My parents were at the hospital, where they’d been since early that morning. My mom was sick — the kind of sick that made her lose 20 pounds in three weeks and caused so much bile in the back of her throat she constantly felt like her molars were floating. The kind of sick that caused night sweats so extreme they were changing the sheets once, twice, sometimes three times a night. The kind of sick that made her look like a living ghost, translucent and frail, sitting on the staircase and resting her head against the wall, unable to do much else when I had visited the house the day before.

Even so, she’d been at the office the Thursday before, like the powerhouse she’d always been, seeing patients though she was sicker than all of them combined. She thought her hospital visit would be outpatient. It was stress, she kept saying. She neglected to mention her liver was failing, as well as the conviction that it was something worse. Yet as I stood in front of the refrigerator and answered the phone, I knew it would be bad. Her voice came through, weak but calm:

“I want you to hear this from me. They think I have an aggressive lymphoma.”

Over and over I remember myself in the kitchen, telling her I would drive over right away, hanging up the phone, and then crumpling to the floor. I remember how much I wanted to sob, that there should have been an emotional sensation to go with my fall to the well-worn black and white squares that lined the kitchen, Real tears, a deep low rumble in the chest, a gut wrench, anything. Instead, as I landed, I felt how I might never really feel anything ever again.

There are many wards in a hospital. There are the happy wards, with new parents and new babies. There are surgery recovery wards. There are wards where sick people have recently been admitted, before they know where they’ll be going, or even whether they’ll be going at all. Then there are the wards that are a mix of both, the sick people wards, or the very, very sick people wards. I think they’re called units now, but a unit is something we measure, something technical and removed. To ward is to protect and to guard fiercely, even if all we’re keeping safe is the illusion there’s anything we can do.

My mom was first admitted to a ward full of a mix of people, including patients who wouldn’t be there long as well as those who would probably never leave. The never-leaves were a previously unknown form of heartbreaking. They were sick and usually alone, with diseases that had eaten away at their brains and made them cry out to no one in particular. One of them, an old woman, cried out “Mommy! Mommy!” whenever I walked-ran by to my own mom’s room.

The first few days in the hospital were a mess. No one seemed to have any idea what they were doing or what was going on. There were two good doctors, but one went off duty immediately after admitting my mom, and the other was in and out of the hospital, busy at the cancer center too. A few of the nurses were nice, but others were irritated, dismissive, forgetful. Orderlies would take my mom for a procedure even though the nurses had forgotten to complete the paperwork. I’d rush the paperwork off to the nurses’ station, where one would snap at me and then, seeing the error of the forgotten paperwork, take it sheepishly. After at least one procedure, a nurse and I stood in my mom’s room, discussing when to move my mom to the oncology ward while the recovery room called me on my cellphone to ask where they should take my mom. Even in the hospital, I seemed to be the only one connected to anything, especially to the patient, my mom.

From the moment I walked through the doors of the hospital, I had assumed control of my mom’s care. My dad had been with her when I had arrived and wordlessly handed over the reins to me, in a state of near-shock. He went home to work — under my mom’s orders to finish his project for her — and took care of paperwork, did grocery shopping, tried not to fall apart.

In the oncology ward, things were less messy but much more powerfully disconnected from any real world experience. This was my world now. I spent 14 hours a day in her hospital room, the day room, at the nurses’ station. The nurses asked if I wanted a pair of scrubs.

One night, her first night of treatment when things went horribly wrong and she was too sick to argue with me, I spent the night curled up on a cot half-asleep, waking up to beg technicians to wait until morning for repeat tests they’d only just performed — to let her get some sleep, two solid hours, please. I was surrounded by people busy and working hard, but ultimately I was alone. I didn’t have anyone by my side; I was too busy being by someone else’s side.

It seems like a punchline to say I turned to the internet at my most emotionally distant, during such a crisis. But punchline or no, at 3:00 a.m., when the world was asleep and the day room lights buzzed, there was always someone awake. There was sometimes even someone awake who had sat in a room much like that day room, with someone they loved down a similar hall attached to similar tubes.

We complain about how lonely technology makes us and how awful social media can be. But this is often a loneliness of our own making. We fuel our own jealousies, don’t know how to limit our own obsessions, binge and purge. We make a thousand “friends,” though we scoff nervously at the notion of a real connection. There is nothing so worthy of an eye roll as someone using technology to be sincere, and yet on any given Saturday night there we are, a nation of us, checking in and tweeting our hearts out in hopes that someone will know where we are, and respond. It’s not technology that’s making us lonely. Most often, we just are lonely. What we do with technology is up to us.

I have to remind myself of this. The levels of technological loneliness I’ve experienced are too often self-inflicted wounds. There was the loneliness of 5:00 a.m. when a hospitalist with a loping gait, himself at the tail end of a long shift, beckoned me down a hall to talk about what I thought my mom meant by her do-not-resuscitate orders. Or the hours I spent in the waiting room of the cancer center as she dozed in a treatment room, or when we were back at the hospital, watching her sit with no immune system in a sterile room for weeks on end, awaiting a stem cell transplant. Or simpler still, day after day spent at the house, trying to figure out what she could eat that didn’t taste like cleaning solution one week, burning rubber the next, and something far worse the week after.

Throughout it all, I was lonely at my core, alienated from myself, steady but adrift.

