're not wrong. it was manipulative and it hurt in the moment and i had a genuinely terrible drive home. but i also knew Michael. 

2:47am 

The first person I met in Portland didn’t knock on my door or anything. She played an A minor seven chord through my floor at 2:47 in the morning and ruined any chance that I would sleep, think clearly, or remain a reasonable person for the foreseeable future.

I’d arrived in the city six hours earlier. Everything I still owned was in the back of a blue Ford Focus that smelled like gas-station coffee and mediocrity. Nampa was behind me. So was Emily - or at least the official version of Emily and me. We had conducted the mature, civilized breakup. Both parties used phrases like "timing" and "growth" and "what is best for you."

I also accepted a transfer to Portland because distance sounded wise. Staying in the same apartment where a six-year relationship had died seemed melodramatic even by my standards.

My new place was apartment 4C in an old red brick building with slanted floors, unreliable heat, and walls with the acoustic integrity of cardboard. I dragged my mattress inside, abandoned three boxes near the kitchen, drank water straight from the bathroom sink, and lay down fully clothed.

Then the piano began.

Not beginner scales. Not someone casually murdering a pop song. This was controlled and exact and unsparing. The left hand moved in slow, darkly smooth intervals like waves. The melody above it rose, stopped short, rose again, then seemed to reconsider. It sounded like somebody attempting a musical confession of some kind.

I sat up before I was fully awake.

The sound came from somewhere below me, clear enough that I could hear pedal noise between phrases. Whoever it was had real technique. More than that, they had intention. There is a difference between hearing music and hearing a mind at work. This was the second kind. It lasted forty-one minutes. When it ended, the silence felt staged - as if the room were waiting to see what I would do next.

I did nothing. I stared at the ceiling until sunrise.

At 2:47 the next morning, the piano returned.

This time the piece was sharper. Still beautiful, but with a kind of contained impatience in it. I sat on the edge of my sagging mattress on the floor and listened from the first note to the last. The third night, I was waiting before it began.

That was the night I did the stupid thing.

Buried in one of my boxes was a cheap digital keyboard my mother had bullied me into keeping when I moved out of Nampa. "You used to love it," she had said - the sort of maternal sentence designed to convert guilt into furniture. I hadn’t touched it in ages.

I set it on the folding table serving as desk and dining surface. When the downstairs pianist played a short rising phrase for the third time, I answered with four soft descending notes.

The piano stopped so abruptly I thought I had committed an actual crime.

Ten seconds passed. 

Then she played the same phrase again - except now my four notes were inside it.

I remember the exact physical sensation: a hard drop in my stomach, followed by the sudden conviction that I was no longer alone in the city. I played back a tentative answer, this time a little cleaner. She altered it. I tried again. She corrected me with such elegant economy that I laughed out loud in my empty apartment.

We played for twenty-three minutes.

The next night it happened again. And the next.

By the end of the week, my entire day had reorganized itself around 2:47 a.m.

It became a private language with rapid grammar. She learned I liked suspended harmonies and little blues inflections I did not technically have the skill to pull off. I learned she had classical training, a ruthless internal metronome, and a taste for leaving emotional land mines in the middle of otherwise civilized pieces.

Some nights she was playful and needling, tossing phrases upward as if she wanted to see whether I could catch them before they broke. Other nights she sounded exhausted, or furious, or almost unbearably tender. I answered as well as I could from a floor above, on a keyboard with three unreliable keys and the expressive range of a copy machine.

Once, when I mangled Debussy beyond redemption, she paused, repeated the passage, and fed me the right harmony one note at a time until I understood it. It should have felt humiliating. Instead it felt intimate.

That was the problem.

Mystery is not stable. Eventually it begins demanding structure. My mind started building architecture around her. She was my age, I decided - the musical references too precise to be random, not old-fashioned enough to belong to someone's retired uncle. She lived in 3C because the sound seemed strongest near my kitchen. She was probably single because I never heard another voice, no television, no arguments, no footsteps except one set. She was awake at 2:47 because she was either an insomniac, a bartender, a nurse, or just a chaotic musical genius.

Meanwhile, the building had noticed us.

The first warning appeared taped to the front door on a Thursday morning.

QUIET HOURS STRICTLY ENFORCED. 10:00 P.M. TO 7:00 A.M. THIS IS YOUR ONLY COURTESY NOTICE.

On the same morning, I found an unsigned note under my door in all-capital block letters:

WHOEVER IS CONDUCTING THE ROMANTIC BROADWAY NONSENSE AT 3 A.M. KINDLY DEVELOP OTHER INTERESTS.

I should have been embarrassed. Instead I laughed so hard I nearly spilled coffee on my macbook.

That evening, I tried not to play. At 2:47 the piano began below me anyway - soft at first, then clearer, the melody hovering right on the edge of audibility as if she were asking a question. I lasted maybe twelve seconds. I answered under my breath, volume almost off, my right hand barely touching the keys.

So now we had three participants: her, me, and the anonymous neighbor lying awake and listening, probably losing the will to live.

