I walk in the back door of the artists’ home you two have cultivated. Pass the array of baskets and gardening gear through your kitchen with the black stone countertops. The postcard I sent you from Glacier this Summer is still on the fridge. Your home is full of antique furniture and art. Not in a stuffy way, but a real, lived way. Pieces you picked up or traded for at art shows. Symbols of you two’s combined taste. Which you might argue are one and the same now, and then tell a story a few minutes later proving that inaccurate, “this piece took some convincing…”

I steal a long peek at you in the living room. Reclined in your sitting chair, hands tucked under opposite arm, smiling with your new AirPods in. You love them because they work both as noise-cancelling and as hearing aids.

I tiptoe on your slightly creaky real hardwood floors to my potential new jacket. I take her in, gorgeous material, but maybe not my cut. I don’t try it on. I feel no urgency to have more of either of your belongings just because. Except maybe your journals, I am still coveting them post-death, but that’s not just because. Instead, I’m drawn to the light coming through the room you refer to as The Beautiful Room.

Sun pours through the south facing windows lining the soft, earthy orange walls. It amazed me, but didn’t surprise you, that I’d painted my bedroom in the same faux clay technique, just in rusty pinks instead of oranges. The sun casts drapes over your meditation bench where you sit routinely each morning with your face towards the sky. I lean against the sturdy door frame. Your 18yo cat Kiki is curled up on the room’s guest bed, surrounded by textured pillows on a tapestry duvet. How lovely to take a cat nap here in The Beautiful Room.

I am drawn to join. A softness in my heart wants to rest in a place like this. For a moment, it crosses my mind that this is inappropriate for some reason. Maybe I should wait outside. You are asleep. I didn’t ask permission. Maybe it’s inappropriate to feel at home in my elder male friend’s house. Too vulnerable, too innocent. I determine quickly and trust it is not inappropriate at all. I join Kiki by lying on my right side in the warmth. I tuck your Mexican blanket between my knees and close my eyes. My shoed feet over the edge. I am not worried, I am not nervous, there’s nothing else for me to do but to be welcome and at ease.

Later, you tell me you’ve decided you’d like to live a long time. My heart thanks you repeatedly, while my mouth offers a joke, “glad to hear it, about time”, and I hope we have some choice in these things.

x little sister

He asks in no certain terms who I pray to. His God, though easier to define, is still complicated for him. I wonder if he thinks me utterly confused and untamable, praying to god with no name, only an essence I know when I feel it.

I sit at my dusty altar and watch the snow blow across my window. My awareness tight and contained in my chaotic body. Blood pulsing near my elbows, urgency in my heart, and thoughts grasping for a plan, go, go, fix, fix, find, find.

I look to the sky and feel for the distance this snow must have come from. Farther and wider my awareness spreads until it finds the clouds and the mystery. My god is here suspended mid-air in these emorphic collections of elements. And where did they arrive from? Brought by the influence of the wind, and who or what originates that? While traceable and to an extent predictable, the origin, the source of wind, is still a mystery. I see in my mind an image of a wind map. Whose thin lines and curving shapes form a fur coating the US. The animal of our bodies held in our global animal. Whose urges and movements are derived from an uncontrollable place. No one’s pet.

My awareness is wide and vast now, no longer trapped in the details of my internal landscape. I am beyond the clouds. This place where serenity resides. Here I am as light and as available as air. Me and this essence are one in the same, one of the same.

I say my prayers here, not to but with.
May I trust this space both known and unknowable. May I surrender to the whims of the winds and trust them to take me where I ought to be, or that they will take me and I will arrive, and that’s just true. May I not fight these winds or the rain or the river. May I not be at war with the weather or with nature, my nature. May I be soft in the earthly way, malleable, moveable, yet stable and at ease despite the storm, despite the pressure. May I lean in, lean with, go, flow, follow. And when the snow layers onto the Earth where I am, may I be that too. The purity, the covering, the hush, the cold, the mystery, the cocoon. May I surrender to what is.
My god is What Is Happening Now, and where Now comes from.

