all the kinder forms of longing—

what does it amount to now?

            not:

               I miss you;

               shadows that speak;

               disappointment as a crown;

               the imprint your body
            made in the witchgrass;

               the taste of your name,
            thinning in my mouth…

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if i find my pants and the other sock

i’ll be on my way

to the trees along the river.

there are palm warblers there.

they move through like lemon drops

on your tongue, taking their time,

freshening the air behind them.

i need that clean air now

to rest my swollen eyeballs and confess

to myself how i got here

on my own and ignore the traffic

up on the road just like pigeons

under a bridge.

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i have returned! and you have always been

in the unmown bank of grass beyond the house of my neighbor,

visible through winter, your lean-to and the adopted pilings

of your enclosure giving ramshackle comfort. i mean come on.

what more could we ask for this spring than unbent orange tulips,

the woodthrush so modest in the neonspit forsythia,

and the emergence of further goats! not peace. not peace.

not hope. endurance maybe. do not hide from me, goats,

one black, one white, evergreen in your interest,

snakeeyed and kind, season by season, in the world’s clover.

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His name was Hank. Not the most romantic name for a first love, I admit. But it was his name, and I loved repeating it in my mind and sometimes out loud to a few trusted middle school confidants. Then there was the obsession with writing it alongside my own name, in exaggerated cursive fonts joined together by one red heart and the word FOREVER in all caps. Even after summer camp was over and I returned to school as a seventh grader, I would trace his name and mine in my spiral notebook, knowing I would probably never see him again, but also knowing intuitively that I would never forget him. I was right.

After all, it had been my first kiss. The fact that it happened at the bottom of a mudslide didn’t cheapen it for me. I had waited forever, almost eleven days to be precise. From the first night when I saw him at the campfire, my heart had developed a strange new rhythm whenever his boys group joined my girls group for an activity. I saw him watching me as I did roundoffs and back handsprings out on the soccer field before dinner one night. Not that I was a showoff or anything, but before I did the splits, I glanced out of my peripheral vision to make sure he was still looking my way. He smiled at me. It was almost too much.

Every morning I would rummage through my packed bag, which stayed closed against the threat of lizards and other critters at the foot of my bunk bed, searching for the perfect outfit to get his attention and hopefully another smile in my direction. And every night, as I lay in that bed, my heart pounded relentlessly as I wrote about him in my diary. He was tall and lanky, tanned from our days spent out on the zip line and learning the J-stroke as we awkwardly steered our canoes down the river. His sense of humor delighted me most, as he would laugh hysterically in such an animated way at his own jokes, causing his hair to fall wildly in his face while he entertained a captivated audience. I was captivated. Those overgrown golden curls which he repeatedly swept to the side of his forehead were the stuff of my dreams each night, right after brushing my teeth, saying my prayers, and applying bug spray for the umpteenth time to ward off the mosquitoes.

Our groups spent one day apart, a lifetime, taking turns rotating through the obstacle course, the rope swing and monkey bridge, and an indoor craft time. I had a hard time concentrating on anything that day because my mind was wherever Hank was. While I swung from the rope and shimmied across that bridge, I was consumed with thoughts of him. At dinner that night, he approached my table and sat beside me on the edge of the splintery bench that swayed beneath our slightest movements. He was shy, and that charmed me all the more.  Timidly, he pulled something from behind his back. A leather bracelet with his name burned into it was in his outstretched palm. “I made this for you,” he almost whispered.  I kept that bracelet until I got married eleven years later. I think I kept it not because of how special he was, but because of how special he had made me feel. 

Every girl’s celebrity heartthrob, Donny Osmond, sang a song that I always believed was about that summer. It was called Puppy Love:

            And they called it puppy love,

            Oh, I guess they’ll never know

            How the young heart really feels

            And why I love us so.  

It was near the end of the two weeks, and we knew we would part ways soon, trading the intoxicating high of summer love for the realities that awaited us back home. He would return to football training and drum lessons. I would go home to cheerleading competitions, gymnastics meets and flute lessons, wondering if what had happened at summer camp was just a dream.