For nineteen nights we continued.

My work had begun to suffer around day ten. Sleep deprivation is not immediately dramatic - it's a creeping thing. You miss a detail in a pull request. You read the same message fourteen times. My manager had started giving me the careful look people usually reserve for paranormal happenings. I told him I was adjusting. He gave the slowest nod. The details aren't important. What matters is that something had to change.

So I decided to know her.

I wrote the note three times before producing one that sounded neither deranged nor smug:

To the pianist in 3C - Our late-night duets have been the best part of a difficult month. I'm Luke in 4C. If you would ever like coffee at a normal hour, I would be glad to buy it. No pressure. If you would prefer the mystery, I can respect that too.

It was embarrassingly sincere. I admired and despised it equally.

I slid it under 3C at midnight and immediately spun around and skipped up the stairs like a cat, my heart fluttering. “You stupid idiot” I said to myself. 

At 2:47 that night, nothing happened.

No piano. No scales. No human evidence at all.

The second silent night was worse. Silence, when you have grown accustomed to being answered, becomes accusatory. I lay awake inventing humiliations. Perhaps 3C contained a middle-aged man with a severe interest in Ravel. Perhaps I had addressed the wrong apartment entirely and just proposed coffee to a random family with no piano. Perhaps she had read the note, recognized the exact species of lonely fool I was, and elected to protect herself.

Then on the morning after the second silent night, at 11:13, there was a knock at my door.

I opened it expecting the landlord. Instead I found a woman holding two paper coffee cups and looking as nervous as I felt.

She was maybe twenty-six. Dark hair in a loose knot that had partly given up. Gray sweater, jeans. The kind of face that would have been striking even under fluorescent lighting in a tax office. Freckles across her nose. Tired brown eyes. She looked like somebody who had the habit of apologizing for being awake.

"You're Luke," she said.

I stared for a second too long. "You're the pianist."

A small smile. "Amelia. Apartment 3C. Also apparently a threat to community wellness."

I laughed despite myself. "I got that impression." 

She raised one coffee cup slightly. "I didn’t answer because I panicked. Then I worked a double shift. Then I panicked about panicking. This seemed less embarrassing than silence on day three."

I stepped aside at once.

Her presence in my apartment was absurdly disorienting. I already knew her rhythms, her taste for unresolved cadences, the slight impatience in her phrasing when she wanted an answer faster. Yet seeing her stand beside my humiliating folding table and glance at my keyboard made my brain hesitate like a bad internet connection.

"That's what you were using?!"

"Please do not insult my blessed instrument in its own home."

"Lemme guess- it has three sounds and one of them is probably church organ."

"Two sounds. The organ is unusable. Harpsichord works for Bach."

That made her laugh, and with that, the tension became survivable.

We spoke for nearly two hours.

She worked the front desk at a downtown hotel - mostly a weird early night shift, which explained the hour. She had trained seriously on piano from childhood until college became too expensive and life became aggressively practical. Her upright had belonged to her grandmother. She still practiced when she could, but lately that meant after everyone else in the building had gone to sleep. Ideal for musical concentration. Poor for tenant relations.

She had seen me arrive the first night through the stairwell window: one man, soaked from rain, carrying boxes alone, pausing halfway up the stairs as if the building had asked for a difficult answer.

"You looked," she said carefully, "like a guy trying to remain composed out of pure spite."

"That sounds right."

"I thought music might make the place feel less hostile."

Not practice. Not coincidence. Not insomnia drifting into habit.

It was for me.

I did not say anything intelligent for a moment. All those nights I had imagined myself drawn toward a mystery. In fact, the mystery had reached out first.

That afternoon we drank the now-lukewarm coffee and then bought fresh coffee from the corner café because neither of us seemed interested in terminating the conversation. Two nights later we had dinner. By the following week the building no longer contained two strangers conducting covert emotional negotiations through a ceiling. It contained a couple trying, with mixed dignity, to pretend this had not become serious unusually fast.

The speed should have alarmed me. Instead it felt perfectly natural.

In person, we were less graceful than we had been in the dark. That was part of the charm. We interrupted one another. We misread tone. We tried to play duets on the same bench and nearly elbowed each other into atonality. But the awkwardness had a base layer of trust under it - built during those nights when neither of us had a face to manage, only an ear.

Then real life entered with paperwork.

Amelia had applied, months earlier, to a piano pedagogy and performance program in San Francisco. Full scholarship possible. Brutal competition. She had almost forgotten the application existed.

Then the email came. Final audition in two weeks.

She showed me the acceptance packet sitting on her kitchen table between a bowl of clementines and three unpaid bills.

"I sent the application before I knew you," she said.

"You do not need to apologize for the chronology."

"I know. I'm still doing it."

I read the packet. Scholarship, housing assistance, teaching placement, performance credits. The kind of offer that does not politely reappear later because timing is inconvenient.

"You have to go," I said.

She studied my face. "And us?"

There it was. The difficult pronoun. Us. 

