Though It May Look Like Disaster

Essay by Beth Nguyen
Illustrations by Li Anne Liew

In the night I woke myself up before I started screaming. D woke up too, asked if I was ok. I had learned, years ago, how to get out of nightmares by changing shape, or by running right out of the narrative, but it didn’t always work.

Sometimes I just whispered, this isn’t real, this isn’t real. If I was lucky, I would not remember it. D put his arm around me and settled us back toward sleep. I reminded myself that he was here with me. That we were in bed, on the second floor of an old hotel. We were in Arizona, halfway across the country from our homes, our children, our regular lives. We were at the edge of the goddamn Grand Canyon.

• • • •

As a kid, I learned that fear was weakness and therefore best kept private. No one wanted to hear about nightmares or dreams, the imagined intruders coming for us. The problem was, it’s hard to fake bravery. I was always the scaredy-cat. And someone was always ready to jump out, to laugh at my reaction. Haha, boo hoo, someone’s gonna get you.

• • • •

My family—after fleeing a war, after three different refugee camps, after resettlement in another country and language—my family became obsessed with disaster and destruction: action movies, asteroid strikes, monster and alien attacks, the terrible things broadcast on the nightly news. The first movie I remember seeing was 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it imprinted on me a lifetime of nightmares in which white spaces, sudden obelisks, the immensity of outer space, and dying robotic voices reminded me, over and over, that nothing, no one, and nowhere is safe. 

My family loved it. The violence, I mean. We must have. Because we wanted to watch it all the time.

In the 1980s, the TV gave us what it wanted, not what we wanted. Before VCRs and video rentals, we watched movies as they were shown on the channels available to us. And what my family loved the most was what terrified us. Some movies we watched over the years: The Blob. The Birds. The Poseidon Adventure. The Day After. Planet of the Apes. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Countless movies about war. So many movies in which men fight to the death with guns, knives, swords, bare hands. Almost anything can make us bleed.

I was the weird one who hated all of it; who saw movies in terms of how frightening they were. Even musicals like The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz, which aired on TV several times a year, billed as “Friday Night at the Movies.” It wasn’t just the tornadoes and witches and Nazis. The progression of childhood itself was terrifying. Dorothy, torn from her home. The Von Trapp children, neglected and alone. A 17-year-old boy singing, or was it threatening, Your life, little girl, is an empty page that men will want to write on. 

Everything I watched made it clear: at any moment, disaster can happen. A storm, a weapon, a man, a choice, an accident, a war. The life you know might be done, and, if you are lucky, you will have to become someone else. 

• • • •

One evening, last October, my sister told her husband that she had a terrible headache. They were just sitting down to dinner and she asked him to rub the top of her head. Then she collapsed. My brother-in-law told me all this in a phone call that night, from the hospital. He was in shock, and spoke with such calmness. She’d had a major hemorrhagic stroke, he said, and she was not expected to survive. I should come say good-bye.  

By the time I started driving to the Chicago suburb where my sister has lived for over twenty years, it was past midnight. Few other cars were on the highway. Wispy clouds flew past, trying to become fog. About an hour out, on an empty stretch of road, I saw strange shapes moving through the air. I realized they were t-shirts and pants and hoodies, tumbling in the wind. Like a great force was throwing someone’s laundry all over the highway. I drove an obstacle course around the clothes—lit up by headlights, floating back into darkness—and it was like a slow-motion fever dream. Two minutes later I wondered if it had really happened at all. 

At the hospital, my sister’s husband and sixteen-year-old daughter waited. For nurses, neurosurgeons, information. My sister was in an induced coma, fixed to the ICU bed with tubes and monitors, machines that beeped and whirred. A ventilator. 

Over the next ten hours my extended family gathered at the hospital. We’d all seen each other just a couple months earlier, because my sister had organized a family reunion. A big rental house on Lake Michigan, with a fire pit, hammocks, Adirondack chairs on a gently sloping lawn. Most likely the last time all of us will ever do this. At one point my sister and I were alone in the sitting room that faced the lake. She’d been wild as a teenager but in adulthood had become the responsible older sister. She rarely even drank. Still, when I brought out a bottle of champagne and said, how about it? she said, ok, why not. That was the last time we talked face to face, in the same room, just us, before going outside to join the rest of our family.

In the hospital one of the neurosurgeons who came by reasserted that the most likely outcome, with this kind of severe stroke, was death. These months later, I remember exactly how he said it, and that he resembled a colleague I don’t particularly like. He was in a hurry, trying to get out the door, and my family was crowding him with questions. I both believed him and didn’t believe him. 