-written to the sound of the windchime

-Apparently, “emorphic” isn’t a word, but I believe it means: a shape or form of material that changes seemingly at random, but maybe there’s a magical pattern like flock formations or slime or clouds.

-Of course, the first thing I write that doesn’t involve my dead dad is about god

My dad always called my brother by his first name twice. Short and chirpy with an inflection at the end, like it had a smiling exclamation mark. “Michael, Michael!”

My dad said my name in a particular way too, and occasionally “Kelsey, Kelsey!” like he did my brother’s.

My brother calls me “Kelsey, Kelsey!” when he greets me endearingly. I don’t know why he does this. I haven’t asked. I assume it’s because he’s trying to do something sweet or nostalgic for either him or me or us. It’s a kindness. A continuing.

As a kindness, I do not correct my brother by telling him how Daddy actually said my name. Instead, I reply “Michael, Michael!” and let this be our thing.

A few weeks ago, I realized I ought to take my legal name off my Substack for reasons and changed it to “Kelsey, Kelsey!”. I told Michael this. He beamed, “That is really cool. A really good name for a blog too”. He looked proud, a part of it. I am happy to feel this is true.

written to “Georgia Walks” by Hans William on repeat

You asked me a question, something about how long we’d been there, maybe. You in the hospital, me rarely leaving the armchair next to your bed. I answered matter-of-factly. Then I saw a wave of understanding saturate you, some disbelief mixed in, and a touch of humor rising. Not the humor of a joke but the humor that exists in all truths. I was ignorant of the profoundness of this moment until you let me in.

You half shook your head and exhaled, “time remains so unconditional.”

Based on the disbelief I saw, I gathered it was a lesson that had repeated throughout your life, and here it was finding you again. Finding me for the first time.

This phrase immediately replaced any previous winner of “most wise thing my dad let me in on about the universe”.

No matter what confusion or delusion your brain took you through, took us through, in your blood-infected state, time passed the same regardless. New days came, even if I begged them to pause or wait for us to catch up. The evening would arrive oh so consistently, as would my dread, and your “sundowners”.

Plus, according to you, you’d be dead in 2 days’ time.

You must have misheard the message, though, because you didn’t die on your birthday, but on your sister’s a few months later.

We came home from the hospital. I found your poetry and writing in the in-between time.

It took me a week to work up the courage and find the strategy to ask you about it. With days passing in this delicate liminal space, letting a week go by could be seen as a risky move. I was never allowed in your office, and now I’d not only stepped in but opened the drawers. I knew you’d perceive this as a deep betrayal. I wasn’t willing to risk the trust we’d built or set off Parkinson’s paranoia. And honestly, I only read one piece. It was good. Devastating, but good.

Instead, I asked you about your MFA and let that prompt the conversation.
“Did you keep writing?”
“Oh yes,” your face lit up adoringly like I’d finally asked a question you’d been hoping for.

I tried to ask you why you wrote, but you must have misheard me too, and answered why you kept it a secret, “Everyone’s afraid they aren’t as good as they think. Aren’t they?”

I asked you if we could read some together. Told you I thought it was so cool of you, that it didn’t hurt my feelings you’d spent so much time on it, away from me. I understood.

I think that relieved some of the shame, but not all.
”Isn’t when I’m gone soon enough?” you asked through your partial laugh.

I nodded and knew to leave it alone.

Your sister turned a year older today. Making 365 days of unconditional time since the prophecy of your death was realized.

Turns out, when you were gone was too soon. I’ve sat in your office, relishing in everything left untouched, letting myself be with you in this way. There’s no fear you’ll find me, be hurt, or kick me out. Even still, I haven’t read any more pieces. As time remains so unconditional, I’d like you to remain unchanged in my memory for more of it.