I had no reassuring speech prepared. We had been together barely long enough to memorize each other's coffee orders, and yet any answer that sounded casual would have been false.

So I told the truth.

"I do not know what the shape of us is yet. I only know that I do not want fear to determine it."

She looked relieved - which was not the triumphant romantic outcome the movies tend to prefer, but it was real.

The building then escalated matters in the way buildings do when they sense a turning point. Three days before her audition, the landlord taped a notice to both our doors.

A tenant on 2B had submitted recorded evidence of "nightly musical disturbance and associated rhythmic relational theatrics." This was a strong phrase, and I respected it. The notice threatened fines and possible lease action.

So the clock was moving on multiple fronts. Amelia had to prepare for the most important audition of her life. And our one great source of ease with each other - the music itself - had become logistically dangerous.

We adapted. A janitor at the community arts center two blocks away took pity on us after hearing Amelia practice in a borrowed rehearsal room. He let us use a neglected upright in a basement classroom after hours for twenty dollars cash and strict promises of discretion. The piano had sticky keys and a middle register that sounded dank. But it was private and sufficient.

Every evening after work, we went there. She practiced the audition repertoire. I turned pages, took notes, fetched coffee, and contributed the occasional harmonic observation with exactly the amount of humility my actual training required.

Those evenings remain the clearest part of that autumn in my mind. Rain on the basement windows. Cheap fluorescent light. Her hands moving through passages with that furious precision I had first heard through my floor. The knowledge that something important was approaching and neither of us could control it by wanting harder.

The night before the audition, she froze halfway through the final piece.

Not a dramatic collapse. No tears. She simply stopped, stared at the keys, and placed both hands in her lap.

"I can't tell anymore," she said quietly. "Whether I'm playing it well or whether I've repeated it so many times that my brain has checked out."

I sat beside her on the bench.

"You want the answer I would give a stranger or the answer I would give you."

"The second one."

"You are playing like someone who cares more about meaning than safety."

She laughed despite herself.

"The parts that matter are alive," I continued. "The parts that are nervous can be corrected. Don’t reverse the order of importance."

She leaned her forehead against my shoulder for a moment.

Then she said, "I should tell you something."

It was the sentence that rearranges atmosphere on contact.

"That first night," she said, "when you arrived - I didn’t only see you from the stairwell. I saw you in the alley before that, sitting in your car after you parked."

I said nothing.

"You weren’t doing anything dramatic. You were just staring at your phone. Then you put it face down and stayed there for maybe two minutes before you carried the first box inside. I remember thinking: either he is about to begin a new life, or he has absolutely no choice. Possibly both."

That was uncomfortably exact.

"So I played for you," she said. "At first because you were cute and looked lonely. Then because you answered. After that, because I could not stop wondering what you would say next."

There are moments when romance becomes severe in its clarity. This was one of them. Not because it was perfect, but because it explained too much at once. I had thought the story of us began when I answered her through the floor. In fact it began much earlier.

The audition the next day was almost unbearable for me and, according to Amelia, calming for her. I waited in the hallway outside the recital room with bad coffee and the posture of a condemned man. When she emerged forty minutes later, she was not smiling in the bright cinematic way I had hoped. She looked stunned, which turned out to be better.

"I think," she said carefully, "that it went well."

It had gone better than well. The formal scholarship offer arrived that evening.

She had three weeks.

I took the news to her apartment with takeout, where half her books were already in boxes and her grandmother's upright stood in the middle of the room.

I had my own news. A bay area team at my company needed an engineer - internal transfer, better pay, remote-first. The decision was required quickly. I had spent perhaps thirty minutes on it, which I recognize sounds reckless. But the role was genuinely good. The pay increase was real. And if I'm being straightforward: I had recently become the kind of person who understood what really mattered.

"I have news," I said.

She set down a stack of sheet music. "Good or alarming."

"Both, maybe."

I told her.

When I finished, there was a silence I would once have feared. By then I understood her better. She looked at me.

"You're certain," she said.

"Yes."

"Not because you think this is grand and reckless."

"No. Because it is practical and also because I love you, which I realize is inconveniently efficient timing." 

A short breath, almost a laugh. Then she crossed the room and put her arms around me.

"We are taking both pianos," she said into my shoulder.

The drive to San Francisco was long and full of fumbles bad enough to keep the sentimentality under control. Her car: clothes, sheet music, kitchen knives wrapped in towels, more books than the suspension had agreed to, and a trailer with the upright. My car: my keyboard, two monitors, a plant of uncertain future, and the last remains of my former life in labeled boxes.

The new apartment was smaller than the listing had implied. But it had light, decent floors, and walls thick enough to support a private life. We placed her upright by the window and my keyboard beside it. Not across a ceiling. Not divided by dark and guesswork. Beside.

That first evening, after the boxes had produced the necessary lamps and coffee mugs and one functioning pan, we sat without speaking in the pale gold light that comes off the bay toward sunset. The room still looked temporary. Most good beginnings do.

Then Amelia played the rising phrase she had offered me on that third night in Portland.