Later when I was given a minute alone with my sister, to say goodbye, I couldn’t. It sounds foolish but I had never, not once, thought she wouldn’t be here with me. When we were very little—refugee kids, though we didn’t know that, because we had no memory of the crossing—we lived in a creaky old house with our dad and grandmother and uncles. We learned to speak English by watching TV, a black and white with complicated antennae. Sometimes our grandmother would give each of us a whole pear and then my sister and I would play a game that we were the last two people on earth. This was all the food we had, and how long could we save it?

• • • •

Seven months earlier, in March, D and I had flown from the Midwest, where we live, to Phoenix, Arizona. We had two reasons: to see the Grand Canyon and to see a giant meteor crater. 

The Barringer Crater, as it is known because in the early 1900s a geologist named Daniel Barringer actually purchased it, sits off I-40 between Flagstaff and Winslow. In aerial photos, the crater is both a gigantic earthen bowl in a desert landscape and the optic illusion of how something concave can appear convex. I wanted to see it in person to make it real in my mind.

D and I had met a year earlier, when he was about to get divorced and my divorce was about to be finalized. I’m pretty sure that people on the internet would have said there was no way either of us was ready for another relationship. We would have agreed. I wasn’t looking and neither was he. But there we were, meeting at a conference, and here we were now, driving through desert landscapes I had always craved, long before I had ever stepped foot in this part of the world.

When I first started thinking about divorce, years before actually going through with it, a fellow writer friend who was also considering it said to me, Just think of all the extra time we’d have for writing. She meant the off days, or off weeks, terms used to denote the times you don’t have the kids. With 50/50 custody, my writer friend said, I would have so much more time to write and work and just…be free. She had sounded downright rapturous about it. I had never thought of custody agreements in those terms before, only in terms of how awful it would be to see my kids half the time. Now there was a new idea: the feeling of time not as pain but as freedom. That friend and I lost touch, but I know she didn’t get divorced. I wonder how she figured it out, if she did at all, or if she’s just waiting it out.

On my off days, I get some writing done. I clean the house. I catch up on work and emails. Alone, I make pasta any time I want and often eat standing at the counter. And on other off days, there’s D. We live a distance enough away from each other that our days together feel like getaways. Often that’s exactly what we are doing—getting in the car, getting on a plane, meeting in other cities. And then we are just two middle-aged people walking around, deciding we’re too young not to start over.

• • • •

In college, I studied literature and writing. This was before cell phones and social media, when we had to go to a computer room in order to check email. We would linger after classes, talking about books. Once, I ran into a classmate outside the English Department building and we started talking about poets and poems we liked. He and I had been in a couple of the same classes, and often crossed paths at readings. We got to Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” It was one of those soft fall days when being on campus felt like being alive, and when I said the first line of the poem, he said the second. Then we recited the rest together, racing to finish the lines, so pleased with each other and with ourselves. We brought zero art to the recitation. We were merely repeating words that we had imprinted into our minds. We loved the poem, or so we thought, though clearly we didn’t understand it at all. We enjoyed it too much. We over-emphasized the parenthetical (“Write it!”) and laughed at the end. A year later we would spend half a night together, probably out of boredom, or avoidance. There was nothing to lose, and so we didn’t.

• • • •

Off I-40, the road to the Meteor Crater and Barringer Space Museum is dotted with RV campsites. Every couple of miles an embarrassing billboard tells us The Crater is near! This way to impact! 

I wanted to visit the crater because I couldn’t comprehend the scale of it through photographs. I wanted to consider what it would mean to stand in a place that, some 50,000 years ago, had been struck by a meteor. Of course, everywhere we go, everywhere we walk, is a buried landscape of geologic time. But few places make it so obvious, so vulgarly known. The most famous impact crater, Chicxulub, known for kicking off the beginning of the end for the dinosaurs, is unseeable, buried under the northwest edge of the Yucatan Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico that cradles it. 

