A Cold and Very Broken Hallelujah

creative writing post (#43)

Midjourney-generated image from a prompt I wrote for this essay

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Context: this post is a writing experiment in poetic narrative nonfiction in essay form.

That means: it’s partly a bit of practice, akin to how I sometimes pick an object and try to do a 3D rendering with pencil. And it’s partly my trying to figure out what I am feeling. The “object” in this case is my idiosyncratic experience of driving home in December: what I see, what it makes me think about. I’m trying to capture it in writing, if I can, so that it’s recognizable or relatable, at least a little, for a naive reader, and simultaneously figure out what I’m feeling—all I know for sure is that it’s intense, and it hurts. But it hurts in an unfamiliar way.

All quotes in italics are song lyrics, which are identified in footnotes.

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Content Warning: this contains references to suicide, depression, child abuse, trauma, Hunter Biden, etc. It’s a tough time of year, so take care of yourself with regard to what you choose to put in your mind. Including my ramblings.

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I: The Arch in Archetype and the Axe in Property Taxes

“And to Christ, a cross.

And to me, a chair.

I will sit and earn the ransom from up here.”¹

I live in deeply rural Vermont, which means my shortest drive home is thirty minutes, even in summer. In winter, driving through snow can take twice that long.

I nearly always discipline myself to just think while I drive home. Long stretches on curvy, two-lane roads reveal Vermont’s idyllic beauty in all its seasonal variety.

Each drive feels like being immersed in a master painter’s finest work: the watercolors of autumn give way to monochromatic winter studies, which transform into the dreamy pastels of spring and the lush oils of summer.

When it’s snowing and I need a confidence boost—I’m far from sure of myself, as a winter driver—I’ll put on my Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas playlist and sing along.

But mostly, I just think.

Driving these roads, with their unbroken stretches of beauty and solitude, reminds me that meaning doesn’t just appear—it has to be created, brought into existence through effort and intention.

Is beauty still beauty if humans fail to notice it?

Meaning and the responsibility of finding it: maybe that’s why my favorite part of the drive is passing houses lit up from within.

Out here, where cars are rare and curtains are often an afterthought, it’s easy to glimpse the lives inside.

I see families laughing, hugging, playing, cooking, and sharing meals. Conflict is rare, or at least harder to detect from the road. Mostly, these houses radiate warmth, happiness, and love.

They aren’t just houses. They’re homes.

Homes are places where it’s okay to mess up, to fail, to get sick, to be imperfect.

They’re spaces where people are loved simply for being, not for being helpful, useful, interesting, or otherwise having a utility function. That’s what makes them so profoundly hopeful, so achingly beautiful to me.

I think about these homes as I pass, and though my face stays frozen from the cold, my heart smiles.

That smile fades when I remember one of America’s harshest ironies: we never really own our homes.

I will own a house someday, largely because this Substack is letting me pay off my student loans ahead of schedule.

I will, I hope, successfully make it into a home for myself.

But it will never really be fully mine. If I fail, for any reason, to pay the confiscatory property taxes demanded by the state of Vermont, they will come and take possession of their house.

It will always be as much their house as mine, which is both a “first world problem” and a moral violation of the highest order.

That’s one of the inherent contradictions to being American: everything is like that. Your government is doing its best to strip you of your dignity, and you must react to this without forgetting that you are luckier than all but a minuscule fraction of a minuscule fraction of humans who have ever lived.

You must reconcile these extremes and lead a balanced life anyway.

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II: Hunter Biden and My Time-Traveling Assassin

“She looks up at the building, says she’s thinking of jumping.

She says she’s tired of life — she must be tired of something.”²

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that feels almost noble, as though being tired of something profound might justify the weight of it all.

But that’s not what this is about.

Sometimes, on these drives, I imagine a different life for myself: that of a time-traveling assassin. It’s ridiculous, I know, but there’s a strange comfort in pretending I could excise moments in history like tumors.

Rural Vermont would be an ideal place for a time-traveling assassin to hide out. New Englanders have perfected the art of leaving each other alone — not out of rudeness, but because they understand solitude.

There are historical inflection points, those hinge moments when if a key player had died just before doing something significant, good or bad, everything might have changed.

Life is a complex system, and these scenarios, while fun to imagine, are impossible to fully grok. The ripple effects stretch too far and twist too wildly for us to see where they would end.