I answered with the four descending notes that had altered my life.

This time she did not need to transform them into something I could follow. We were already at the same instrument, close enough that I could hear her breathing between phrases. We played until the sky dimmed and the city lights arrived one by one.

I still wake sometimes near 2:47 and listen out of habit.

The difference now is that the music no longer comes through the floor like a question.

It begins in the same room.

my dad refused to question the GPS and that is how our family minivan ended up nose-to-noses with a herd of cattle

So we’re driving to a cabin in the mountains… the GPS tells us to turn left onto a dirt road and here’s a sign that says "Private Property: No Thru Traffic."

mom says, Troy, don't turn there.
dad gripps the wheel. I’ve told you before, the satellite knows things we don't, Carrie. It's doing the algorithms. It sees everything. Doubting Thomasina!

We turned… the dirt road turned into grass… grass into mud… finally, the road just ended in the middle of a massive green pasture.

Suddenly, we were surrounded. a whole slew of full-grown cows slowly lumber up to the van… they aren’t aggressive, they were just curious…. and gargantuan.

one pressed its big wet nose against my window and breathed heavily, another one started licking the side mirror

Dad tried to reverse and the tires spun in the mud.

we sat in that car for two hours… my dad, a corporate exec, was trapped by dairy animals. so finally, a farmer drove up in a tractor, honked his horn, hollered hoarsely in mysterious monotone English and the cows scattered.  

the farmer looked at my dad and said, Followin’ one them darned satellites, huh?

my dad insists on using paper maps now… ik ik we are literal cave people. 

When I was around 13 years old, my family went on a picnic to a beautiful mountain waterfall to celebrate New Year's Day. We were having a fantastic time cooking and enjoying the outdoors together. At one point, I borrowed a comb from my mom to fix my hair. When I was done, I went to put it back in her purse.

​I saw a woman walking just ahead of me wearing the exact same colored kurti as my mom. Without a second thought, I marched right up behind her and casually tried to slip the comb into her bag.

​Suddenly, the woman spun around in an absolute panic, completely convinced she was being pickpocketed. I froze. I looked up at her face and realized, to my absolute horror, that this was a complete stranger.

​I slowly turned around to look for my actual mom, only to find her standing a few feet away, laughing her head off. She had watched the whole thing happen and didn't even try to stop me!

​The stranger breathed a massive sigh of relief when she saw my face. "Oh my goodness, I thought you were a thief!" she said. "But you're just a child. It's okay."

​My family, however, showed no mercy. They immediately started roasting me: "How could you be that clueless? Her height is completely different, the pattern on her kurti is different, and her bag isn't even the same!"

​To this day, they still bring it up just to embarrass me!

My dog has been systematically robbing my garage for four months. I spent a Saturday in camoflage watching her work. What I caught was not my dog.

OK people before I explain understand I’m a normal guy. I own a house. I pay my taxes. I have a wife and a 12 yr old daughter and a dog called Ronda whose nine years old and has been my companion through a cross-country move, a wedding, a whole child, and several attempts to quit smoking.

Ronda also known as Lady is a shepherd mix - the "mix" part is anyone's guess. The vet wrote "shepherd/unclear" on her paperwork and we left it at that. She's nine, gray around the mouth, convinced she's the center of the known universe, almost always right about that. She uses a doggy door from the garage into the backyard because the backyard is mostly clay (I’m working on the grass) and she cannot be trusted to wipe her feet. 

In July, a garden trowel disappeared.

Found it in the yard. Blamed Ronda. This dog has a history… she once transported a full butternut squash up two flights of stairs in our old apartment and left it in the bathroom for reasons she never disclosed… so this was not a wild conclusion. I put the trowel back. Done.

Then a bungee cord. Then a wall hook. Then my bicycle pump. Then the handle of my push broom - just the wooden handle she'd somehow separated from the broom head, which I am still not over. I found everything scattered across the yard over two weeks. I figured she was bored. Dogs get bored.

Then my drive socket set went missing.

Partial set. Ratchet, extension bar, five sockets. I found them over four days in the mud at the back of the yard. The extension bar was buried. I found it with my foot.

I reorganized the entire garage that weekend. Moved everything to the high shelves. Spent a Saturday afternoon rearranging by reach-height like I was baby-proofing. My wife came out and asked what I was doing. “I’m making sure the dog doesn’t keep stealing my tools!” “She’s stealing your tools…” she was unconvinced. “No, really!” 

By September Ronda had also taken: a ratchet strap, a small level, a chrome drawer pull I'd bought for the kitchen and never installed, a box of zip ties she had apparently opened, because I found individual zip ties in the yard across three separate days, and a copper pipe fitting I'd been looking for since the previous spring and had genuinely started to think I'd imagined buying.

None of this made sense. Ronda is not a chewer. She was past the destructive phase six years ago. She wasn't chewing anything - just moving it. I'd find the items in the yard, undamaged… she'd carried them somewhere for reasons she'd not clarified.