Chicxulub was 66 million years ago. The Barringer crater is just a tiny baby. And it is owned (though it seems ludicrous, that a person could own such a site) by the Barringer Crater Company and descendants of Daniel Barringer. He had theorized that the crater had not been caused by a volcanic explosion, as other geologists had believed, but by a meteor strike. Barringer had gotten wealthy through gold and silver mining elsewhere in Arizona and was convinced that the crater held stores of iron from the meteor. This is a very American story: he bought the crater and the land around it and started mining for what he was sure would be a ten-million-ton meteorite buried in the ground. He would go on to spend today’s equivalent of nearly $10 million on this endeavor. Also American was the disappointment: there were no stores of iron, because the impact of the meteor had vaporized the meteorite itself. What’s left in the ground are particles of a former life in a literal other world. Daniel Barringer died in 1929. Decades later, his descendants realized there was another path to profit: admission tickets. 

On a Friday afternoon in early March, when D and I arrived, there were few other cars in the parking lot. The museum building was larger than I’d imagined but that made sense; it cost $29 to see the crater, and it wouldn’t work if you could see it right from your car. Like its billboards, the museum made an effort. There were guided tours, a theater that played an informational movie on a loop, exhibits about meteor strikes and space exploration (NASA has used the crater for training astronauts for moon missions). I wasn’t there for any of that. Though I am not a person who goes to the Louvre just to see the Mona Lisa, in this case, I was a person who went to the meteor crater museum just to see the crater.

And so there we were, D and I, walking the observation ramps, trying to take pictures of the crater as if we could get at the immensity of it. 

The crater’s diameter stretches about 3,900 feet, or almost 3/4 of a mile, or about 11 football fields. The depth is about 560 feet, which is like a building 50 stories tall. As another point of comparison, Chicxulub is about 633,600 feet in diameter and 3,273 feet in depth. 

Not that these numbers make sense in my mind when I’m looking at the crater. For me, it’s like the geologic time scale. I understand it as a chart and as a method of information delivery, but that’s it. I can’t feel it, can’t even memorize it, as I would if it were a poem. 

In geologic time, 50,000 years is not even a blink. 50,000 years ago sits in the Late Pleistocene era, which covers a span of time between 129,000 and 11,700 years ago. Every time I think about that, I have to check my notes. I have to look up the dates again, to make sure. What does that even mean, 129,000 years ago, back when Arizona wasn’t a desert at all but covered with grasses and trees and mountains? 

I was thinking about all of this while standing as close to the meteor crater as we were allowed to get, leaning over the thin metal railings. The wind was fierce and whipped my hair around, but I had no sense of danger or even fear. The empty bowl of the crater was, if anything, deeply melancholy. In the scheme of geologic time, the meteor that created this crater was minor. It just happened to be beautifully retained and preserved. In a sense, that’s true of all fossils and archaeological finds. Luck and timing determine what is kept, what can be found, and what will determine our idea of the past.

Later, as D and I left the crater museum, we crossed paths with a couple heading toward it. How was it? the man asked. He asked how much it cost, and was shocked by the answer. Was it worth it? he asked. I never know how to answer such a question, because how can I know what is valuable to someone else? But I said yes, because it was true for me. Driving back to I-40—next stop the Grand Canyon—my mind went back to that couple. Where they lived, how far they had come, what had made them decide to go see the crater in the first place. Would they think it was worth it? Wasn’t the concept of worth dependent on hindsight, something we can only really know afterward?

• • • •

One night at Lake Michigan with my family, during our reunion, we saw a star emerge from the water. That’s what it looked like. More followed—a string of stars arcing into the sky, then disappearing. 

Satellites, one of my cousins said. 

It was not beautiful; it was unnatural. A star in disguise. A jump scare from the night sky.

• • • •

My younger son told me that before he falls asleep, he thinks about disasters. Tornadoes and earthquakes, break-ins and bombings. He can’t help it, he said. He thinks about terrible things and then he ends up having nightmares. Later he thinks about those nightmares and they give him more nightmares. We talked it through; we are still talking it through. One day I told him that I did the same thing when I was growing up. How did you stop, he asked. I told him that I never did. I just got better at it, and better at getting out of it.

• • • •

My sister survived. She even learned how to breathe on her own. She can move her right hand and arm and sometimes communicate with them. I have asked her, do you know who I am? Do you know you had a stroke? Hold out two fingers for yes, and she held out two fingers. At one point, we thought she would learn how to swallow tiny bits of applesauce, though really she’s been on a feeding tube this whole time, and always will be.

What I’m saying is that we had so much hope, at first. But it has been outweighed—by the realness of her condition, grief, family disruption, and the way American health care brutalizes those most in need. My sister has been in numerous hospitals for ICU and rehabilitation and care, and most of those decisions have been made by insurance. 

