The intimacy of Photoshop

There's a strange sense of intimacy in Photoshopping a person--not to change their appearance, but to remove smudges or scratches from the picture's surface. It feels like you're grooming them through real touch, even though you're only clicking on pixels. This can feel odd if you're fixing up a photo featuring someone you haven't seen in years, no longer have a relationship with, or have never met. There's a certain thrill in digitally primping someone you wish you had known, like a famous person or historical figure.

It's hard to divorce two-dimensional images of people from their tangible forms. For that reason, it's also eerie to find a photo of someone who is no longer alive and look into their eyes, even though they were alive in the picture. It's confusing to read a distraught message from a friend while seeing the userpic of their grinning face.

Time is never static, but photos give us the illusion of that. They really do seem to store an unchanging facet of a person. And maybe many of us present two-dimensional versions of ourselves in real life, because it feels safer than showing our fuller and unretouched selves.

My inner emo child is showing

Watched Blink 182's new video for "Bored to Death" and am currently torn in two directions like a Stretch Armstrong doll. The song is repetitive and the lyric "Life is too short to last long" is one of those maddening statements that's clearly meant to sound profound, but really is just self-defining (it's like saying "Fire's too hot to be cold"). But at the same time, damned if the scene of the angsty punk boy scratching messages into his desk and his bleach-haired girlfriend jumping around listening to oversized headphones and them skating in the parking lot doesn't leave my early 2000s mallcore heart screaming. I'm surprised I didn't combust into a cloud of AIM icons featuring Sally the Ragdoll and skulls with little pink bows on top.

Art fights

I recently thought of a really funny fight that my brother and I had when he was about seven years old and I was nine. He was chasing me, so I locked myself in the bathroom and was taunting him from the inside.

Then a piece of paper and pencil were slipped to me under the door. It was a drawing of me being chased by bees.
I flipped it over and, in response, drew him dropping an ice cream cone and crying.
He got another piece of paper and drew me stubbing my toe.
In turn, I drew him surrounded by stink lines.

We kept this going wordlessly for a few minutes, each drawing images of each other that were either unflattering or depicted the other in an unpleasant scenario. It culminated in him drawing a picture of Bart Simpson mooning me, and then we both burst out laughing and I unlocked the door.

This is how siblings fought back in the mid '90s, in a house where everyone drew and religiously watched The Simpsons. And I still have that last drawing.

From June

When my aunt Mary was in her early twenties, she wrote this description of her parents in a journal: “Kiki and Harold: A mass of confused frustration, or a kind of breakfast-out bargain kids who love to get up early! Their house is full of their kids, dogs, and their guests for wok or spaghetti dinners. Their house has so much flea market stuff, but they know that you can always add another addition to their mass of life.”

I’ve never heard a truer description of my grandparents. Kiki, Harold, and Mary were a trifecta of my young life, of my whole childhood. And now all three of them are dead.

I never met a person who disliked Kiki, but she was always my inner litmus test. If anybody didn’t like her, I knew I couldn’t like them.

When thinking of my grandma, I think of her love of African and Native American art. I think of the way she made jewelry and collected thousands of beads. I think of how she was the first woman in her family to go to college—and then went on to be a part of the school board, to become an art teacher, and to start her own business with her husband. I think of her Yiddish profanity, including an expression that literally translates to “Go shit in the ocean,” and an ancient curse of “May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!” I think of how she built an enormous house out of wood and stone while pregnant. And I think of her as a violin virtuoso, and the day when, at 90 years old, she picked up a violin for the first time in decades and realized to her dismay that she could not play anymore.

Kiki’s dementia was especially difficult for her because she was used to being the family matriarch. She was used to always being in charge, and her whole life was defined by giving care to others. So when she was in the position of needing care, it distressed her. After Harold passed on in September, she started saying she wanted to go home. Even when she was at her house, she’d tug on the doorknob and start crying, begging her children to take her home. This was heartbreaking, and my husband had an astute insight about it. He thinks that even though her senility prevented her from processing Harold’s death, she understood something was missing. And so with her husband gone, it didn’t feel like home anymore.

Even in severe dementia, her will was astounding. In the hospice, she managed to live for over two weeks with no food or liquids. Most people can only live that way a few days.

Today, shortly before she passed away, her five surviving children gathered together at a beach by the hospice. They wrote her name in huge letters in the sand with a big heart and all danced around her name, shouting it into the sky and yelling, “You’re free!” When they returned to her room, she was still. She’d passed right as they were “releasing” her.

My aunts and uncles are going to donate her brain to the medical community in order to contribute to dementia research, and to learn more about the type she had. It makes perfect, harmonious sense that they would perform a spiritual ritual while also contributing to science. And I know that’s exactly what Kiki would want, because it means she can help people even in death.

Harold, Kiki, and Mary: you are my blood, my trio, my history. And for the rest of my life, you’ll show up in my Technicolor dreams.