But that kiss had been real, even if it was just a rushed, awkward peck on lips sunburned from a day at the river. Climbing up the hill to the top of the mudslide was a tiring, treacherous journey. For the joy set before us, we made the trek up the hill more times than we could count. Each time we were rewarded with the exhilarating thrill of sliding down the smooth, wet earth cut into a body-shaped groove on the hillside. Our bodies were covered in the reddish brown clay. I laughed until I was hoarse. Never had one day held more electrifying enchantment as that day when twelve-year old me took the hand of a boy in whose eyes I was found beautiful, covered from head to toe with mud. Holding tightly to my slippery hand, he pulled me up that hill, and when we reached the bottom, we stopped laughing just long enough for that one kiss that I have never forgotten.

Forty-six years later, I still remember that last day of camp when I found a little love letter from him on my bunk. On top of it he had laid a tiny bunch of wildflowers picked just for me—some ever-romantic Queen Anne’s lace, sturdy black-eyed Susans, and bright yellow dandelions for a splash of color. Those dried flowers, the letter, and the bracelet became my most prized possessions, and I treasured them with all the respect they deserved for longer than I probably should.   

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At first there are just a dozen of us. Strangers who’d heard the news. Many of us didn’t know Oliver personally. The newspapers said he was 26 years old, whip smart, about to start med school. Bright eyed and handsome, in a small-town kind of way. We could’ve been friends with him, we thought. We loved him in a way that only strangers can, through our individual imaginations. Maybe some of us had seen him on the patio at the Second Cup. Maybe we’d danced beside him at Fly. Maybe we’d even kissed him years before, fleetingly, in a midnight disco haze.

Have you ever missed someone you’ve never met?

Soon, we swell. Fifty to one hundred to more than we can count. Most of us wear black, but a few arrive in the clothes we wore to work. One of us, a barista, has hair that smells of coffee and baked cinnamon. Another brought his dog. Another brought her three-month-old baby, bjorned to her breast like a marsupial.

A woman in a yellow puffer jacket hands out white roses, still studded in thorns. We hold them gently to avoid cuts. Others pass around votive candles stabbed through plastic cups to catch the wax. Dusk glows pink and tangerine in the village windows, giving them the illusion of life. Lots of people like to hate this city as a pastime, especially those who’ve never been here, but we find beauty in the plainest places. It’s part of what we love about each other, our aptitude for silver linings.

Do you know what it’s like to start a new life?

The Facebook event mentioned silence, so we speak in mimed gestures. Once the sun sets, we light our candles and walk south. The roll of footfalls on the empty street is like a passing storm, ready to burst.

We know the route and why we’re taking it. Oliver had been on his way home after his sister’s birthday. They were best friends. He didn’t have far to go, and besides, he’d done this walk countless times before. It was after midnight, two weeks ago. Early October. Crisp and quiet, the perfect time to clear your head. We imagine what he might’ve been thinking. Replaying conversations from the party. Making plans for the weekend. Possibly even visualizing his lavish wedding-to-be—the playlist, the table arrangements, the lilies. We imagine his fiancé opening the door the next morning to two police officers. We try to picture what comes next, but imagination can only take you so far.

A police officer on a silver bicycle guides us through the streets. A whistle dangles from his neck, and he blows twice to freeze traffic. We know his presence has less to do with courtesy and more to do with municipal code. Shortly after Oliver’s death, investigators assigned to his case said there was no evidence of a hate crime. We wonder how it’s possible to make statements like this without arrests or suspects or witnesses. We’ve cultivated a healthy skepticism of the authorities over the years. We remember the raids, the whip of metal batons, inky bruises blossoming on bare skin. Some of us lost our jobs and pensions for the crime of falling in love. Years from now, when lookalikes start disappearing from our streets, the police will tell us to stop spreading rumours, to stop posting misleading pamphlets on city property, that this is all just a terrible, terrible coincidence. We will not believe them, not out of spite or anger, but for the simple fact that they do not know us. We’ve learned to distance ourselves from certain men, the kind that lean on tired assumptions and call this logic. Obviously they’re afraid of us, but maybe—going out on a limb here—they’re just a touch dim.

Have you ever been so misunderstood it could kill you?

We walk towards the lake, but it’s too cold to smell the water. If you listen closely, you can hear the wax dripping into our cups. Our silence stops traffic, redirects streetcars, and probably makes at least a few people late to dinner.