A few months after the stroke, I dreamed about my sister. A vivid, clear dream that I can still feel, even now. I was sitting by her bedside and her head was turned to me. She couldn’t move her head, you see, and still can’t, not really. In real life she also can’t talk. But in the dream she opened her mouth and said, I’m so sad. I’m so sad.

Maybe because, the previous time I had visited her, I had seen tears seep from the corners of her eyes. Was she crying for real, or was it a reflex reaction? I asked. No one could say.

I woke up from the dream also crying. Of course she was sad. We were, all of us, every one of us in my family, in her family, deeply and desperately sad. 

Disaster is sudden; it is slow-moving; it is terrifying; it is irrevocable; it changes the idea of the future. The funny thing about the art of losing is that there’s no art, and no mastery. 

• • • •

In 1998 two competing asteroid movies arrived in American movie theaters: Deep Impact and Armageddon. I saw them both, and have seen them many times in the years since. Partly because I’m fascinated by how they portray human reactions to impending disaster. And because I was learning how to understand my family’s relationship with disaster and violence. 

The answer, if it can be called that, was so obvious: the war in Vietnam and our flight as refugees at the end of it. These are the anchoring facts of my life, but the details are not mine. I was eight months old, and my sister was two. When my dad describes what happened, it feels more like storytelling than reality. How they—he, my uncles, my grandmother—decided at the last minute. How they got us to the Saigon River on motorcycles. How they got us on a boat that was going out down the river to the sea. How we were picked up by a U.S. Naval ship and brought to a refugee camp in the Philippines. From there another camp in Guam, and a third camp in the United States, in Little Rock, Arkansas. I know the story, not the experience. I don’t even understand how to look back on something like this. It’s like residue, the sense of consequence. It’s my dad coming home after his shift at the feather factory in Michigan, where we were resettled. It’s my uncles listening to the Eagles, to Santana, to Simon and Garfunkel. It’s growing up with so little sense of understanding or context, but always this feeling that I was missing out, forgetting, and trying to catch up to something. 

The asteroid movies are, essentially, about the end of human time. What decisions will people and governments make to avert, to preserve, to survive? What will we accept, and what will we relinquish?

• • • •

I have been to the Grand Canyon three times: once with a husband, many years ago; once with my children, after getting divorced; and then, a year later, with D. I don’t come here because I’m into hiking or camping. I come here because I’m a nerd, because geology asks us to consider the progression of time in a way that defies how we experience it.

I like the astonishing quiet of the canyon. I like seeing the shiny ribbon of the Colorado River and feeling almost sickened with awe. To consider what it has done, how it’s been used and controlled, what time and erosion have done and are still doing. While parts of the canyon rock are about two billion years old, the river has been at work only five or six million years. It begins in the Rocky Mountains, in snow melt and rain, then travels hundreds of miles, passing through dams, including Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam, before it cuts through the Grand Canyon, becoming a major source of water for millions of people in the southwest and Mexico. The river is supposed to end in the Gulf of California but with climate change and all these years of aggression and diversion, that’s no longer true. As the USGS puts it, “The Colorado River just disappears into the desert sands.”

What you do at the Grand Canyon is spend a lot of time looking out and looking down. Over and over, as if you’re trying to believe what you’re seeing. While the meteor crater feels static—call it a scar, a wound, a hole in the ground—the Grand Canyon feels alive, dynamic and changing, in its stillness. 

At nightfall in March, it’s too cold to stay outside very long. D and I go back to our hotel, the El Tovar, which was built in 1905 very near the edge of the South Rim. It’s got that part Victorian, part Swiss Chalet, part fancy-lodge architecture that’s come to be known as National Park Service Rustic. Rough-hewn wood, mounted animal heads, a formal dining room, a cozy bar with a view of the canyon. It’s both charmingly and uncomfortably historical. 

D and I live in different cities, and when we meet we are often traveling, often in hotels. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I forget which one. I wake up wondering where the hell am I. It’s such a relief when I can’t remember whatever I’d been dreaming about. D puts his arm around me, always. I remind myself we are here, together, in this moment, in the same strange stage of life. 

• • • •

In her hospital bed my sister coughs sometimes and it’s a raspy, scary sound. She is still learning how to deal with saliva and phlegm. Her husband told me that he once held M&Ms to her nose and that she seemed to recognize what they were, and wanted them, though of course she couldn’t have any. 

Sometimes my sister lifts her right arm to her neck as if to scratch it, or to push something away. 

How can I help? What do you need? I ask these questions as if she will answer me. I forget, all the time, that she won’t. It is so strange that she won’t. 