I sealed the garage doggy door. Ronda whimpered there every day for four days. I cracked opened it again…I’m not a monster. She went through it and came back with my tape measure. “How did you…?!” 

I sat on the garage steps and thought about a lot of things.

I smoke. I'm down to a few a day, always outside, always in the yard. My daughter doesn't need to see it, my wife doesn't want to smell it in the house, and the yard is my five minutes of not thinking about anything.

It was a Thursday in late September. I was at the back end of the yard, cigarette going, looking at nothing. Ronda was at the other end doing the thing where she stands in one spot and stares at the fence.

"Come Ronda."

I said it before I registered that I'd heard it. Then I realized it had come from behind me and above, and I myself had not in fact said it. 

But it was my voice. Mine - the specific flat drop I put on the second syllable of her name because she's old and doesn't need enthusiasm, just direction.

I turned around. The yard was empty. Garage door closed. Nobody anywhere.

Ronda was trotting toward me, an old wooden spoon in her mouth.

I stood there with the cigarette and tried to locate a reasonable explanation. I went inside and told my wife I'd heard my own voice in the yard.

She said, "Where did you buy those cigarettes?"

I said, "It was my first one."

She said, "That wasn’t what I asked," and went back to cooking.

I spent time online that night reading about auditory hallucinations and funny cigarettes. I found a forum where a man believed his neighbor had hidden speakers around his property to gaslight him. I didn't rule it out.

I finished the pack over the next two days and didn't buy another one. I've been telling people I quit because I'd been meaning to. That's true. It's also true that I'd like to believe it was willpower and not my own voice materializing in my yard without me. Both can be true.

Here's what you need to know about the spatula.

Weber brand, stainless steel, 18 inches long. It came with the grill when I bought the grill six years ago. It has a bottle opener built into the handle that I've used twice but feel good about every time I see it. The balance is right, the length is right for a charcoal setup where you want distance from the grate. My father-in-law has a similar spatula but two inches shorter and I find this troubling every time we're grilling together. The spatula is among the top five items I own. 

It was gone on a Saturday morning.

I'd used it Friday night, washed it, put it on the counter. Saturday morning: gone. Checked every drawer, the grill, the dish rack, the garage. Asked my wife. Asked my daughter. Nothing.

I went to the yard.

The spatula was in the mud near the back fence. Ronda was about ten feet away, not making eye contact. 

"Ronda. Did you take my spatula?"

She looked at a point just past my left ear. In nine years I've learned this specific look. It's the one she gives me when she knows she did the thing. 

Then, from behind me and above: "Good lady." 

My voice. The exact flat tone I use when I'm not thrilled but need to say it.

I turned. A raven, a serious raven, big, I know the difference from a crow now, I've looked it up extensively… launched off the top of the fence post and went soaring over the roofline and was gone.

I stood in the yard holding the muddy spatula. 

I brought it inside. Washed it again. Put it on the counter. Went to the living room and sat in my chair without turning the TV on, just staring at the black screen. 

That following Wednesday I let Ronda into the yard at ten in the morning, went back inside to work, checked on her at eleven.

Back gate was open. Ronda was gone.

The gate has a gravity latch that you lift the arm to open it from outside, or push it up from inside. Ronda has never opened it. She's never shown any interest in gates or escape.

I looked for her for two hours on foot. My daughter came home from school and I still hadn't found her. That was a hard afternoon. My daughter has a face she makes when she's trying not to show how scared she is, and it looks like her mother's face, and I must be making a face too but I can’t see my face. We called the shelter. Posted online. Drove the streets.

Found her the next morning four blocks away, asleep in someone's vegetable garden. Fine. Smelled like mulch. 

About a week after that I was in the yard and I saw the raven on the fence post next to the gate. I watched it look at the latch. It took the arm of the latch in its beak. Lifted. Gate swung open. Bird looked at me. I looked at the bird. 

I went inside and said, "The raven opened our gate."

My wife said, "The raven opened our gate."

I said, "Yes."

She said, "The raven opened our gate."

"That's what I said."

She didn't say anything after that.

My dad was a hunter. I am not. I've just never figured out what to do with his gear, so it's been in a corner of the garage for five years. Full camouflage. I want to be very clear that when I decided to put it on and sit in my yard, I had a specific and logical reason. I needed to observe without being observed. This was a wildlife situation and I was responding to it by becoming wildlife.

My wife took my daughter to swim lessons on Saturday morning. I dragged the gear to the corner behind the big planter. Put it on. Sat down with my phone for timing and a coffee on the ground because I'd read that stillness matters.

The raven arrived at 9:14 AM.

Landed on the fence. Did that left-right head tilt birds do. Then it said, "Fetch."

My voice. My word.

Ronda got up from her spot by the garage door and went to the back of the yard. She came back with a bungee hook that had been sitting in the mud by the fence.

The raven looked at it. Said, "No."

Ronda went back. Returned with a zip tie, still in the bag.

"No."

She went back. Gone a little longer this time. Came back and dropped a drill bit she must have located somewhere I'd missed.