Social media time travel

I wish there was a social media network to connect us to people from different times. And before anyone says "books", I mean in a reciprocal way. A Facebook-like service to communicate with others from the future, or the far distant past, or with relatives the way they were before we knew them. Or even with a friend who completely changed; to talk to them when they were different. It would ret-con the universe and completely screw up our timeline, but it would be so damn interesting and cathartic before time starts to eat its own tail and the aliens have to show up and fix everything.

Dawn in a Trash Can

Yesterday the sun rose inside a garbage bin.

We gathered up all his things. Packed them into a black metal trash basket and then headed to my parents’ house, where I plucked out the rest of it. Every letter he ever wrote me was in that basket. Every photo, every note we once passed back and forth, scribbling furiously to each other. His journal that he kept all throughout high school was in there. So were all those poems I wrote for him at sixteen and seventeen; literary high fructose corn syrup. I wish I could go back in time and shake the stars out of my eyes, but those stars had already fallen. We couldn’t snuff them out of history. We could burn them out of the future.

We burned it all in the middle of the empty dead end road. I didn’t look at the photos as they were consumed. Wouldn’t look back at that gaze staring out to challenge me. Instead, I looked at the writing. The pocket-sized spiral notebook fanned out like an accordion. Like a flower opening in bloom. The ink-inscribed torment and rage and confusion bowed in on itself, the pages wilting into a fetal curl. In their destruction, they reconfigured into shapes of beginnings. It wasn’t him that was destroyed; it was his pain. The pain he both carried and injected into others. I haven’t taken much from organized religion, but I always liked the idea of fire as refinement. Fire consumes while it purges. It leaves only the pure elements behind.

I burned all the love letters along with the hate ones. It can feel tragic to throw out beautiful words, but that beauty was what made them so dangerous. It had anchored me long ago, but that anchor had almost drowned me.

For years, I’d kept all these remnants inside a clay box in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. It was a box I’d made at Creative Arts Workshop the summer when I was six. Ever since grade school, I’d designated it as my pint-sized gallery of pain. I’d used it to house objects associated with bad memories, from embarrassing to sad to traumatic. Things I didn’t want to look at, but was also reluctant to throw away. In high school I’d kept an angry note from another ex in there, along with the padlock to a drawer where I’d locked up my childhood diaries. The journals were full of memories I’d repressed by siphoning them off onto paper. I wanted to hide them from myself, but also to remember. To tattoo them into my brain in invisible ink. That was when I’d started keeping those things, while also intent on tucking them out of sight.

I burned the box along with its contents. It blackened in the smoke, but wasn’t melted. It was stained and purified at the same time.

My sister was there, and so was Mike. Dedicated and steadfast as ever, he lit the flames. My sister circled around the fire, talking excitedly. Remembering history. Telling me about her own life and friends. She was there, and we love each other. When all those other layers are eroded and refined, that’s what matters. And so I folded up this moment as a keepsake to look at fondly; not to hoard away.

As the relics crumbled down to ash, the smoke started to smell faintly like almonds. I’m sure there’s a long history of symbolism behind them, and they could be waxed poetic about for ages. But what struck me so much was the simplicity. I half-wondered if I’d hear his distant guitar notes floating from the smoke, but the trace of almonds was enough. After burning down years of horror, what was left was a scent so refreshing and benign.

I thought of burying the debris or leaving them in the garden, but decided against it. As long as I held onto his creations, they held power over me. If I discarded the ashes in a poetic way, then they’d still retain a significance greater than themselves. So I tossed them out unceremoniously in a dumpster behind Sam Ash (the pun not realized at the time).

Something tentative was budding in the absence, and I wanted to let it grow.

Written in March '14

Social media makes us nostalgic. The websites are expansive rooms filled with everyone we've known over the years, existing in the present and in a time lock. We perpetually run both backwards and forwards, each half in the opposite direction, and then wonder why we never feel like a cohesive whole. Photos are nostalgic by nature, by the act of harnessing time. We exist in pixels, colors and frames. Photos offer an illusion of stasis, but even the images and recollections alter with perspective. We just do what we can to hold on.

Nostalgia even emerges from times that were terrible, because I miss not knowing. I miss the unconstrained possibilities. Even if they weren't actually infinite and everything followed its inherent course, I miss having no idea what would happen while holding endless ideas of what could.

At 4 a.m., or on Facebook, or alone with the quiet and impassive reality of time, I greet my sadness. It always lingers in the periphery, but now there are no distractions. It's late at night and I can see it reflected back in every letter and pixel onscreen. The clock carries weight in each tick. I need that grief, because the pit in which I can lose myself is the wellspring that sustains me. Compassion, creativity and connection flow from its stream, which permeates everything that matters. And so I embrace the paradox of an ache that can consume me but also fuels my inspiration, and the paradox of a website that links us to each other but divides us from ourselves.

No one is fully cohesive. We're spread out in words and pictures and ambitions and memories, dispersed into each other and scattered through time. Being bound to a million different places may not always feel freeing, but in a way, it also makes us limitless. We can choose where we want to be.