Some of us carry banners that read “Take back the streets.” Some carry flags. When the baby cries, it’s like a cellar door creaking open. There is a twinge of ancient in the air, as if we are trying to cast a spell for Oliver. If magic was real, we’d bring him back. Instead we settle for something more ordinary: the vapours of him, swirling around us like a kite on a string.

Do you believe in ghosts? Because we have far too many.

As we get closer, our mood shifts. You can tell by the quality of our silence. Reverence is dewy eyes, hunched shoulders, lips between teeth. But rage is pulsing jaws, burning ears, downward stares. Our thoughts move from him to them. Unlike Oliver, they are impossible to imagine. Maybe this is because imagination requires empathy. To us, they are a vague nothingness. Smoke spilling from a pit. Police only released a blurry picture of their black SUV and asked the public to come forward if they recognized the vehicle, which is almost funny when you think about it. How can you recognize a static smudge on a screen? Those of us who’ve dealt more closely with the justice system know that old cliche is true: if you’re not laughing, you’re crying.

Don’t you think it’s funny how our minds can make things funny when they’re not really funny at all?

We turn west and bend like an elbow. Those of us in the front can now make out our destination. A patch of blank, grey road surrounded by blank, grey towers. Hardly a landmark. In the daytime, some of us work here. We admit that it’s bleak and soulless, that the outside matches the inside, and we try to blend in as best we can. We’re professional blenders. We modify our clothes, our voices, our opinions, but only to the minimum degree necessary. We know this is a weirdly temporary place, bustling in the day and eerie at night. How can it be that a well-lit intersection in the heart of the country’s biggest city had no idling cabs, no late-night runners, no wandering insomniacs, no overnight security guards? We ask these questions, but the answer is a shrug. Police are combing through all relevant evidence, please be in touch if you have any information. Not that anyone is to blame for a lack. Still, some of us can’t help it.

Then we remember that photo of Oliver’s face. The one on the front page. The unstoppable smile of someone who feels every piece of their life finally falling into place. A part of us can’t help but feel an abstract guilt. For not knowing Oliver personally, as if our hypothetical connection could’ve had the potential to change everything. Grief can be leaky.

Finally we stop. We’re here. We arrange ourselves in a circle, leaving a blank space in the middle. We become what black holes look like: energy swirled around an infinite emptiness. A gravity so intense it devours every last speck of light. Scientists call the boundary around the mouth of a black hole the event horizon, and this is where we place our photographs, our roses, our melted candles. A pastor removes his mittens and lays his bare hands on the cold concrete, whispering the Lord’s prayer. On Earth as it is in heaven. We fill the emptiness with everything we have, but ultimately all we have is a thousand different versions of love.

Is love enough? Yes and no.

A woman with her hair in braids begins to sing a song we all know. One at a time, we join her, even those of us who can’t quite carry a tune. We sing of blindness and snares and ten thousand years. We sing of wretches like us and a God who will save us. Some of us are believers. Faith taught us how to forgive, which has become our superpower. Our necks are stiff from turning the other cheek. We build bridges and put out fires but rarely get the credit we deserve when panels of well-dressed men and women on television speak of landmark legal victories and a growing culture of tolerance.

But others among us, despite our best efforts, cannot bring ourselves to believe. We’ve tried, but this trying requires too much contortion. We can’t forget what others have said about us in the name of faith. We remember the words they used at start of the plague. Some wounds are personal and some are shared, and we miss what it felt like before we were tending to our cuts. This is why our joy never ceases to feel radical, if not a little ridiculous, like a disco in the morgue.

The song repeats once and then ends. Those who’ve cried use our coat sleeves to wipe our cheeks dry. Sadness has washed over us, and the tide is now moving back out to sea. We are flotsam, tumbled and waterlogged, strewn about.

Slowly we recognize each other. We say hello, ask about each other’s jobs, our girlfriends and boyfriends and dogs and cats. We gossip. A few of us deal with the intensity by making jokes, and it doesn’t take long for the first of us to laugh—high and bright and spinning. With this, the light shifts and a balance returns, wobbly but there.