It was nothing short of a blessing that a best friend was here on a trip when my mom was admitted to the hospital. My friend and I both felt a powerful gratitude for the timing, as much as anyone can be grateful when cancer makes its appearance. I was glad for the support she offered, for her willingness to help in ways unasked yet deeply needed, for her mere presence briefly at nights when I would leave the hospital to sleep. She, in return, was glad to have been here rather than 10,000 miles away when I needed her most. To have not been across the globe feeling unreachable, helpless, powerless. She had been here for a week or so, staying in the apartment I shared with my then-boyfriend, when my mom was admitted to the hospital. On the day my friend came with the notary to be a witness as my mom signed her will, my mother, true to form, reached up from her bed and patted my friend on the arm. “I’m sorry I ruined your vacation,” my mother said.

But by the time the first week of home care rolled around, my friend had to return to Australia. And within days of the diagnosis, and as the months rolled on, the boyfriend broke the unspoken promise of love. Even given a list of tasks — clean the house, make sure fresh food is available, offer to visit across the bay when necessary — he did none of them, seemed at a total loss for what to do. The constant presence of family crisis and my dedication to it caused him to burrow further and further into his own life. It might have been painful and heartbreaking for me under more normal circumstances, but instead it made me angry, borderline resentful. Love would have been wonderful, but even more than that I wanted to lean into something steady that itself would not inch away. During the months of her treatment leading up to her stem cell transplant, I slowly moved in with my parents to take care of my mother. Shortly thereafter, I ended my relationship so dispassionately it surprises me still.

There is only one way I have ever been able to explain how I felt that year. It was a graying of emotions. I suppose a little like the blues or the mean reds, but more like trying to click on something and finding it’s no longer available to you. It’s been grayed out. Food had little flavor. I stopped listening to music almost entirely, something I still haven’t entirely recovered from. Some days I wondered if I’d ever be interested in sex again, or even in being intimate at all, in touching and being touched, in letting someone be close to me emotionally, because of what it would require and because of what I would need to access inside myself. After nearly a year by my mom’s side, I remember having an amazing kiss with someone in whom I was otherwise uninterested. He wanted me to come home with him and when I demurred, he asked me why. “It feels good enough just to remember what ‘alive’ feels like,” I told him.

I was in charge of something bigger than anything I had ever imagined because it wasn’t anything I could have ever imagined. Not until I was suddenly, unavoidably there. How do you imagine being in charge of a deathly ill parent?

Emotions were inconvenient. They weren’t even a luxury. Locked up for another time, they were to be brought out when breaking down wouldn’t derail me from staying focused on moving forward. Emotions would get in the way of being eagle-eyed at every stage, watching six spinal taps unflinchingly or knowing how to handle the hospital staff when major errors in treatment were made during the chemo for her stem cell transplant. I had to disconnect, if not from the world then at least from myself.

I wanted to connect to others in order to have someone to rely on. I imagined what it would be like to have local friends leaving food on my doorstep or dragging me out to take a break, checking to make sure I was taking care of myself. But the truth was that my social network was small. I had only recently returned to live here after many years away, had been distracted by work, and was fortunate to have a handful of incredibly dedicated friends who just happened to live hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away. I had never thought of the repercussions of being so unmoored in a sea such as this.

That human connection eluded me and so I craved it. I wanted to not be so isolated in a world of chemotherapy, cancer, fear, sadness, and an inching-along dissertation.

I have no doubt there are many people who have a deep need to perform their trauma and grief. They need an audience, and there is nothing quite like the combination of performative grief and the vast reach of technology to create a sucking vortex of mutual need. There are those who create and crave grief porn. There is a voracious public interest in other people’s tragedy.

Yet even for those of who are less performance oriented, technology has changed how many of us negotiate, discuss, express, even understand our experiences, emotions, and the often exquisitely painful crises we encounter. The boundaries of external and internal, the distinctions of public and private: do we think first about how we feel, or do we put it on the internet and then understand it as it is reflected back at us? Is it possible for us to communicate our tragedies and traumas without the internet, email, and social media? Do we put it all out there for everyone to see, or do we keep it hidden to all but the closest of friends? And what of our moods — is it acceptable to let them be as grim as necessary until we’ve healed, in both our private and public worlds? Do we — should we — put on a smiling face, in real life, online, everywhere, anywhere, even as inside we are devastated?

For many of us, our online selves are some version of our “regular” selves — maybe a pared down version, maybe an idealized version, maybe no different as anything in living breathing Technicolor. Some of us will open tiny windows into our lives that offer virtually no glimpse into the back rooms. Others will only light up the windows of the parlor, where the happy, tidy feelings are. Still others will fling open a window into what seems a most private passage, only to have fooled you into falling for a locked foyer.

But sometimes, even now, I think about public mourning rituals. I think about how the Victorians treated grief, how publicly they wore it, how they wore rings made from the hair of their beloved deceased. I recall telling myself I could say something, I could document my grief. It was okay to make it public, even if it felt like a very wrong, obnoxious, and strange thing to do. I remember thinking I needed someone to do something, but I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know how to ask.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Under even the most ordinary circumstances, how difficult it is to tell people we feel awful, to ask for a little extra patience, to ask for comfort. So to reach through the emotional distance when the stakes are so much higher, when the cost of rejection is risking further isolation at a time when you are already floating on what seems like the last splinter of wood from the great wreck of your life — well, you know, maybe throwing a thing or two at the internet and seeing what sticks doesn’t seem so crazy.

Not everyone knows how to behave in the worst of situations. Some people will behave admirably, and some will be tremendous in ways that are astonishing. while others will disappoint, leaving you to wonder if they alone have ruined your ability to trust, especially given your current fragility of spirit. But because they are human, some of these people, in fact many of them, will be kind and generous, even if they are far away, typing, sending photos, texting, sending so much love it will astonish you. You’ll keep them with you always. You’ll forget to tell them as time passes but you’ll never forget them. They will do for you what so-called friends cannot. Even if they are not, as we like to say, here with you in real life.