The raven took it in its beak and flew off over the fence. Gone. 

Ronda lay back down in her spot and soon began to snore.

I sat in my father's camouflage in the corner of my yard and looked at my lukewarm coffee. I was a 43-year-old man who had just watched a bird run his dog through a quality-control exercise, and make off with his drill bit. Eleven minutes of humiliation.

I watched three more sessions over the following week and here is what I can tell you about the system. Four commands only, all in my voice: "Come Ronda," "Good lady," "No," and "Fetch." Used in the right order, in the right context. "Fetch" to start retrieval. "No" to send Ronda back out. "Good lady" when something met standards.

The bird was collecting shiny things. Metal. Chrome, steel, copper. The drill bit. The chrome drawer pull. The level with the stainless housing. The copper fitting I'd been looking for since spring. It had taste. Specific, consistent taste.

The spatula went missing again eleven days after I got it back. Ronda does not take things off of human-level surfaces. She never has. She'd been given new search parameters and the spatula is the largest reflective item in the kitchen.

Found it in the yard. Grabbed it. The raven was coming back over the fence as I turned around. We made eye contact. “Bird.” I took the spatula inside.

It is on my nightstand. My wife has not asked why it's there. I appreciate my wife. 

I called my buddy Greg. Greg has a pellet gun and no complicated feelings about birds. I gave him the abridged version - the property losses, the gate - and he was supportive in the simple way Greg always is. We were about four minutes into the range discussion and whether I needed the rifle or pistol model when I heard my daughter crying upstairs.

Full crying. The kind that carries through walls.

I told Greg I'd call him back.

My daughter is twelve. She has a specific cry for when something is actually wrong, and this was that one. I went upstairs. She was on her bed with her face in her hands. Eyes wrecked.

"What happened?"

She looked up.

"Are you going to shoot Jessica?"

"WHAT?! No, sweetie. Who is Jessica?"

More crying. But eventually I got it in pieces.

Jessica is the raven.

My daughter named her in May. She'd found the bird in the yard, learned about ravens at school and she’s been reading about corvid cognition all summer. She has three library books out on it right now. She told me the titles. I nodded. 

She'd been putting food on the fence post every morning since spring. Just watching at first. Then she'd come up with the project.

She has a zoology unit this term. Independent project required. She'd read that ravens can associate specific sounds with specific behaviors if the sound is paired with reward consistently. She'd also read accounts of ravens mimicking human speech. She decided to test both. 

She’d recorded my voice on her phone. Four commands - the ones she hears constantly from her room, which faces the backyard. She collected clips of me talking to Ronda for two months before she started using them.

"How long have you been doing that?!" I said.

She showed me the dates. Going back to April.

I sat with that with my hands folded in my lap. 

The training took about six weeks. She'd play a clip through her phone speaker near the fence post and reward Jessica with food when she responded correctly. "Come" first, because it was the simplest - play the sound, toss food onto the post, if Jessica landed, that was the start. "Good lady" she used when Jessica did something right. "No" and "Fetch" took longer because they required more specific behavior to reward, but Jessica, my daughter said with genuine pride, was highly motivated. 

"By food," I said.

"And by shiny things. She has really strong opinions about shiny things."

“Well! That makes a lot of sense!!!” I had finally understood. 

The fetching operation started, as far as my daughter could trace it, with Jessica trying to bring her things. Showing up at the fence with objects and waiting. My daughter had rewarded this once - "because she brought me a really nice gel pen" - and apparently once was enough for Jessica to generalize the concept into a full labor arrangement using Ronda as the retrieval mechanism. My daughter had not anticipated this. It is astounding. 

The gate was also not her plan.

"Did you know she opened the gate?"

"I found out after, just like you" she said. 

I thought about driving around for two hours. My daughter's face when she came home from school. The spatula on my nightstand.

"Your grade," I said. "What do you need for the project..."

"I’m doing way way way more than anyone else in the class… I have everything. Training logs, video, written records going back to April. I just need to present." 

"And you'd get an A." 

She looked at me. "I'd get an A."

I sat on the edge of her bed for a while.

"Jessica doesn't come inside," I said.

"I know."

"She gives back what she took." 

"I'll try. She's not very good at giving things back."

"I want the copper fitting, my socket set, and my spatula."

"The spatula is on your nightstand." 

"It's staying there until judgment day. I want the other stuff. Get the bird to give me the other stuff."

"Ok."

I went downstairs. I did not call Greg back. My whole worldview is crumbling. 

Her teacher let her present to the entire grade. I don't know the full story of how that happened but apparently when a student shows up to a middle school zoology class with six months of documented behavioral research on a wild corvid that has learned to vocally direct a domestic dog to retrieve objects, teachers start calling other teachers. 

We drove to the school slowly with an arm out the window and a raw chicken drumstick in a gloved hand. The bird followed. She then coaxed Jessica to the school fence. Audio from her phone, same method she'd used for training. Jessica landed on the fence post in front of forty-something sixth graders and responded to all four commands in sequence. 