For the most part, we do not know each other by name. We have a vague sense of one another, from cheap bars and dog parks and hungover brunches. The funny this is, we do not need to be intimately known. We know, push come to shove, we can rely on each other. It’s a gift, the radar we’ve developed, to sense each other in crowds of strangers. It helps us to connect, to crush, to fall in love. But it also serves as a means of protection—a safety net, anonymous and free floating. Living here, we know one of us is never far away, which makes it hard to leave. Life without the safety net scares us. Some of us dream of green pastures and spotted cows and honey sold in glass jars from the shoulder of the highway, and we let ourselves create a prospective self out there, up past the Green Belt, an imagined future that feels equal parts dull and thrilling but all the while impossible.                                                     

We hear the horns and recognize where we are—downtown, blocking city traffic—and we shuffle over to the sidewalk. Some of us make plans to grab a drink. Others head south and hop on the subway. Many of us stay back and linger, holding hands, remarking on our size, how many of us came out despite the cold. But really, we’re not surprised. We understand the power of showing up.

Have you ever been surrounded by strangers who love you back?

We thin out, dwindling from to one hundred to fifty to twelve. Eventually just one person, a young woman, is left. She picks up everything left behind. The photographs, the roses, the melted nubs of candles. It all goes in a yellow No Frills bag. She refuses to let anything end up in the trash. She understands that all of this is precious.

Gradually we make our way home. It’s an odd sensation to be alone in our apartments and houses and draughty dormitories again. We’ve changed, but it’s hard to say exactly how. We rest our heads on our pillows and think of a beautiful man most of us never knew. We can’t promise to build a world that will save him. We know that’s impossible. All we can do is conjure another future, a better one, and pray that one day our spell will work.

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Moments after the drill starts its unholy aria, my nostrils filling with the hot electric odor of cauterized calcium, a shock of pain jolts open my tightly clenched eyes to reveal through the mist of tooth-particle motes a woman staring down at me. With a face like the backside of a spade and eyes that are two minnows swimming toward each other, she looks extremely familiar and utterly strange. Just as a flash of recognition passes through me, the pain resurges. She flickers and fades like the faulty transmission of an analog image, then comes back more vivid than ever. I scream.

The vibration in my head suddenly ceases and Dr. Dufera asks, “Are you alright, Miss Stephens?”

“No, I am not,” I confess in a shaky voice. “I need more anesthetic.”

“I’ve already given you the recommended limit of Lidocaine and cannot administer any more. I can, however, offer you nitrous oxide. It will cost extra, I’m afraid, and your insurance may not cover it.”

“Anything not to feel the pain!” I plead.

After I sign the paperwork, Dr. Dufera places a softly hissing nozzle over my nose. As I greedily inhale the gas, I think I hear him murmur to his assistant, “After all, the teeth have been a very effective instrument of torture since the beginning of humanity.”

I’m soon floating in the warm, velvety depths of a profound darkness. It’s extremely pleasant, euphoric almost, until a voice slashes through the swaddling numbness: “Wake up, princess.”

I open my eyes and there she is again, her broad chin resting on Dr. Dufera’s shoulder, even as he jiggers his cruel instruments around in my mouth, paying her no mind. The assistant, too, behaves as if there is no interloper in the room.

Though my mouth is filled with the dentist’s fingers, the drill, cotton balls, and the spit-suction thingie, I manage to grunt, “Who the hell are you?” I glance at Dr. Dufera to see if he thinks I’m talking to him, but he just keeps drilling and drilling, lips creased in concentration, goggles powdered with tooth dust.

“The better question is, who the hell are you?” she asks, a crazed smile appearing like a crack across her face to reveal dark gaps between her teeth, the survivors broken and jagged like the splintered pilings of a jetty that has mostly been washed out to sea. Her breath is rancid, breaching the plastic apparatus of the laughing gas with the bilious stench of decay.

Reaching around Dr. Dufera, she strokes my sweater, nails scraped and broken to the quick, fingers worked to crookedness, knuckles popped out and shiny. “Nice. What is it? It’s so soft.”

The unraveling cuff of her plain gray sweatshirt rides up to reveal a gaunt arm corded with hard muscle, the flesh stippled with tiny, suppurating bumps.

Knotting my hands together so she will not see the diamond ring, I mumble, “Cashmere.”