Eventually, as is most always the case, my world started turning again. My mom made it through her six rounds of chemo and her stem cell transplant. She continues to endure a long recovery that has been difficult and is still sometimes painful. We have connected in new ways and disconnected in others. Same with me and my dad. Cancer continues to change everything long after everyone else assumes that, in one way or another, it’s over.

So now that food again has flavor, now that an attractive man will turn my head on the street, now that I’ll easily blare Jean Wells at full volume while driving down a sun-drenched California highway, how do I let these pieces float to the surface? When the continued effects of being a caretaker make themselves known, what do I do? I find I have again retreated into that place of fear, of pride, of projecting only strength and confidence.

This technology, the one that facilitates these human connections: it is only as human as we allow it to be.

Illustrations by Yael Levy

Dear long lost (imaginary?) love,

Do you remember how it happened? The end of our friendship? Whichever way I put it in my head, it never makes sense. I can recall that it was soon after the winter break in fourth grade when you told me you’d be going away for the summer to Germany because you needed rehabilitation for your ailing knee. And of course the doctors across the Western border were able to speed up this process from something excessively long to a mere three months. I can just see us standing in the corner of the classroom and after having that brief conversation running off towards its middle. I remember you delivered the news in a very carefree way, as if you were brushing a speck off of your arm and we soon went onto doing our regular thing, whatever that was, you know, very mindlessly. Then time passed quickly, and you disappeared one day just like that, which I probably wouldn’t even have noticed amidst all my ten-year-old affairs, if not for one psychopathic game we played with our classmates. It was some time toward the end of the school year, June probably, and so for the last time we started a ”war” with one of my frenemies. We set up two camps in the bushes in the backyard, and there was one soldier missing in my army. We would have won with your help, and instead two of our little soldiers turned out to be traitors. I’m realizing just now, as I’m writing this, that this is my last true childhood experience. This is where my memory of you and my childhood nostalgia ends.

During that summer I moved from Warsaw’s downtown to the suburbs with my parents and they enrolled me in a school closer to our new house. So it was only in September when I came to our old school to say “hello” to everyone when I discovered in terror that you supposedly were neither coming back nor in touch with anyone. This is how our friendship ended. Not on a positive note, not on a negative note, not on any note, like it had never happened. Just like that. It had ended in late spring but I found out about it in early fall.

It’s unbelievable how communication failed us a decade ago. Those were the early 2000s and it was an odd period when sending a letter already seemed suspiciously ancient, but emailing on the other hand was suspiciously modern, almost as if there was this fear in the air that the correspondence could be sucked into some other dimension. So we basically would have had had to see each other in human form to be in touch. I even had this dream once that the teenage me went back to second grade in a time machine and gave you my number. And when I woke up, it didn’t come to my mind how foolish the dream was, but instead I immediately thought, “Damn, I gave him my old number. I’ve moved since and he won’t be able to reach me.” And it’s even more terrifying how modern means of communication failed me. I mean, have you ever heard of Facebook? Or Twitter? How did I manage to find some people from my kindergarten, who are as insignificant to me as last winter’s snow, but didn’t find you? I searched all the German “Facebooks,” I emailed all the Polish communities in Germany. I was so desperate to scour the web and find you that I came upon something called Orkut. Orkut, for God’s sake. But your online presence is just as non-existent as you’ve been.

You left me with no evidence that you’d even existed, besides that ridiculously cute photo of yourself that you glued to my 2002 Valentine’s Day card. You gave it to me with a theatrical wink. I have a few memories of you, which become vaguer and vaguer every single day, so to keep you alive in my head I just think about some casual characteristics that you may possess, based on my general observations of the human race and the world around me. How long does it take you to smoke a cigarette? Do you murmur a punchline of a joke to yourself and smirk before you actually tell it? Have you ever eaten marshmallows covered in coconut (my latest culinary discovery)? Have you read The Great Gatsby in German (my latest literary discovery)? Can you curse in French? I think that throughout the period of time that we haven’t been in touch, I have made up a new you, or many new yous in my head. I’ve also had many theories about your profession, but all of them sound just as attractive and interesting: a lawyer, marine biologist, community gardener, investment broker. As to how you may look however, I’m afraid to go there in my head, or maybe I’m subconsciously waiting for it to be a surprise. Or I just assume that cute boys turn into handsome men.

Do you know what really messed with my head though? In early December of 2009, I went to your old apartment (don’t ask me how I found the address; desperate times call for desperate measures) and got in touch with its landlady, who I deduced was your aunt of some sort. Very hostile at first, she told me she wasn’t in position to give out any information about you, a private citizen, and then called me on New Year’s Eve to tell me in a surprisingly pleasant tone how she’d contacted your mother and how you were now busy moving to a new city, but would email me soon after you were done with the move. The New Year’s party came, I locked myself in the bathroom with my best friend and lots of champagne, and before I got a chance to share my story, she said, “You know how I don’t believe in all the superstitions? But my mom went to a fortune teller this week, and she said our great loves will return this year!” Like, are you fucking kidding me? As you can guess, you never wrote. All I’ve found out for the past two years from your reluctant aunt was that she and your parents had some differences and she doesn’t even know where you live anymore, except it’s somewhere outside of Europe. Is she aware, the poor thing, that “outside of Europe” ranges from Mauritania to French Guyana, all the way through roughly 144 countries? But that experience also got me thinking that maybe things are never ”meant” to be, or maybe just not meant to be in this case. So many signs point to the conclusion that I’ll never find you, but who knows? Many things point to many other things and then something invisibly twists their fate. Like that New Year’s Eve. Or the first time I was getting on a plane, a man behind me called his wife and told her he had a prophetic dream that the plane would crash. Guess what, loser. You landed safely.