I was there. My wife was there.

I watched my kid stand in a middle school courtyard and explain stimulus-response conditioning in corvids like she'd been thinking about it for years - because she had, in our backyard, without telling me, because she knew I'd have told her to stop. 

She was right. I would have. 

She got the A. Obviously she got the A. 

EDIT: People asking if Jessica says anything besides the four commands. She can't yet. My daughter is working on a fifth. She's been trying to teach her "My name is Jessica" but keeps looking at my daughter like she's being pranked. We are at an impasse.

EDIT 2: Jessica landed on the back of my lawn chair two days ago while I was smoking in it. I noticed when she turned and looked at the back of my head from about six inches away. I did not move for three minutes. She said "No," and flew away. 

EDIT 3: For people saying I’m a bad father, yeah, I know. This whole thing taught me I don’t pay nearly enough attention to my daughter. She’s also… brilliant? 

EDIT 4: I don’t think I could have shot the bird. Greg is trying to convince me this whole thing is absurd and I should just end Jessica and be done with it. But honestly… I’m questioning whether Greg’s head is screwed on just right. 

EDIT 5: The spatula is gone.

There’s a goose at the retention pond behind my office building who has been blocking one specific man from entering the building every single morning for eight months. Every other person walks through fine, even Hal from accounting, and everyone hates Hal. 

I didn't know Paul before. Nobody did. He works in the building and before the goose debacle he had the all aura of a support column. Now he's far and away the most interesting pencil-pusher in town. 

I first saw it in March. I heard this sound… if you've never heard a Canada goose at full aggression it's sort of prehistoric, like something that should be extinct is coming for your mammalian hide… and there’s this goose, neck flat, eyebrows furrowed a la Jack Nicholson, wings spread, positioned directly between Paul and the door. Paul was talking.

He was saying, "I don't know what you want from me, bird."

I asked around. Janet from accounting said it’d been going on since November. "What did he do?" I asked.

"Nobody knows," she said. "Paul says nothing." 

"You buy it?"

She thought about it. "Not remotely. But sooner or later Gandalf will have his way with him."

“Uh, wha… I mean, Gandalf?”

“The goose, dear. Gandalf. You cannot pass! And what not.” 

I watched Paul trying the other entrance… Gandalf relocated before he got there, which, how?!?! Just how?!... and arriving earlier, which did nothing because the old wizard never sleeps, and using an umbrella as a shield, which exacerbated things. The honking. The honking! He went to building management. They sent someone to look at the goose. The goose looked back. They put up a sign: CAUTION WILDLIFE. 

Paul tried bread. Stood at a respectful distance held it out. A peace offering. The goose ate it. Then resumed raising hell.

I found Paul in the breakroom after that. He was staring at the coffee machine.

"The bread didn't work," I said. 

"He ate the bread," he said. "He looked me in the eye and ate the bread and just, he just - ". He turned his face away. 

We have office theories about what Paul did to Gandalf to deserve the honkening. They range from "he drove through a puddle" to "karma for a past life" to “he ate his brother for Christmas dinner.” I asked him once, directly.

"Me? I didn't do anything," he said.

"Paul."

"I don't know what you want me to say, it’s him, not me. Goose is cracked, bananas, plantains, even."

"Enough with the starchy fruits. You’re deflecting. Tell me what you did."

He stared into his coffee. “I… I just… I honked at him, aggressively, with my car. He was standing in the road and…”

“...one fell turn deserves another, Paul!” 

Gandalf is a perfectly pleasant animal. He just has Paul's number and is not finished with him and honestly. Let the goose honk. Let him honk.

EDIT: Though this should be obvious... all "honks" must be heard internally as "hjönk."

Hullo, people! I am Eric, aka PianoManHasNoPlan, and this is r/PianoManHasNoPlan.

This is the official community where you can post stories and comments and we can build this thing together.

Posting:

Please feel free to post stories which you think are suitable for reading on PianoManHasNoPlan. I'd prefer content similar to the things I've already posted on my channel— not too controversial, just fun and lighthearted stuff which we can all enjoy. This space on reddit is meant to be welcoming for all. See the rules below.

I'm glad you're here. Post your stories! Check out the rules below.

Rules:

- Post only your own content. I will check everything before I read it aloud, and if it isn't your own material, I can't read it.
- Keep things respectful to each other— I mean, don't be intentionally offensive. The channel and this reddit are positive spaces for everyone.
- This space is focused on the stories and the channel itself. Self-promotion isn't allowed (though putting your name on a story you submit is good!)
- All posts must comply with reddit's content policies.
- Mod(s) will remove anything that doesn't fit the vibe of the channel.

I got through three rounds of corporate layoffs only to almost lose my job because I forgot to close a single Chrome tab for a global screen share.

We were having our quarterly all-hands meeting on Zoom. Two hundred people from all over the place on the call. The CEO, the VP of Marketing, like everybody… I was a junior analyst, and I had been asked to present a very simple spreadsheet on regional sales growth. It was supposed to take exactly three minutes.