My sister keeps getting moved to different hospitals and facilities around the Chicago suburbs. Mostly her condition stays the same. She can’t move her body. I don’t want to say she is trapped, but my god it really feels that way. I look in her eyes—they are wide, involuntarily—and it’s like she is staring very hard and yet I can’t see where she is. It’s not clear how far her memory goes, or where it stretches—what she retains, what she loses. I wonder what she is truly experiencing, and how she marks the passage of time.

• • • •

About 1.2 billion years ago, a meteor struck the area that is now Santa Fe, New Mexico. Geologists know this because of a rare and subtle formation in rock that indicates the effect of impact—what the now-defunct EARTH Magazine described as “fossilized shockwaves.” These are called shatter cones. In person, they’re just ordinary-looking rocks. Because not every meteor impact results in a crater, and most craters disappeared from view many geological years ago. Non-crater remains are referred to as impact structures. They are not crater-sexy. They are not even unnoticeable unless you’re actively looking for them. No one’s going to charge admission for a glimpse.

A few months after we went to see the Barringer Crater and the Grand Canyon, D and I traveled to Santa Fe to find its shatter cones. I had read that they were sprinkled over a square mile in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains along Highway 475, and that the most accessible section could be found near a popular trailhead. Here we pulled over. We gazed out at the rock face, what we might drive by all the time without even thinking about it. Except for bicyclists flying by, the road was pretty much empty. I crossed it, climbing over a highway barrier to see the rock up close. And there they were, in easy plain view. The name was true. They looked like a series of conical trees in the rock. I touched the shatter cones and tried to comprehend, as I have tried so many times, the concept of time. A billion years ago, the Earth’s landmass was a supercontinent. Rodinia, it’s been named, precursor to the better-known Pangaea that formed some 500 million years later. 

No, not everything that leaves, leaves a trace. Think of the metals that evaporated when the meteor hit that patch of land in northern Arizona, and how, thousands of years later, Daniel Barringer went searching for what he would never find. But think, also, of the weirdness of shatter cones, their shape and discovery. The years, the generations, that go into the making of a scientist who is able to understand how to read a sign in a rock, and decipher its long ago messages.

• • • •

So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost. I’ve been thinking about that line for thirty years now. It is a form of retrospective narration. Part deep depression, part deep acceptance. 

The thing about love, about loving someone, is that, one way or another, there is always an ending. 

• • • •

Nearly twenty years ago, before my first book, a memoir, was published, I sent the manuscript pages to my sister. I wasn’t asking for permission but in a way, I was. I was a little scared. That she would get mad at me, that she would contradict my perceptions of how we grew up. The same things every memoirist worries about. But she called me up and said, This could have been so much worse. 

I thought she meant that the experience of reading the manuscript could have been worse, or that the book could have been worse-written. But it turned out that what she meant was that the stories themselves could have been worse. Harsher. Harder. Because, she said, that’s what she would have written down. My sister and I, two years apart, too often compared to each other, or rather against each other, hadn’t had the same childhood after all. All along I had thought her life easier—she was the prettier one, the one with more friends—yet she hadn’t felt that way at all. 

Writing, maybe especially nonfiction writing, is a self-inflicted investigation of why we are even trying to do this in the first place. It’s trying to pin down a story, a feeling, a past, that can’t actually be pinned because we, the tellers and observers, are always changing. Nonfiction is a chase. It is the desire for confession and the necessity of restraint. 

Sometimes, every bit of writing I do feels like an act of trespass. I say that because I really do not want to write about my sister, while knowing I can’t avoid it. It’s because I do not want this story to be true, and there’s no good resolution. I don’t want this to be the story of my sister’s life. 

And there are so many things I can no longer ask her, because she can’t answer much beyond an inconsistent yes or no. It is unclear how much she can even see. Most likely, though I still cannot agree to believe this, she will never speak again. 

