1. What are you?

My great grandmother in Mexico was the first to call me gachupina. I don’t know why I spoke that way, or where I got it from; I was two, maybe three—a baby. It was an accent no one else had, not even my mother. Perhaps the blame can be placed on Spanish ancestors, whispering soft instructions into my ear from an unseen dimension in their hushed and slithering consonants: “Asssi, asssi.”

At my most relaxed—when I’m not concentrating on pronouncing words with the inflection that goes here, and not here—when I let the chemistry of sounds roll and melt into each other in the way they crave to be fused and molded—you can hear the undercurrent of my first language push up against the blanketing English that smothers it; the colorful, lilting, sing-song cadence threatening to bleed through and stain the monotones that have drained all color from speech.

My relatives tell me I speak with a different accent now, but it’s one that’s not placed.

2. We were writers.

There was a lankiness to Patrick that made him move like he was dancing through the world. Thinness does not automatically grant you grace, but his did. His lean body, I’m sure, was partially the result of genetics, but could also be attributed to the cancer he had once battled, and which he told me about over beers at a bar on University Place.

“I didn’t want you to think I lacked depth.”

I snorted, inappropriately. “Does cancer give you depth?”

He shrugged and took a swig from his glass.

He dressed like an old man, and somehow this only made him appear more youthful: tapered slacks; blazers; moc drivers; thick glasses; a Burberry scarf. He didn’t take the world seriously even though it weighed heavily on him. When I search for “patrickpritchard@gmail.com" in my inbox, the numbered results list “1-50 of many.” They are mostly chats. The penultimate exchange is dated January 29th, 2010 at 5:33pm.

4:29 PM
Patrick: do you know who john waters is?
5:09 PM
me: the dude who did pink flamingoes?
5:28 PM
Patrick: yeah
i had a dream that i had to hang out in his weird fantasy world
5:29 PM
it was exhilirating and gross
5:30 PM
me: oh man
i've never seen that movie
but i've always heard it referred to as outrageous and somewhat disgusting
Patrick: oh yeah
i'm writing a short story about it now
me: niiice
5:31 PM
Patrick: it's fucking peculiar
i can tell you that
5:33 PM
me: cannot wait to read it

The last search result is an email sent a year later on January 29th, 2011 at 4:47pm, that has not, and will not, receive a response.

“we were in your apartment in new york – in your tiny, dimly lit room – and you were talking to me about 'the master and margarita' because somehow you’d found out margarita was my middle name. you had music playing in the background and this song came on. you stood up and grabbed your wiffleball bat that was propped up in a corner and started swinging it, very slowly, observing your follow through, so beautifully aware of your stance and technique, and it all just synced: the music, your movements, your demeanor. in that moment it seemed that you transcended any universal rule about time or space or gravity - none of it applied to you. it was just you, your bat, and this song. a perfect moment, so distinctly yours, the memory of it still so vivid in my mind.
love you always, p2rd.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lnt0DN2fBQ”

3. Let me tell you about the time I got micro bangs.

You never take into full realization the quickness of a blade until it’s put into action—against paper, against skin, against hair. Do you know how difficult it is to control eyes that want to go wide?  

“Pretty.” She grins, lightly brushing away the fringe of hair bangs that now extends no farther than an inch past my natural hairline. The scissors in her other hand snip a rogue lock that dared traverse the nape of my neck. She is so proud of her work.

“Well, thank you for letting me practice on you! I hope you’ll stop by the salon again. Oh—no! No, put that away, there’s no charge.”

What else is there to do but return a smile of gratitude?

I straighten my hair and my boyfriend stifles a laugh. “You look like Prince Valiant.”

A friend sends me a picture she snapped of a poodle-triangle-haired Halle Berry in her most recent movie: “Daniela, es tu?”

A coworker cranes her neck over our cubicle partition to tell me her mother saw a picture we took together on Facebook, and thought I looked like a cute macaroon.

Hair grows back, but my god does it grow back slowly.

4. Reality isn’t a simulation, but it is tethered to a very thin string.

I once went through a breakup that sent me into a tailspin. Up dove down, inside flipped out, day dawned to night, that sort of thing. And after several weeks of this—of the topsy turviness that inevitably results in not eating or sleeping—I felt something in my head pop and release.

Do you know what it’s like to dream while you’re awake?

Somehow anguish had made the world beautiful: Slow and melodic, ultra saturated and bright, but no place a person can exist for long before the ignored undertone of energy vibrates to a feverish trill and you feel the edges burn hotly and close in.

On a Monday night I found myself alone in a bar, staring through my drink at the woodgrain counter and ignoring the only other two patrons who were dancing on an empty floor.

“Hey!”

The man must have been in his late fifties, the woman his age or slightly younger. He didn’t wait for me to respond or acknowledge him.

“Isn’t this life beautiful? It’s tactile!”

And they spun, and spun, and spun.

5. The most expensive crepe in the world.

If ever flying out of Charles de Gaulle airport, please take note that the employees at the check-in counter will not be sympathetic if you miss your departure due to a miscalculated estimate of how long it would take to travel to the terminal, nor be very interested in how said error was what allowed extra time for the detour you made to purchase and consume one final cheese-filled crepe.

6. Remember me when you’re finally ready to heal . . .

I watched a TED Talk about sound therapy. The woman giving it said there’s a healing quality to the perfect fifth commonly found in baroque music. I don’t know anything about baroque music—or music in general, despite decades of exposure to it—but a search for “perfect fifth” on YouTube provides a video with ten hours worth of one uninterrupted chord. Listening to it brings up the memory of your hospital room. I remember how smooth and unresponsive your hand was, still warm. Abuelita. Lucila. Lila. There’s something about the whirring and pumping and beeping against silence that makes one—or maybe I’m projecting, maybe it was just me—cling to lingering humanity in a room like that. Crazy that at the end of life we look to a series of startling robotic noises to give us hope; desperate ears trying to find reassurance in mechanical monotony. We listen for the sounds: Our paths of life. Climbing. Falling. Climbing and falling. Smoothing out. The journey settling into stillness and peace. Ten hours of a perfect fifth stretching out into light filled eternity. Yours. A parting gift from the world, streaming from your hospital room.

7. . . . And once you have, please try to find your way back.

The twenty-two year old version of me used to wear a bright yellow silk maxi dress with a black leather moto jacket, and strap her feet into multi-colored five inch platform shoes to explore New York on a spring day. With time I got older and the temptation of sensibility settled in: the gravitation towards a uniform of unaggressive neutral and earth tone colors so streamlined and tailored and simple and effortless and chic and refined and beautiful—and it is so beautiful—but maybe it isn’t me? Has never been me? Because I miss her. The twenty-two year old who would stop after twenty minutes of walking to peel the jacket from her slick skin that stood at attention as a spring breeze blew across the tiny beads of sweat, and the exchange of heat for cold came as such a welcome relief. And she would drape the jacket over her arm, or tie it around her waist, or put it in her bag that was too big but—now, look at this foresight—had room for it, and she’d travel slowly onward so as to avoid blisters, but mostly so that she would not trip over her impossible dress in her impossible shoes while carrying the weight of her impossible jacket in her impossible bag, and she was happy despite all of this. Messy and all over the place and happy. Life was disorder. Inefficient and impractical. Not streamlined. Not uniform. It was disruptive and uneven, punctuated by moments of brightness and color. It was sweaty and dirty and smelly and cumbersome. It was scattered everywhere. And perfectly so.