I never let myself imagine assassinating individual humans for their personal sins, no matter how egregious. It’s always the historical figures — the ones who wielded their power to shape cultures and nations — that I consider.

Why?

Because anger is my most ferocious demon, always clawing at the edges of my resolve. I don’t need to feed it. It feeds itself plenty as it is.

I’ve erected a wall — a PTSD wall — in my soul for what I’m about to describe.

It’s an odd thing, to sense your anger without feeling it, like knowing a storm is building but never seeing the clouds. I only know it’s there the way I once knew I had an ovarian cyst: not by its presence, but by the rupture.

For this, though, I’ve made damn sure it will never rupture.

That’s the only reason I can talk about it. If I didn’t have that wall, I’d choke on my own fury.

I’m too angry, but most of you aren’t angry enough. That’s the irony — my anger is so overwhelming it cancels itself out, leaving me oddly calm.

But yours? Yours should be blazing.

The dirty laundry of the Biden family is so voluminous that keeping track of every detail would be exhausting — even for someone glued to their screen, steeped in every news cycle.

But this isn’t hidden. It’s public knowledge, if you look past the mainstream media and dig into sources willing to critique a Democratic elder statesman without flinching.

President Biden’s granddaughter, Natalie, was ten years old when her father, Beau, died. By all accounts, he was a wonderful father — the kind who made his daughter feel safe and deeply loved.

I cannot imagine the internal experience of being a ten-year-old girl whose father loves her, but I understand that experience from the lack of it.

I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a ten-year-old girl whose father loves her, but I understand the shape of that loss. I know it intimately — not from having it, but from the void where it should have been.

Ten-year-old girls stand on the fragile edge of childhood and adolescence, mere months away from a storm of hormones and an onslaught of new emotions they can’t yet understand.

Many of these bewildering, often frightening new experiences revolve around the world of men — a world that can feel both alluring and dangerous.

Ten might be the worst possible age for a girl to lose her daddy. She’s old enough to realize just how little she knows about the things he could explain, but too young to face the world without him.

I’ve written before about how pedophiles groom their victims — the evil precision with which they target children starved for love, exploiting that unmet need to manipulate them into submission.

Worse still, into the illusion that they weren’t manipulated at all — that what happened was their choice, their fault, their burden to carry.

Only one thing could possibly be more evil.

For a little girl whose daddy is gone — dead, buried, and never, ever, ever, ever, ever coming back — to be groomed by the one man left who should protect her: her uncle.

To be preyed upon by the one man who could answer her questions the way her daddy would have. Because he, too, was there, and he knows all the stories.

Only Natalie knows what her uncle did or didn’t do to her when she was as vulnerable as a human being can be. I certainly don’t know.

What we do know: even in the depths of grief and addiction, Natalie’s mother was concerned enough about Hunter’s “inappropriate” behavior to involve a therapist and, however imperfectly, try to protect her daughter.

Hunter Biden’s pardon covers every crime he may have committed starting a year before his niece’s daddy died.

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III: Horny To Worship

“Take me to church; I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies…good God, let me give you my life!”³

Worship has always been transactional: devotion for safety, obedience for love. It’s an act of surrender, yes, but also one of brazen, visceral longing. It’s a bargain you make with your body, your breath, your very self.

The idea that “humans are built for worship” annoys me—mostly because it feels true. Worship is baked into our flesh, like hunger or sex. We were built to tremble before something, to moan out gratitude or need. The real question isn’t if we’ll worship but what.

I wish that wasn’t true. But it is.

Worship loves company. It thrives in churches, where bodies sway and voices rise as one, where intimacy grows thick and heady under stained glass and candlelight.

Lean in, children, while Auntie MathNerd tells you a secret. Ready?

Community is the cover story; the real pull is that primal high.

Organized religion has blood on its hands, and it keeps washing them in holy water. Fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity—different flags, same carnage. One sings hymns, the other calls to prayer, but both have left a multitude of raped and beaten children bruised, broken, and begging for deliverance.

I grew up in a church that marinated in “praise and worship” for two sweaty hours every Sunday. The praise felt fake, a neon sign flashing “Look how holy we are!” But the worship? That was raw, needy, and intimate—especially the songs that turned God into a father who’d hold you while you broke.