I also thought throughout the years that maybe I should blow up the scale of my search for you. But then even if I were Lady Gaga and had 30 million Twitter followers, there would still be a chance that you were one of those few people who had never heard of her. If we exist in the same niche, maybe we just simply keep missing each other, like the simplest detail or routine is distracting us from meeting. Three years ago I went to New York on two separate occasions and bumped into the same stranger in completely different places and circumstances. Was I so focused on his hair and leather satchel that I didn’t notice you walking by on the other side of the street?

I turned to Google, I turned to God to find you, and nothing. I wanted to tell you that some tiny particle of my body still misses you. And I just hope it doesn’t miss the idea of you.

Image courtesy of Flickr Commons

My poor sister Olivia. A month ago, she reblogged this Arrested Development GIF on her Tumblr with the caption “college applying anxiety INITIATE.” She’s in the thick of the college admissions process, which somehow has become even more kafkaesque and humiliating since I was in her position eight years ago.

The most memorable thing about my college admissions counselor was how he asked if my parents were “boat people,” after learning that I was of Vietnamese heritage (aka after seeing my last name). Once he assured me that serving in Nam gave him license to ask this, he wrote down a list of universities for me, scored them from one to three based on how hard it would be to get in with my middling SAT scores, and sent me on my way. I applied to nine schools total, none of which had appeared on this list.

I wasn’t an ambitious college applicant, but I took offense to the subjectivity of the schools I had been assigned (many of the schools were in rural areas, even though my only criteria was a city environment). And how could my chances be so easily reduced to one of three numbers, scribbled on a whim? If there’s something that’s implicitly wrong about the college process, it’s how we attempt to give it numerical order to tame its ambiguity.

But I was just as responsible for the same sort of laziness. I poured hours into researching schools in The Fiske Guide to Colleges , a popular phonebook-sized tome known for its scoring of major schools around the country. Colleges have long eschewed these ratings for being unscientific, and sometimes even fixed. Yet I, like many prospective college students, took these ratings to heart because it made the headache of applying and deciding between schools all that much easier.

While looking up schools for my sister in this year’s Fiske guide, I peeked at my alma matter, the University of Puget Sound: on a five-point scale, it received 3.5 pencils for academics, three telephones for social life, and two $-signs for expense (which reminded me of sorting restaurants on Yelp). While the Fiske guide even concedes in its introduction that “no complex institution can be described in terms of single numbers or other symbols,” nor are these “precise or infallible judgments.” And yet this doesn’t stop the Fiske editors — and those behind the Princeton Review and Kiplinger’s — from attributing largely meaningless and subjective ratings to schools. (I personally enjoyed my time at Puget Sound and found my education more in line with the Princeton Review, which gave it a flattering 92 for academics and 88 for campus life, both scored out of 100.)

As everything in our lives migrates to the digital realm, we are becoming increasingly data-obsessed. We like numbers, but we rarely ask what they mean. Counts of Facebook fans, megapixels, tomatometer percentage, and apparently number of pencils — what do these things actually represent, besides our own laziness? As consumers, we want to know what’s “better” immediately, but nothing encourages us to do our homework.

College shopping, as it turns out, has moved online too. While I was looking things up in Fiske, my sister was using a website called Naviance, which lets high school students look up colleges and organize their applications online. It also encourages students to plug in their GPAs and test scores to calculates their likelihood of getting into specific schools, plotting them on a scattergram alongside former students from their high school.

I suggested Wesleyan College to my sister, since I have a close friend who does nothing but talk about how much he loved his time there. We looked up Wesleyan in Naviance, which reported that my sister’s ACTs were slightly lower than the school’s average for admission, and many students from her school with similar GPAs had been rejected. I explained that it was just a calculation, that it didn’t take into account the fact that she was a great writer, talented artist, varsity athlete, and soup kitchen volunteer. But she seemed overwhelmed and defeated by what she was being told by an ugly graph.

I can keep telling her that everything will work out, that in hindsight, she’ll realize that not getting into her first-choice school is not the end of the world. But the last thing a teenager wants is their distress to be treated with condescension. A teenager’s pain is unique and singular, and yet it must be understood by everyone around her.

That’s probably why Tumblr makes such a good outlet. Maybe I am overstepping my bounds as a concerned older brother, but I tend to track Olivia’s mood based on what she reblogs. She recently renamed her Tumblr “and i fall, i fall, i falter” (which, after some googling, are lyrics to a song by City and Colour, which, after more googling, is a band of some sort). Over the past few months, Olivia has been posting fewer wistful, faraway landscapes and more images of cracked mountain ranges and crashing waves.

But I sincerely enjoy my sister’s site; she has a great aesthetic sense. Lately, Olivia has been reblogging more abstract art, moving away from the clarity of photographs to something more muddled and ambiguous. Maybe she’s starting to see the beauty in uncertainty?

A week ago, beneath a photo of a forest, she wrote:

I have 18 days to finish this application for my dream school.

This is happening.

Images taken from Olivia’s Tumblr

You can sense the dead girl’s presence but you can’t see her. You can almost picture her standing at a microphone saying her little poems. It must have been in graduate school. She was at the bar where the poets read their new poems and the audience (all the other poets) decided how jealous they should be. If you stare directly at your memory of her, she is obscured. Is this a symptom of age, you wonder? Or perhaps your brain has no more capacity for memory?