In one of the last conversations I had with my sister, before the family reunion at Lake Michigan, we talked about aliens. I was visiting her and we were doing our usual thing, sitting at the kitchen counter, eating and gossiping and reminiscing. I asked if she remembered the time one of our uncles took us to see The Brother from Another Planet at Studio 28. It was hot, late summer, a matinee. My sister was eleven and I had just turned ten and we didn’t understand the movie; I remembered it as sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and deeply unsettling. My sister said she didn’t recall that, but she did remember going to that same theater to see Aliens, the one with Sigourney Weaver, and how we screamed at all the blood and violence. We then remembered Close Encounters of a Third Kind; E.T.; Independence Day. What’s with all the aliens? she said. And then we laughed, because of course, that’s exactly what my family had been trying to figure out by watching all these movies. Because we too, quite literally, were aliens. Our Resident Alien cards were proof of identity and status until we became citizens. It’s so weird that we grew up like that, my sister said. I knew what she meant. In less than a generation, we seemed light years away from what our dad and uncles and grandmother had gone through. And yet we were still refugees; it was still part of us. The alien within. My sister and I started talking about something else then, and we never went back to that subject though I wish we had. I keep wishing I could stay in that moment a little longer, or in that moment in the lake house when we drank champagne, or even those times when we were little girls saving the pieces of fruit our grandmother gave us. I swear my sister would agree if I said time feels more unreal as we get older. How thirty years ago can seem more real than three days ago.

In all the movies of my and my sister’s youth, the protagonists have to figure out what home is, and where they belong, and who they’re supposed to be. It’s always the same lesson, repeated, because no one ever really learns it. 

All these years later, ongoing, I still think that if I can evidence and information my way to understanding, then I can mitigate the fear and actuality of disaster—even as it’s happening right in front of me. I have to remind myself that the concept of time is human-made, as are the names people give to stars, or to anything. I read that the earliest recordings of time are marked by women in the Stone Age, keeping track of menstruation. Is that actually true, or just true for now? The long past, like the long future, is part interpretation, part wonder. Here we are, always digging for more answers.

• • • •

When I brought my kids to the Grand Canyon, they were then eleven and thirteen years old. It was my first trip with just the three of us—a reimagined idea of family vacation, with me solely responsible. One day we were walking the rim trail when the sky suddenly shifted. A storm. We were about half a mile from the next trailhead that had a bus stop, and we could see lightning and rain heading toward us. It occurred to me that no one else knew where we were. Let’s hurry, I said, but I felt no panic. When we got to the trailhead, a bus appeared as if by summons. We boarded, and then the rain started. The bus driver announced that everyone out there needed to get picked up. We waited as people came bursting forth from the trail. Lightning and thunder closed in. The rain lashed at us. And I realized I was not scared; I was exhilarated. In the proceedings of divorce, maybe especially when children are involved, there are ample opportunities for guilt and grief. But then there are times, like on that bus, when you just know you’re going to be fine. And you are. And so we were.

My divorce had been finalized two months before, in a five-minute Zoom meeting while the kids were in school. Me, my ex, and the judge. She went through the settlement and custody agreement that we had signed. She asked each of us if we believed the marriage to be irretrievably broken. The question was expected but still startling in its directness. More direct than my ex-husband and I had been for most of our twenty-year marriage. I answered yes. My ex answered yes. And it was done. It’s wrong to say that I felt nothing. I don’t mean to say I felt nothing. But for me, the ending had been years in the making. 

For some, divorce is a disaster, as when we describe someone as wanting to blow up their own life. For me, it was more like an unstoppable force—the more I contemplated it, the more certain it became. Like watching a river before it becomes part of a waterfall. Seeing a glass vase wobble, about to fall, and knowing it’s going to fall even before it happens. Once the ending begins, it has to continue. The impact of divorce might be a crater, a shatter cone, a buried structure. But we get to decide the shape, the visibility, the viability of such a fossil or scar.

It was April when I got divorced, and I was in my office in my house, which was now completely mine. I had paid to make it mine. I closed my computer and stood up. I went to my kitchen for a glass of water. Soon I would text D; later, that night, I would meet him at his hotel. But for another couple of hours, before my kids came home from school, I would be alone. In a way, aloneness is my most known, and thus most comforting, condition. It’s what I think of when I think of childhood, even with my sister. Probably this is what makes me a difficult person, too. But when I’m alone I am entirely unwitnessed, answerable to no one. And that, for good or ill, often feels like freedom.

One night in Santa Fe, D and I went out to observe the night skies. I am mediocre at identifying constellations and planets. I mean, I can do it, but I always lose my way. But everyone loves to look at stars because it approximates the feeling of magic. Even when we know that whatever we’re seeing is already dead, it’s kind of like viewing hundreds-year-old art in a museum. The painters and the people in their portraits are long gone, yet the work feels alive. Poets will always be writing about the stars and the moon, and so they should. Like love, how could we ever get enough? When we look into the sky we are trying to look into space, which is to say the future. The next meteors, asteroids. Whatever is coming, is already coming.