My favorite was “Take Me Away.” It was the first time I realized just how wrecked my hearing already was, but I didn’t care. The song promised a peace so lush and all-encompassing I’d have traded the rest of my hearing—every last note, whisper, and breath—for even a fleeting taste of being found acceptable.

I never did. The experience of the song was never mine, not for one minute.

As a kid, I assumed it was my fault. Unworthy. Dirty. Too flawed to touch even the hem of the divine.

As an adult, I came to rationally recognize the nonexistence of gods. But that lens of unworthiness stayed fused to my bones.

Even without a deity, some fragment of my soul still aches for shekinah glory.

Worship is transcendence through submission, an ecstatic collapse into smallness. It’s the breathtaking realization that you’re nothing but a speck—and that the speck matters anyway.

There are other experiences of collective transcendence. (Concerts come to mind.) But churches specialize in the performance of transcendence, and that’s where the trouble starts. People in groups, being all….peopley. In groups.

Still, the impulse to worship claws its way up from my depths. It’s visceral, unrelenting, a hunger I resisted naming for years, not wanting to acknowledge it or own it.

But that’s what it is.

It’s most powerful in New England autumn, when the world around me is a watercolor painted by a master.

But it’s not just autumn. Worship sneaks into music, into art, into the fierce pride I feel when someone I love lights up the world with something extraordinary. That pride burns like reverence—a helpless, holy awe at the miracle of another person’s greatness.

It leaves me yearning, desperate to chase down the source of all this beauty and brilliance, just to fall to my knees and say thank you.

There is no God. No loving Father with a beard full of wisdom and a lap big enough for the whole damn world.

No one is listening, no one is answering, and no one is choosing not to answer.

I wish there were. I want to believe in a love I don’t have to work for, don’t have to hustle for—love that wraps me up just for existing, messy and unworthy as I am, love that’s available even if I’m not helpful or useful or thoughtful or anything else.

But it doesn’t exist. The window for that kind of love slams shut in childhood, and the adult left behind has to pry open the cracks and find fresh air somewhere else.

But knowing this hasn’t relieved me of the impulse to worship.

This section isn’t entitled “horny to worship” to be funny or prurient. This isn’t a joke or some halfhearted pun. Worship is an arousal of the soul—a deep, throbbing ache for release, for surrender, for connection to something bigger than myself.

It isn’t fulfilled very often, but there is one arena open to me, always and forever.

I found it last summer.

I was tangled in a number theory problem, so deep in the mystery of its intricate beauty that dawn slipped past unnoticed. I blinked, and my alarm was already calling me back to the world.

A night spent enraptured in the language of reality is a seductive and surprisingly pure way to worship.

It’s not the warm, fatherly embrace I begged for as a child.

But it is edifying, as worship always is—anytime it’s directed anywhere but at a human or a human institution.

It is edifying. It is nourishing. And it is good.

“Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer."
“If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.”⁴

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IV: I Am Not An Onion in Hightop Chuck Taylors

“If shame had a face, I think it would kinda look like mine. If it had a home, would it be my eyes? Would you believe me if I said I’m tired of this? Here we go now, one more time….”⁵

Shame is an onion in hightop Chuck Taylors—layered, raw, and uncomfortably close.

But I am not.

There are hightop Chuck Taylors in the floorboard of my car, waiting like old friends. Winter boots are mandatory until mid-April, even if I weren’t as clumsy as I am. Still, I love my hightop Chucks enough to smuggle them into winter—a little rebellion against the slush that always threatens to put me in closer touch with gravity.

I wear hightop Chuck Taylors all day while working from home. On Etsy, you can get them embroidered, stitched with seasonal imagery, tiny flowers, or initials—a little embellishment for a shoe that already feels like a signature.

It’s a small splurge, one I’ve justified more than once, including recently:

Hightop Chuck Taylors were my first big purchase with my own money, the first thing that felt fully mine. I’ve worn them every day since, except when hospitals had other ideas. They’re more than shoes—they’re a ritual, a reminder of where I started.

If I live long enough, I’ll be in the nursing home one day, coaching robot aides on the finer points of straight-bar lacing. They’ll struggle, I’ll laugh.

Some things are too human to replicate perfectly.

I am not an onion walking around in hightop Chuck Taylors.

It’s an easy mistake to make, which is why I make it almost every day.