Google may help clear things up. Type in her name and click the images. OK. There are four pictures here. In all but one she has put on a different face from the one you knew. She has a professional smile and a professional look. In these pictures she seems like nobody you knew or ever could know. She is her own stock photo. You stare. You excavate the image and feel a tug of memory there. One image looks like her. She is standing at a microphone saying her poems. Her stringy, unkempt hair. That’s the key. You have known that hair. Perhaps you have been close to it? Smelled its funk? Imbibed her living essence back when you were a young man fiddling with your verse?

Perhaps she was one of those confusing poets who said things like, “And then we came to the ellipses and slid, little children on sleds, down the white of the page.” Perhaps she added a drug habit or a dead brother and wrote from what we called the “victim’s pose.” You only remember her if you don’t try to remember her and what you remember is she was standing at a microphone and looking down at a folded page just spat out by a dot matrix printer and she was insisting that you take her seriously. I hope you did.

The search bar is certain. The search bar knows she smiled once when her company needed to update its employee page. The search bar can recite her poetry verbatim, though it makes no judgments. Your memory is haphazard. Your memory is stitched sensation. A borrowed sound here, a cast-off emotion there, perhaps a bit of fabricated plot to hold it together.

Your poetry professor, jangling her many bracelets for effect, said that overuse of “you” generally suggests the poet has an uncomfortable relationship with “I.” Be wary of those who use “you” to speak of themselves.

Perhaps you ought to read no further.

Let’s place you in a cafe. You are in the cafe on the corner of Main and Front streets in a dirty former mill town in Connecticut. It is a town of crumbling memory. The busted windows of the old paper mill. The Sunday flea market where people pick over the bones of farms and farm houses. The old train station where, a hundred years ago, well-heeled New Yorkers used to pass through on their way to their summer mansions. Now the station is a former restaurant and a future real estate office.

You are eating a mini-cake and drinking a difficult espresso with a special squirt of the season: pumpkin for fall. Soon the season’s flavor will turn to peppermint. Then the great wheel of the calendar will slowly turn atop the universe and you will face lemon-lime season again. How many more rotations of seasonal flavors will you taste? With this thought, you sink into a vinyl chair, your laptop battery warming your knees.

There is the dead girl’s smiling face in the images. Was she a little crazy, like so many of your schoolmates? Many of those graduate school poets were crazy or pretending to be crazy which amounts to the same thing. You attempt to animate the image of her face into a real memory, but fail. Perhaps you should try other associations with the time in question. Think of the bar you used to frequent. The bar where the geniuses swallowed their greatness in great big quaffs of Old Style served in clear plastic cups. You sat mesmerized by the eternally cascading waterfall of light in the plastic beer ad that graced the wall. The undulating blue light represented the pristine waters from which the cheap beer was supposedly fashioned. You would gaze at the faux-artesian spring until harsh bare bulbs switched on at closing time. The bar patrons suddenly appeared very clearly to each other as nothing more than human rubble. In the naked fluorescence of bar closing, all pretense of specialness was cast away. You were just a bunch of swaying, feral poets whose lives were somewhat limited by your chosen path. Limited beautifully, you thought, in the way that a sonnet is limited. Meanwhile, somewhere far from Iowa, a person who actually knew what to do with a “tech bubble” was getting filthy rich.

As the bar closed, the poets lined up at the payphone. They called any number they could remember and begged to be allowed to please stay over tonight. “Hey, can I please crawl in your window?” they asked.

Was the dead girl one of these poets?

You are at a cafe trying to remember a woman. You are sipping a confusing drink that has no discernible identity but “warm” and “frothed” and whatever word the cafe has put in your brain to tell you that this concoction you are drinking is an autumn wind on a cool autumn day. It’s the word, the corporate suggestion, that you are really drinking.

Maybe that’s why you remember that it was autumn when you walked home with her after the bar closed. You couldn’t see her face behind her long, stringy hair. You left her at her apartment. She walked up the wooden stairs of a Victorian house that was turned into seven shag-rug enshrouded apartments. She waved goodbye to you. Did you follow her inside? Probably not.

It was understood that poets shouldn’t sleep with other poets. You would become fodder for metaphor as soon as you left her apartment. Perhaps you would show up in the next poetry packet as a talking cockroach or a slumping weeping willow or a stubborn, squawking duck in the Iowa River. And then you would have to fire back at her the next week with a carnivorous flower or something. Much of poetry is just metaphorical warfare that is the result of bad sex.

You stumble away from the dead girl’s apartment, alone.

I know where you are going. I bet she will open the door for you, too. In fact, I know it. Well, go ahead: remember. It is a memory that will forever escape the search bar. Let the cloud collect fake smiles and polished bios. This memory will go to the ground, where memories should go, along with their bearers.

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

After a thousand days of blue-green light, I bought a one-way ticket to my old home. So began the little films, the perpetually looping scenes.I remember the reflections which caught my eye, the scrolling billboards and the ever-humming escalators and the traffic and the leafless branches as they twitched within a light wind. Photographs seemed insufficient, though I took them all the same. It was worth trying, at least. Tempting permanence. Things which once bored me — or lay ignored — now enjoyed my undivided, ecstatic attention. My camera kept me busy, happy.While I was in the city of my tiny cinema, I drafted up short films in my head and scribbled out overly-specific shot lists. None had plots. The ambition I had — and maintain, frankly — was not simply to capture but to summarize, to keep. I walked quickly from place to place until I was struck with something. Then I stood still, observed, and took a great many consecutive photographs. Time ceased, if but for a moment.When the moment expired, I’d set up shop at the desk near the window, near the pharmacy sign’s persistent glow and the street and the train and the city. On the computer, I’d stitch the images together into a little montage, accompanying the process with moody music and a glass of cheap wine. I’ve found these little films to be most successful with such pairings.I’d become obsessed. My solitary focus was no longer the present, save for the persistence of a countdown. I became fixated upon how the past will situate itself in the future. Yes, the things I don’t want to forget.

