BY LISA MARIE BASILE
The windows are letting in all the light, and I’m 16 or 17, sitting in a high school literature class watching a play I can’t remember anything about.
The one detail I can conjure is this: A man weeping, he’s weeping, over the scent of coffee — and how, in death, that particular magnificence will be lost.
It is a small thing, yet it is everything — the very essence of what it means to be human. To let our bodies tell us what love is, to ache for the perfection of simple things, to kneel at the pew of ritual.
I thought, this must be what it’s like to experience the divine. To pair everything down to a single tiny magnificence. Just experiencing something so mundane without all the pomp and decoration of a busy life.
The soil and its many gifts.
I can’t remember if the character was dying or if he were dead and lost in some arabica reverie, but I remember thinking of my own death as impossibly far away.
A thousand years away. It felt like it would be one thousand years until I’d be old and tired and dying. In that bright classroom I felt a certain youthful comfort that can be taken in learning about and witnessing death, but feeling it is not yours — does not belong do you, cannot belong to you.
~~~
I’m 35 now. I’m sitting on the sofa in my front room, the sofa destroyed by my cat’s little paws. The scratches have worsened over the year, the inside of the sofa bursting out as soft white blood.
I can remember the sofa before the pandemic, how it scratches weren’t so deep, how it wasn’t embarrassing yet. And here we all are, home.
I’m staring out the window, out into the little crack of space forged between two city buildings. I am thinking of the small spaces we are all inside of, how we are both separate and together, pacing rooms and rooms — wondering, “What can I do? What should I do?”
Our hands are always in prayer whether we notice it or not, whether we call it that or not.
November pours itself all over the city. Every day I ask myself, is this going to be forever? And every day I tell myself this too shall pass. I learned that line as a child; it only works half the time.
I am struck dumb with thoughts of grief, a grief so contained it is water in a kettle; it is boiling over and screaming into the void. No one hears it. We are tending to our dry gardens out back. We are tending to the horses fallen in the pond. We are trying to lure them out, their glorious mains caught in the otherworld — but they have resigned themselves to death.
Our souls are kneeling in wet soil and weeping, even if our bodies are somewhere else.
Many days, I am hot and I am burning and I have nowhere to go, and so I have to explode or evaporate. That is what it feels like to be alive right now, holding my breath for grief, the never-ending dirge of spirits.
~~~
There’s my father, in Kentucky, whom I haven’t seen in almost two years. I imagine him standing on his porch with all of his animals. He’s playing guitar as he always does. And then he’s gone because no one wears a mask.
There’s my mother, who has gotten sicker over the years, walking through crowded aisles of rice and pasta. Everyone is breathing so hard. It only takes one hand to touch one bag and then life I am alone in this world.
There is no public show of grief yet — at least not in the way that we need it, as a globe, as a network of incredibly connected people who are cut apart by loss. We are trying to make sense of the everything and the lack and the heart’s wild ache.
People are giving birth alone, people are dying alone, people are drinking dirty martinis inside of crowded bars while someone waits for intubation. Someone is attending a super-spreader rally while my friend is put into a medically induced coma.
And we don’t need the disabled or the elderly, right? That grief is different; it’s not as bad, apparently, as though it’s OK for low-income communities and communities of color to simply vanish. Some zip codes are kept clean. Others are expendable.
~~~
It keeps me up at night, this great big everything. In April, anxiety had me on a leash. I took too much CBD and I lived in a fog, a molasses of self. I kept getting psoriasis around my eyes. My skin was trying to get the fear out, the heart’s palpitations pushing through the surface, boiling over, asking to be heard.
My body, its chronically ill state, is tired ad scared and on high-alert, cortisol racing through me, my spine fossilizing.
I downloaded apps that tell me sleep stories, like the one about the Trans-Siberian Express, how it moves quick and sharp through the darkness, through eight time zones, how it passes Lake Baikal — the world’s oldest, deepest, clearest lake. It’s witnessed everything, that water; it’s been here and it will always be here.
Is that supposed to be comforting?
~~~
These days I can’t focus on a thing. If I read a book, I reread some passages three times.
Writing is a little easier, but only because I need to pay rent and I can shame myself into getting it done on most days.
But I’ve never understood people who say work is a distraction from pain; my pain sits on my chest as I work. I toggle between my documents and the news. I read obituaries with abandon, sometimes for hours. I watch the world tear itself to pieces in pixels.
I send tiny messages — I love you — to friends and I mean it with a fullness that verges on heartbreak.
I wear two masks and march for Black Lives Matter. I watch the cops line the streets, blockading City Hall Park, their blank stares facing the crowds that stay for weeks. The occupants erect little libraries in the park. People start bonfires. There is energy in doing and going.
These are the things that matter.
~~~
I have always placed a value on finishing up projects, on being prolific. When quarantine began I played a game with myself: Do I do something or do I lean into stillness?
I have always used work to chisel away my shame and my childhood poverty and my insecurities. This year I wrote a book, somehow. I had a contract — but I did it because I cared, and I did it because the book was a love letter to my city.