Onions bring tears—no Kleenex required. They’re quick to overwhelm but just as quick to pass, a fleeting sting in the eyes that leaves you blinking at something sweeter underneath.

But onions are also great levelers: everyone who cuts onions without taking special precautions will find their eyes welling up.

It’s inevitable, like facing some truths—ready or not.

Onions are at their best when they’ve endured something. They shine brightest when they’re put through a lot: chopped into small pieces and subjected to the stress of heat, blackened and charred.

Their sweetness comes out only then—as a type of resilience.

Getting better when you’re as screwed up as I am is a process of shedding defenses like onion peels—layer by layer, defenses falling away. Pungent, overwhelming, and sharp at times, but revealing something softer underneath. And maybe, eventually, worth loving.

I am not an onion walking around in hightop Chuck Taylors.

Onions have, at their core, a basal plate: something fixed and identifiable that can be found by peeling off enough layers.

When I’m done peeling off my trauma-layers, I will not be a naked basal plate.

I will be something else entirely.

Because I am not an onion walking around in hightop Chuck Taylors.

“I tried to earn my way; I tried to tame this mind. You better believe that I am trying to beat this. Will this end? It goes on and on, over and over and over again! Keeps spinning around, I know that it won’t stop ‘till I step down from this for good….”⁶

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V: The Smell of Blood and Lilac Carpet Powder

“I can't go down to the water's edge
I didn't do it, I saw who did
Don't go down to the water's edge
They did it once, they can do it again

This ain't no fucking game
And I'm feeling so ashamed
'Cause I didn't do anything
No, I didn't do anything

To stop, to stop
To stop, to stop
This from happening
I didn’t do anything!”⁷

I’m statistically likelier to die by suicide than anything else.⁸

I either think about this a lot or not at all.

Lately, I think about it a lot.

That’s “think about ” in the sense of “reflecting,” not “considering.” ⁹

It’s a complex-trauma thing.

I found someone who mattered—a lot—to me after he took his own life.

I became an entirely different person on the day he ended his life. There is no way to accept the impossibility of resolving this trauma — the need to let the dead bury the dead and let the lack of resolution serve as my resolution — without considering that.

If you’re young enough when you become aware of suicide, especially if you lose someone that way and double-especially if you find them, your relationship to the act of self-termination changes.

It’s not theoretical.

It’s not shocking.

It’s not even more than mildly surprising.

It’s territory, not map. And it’s territory in which you’ve stumbled and fallen.

You brought some of the dirt home with you, dried and caught up in the whorls on the soles of your shoes.

No matter how much you try to make yourself normal—to make yourself be someone who doesn’t know these things—you’re not normal.

And you do know them.

Suicide is a thing that some people do, and you’re a people; ergo, it’s a thing you might do.

My therapist told me recently that it was past time for me to let the dead bury the dead and accept that my questions will forever be questions.

I, the girl who will stay up all night working on a number theory problem just for the intellectual orgasm of writing 'QED,' must reconcile the disconnect between what my mind craves — answers — and what my heart must carry — unanswerable questions.

Some problems remain unresolved.

Some will always remain unresolved.

By definition, by category, by rigorous real analysis, they were utterly unresolvable the moment I first confronted them — an irrevocable fact, as true as anything proven by QED.

They were unresolvable the moment I realized that the brownish gray splatter on the wall was his brain.

They have been unresolvable every moment since.

They remain unresolvable when I lie in bed considering that every breath I take has at least an atom of his last breath.

How much of the pre-recognition me can I get back?

How much do I want to get back?

How angry am I, still? At him? At myself?

What about the selfish, terrified toddler inside me — the one who so desperately doesn’t want this burden that she’s been screaming “NOFE-AIR” long enough to make herself hoarse?

She is never going to get what she needs. Ever.

It’s never going to be fair, and she’s never going to really trust me when I try to comfort her.

She probably shouldn’t. I’m glad that kid is smart enough, savvy enough, knows enough not to trust me.

And while there is nobody who would be similarly affected if I did the same, there are a few people who would heal slowly and carry a scar forever.

There are two people who would be, at least for a while, pretty fucking shattered. I am glad they don’t really know how shattered they would be, and I will be proud of myself forever for making sure that they don’t find out.

He didn’t know he was going to shatter me.

Truly, he didn’t. We were kids.

We. Were. Kids.

Kids.