The ambition of these images is to remain somewhere, forever, in a very small yet perhaps profound way. These images are simple and imperfect but they’ve achieve what I’d hoped. They are perfect because they exist, not because they are beautiful. Still, I find them beautiful. It’s the closest thing to what my memory sees, I suppose — a Mobius strip populated with light and motion and life.



I still revisit them sometimes—
in fear of forgetting—which I refuse to do.

The story of my life begins with my brother’s death. His name was John, and he was five years old when he died in 1985. He caught measles, which developed into something more aggressive, something that the doctors didn’t catch in time. His kidneys stopped working first, then his liver, and then everything else. Within the space of a week John went from healthy and happy to depending on a machine. His brain shut down, and then the machine was shut off.

The loss of John is a moment in my family’s life that I didn’t experience, so it distances me from them. But that loss is also the event that caused my own existence, because I was born to replace him.

My older sister was seven when John died. She wasn’t present when my parents watched as the doctor switched off the life-support. Two years later, my parents began planning for a second son, and my sister was excited that she would have a sibling again. She was disappointed when I was born. She had been expecting a facsimile of John — someone nearer to her age. She didn’t want a baby.

My parents gave me five names, and the middle of them was John, a name whose significance I wouldn’t know until I was nine years old. I remember the first time I was told that there had been another boy in the family. It didn’t seem like something that could have actually occurred — death was something from the news. I actually said that. “But… that’s what happens to people on TV.” No, it happened to us, too. But now we have you and things are all better.

My aunt once told me that she thought I was a reincarnation of John, and that had certainly been my parents’ intention. The idea was that our family was just a jigsaw puzzle that was missing a piece, and my parents felt pretty assured that they knew how to make one. It worked out for a while. I looked like him, or at least I looked similar to the few pictures that hung on the wall in whatever house we were renting that year. The chubby face, bright blond hair, toothy smile. I idolized our older sister. I shared his distaste of the dirt and fear of germs.

After my parents’ divorce, I was the only one my dad wrote to, sending cards to “my little soldier.” I didn’t write back. I was too young to understand the complexities of marital life, and so I bought into the narrative of my father as the bad guy. I cut him out of my life.

It’s probably for the best that he didn’t get to watch me grow up. As the years went by, I started to reject my body. When people ask me if I “knew” about my true nature when I was a child, I say yes, although I’m not sure. I do know that in second grade I brought home school pictures and took a ballpoint pen and covered the images of my face with ink and scratches. I do know that I told my mother I didn’t look right.

That same year we went to see Mrs. Doubtfire, and I discovered that there was a precedent for the male-bodied to wear women’s clothes. The pictures my mum took that night, of me in an old wool dress, were a family joke for years.

Children at school always sensed that something about me wasn’t quite right. After a decade of bullying I buckled under the stress and attempted to pick up my desk and throw it at a boy who was teasing me. The school-assigned psychologist asked if I knew why I was so often the target of attacks. I told him that I didn’t feel like a boy. I was scared to say those words out loud, to admit that nothing about my internal experience seemed to be reflected by the gender I’d been given.

I needn’t have worried. My nervousness stopped me from elaborating on my dysphoria, and the psychologist assumed that I was referring to my small size in relation to every other male-bodied person my age. Later, I was sent to an endocrinologist who informed me that I had a testosterone deficiency. I prayed that the steroids they used to start my puberty would make me feel right inside. Instead, I became even more alienated from myself: my shoulders were widening, my voice was growing deeper, and I could no longer pretend that I looked feminine. I cried the day I realized I would need to start shaving my face.

I’ve always hated the phrase “woman trapped inside a man’s body” (I’ve never thought of myself as trapped — there are just things about my body I don’t happen to like), but it’s a good platitude to distill the experience into. So that’s what I said to my mother when I finally came out. It was the best way I could think of to say “you’re about to lose another son.”

All credit to her, my mom actually took the news well. She didn’t yell at me, or try and convince me I was wrong. In fact, she didn’t seem to have any emotional reaction at all, which doesn’t make much sense. That has to be a kind of reaction of its own, right? Did I do something so terrible to my mother that she couldn’t even face her feelings about it?

My sister once said that John was the first thing she thought of in the morning, and the last at night. She had always kept her personal and emotional life private from me, perhaps wary of again risking the kind of closeness that could cause her harm. I asked my mother if John lived in her thoughts the same way. She said, “Of course not.” Denial is probably something she’s lived with for a long time.

I feel so strange writing about all this. It feels like a story that isn’t mine to tell. I wasn’t there when my parents and sister lost somebody they loved — it’s an event that belongs to them. I never felt like I could discuss the pressures of having to live up to John’s memory, because that seemed like whining about the fallout while in the company of those who survived the blast.

I’ve only ever been able to talk about these issues before under the guise of performance, as part of my stand-up comedy material. I’ve been callous about the subject, referring to my mum’s “.000 batting average when it comes to raising sons,” but that joke unjustly shifts the blame from myself. The simple truth is that I couldn’t be a son or a brother or a nephew to the people that needed me to.