I sent the file into the editor, wondering if 2020’s open wounds were glaringly obvious in its pages.
Let me know if it’s too much, I type. Then I delete it. Then I write it again.
I could edit it and change it and make it into something shinier and squeakier and more beautiful. But I feel death is in my ligature now; it’s in my everything. It’s in everything I do.
I miss the young girl who thought of death as an abstract, someone else’s dream within a dream.
Maybe if I work, if I create, I’ll stave off death?
~~~
My creative self is a shadow. She is always lingering, just hanging around, and yet I can never quite catch her. I am on her time. The light goes on and she is snuffed out. The light goes off and anytime I get to close she disappears.
But I’m tired, too tired to chase her, too tired to coax her, too tired to use the rituals and practices that I once swore worked.
2020 has made the effort too mountainous.
I continue finding myself in a spiral of anxiety around production. My body wants so badly to rest, to sleep, to calm itself, to be quiet — and yet the devil’s capitalist hooves are galloping across my heart. Get up, he says. Keep being productive. Make something of all this mourning.
Maybe what you reading is a product of that? I can’t quite tell anymore, although I think this is an exorcism.
I have so deeply internalized the messages of capitalism that it has taken this kind of year to unroot me. Sometimes I laugh and blame my Capricorn rising. I just love to work, I say. But the fact is, I have been indoctrinated — and not by the cosmos.
I have been indoctrinated by poverty, by an ancestry of exhaustion, of work, of not-having, of lack, of hunger, of emigration. I have been indoctrinated by men, by white men, by archaic standards of enoughness. By concepts of value that are in direct opposition to my soul. By the grimacing machine that says no to staring out of windows, no to drinking coffee in silence, no to simply breathing. By an expectation that downtime must be turned into learning languages or instruments or launching projects.
I have never been told that it’s okay to:
to simply gaze upon the yellow of a flower
to peer into a terra-cotta pot of basil and to be alive alongside its tiny green body
to giddily decide between coconut and vanilla coffee as the sky cracks with light
to hold my hand against my heart as it rains
to pray not for response or solution, but to simply say “I am here.”
to write for the sake of writing
to experience value as giving dignity and grace to others.
The kingdom of heaven — whatever that place is to you — does not care about how many books you have published nor how many emails you have answered.
Just imagine dying without truly understanding just how many shades of blue the sky contains?
How feckless for me to not use what privileges I do have; what a pity to not be still for a moment.
~~~
At some point, I realize that my body wants to give in.
I too cling to the scent of coffee. There are no longer thousands of years separating me from death, but a scrim of lace or tulle; I can actually see her movements, skulking back and forth, spindly fingers out, draped in shadow. She is the bedroom at the end of the hall. She is the hissing sound at night, and the whole world listens for her. She is the raven whose wings covet the globe.
I keep an eye on the sky, on its light, as though she were my mother or my child. I stare out of windows. I take walks as medicine. The light and I are connected now; I can never abandon her. She is my compass. She is my prayer.
Sometimes I say no to the emails and just drink water or dance.
Sometimes I cancel just because.
Sometimes when I finish work, I don’t think about how much is left.
Sometimes I walk to the park without my phone or a book.
I try to find god in stillness and simplicity. It shouldn’t be radical.
I want to grieve. I want to listen. I want to breathe. I want to give love to others. I want to do nothing, nothing at all, and I want to bloom in that vacancy. I want to feel the splendid rapture of stillness. I want to witness everything. I want to let it move through me. I want to live so that my ghost can miss it all, not regret it all.
And if I’m tired, I will rest.
Lisa Marie Basile (she/her) is a poet, essayist, editor, and chronic illness awareness advocate living in New York City. She's the founder and creative director of Luna Luna Magazine and its online community, and the creator of Ritual Poetica, a curiosity project dedicated to exploring the intersection of writing, creativity, healing, & sacredness. She regularly creates dialogue and writes about intentionality and ritual, accessibility, creativity, poetry, foster care, mental health, family trauma, healing, and chronic illness. She is the author of THE MAGICAL WRITING GRIMOIRE, LIGHT MAGIC FOR DARK TIMES, and a few poetry collections, including the recent NYMPHOLEPSY, which is excerpted in Best American Experimental Writing 2020. Her essays and other work can be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Sabat Magazine, We Are Grimoire, Witch Craft Magazine, Refinery 29, Self, Healthline, Entropy, On Loan From The Cosmos, Chakrubs, Catapult, Bust, Bustle, and more. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes (most recently for her work in Narratively). Lisa Marie has led poetry, writing, and ritual workshops at HausWitch in Salem, MA, Manhattanville College, and Pace University, and she's led ritual and writing events, like Atlas Obscura's renowned Into The Veil. She is also a chronic illness advocate, keeping columns at several chronic illness patient websites. She earned a Masters's degree in Writing from The New School and studied literature and psychology as an undergraduate at Pace University. You can follow her at @lisamariebasile and @Ri