TW: grief, death, trauma, fire.
Iām listening to Cassandra Jenkinsā (
) new song āOnly Oneā - Iām about 2 minutes in, the sax is hitting and I just ā¦. ahhh I just feel both so warm and so weighted down once again.Three years ago, she released her poignant An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. I latched onto it about a month after it came out, sitting alone in my new apartment in Boulder during a snowstorm. I drove to it, I worked to it, I rode my bike under the stars to it. It poured over me like water or moonlight. This was March 2021, which now seems to be a time where I was unknowingly sitting on a knifeās edge, where the old and new converged for a month or two as I teetered on the brink of them both. I find myself thinking back quite often as its the last time I felt like I understood myself and the world, the last time I didnāt hold a weight on my shoulders that can sometimes get too heavy to bare, the last time for a lot of things. That May, a childhood friend passed away suddenly. That October, I lost my apartment and everything in it to a fire.
āAfter David passed away, my friends put me up for a few days.ā
- āNew Bikiniā
My friendās name is David, too. A fact never lost on me.
I think about Cassandraās album all the time. How it dissects her own grief for her late friend and mentor, and how much I loved it before I really loved it. Iād sit alone on my balcony, watching the sun set over the town, completely alone in the midst of that covid year of isolation. Watching TV, painting, writing, reading, biking around town. I was 24, sad, and didnāt know what was to come - but still had some sort of unrealized hope after the year we had all experienced.
I still get scared to think about May 19th. It was one day before he was going to turn 25, and 5 days before I was going to turn 25. I remember everything about that apartment. I remember the way the sunlight hit or didnāt hit certain parts. I remember having my own little diy compost bin that was disgusting to clean. I remember dropping an egg shell while taking it out and cleaning up the shared walkway with a Clorox wipe. I remember sitting on the balcony reading Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and taking a picture of my favorite line, āWe are all migrants through time.ā
I remember walking to get the second dirty chai of my life at the coffee shop down the street. I remember finishing it in 2 sips because they donāt carry anything larger than 12 oz cups and then making a drip coffee at home. I remember falling off my bike alone on a night ride through town, injuring my shoulder for a few weeks because āTarifaā by Sharon Van Etten was playing too loud and I got really into it (Weāve all been there). I remember getting my second shot of Moderna and feeling so sick as I ate a (no longer) frozen pizza from Whole Foods, once again sitting on my balcony and watching the sunset - something I did nearly every night.
Everything I did was alone. But it was nice.
The weight of all these small memories pile up way too fast, and the fragmented image of a life half lived focuses into place. None of these seem to be connected, except by the mere coincidence that it was me experiencing them all. Life at this time was free and fluid. We were all alone and healing from the year prior.
I lost my vinyl of Cassandraās last album to the fire and never got a replacement one. It was translucent and blue, my favorite color, and it was out of stock when I got the feeling to check again. I never really replaced a lot of the things lost to the fire, at least not exactly as they were. It didnāt make sense. I tried getting the exact same jacket I had before. It felt good the first time I put it on, but then I never wore it again.
Spring 2021 feels nearly mythical at this point, before the bad got really bad, before I understood grief, before I realized that the traumas from before this time would only get worse because of what was to come. I remember lying in my bed on the loft of that apartment that would burn down 6 months later, pulling myself up the ladder with an injured shoulder just to eat spoonfuls of peanut butter with M&Ms and watch Shrill until 1 am. I missed my friends a lot, but 1200 miles felt like the same as 2 miles then - so it wasnāt nearly as bad as it is now. Everyone used to say my finsta reminded them of Ruthie - a comment that I still love. Friendly Neighborhood Gemini will always live on <3.
But itās been 3 years, and the spaces where Iāve existed have changed just as much as I have - as if I could even decipher the true difference at this moment. Iām clearly still holding on to all these memories way too hard, but when I think of them, thereās this thin blue veil that covers my eyes, coloring everything I saw and experienced in a gentle hue. Blue is my favorite color.
ā fragmented and kaleidoscopicā
I remember crying for an hour with my face in the couch on May 19th. I remember running from the building, dry heaving because the fire burned up all my tears on October 19th.
āI canāt seem to grasp what happened, I close my eyes.ā
-āAmbiguous Norwayā
ily š and its a lot of l