We knew many things that kids shouldn’t know, but on every metric that matters we knew fuck-all about fuck-all.

We didn’t know that we could be broken more deeply than we already were.

We had the blissful narcissism of scapegoats, kids wearing superhero capes and believing ourselves invincible because of how much those capes cost us.

Kids think everything is about them, but in our respective homes, everything really was about us.

We believed fully in the deceit, the magnificent lie, that when you’ve been profoundly broken you’re somehow safer than you would be if you were whole.

He didn’t know he was going to shatter me.

There’s not enough glue for some fixes. You can try, but it’s hopeless.

You miss slivers, and whole pieces.

If you can’t sweep the detritus into a dustbin and start over — which is rather difficult to do with a human identity — then you take the pieces and build something else with them.

I don’t get a choice about that part.

But I get a lot of other choices.

I know what it is to be shattered.

People do a lot of fucked-up stuff to people they love, and maybe I don’t really love anyone. I might. I usually think I do. But sometimes I don’t know.

I don’t know how to tell.

Maybe being sure of that isn’t on the table yet.

Maybe it will never be.

I might not get a choice about that, either.

But I get a choice about how I act. I’m not going to shatter the people I love, even if I only think I love them.

I may not be capable of love, but I am capable of choosing to never be capable of the kind of not-love it would require to shatter them.

I can have that choice.

I get the choice to peel off this onion layer, scrape some more of this dried mud out of my shoes, and keep walking away from the territory.

I sound, to my own ears, like I’m justifying a used car purchase.

But isn’t that the point?

The brand-new ones, shiny and perfect, are what you lose first.

The used ones hold their value.

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VI: Confrontation Between the Fragments

“If you think that I could be forgiven, I wish you would.” ¹⁰

The toddler, hoarse from screaming “NOFE! AIR!” until her ears hurt, pauses just long enough to cough and grab her sippy cup.

She locks eyes with me while draining it, never blinking.

Then, with calculated defiance, she hurls the empty cup over her shoulder, her gaze unbroken.

She dares me to challenge her feelings.

I have no idea what a sane adult would do in this situation.

Would they give her a gentle talk about big feelings? Pick her up and hold her until she ran out of steam? Distract her with candy or a toy in a bid for fragile trust?

Instead, I lower myself to the floor about five feet away, legs crossed, and let her decide what happens next.

She spots my mismatched Chuck Taylors — green on one foot, purple on the other. Her eyes narrow like a predator sizing up prey.

Shoes are supposed to match.

Shoes that don’t match are wrong.

Why would I wear my shoes wrong? To trick her, obviously. That’s what grown-ups do.

They trick you!

She’s done with grown-ups and their dirty tricks.

Done.

Her eyes narrow further until they’re slits, and I know I’m lucky she isn’t adult-sized. She would beat the hell out of me if she could.

I take a slow, deep breath, exhaling through my nose.

“Sweetheart,” I begin, and my voice cracks.

“You’re exactly right. It’s not fair.”

Her expression hardens, daring me to try to fix it.

“I can’t make it fair. Grown-ups can’t fix everything. But we can have big, angry feelings about how unfair it is. That’s all I can do for you right now.”

I see the realization dawn on her broken little face: I have just confessed to being powerless.

Her worst fear is confirmed.

It’s going to be this way forever and no tantrum will motivate me to fix it.

Because I can’t.

She starts yelling again, and this time, I join her, keeping my hands on my shoes, where she can see them, in case my yelling frightens her.

Beyond that, I am mindless.

“NOFE! AIR!”

I stop only when I cough, while she keeps going, her little face flushed with fury.

I marvel at the ferocity of her anger — anger that burns hot, untamed, and righteous.

I will let her rage until she tires herself out, without judgment or fear of punishment.

I think this is what the Wokies call “holding space.”

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VII: Tattoo of A Forest Green Question Mark

“And now that you're gone
I can't cry hard enough
No, I can't cry hard enough
For you to hear me now

Gonna open my eyes
And see for the first time
I've let go of you like
A child letting go of his kite

There it goes, up in the sky
There it goes, beyond the clouds
For no reason why
I can't cry hard enough
No, I can't cry hard enough
For you to hear me now.”¹¹

Purple is my primary color, and I really don’t know why.

Maybe it’s as simple as my not knowing: it’s pretty and I like it.

All of my accents are forest green.