“Mmm,” she hums with pleasure until I shrug her off. But that doesn’t stop her envy, her wanting, which I feel coming off her like a cold blast of air. She boldly steps out from behind Dr. Dufera. Supine, I can only see her top half, shoulders wide and torso narrow, a swimmer’s build, also suitable for carrying a yoke dangling heavy baskets.

She snatches my glasses from my lap where I keep them for easy access should I need to look at x-rays or the close-up crime scene photos of my teeth. After admiring the handsome design and the glossy shine of the faux tortoise-shell frames, she places them on her face. They fit perfectly. Her gasp flutters the air. “Everything’s so clear.” She gazes about in rapt wonder, then fixates on the EXIT sign over the door. “If only I could read…”

Exploiting her moment of wistful vulnerability to assert control of the situation, I demand, “How did you get here?”

“How did you get here?” she demands right back with a vehemence that makes me cringe into the padding of the chair. Then, she cranes forward to see what Dr. Dufera is doing. “You still have all your teeth? Damn!”

I don’t tell her that actually, no, two of them are implants. Very expensive implants. She doesn’t need to know that.

Staring longingly into my mouth, she runs a cautious finger over the apocalyptic landscape of hers. I watch in horror as she works free a carious nub, etched with tarry plaque and carved with a rot corroded crater. Her tongue tenderly probes the fresh lacuna, lapping out the blood that is pooling there. In the grime-lined palm of her hand, the tooth disintegrates into talc which she blows at me with a vaudeville wink.

Turning her attention to my purse hanging from a hook on the wall, she begins to rummage through it. At least my purse is old, the leather cracked, the handles dingy with use. But she finds my wallet, which is stuffed with cash as I had just been to the ATM because my cleaning woman doesn’t take checks. She flips avidly through the array of credit, health insurance, and customer loyalty cards and carefully inspects my driver’s license.

Then she takes out my phone and, pinned as I am underneath Dr. Dufera’s drill, I’m powerless to stop her as she unlocks it with her fingerprint.

It occurs to me that I’m dying. Dr. Dufera is either drilling too deep or gassing me up with too much nitrous oxide, and I’m about to cross over to the other side. I wish that instead of her, I was seeing a movie reel of my life. Then, in those first few, brief frames, I would once again meet with my Korean mother who, as legend (in the form of my adoption file) has it, relinquished me when I was two weeks old.

Shaking her head as if in disbelief, she studies photos of my sons, fingertips white under her fractured nails as she manipulates the screen to magnify their faces, looking for herself in them. The anger builds in her as she scrolls through the photos on my phone with sharp, violent swipes, every picture an indictment: family celebrations, group portraits, beautiful vistas, major milestones, famous backdrops, food and drink, laughter, hugs, delight, love, happiness. Too many photos of my beloved mutt Nari, each one eliciting the same what-the-fuck grunt from her. Selfies taken in the glamor capitals of the world: New York, Paris, Tokyo, London.

Seoul.

She hurls the phone to the floor. If the screen cracks, I can’t hear over the high-pitched insistence of the drill. Face phosphorescent, mouth opened wide with all the pitiful remnants showing, she howls, the two sounds harmonizing in a harrowing duet.

I want to tell her that there is a lot of my life that isn’t captured in the photos, like the countless hours I have sat under the whine and bite of the dentist drill, when no amount of numbing agent is ever enough. I want to say it isn’t me she should hate but the system that separated a baby from her mother to make her adoptable, weaning her much too early from her mother’s breast for nine months of god-knows-what from a foster mother’s rubber nipple, ruining her teeth with an artificial sustenance that could never replace a mother’s milk.

The drill stops and Dr. Dufera and his assistant lean in close to inject composite into the freshly bored hollow in my tooth. Leaning back with a satisfied sigh, Dr. Dufera pops the nitrous oxide hood from my nose. The stink of singed bone lingers, tooth smut yet drifting through the air. My glasses are back in my lap. I put them on, the lenses smudged with palm prints, and look for her.

She’s gone like the corrupted part of my tooth that has just been excised. But, I know she isn’t really gone. Since the sundering, she has always been there, and always will be. I’ll see her again when I’m back in the dentist’s chair, what’s left of my teeth disappearing under the drill.

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