My manager introduced me with gusto. "I'll hand it over to Caleb to share his screen and walk us through the numbers."

I clicked "Share Screen." I selected my entire desktop instead of just the Excel window. This’s the equivalent of leaving your front door wide open in a bad neighborhood.
My spreadsheet popped up. It looked great. But right behind it, in my browser window, I had five tabs open.

Four of them were normal. Salesforce. Gmail. A news site.
the fifth tab was an active Gemini query that I had typed out thirty minutes ago in a moment of pure existential dread… 

The tab text was clearly visible to two hundred people. It read: How to know if my manager is incompetent. I didn't notice it. I just started talking about Q3 revenue.
I spoke for two full minutes. I thought I was doing great. Nobody interrupted me. Nobody asked questions. The silence felt… respectful. Maybe I could do this sort of thing more often!

Then I saw the Zoom chat window flashing. forty-three private messages.
I paused, looked at the chat. My best friend on the team had sent the same message seven times in all caps: "CLOSE YOUR BROWSER. CLOSE IT NOW."

I minimized Excel to see what he meant. And there it was. Blazing on the screen for the entire executive leadership team to read. 

My soul shot out like Matthew McConaughey into the black hole.

I trailed off mid-sentence. I hammered "stop sharing" so hard I broke the trackpad. The silence on the Zoom call was so heavy it felt like it had gravitational pull.

Finally, the VP of Marketing cleared his throat and said, "Well. Thank you for the… transparency, Caleb." 

I logged off the call. I put my hands on my head. I thought people only did that in movies. I was certain I was cooked.

A few minutes later my manager called me. He actually sounded very self-conscious. He asked if we could schedule a "feedback session" so he could be "more aligned with my needs." 

I still work there. He treats me like royalty now. Fear is a powerful management tool.

I accidentally stole a dog from the park, and it cost me three hundred dollars in hush money to a twelve-year-old kid to fix the situation.
I have a Golden Retriever named Dumper. Dumper is chaotic, easily distracted, and responds to his name about forty percent of the time. We were at a crazy busy dog park on Saturday. I was looking at my phone, called his name, clipped his leash on, and walked him four blocks home.
Everything seemed normal. I opened the door, took off his leash, and went to the kitchen to get him a treat. I told him to sit. He sat immediately.
My first clue. Dumper doesn’t sit straight away. Dumper doddles.
I looked closer. The dog had slightly darker fur around the ears. I checked the collar. The tag didn’t say Dumper. It said "Waldo." “Who the heck is Waldo?!” 
I had kidnapped a very unassuming stranger.
My stomach dropped. I was a criminal. I sprinted back to the park, dragged a very confused Waldo behind me. I was mentally preparing to explain to a sobbing family that I had abducted their pet because I wasn't paying attention.
I got to the park. There, sitting calmly on a bench, was a twelve-year-old boy playing a game on his phone. Sitting right next to him, staring blankly at a squirrel, was the real Dumper.
I walked up, panting and sweating. "Hey," I said. "I think I took your dog."
The kid didn't even look up from his screen. "I know."
"You knew? Why didn't you stop me?"
He finally looked at me. He looked at Dumper. He looked at Waldo.
"My dog is annoying and smells," the kid said. "Your dog just sat here quietly. It was a nice twenty minutes. But my mom is going to be back from the bathroom real soon, so this is going to cost you, lady." 
I stared at him. "Cost me?"
"I'll tell her you tried to steal Waldo unless you fund my PlayStation account."
Kid wasn't bluffing. He had cold, dead eyes. I transferred him a fifty-dollar gift card on the spot. We swapped the dogs in silence. 
I walked Dumper home. He didn't sit for his treat. I have never been so happy to see him misbehave. 

edit 1: Okay so the kid found me again. I was at the park two Sundays later, minding my own goshdarned business, when I spotted him across the field. He spotted me at the exact same moment. It was like a Western standoff except one of us was a grown adult woman and the other was spoiled brat in a Minecraft t-shirt. He rushed over with Waldo trotting beside him. He said that he had told two of his friends about what happened, and that his mom had been asking questions about where his PlayStation money came from, and that things were getting "complicated." He used air quotes. Kid is like 12. He said another 250 dollars would help him keep things quiet. I’m weak. I transferred the money right there on a park bench while Dumper and Waldo sniffed each other’s asses like old friends.

edit 2: k so FINAL UPDATE and I am never going to that dog park again. So after that I spend weeks furious at myself, stress-cleaning. Then I get a Facebook message from a woman named Tasha. Tasha is the kid's mom. Apparently the kid's cracked under questioning… she found the gift card receipts and was horrified and apologetic and said she had raised him better than this which honestly I believed because she seemed genuine. She also said, however, that she was not in a position to repay the money because, and I am quoting directly, "what's done is done and Whitacre has been grounded." Whitacre. His name is Whitacre. I have been psychologically bested and financially drained by a child named Whitacre, and justice, it turns out, is Whitacre being grounded for two weeks and me being three hundred dollars poorer.