Green is the color of life and certainly God’s favorite color, if there is a God, but that’s not why I love it.

Forest green feels safe, for some reason I cannot articulate.

The evergreen trees are the only ones that survive Vermont winters, so I get to see them a lot on these drives.

Purple and forest green is the best color combination, and I can assert this with all the confidence of a nerdy straight girl who’s had not one but two gay dudes give my interior decoration the Seal of Faggot Approval.

Meditating this morning, I tried to visualize what it would mean to let the dead bury the dead: to accept that this is an unresolvable problem and let the lack of resolution, itself, be my resolution.

I do this, sometimes. I try to visualize solutions — not in the sense of thinking them up and then picturing them, but with reverse causality: letting whatever images come to me point me toward solutions.

I saw the middle of my upper back, a part of my body that I only see in the mirror.

It has a nasty scar from some incident of which I hold no conscious memories.

Next to the scar was a forest green question mark.

It’s an idiot-simple image, with zero layers of nuance or symbolism.

Or is it?

When I was a kid, I loved kites. I didn’t just want them to flutter up there a little—I wanted them as high as they could go. I’d unspool roll after roll of string, standing in some windy field, squinting into the sun, marveling at how tiny they became.

And the funny thing is, once a kite’s up there that high, it doesn’t really feel tethered anymore. It’s no longer yours.

Not even if you’re the kind of little kid who knows exactly and precisely how many rolls of string high that your kite is flying.

Once a kite gets high enough, it belongs to the sky, and you’re just… holding on.

Maybe my forest green question mark is just a symbol of permanent doubt, as common and easily interpretable as a nightmare about falling.

But maybe it’s more than that, or can be.

When you cut the string on a kite that’s flying really high, you’re never going to see it again.

You know this when you reach for your pocketknife. It adds a little flourish to the way you pop out the blade: the knowledge that this is the end.

You’re left with the memory of what it felt like to hang on, to fight to add one more roll while still keeping it under control.

When a kite is just about to vanish forever, it changes shape against the clouds, bending and twisting in the wind.

For a brief moment, it doesn’t look like a kite at all.

It looks a little like a question mark.

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I wrote this post using the brain.fm app to help me focus, which I don’t talk about enough. It fixed my ADHD-style attention problems instantly and miraculously (neither a joke nor hyperbole). They sponsor the DarkHorse podcast with Bret Weinstein and

Heather Heying

, which is how I learned about it. Read about their sponsorship vetting—in which I sometimes participate—here, and get a free month of brain.fm at the DarkHorse link. It’s been three months and the efficacy is just as high as that first day. It is quite literally having a “focus mode” that I can turn on and off at will. For this one, because I had so much intense stuff going on, I used brain.fm’s “creativity” setting and consciously let myself write more freely than I normally do. And it really helped. If you have focus or attention issues, you really should try it. Nobody has asked, hinted, suggested, or paid me to talk about this. I just like to share things that make me happy, and this was fairly heavy so I wanted to end on a happy and hopeful note.

1. Lyrics from “Selling the Drama,” by Live.

2. Lyrics from “Round Here,” by Counting Crows.

3. Lyrics from “Take Me To Church” by Hozier.

4. Quote from A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, a brilliant novel that you should all read immediately.

5. Lyrics from “Sick Cycle Carousel,” by Lifehouse.

6. Lyrics from “Sick Cycle Carousel,” by Lifehouse.

7. Lyrics from “The Water’s Edge,” by 7Mary3.

8. Nobody worry, nobody freak out. I’m fine. Talking to my therapist. Over the weekend I texted a lot with the friend who is most helpful to me when I’m not the best version of myself, and also told him what’s on my mind so he can call me if his schedule frees up. I’m not in danger. There’s stuff I have to work out regarding someone else’s death by suicide, and it’s going to make the topic salient for awhile—and that’s salient in my terms, in the terms of someone who’s found one suicide, cleaned up another one, and has an attempt on her record. Yes, it’s dark, morbid, and fucked-up, but so am I. If you didn’t want to read the thoughts of a profoundly damaged freak, you subscribed to the wrong Substack.

9. Ibid, bitches. Ib-fucking-id.

10. Lyrics from “A Long December,” by Counting Crows.

11. Lyrics from “I Can’t Cry Hard Enough,” by the Williams Brothers.