In my darkest moments I feel like I’ve failed, utterly failed, at the one task life actually gave me. My family asked one thing of me: be this person. And I couldn’t do it. I managed it for nineteen years, and then just couldn’t make it any longer.

Wallowing in the guilt of that failure is self-indulgent, though. And the fact is that the suicide rates for transgender individuals are staggering, and the metaphoric death of a son is surely better than the literal. I did not ask to be born “trapped in the wrong body” any more than I asked to be the replacement for a child I never met. When I’m not struggling with those darkest moments, I like to think that I’ve made choices that are best for all involved.

Sometimes I mentally zoom out, and treat this all like a simple story. Just pronouns and verbs. He was born and he lived and he got sick and he died. I was born and I was sick and then I died and then I lived.

Illustration by Elizabeth Simins

The paper fluttered out of the windows of the coiled and bent Corolla. In a billowing stream, the two-ply newsprint flapped like large albatrosses escaping through the rolled down windows, and into the intersection of 39th and Pennsylvania. Fumbling around the front seat of my car looking for the pieces of my fallen Nokia, I manage to pull my destroyed vehicle to the side of the road. The girl who hit me is already sitting cross-legged on the curb across the street, fighting back tears while clutching her Pomeranian mix to her chest.

“I’m not sure where my insurance card is,” the girl says, still holding the small dog. As we wait for the cops to arrive, I circle the intersection, gathering the numerous scattered issues of Voice of the Tigers, my students’ first newspaper.

If the girl’s Pomeranian had crawled across the steering wheel just five minutes earlier, if the location of this car crash was just five blocks farther East, if she had careened into the car just a few degrees sharper, slamming into us at a perfectly perpendicular angle, the dogs’ owner would have t-boned right into LaShawn, my 6th grade student celebrating the release of her first newsprint publication. I rescue a few more newspapers as I settle into my own spot on the curb, cellphone in hand.

I woke that morning unusually early, at 5, and put on a white jumper dress with a faux bamboo belt — part of the TJ Maxx cache my mother has been buying since I got a “real job.” In preparation for the last day of school, I wanted to look nice for an awards assembly and talent show we were putting on for the community. I had planned this last day almost as one would plan a ceremonial event — in my mind the rituals of the last day had become a sacred rite of passage: I made it, survived my first year teaching. As a team of colleagues, we made it, having essentially opened a middle school from scratch. Our students made it, moving one year closer to high school. We didn’t make the academic gains I had hoped for, but there was one tangible reliquary of academic progress we did create: the first student run newspaper entitled Voice of the Tigers.

The newspaper was born out of a schedule deficit. We needed to integrate an “advisory” hour at the beginning of the day to be in compliance with Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Each advisory was to have a special topic of interest.

After spending a year writing for a newspaper, and a brief freelancing attempt, I decide my advisory would be a journalism course. Our product would be C.A. Franklin’s first student-run publication.

To begin, I bring in a mass of local and national newspapers for students to flip through — The Kansas City Star, The Pitch Weekly, USA Today, The New York Times. Unique to the mix is The Call, Kansas City’s African American newspaper founded by Chester Arthur Franklin, the same C.A. Franklin of our school’s namesake. I attempt to impress upon the students’ that our newspaper can act as a legacy to our namesake; something unique, special. After all, C.A. Franklin led his newspaper with an egalitarian purpose. Franklin’s mission is still written into the paper as its “platform”:

THE CALL believes that America can best lead the world away from racial and national antagonism when it accords to every man, regardless of race, color or creed, his human and legal rights. Hating no man, fearing no man, THE CALL strives to help every man in the firm belief that all are hurt as long anyone is held back.

With this foundation and legacy in mind, I begin our newspaper class. We first study the components of a newspaper, cutting out headlines and ledes, pictures and captions. Eventually, I divide the kids into different groups based on their own affinities — a group of photographers, a group of writers, editors, a group of illustrators and designers. By semester’s end, I have amassed a few scanty, poorly written paragraphs, a few amateur, pointless drawings of the Chiefs, and some photographs of pre-teen girls posing in the girls’ restroom. I edit what material was available into a columned Microsoft Publisher template, added in some clipart, made copies, and distributed them through the middle school. The result was utterly underwhelming: students guffawed, writing our paper off as a joke. “Ain’t nuthin’ real at this janky school. We don’t go no lockers, no real walls, not even a real newspaper,” was the common sentiment of the student population. And they were right, this “janky” newsletter was not sufficient.

“You know, I can probably help out,” Emily, a friend from high school, says over the phone in her mild mannered quiet tones, as I relay the difficulties of my well-intentioned haranguing of a group of middle-schoolers into creating a newspaper. Emily has been working for a suburban community college’s newspaper as a photographer.

“Let me put you in touch with the editorial staff, they might be interested in helping out too, taking something like this on.”

On an overcast Saturday morning, I leave the city and drive to a Christian coffee shop in the suburbs. Christian rock bands play here on the weekends. Latte purchases benefit mission trips. David, a quiet guy with a receding hairline, is waiting for me. He’s an editor at Emily’s community college and puts me in contact with a Jen, a short and stocky woman, with a cigarette constantly hanging from her lip. A natural manager, Jen brings with her a young and committed newspaper staff—a lanky and humorous photographer, two soft-spoken, demure designers. All show up every week to my classroom door, assisting the students with their projects.

With the help of the computer teacher, I relocate unused ancient teal iMacs into my classroom. With the help of a tech savvy friend, we re-image the computers and install pirated software. I convince Principal Walker to buy us several low-end digital cameras. We even find a donor to cover the full expense of printing 500 copies, in color. The newspaper is now officially in business.

A small group of photography students from the college begin working with our “photographers,” teaching them rule of thirds and bird’s-eye view. They run around the playground with digital point-and-shoot cameras, taking pictures of the neighborhood. Davion, a hyper-active kid, has an affinity for the camera, can manipulate the banalities of an Eastside neighborhood into abstractions of color and light. Jazisha pens drawings for the paper. Tovian writes an op ed, calling parents to become active participants in their children’s education, and chastising a now complacent community. Erykisha writes matter-a-factly about classes offered in the new middle school.

Tovian names the paper Voice of the Tigers one day, early on in the school year.

“Well we’re supposed to be the Tigers [the schools’ mascot],” she says. “This paper might as well be our voice.”

We are now working under a deadline. I can be heard chiding the students, “We now have a real paper to produce.”

So we create additional newspaper club time after school. An intrigued reporter from the local weekly newspaper begins following our endeavor, sitting at my desk during class time, following the kids around with a small notebook.

The last week of school, the paper is finally printed. Printed in color ink and eight pages thick, it boasts an article advertising the merits of a talent show and a showcase of student photography. On the front page, Tovian’s op-ed warns parents about looming low-test scores and advocating for increased community involvement with the local school. Jazisha’s practiced tiger drawing ensconces the masthead.

We meet after the talent show and awards ceremony to celebrate and distribute the paper throughout the community. LaShawn, Yulissa and Sasha wait anxiously in the classroom, each holding a bushel of the newsprint across their laps. On the “distribution team” (admittedly a name we made up for a team of kids who were excited to be in newspaper, but didn’t take the initiative to produce anything), these girls’ job is to disseminate the newspaper to as wide an audience as possible. Within the thick of the June heat, we left C.A. Franklin and began our door to door distribution. The girls run up to people’s homes, knock loudly on the front door, then with shy shrugs hand off newspapers.

“This our school newspaper, Voice of the Tigers.”

“We’re from C.A. Franklin, right up the street.”

“We wrote it ourselves!”

They giggle and disjointedly run back to the curb to meet me.

After several hours, we realize we have entirely too many newspapers than we can pass out on foot.

“Take them to the Plaza,” one girl offers, which is the upscale shopping center.

“We can charge people for them.”

“We can take them to church!”

I end up giving each girl a large bushel to take with them and distribute over the summer. I pack them in my Corolla and drop them off at home. The girls babble in the backseat.

“Do you think people will read it?”

“Does this make us famous, well, like, kinda famous?”

I drop LaShawn off last. She lives with her grandmother, an ancient woman who speaks too loudly into the phone. LaShawn’s mother died years ago, and she never knew her father. Their water gets turned off regularly, and kids often refuse to sit next to her. “She stinks!” some kids snarl, as they yank the collars of their uniform shirts over their nose. But today, LaShawn is proud. Sitting in the backseat, as she always does. The scarf around her head is blowing in the wind out the car window, and she prattles on about the newspaper and her summer plans. I drop her off and she screams “thank you!” as she jumps out of the car, arms overloaded with newspapers and running toward the front door. I wait until her grandma opens the door, and watch as LaShawn immediately thrusts forth a copy of the paper, showing it off to her grandma.

My car is now empty save for the 200 or so newspapers in the back seat. I resolve to pass them out at local coffee shops and set them in the windows at boutiques. I start driving back to my apartment with the windows down, the papers flutter against one another in the backseat, making the same noise as spokes on a bicycle wheel. I’m energized, excited. On this last day of school, I’m ready to start the new school year, even ready for the summer school course I’ve been coerced into teaching. I start heading west on 39th street, passing Baltimore St., passing the Walgreens, passing by Gomers, the liquor store. The midtown air is already thickening into the yellow haze of the humidity that’s promised to come.

The light turns green and in one of the middle lanes, I begin to accelerate. I look out the corner of my eye to see a white sedan lunging toward me. A Pomeranian stares at me from the driver’s side of the dashboard. The sedan moves in slow motion, and I know I’m going to be hit. The sedan knifes into the seat behind me, and my car fishtails in a quick semi-circle before rebounding off of a curb. A gust of stale, exhaust heavy wind swoops up the papers, propelling them through the back seat windows and out into the street. I manage to maneuver the car to the side of the road. The abruptness of the collision gives me sea legs and a cloudy head. Dizzy, I drunkenly stumble into the intersection, picking up the papers. I find a spot on the curb and await the cops, tow trucks, and firemen. My car, months away from being paid off, is surely totaled.

I sit, flipping through our first edition of Voice of the Tigers. My eyes aren’t being held by the writing, however, but by the photos. On the cover of the paper is a close-up photograph of Dyesha’s fingers holding our first classroom camera. Dyesha’s long slender fingers wrap around the camera — her long manicured fingernails exposed, as is the uncovered lens. I flip to the back of the paper — a collage of the students’ photographs. One photo recognizes the makeshift computer lab we’ve made — a slanted row of color-coordinated teal shelled iMacs. Three photographs focus on playful shadows and light patterns created through perforated playground equipment.

Each of these photos, however, provides a different perspective of Franklin’s seemingly mundane reality. A piece of outdated playground equipment becomes windows of orange-kissed sunlight. Obsolete school supplies become an emblazoned river of turquoise. A diagonal close-up of a sidewalk lining the rusty fence that surrounds the decrepit school becomes an illuminated pathway. The abstractions offer an alternative vantage point into life at C.A. Franklin, a vantage point that belongs to my students. I sit back, and wait for the sounds of sirens to arrive, to help clean up the mess we’ve made in the intersection.

Photo by Jennifer Kumar