The nightmare of normal.
Dollhouses + windows to the past. It doesn't end. Legacy building. Controlling the timeline.
I’m aware that I’m still living in the year of magical thinking.
And that’s ok.
It’s “normal”.
Normal to think that my love, life partner, and best friend, Larry, is going to come back, walk through the front door exactly on February 28, 2026 to mark the moment he left this world, as if he were just returning from a walk or a trip. I imagine him popping back in with his familiar, warm smile, a sigh of relief to be home, back from traversing the astral plane because, of course, he saw how much people love and miss him.
Yet that’s not true.
He is dead. Gone forever from this physical realm.
And I have to type it, say it, name it because it does not feel “real”. It never does, it never will.
And “real” is relative—these days especially, when a fascist regime is trying to hypernormalize by shoving authoritarianism in our faces and divide us, citizens with codified human rights, by plying the mass uneducated with materialism / consumerism / convenience and weaponry.
Vox “Normal”, Adam Curtis
But “real” (← in quotes) because I also find comfort in metaphysical territories, so I gravitate toward the notion that “reality” and dream are interchangeable, inextricable even. This always leads me to try and connect with L, on either plane—it does not matter which. Like a tv or radio channel, I flip between found notes formerly tucked away in books, his poems (I’ve been reading them nightly for the last year), animal totem cards, tarot and astro readings, lucid dreams, and random playlists that “prophetically” soundtrack my loss and sorrow (yes, I know, it’s not so much prophetic as it is my algorithm). And I have noticed lately that when I “ask” him for a signal or sign, I don’t always receive as easily as I did in the immediate aftermath of his death.
In fact, synchronicities are few and far between these days, less than in the summer and early fall. There has been a heavy pause in love and communication. And I realize that it is winter, when our world sleeps, and that, well, he might be a little busy (and quite literally on a different timeline), as there is, at least I believe, a soul’s labour in the “afterlife” (or “where” consciousness resides in the space-time continuum). What is it that he must be experiencing? Karmic work or returns, healing to resolve, understanding his consciousness’ new form—or many forms? I wonder truly “where” he is, but I also know he is likely everywhere and nowhere simultaneously (everything, everywhere, all at once) and it is cosmically something that we cannot—with our limited knowledge and brain capacity, in this physical form—comprehend in this version of this existence.
Light thoughts, right?
A brief segue, though not unrelated: the start of a letter (or poem?) that he wrote which I found recently:
We were — you
are. But then
as now, hard
to tell the
difference.
*
Us: it seems likely to go
on for some while
but that’s weather for you.
*
How could we have known
it would all turn out this way?
And what if we had?
Again. Finding things like this make me certain he is speaking through time.
But back to “normal” and the existential nightmare that it is, at least, the version that everyone clings to for comfort. After nearly a year of losing him, there is, still, this idiotic social expectation—this blatant misunderstanding of what survivors go through—still hanging around (a late-stage capitalist, productivity-bound yoke) that I surely must be “ready” to get back to “normal” after a year.
No.
There is no normal.
There is no ready.
Ever.
As Kurt Vonnegut once said: “There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.”
Normal was something I never wanted in the first place, even prior to his death.
Normal is the illusion of stability (and boring AF).
But in this context, “normal” is what a grieving person wants back: their life as they knew it and all of its complexities. That, in of itself, to be clear, may not have been “normal”, yes, but it was predictable / expected. There was a perceived “day-to-day”, a routine, a contract that said: “Hey, you saw and interacted with _______ at this time of day, every day; you heard them snore at night, you woke to them making coffee in the morning, you laughed with them, hugged them, cried with them, yelled about the news with them, made chili with them, protested with them, kissed their forehead and rubbed their feet, held hands with them beneath the sheets at night, read poetry with them, made pancakes and listened to records with them, etc.” You had rituals and intimacies that are no longer there with that specific human.
The window, a dollhouse.
I will attempt to articulate it: it truly feels as if someone plucked me out of one lifetime / timeline and placed me on an entirely new planet yet everything looks the same (a little hint of Pluribus maybe)? The internal landscape is entirely different, the external one, the same.
It also doesn’t help that in the midst of the first months of my loss, I was forced to move from one apartment to another in the same building which overlooks the bedroom window of my old apartment. So I constantly see my past through the window of a future-present. A little too Rear Window, might I add. I am simultaneously living—physically and psychologically—in all versions of my consciousness and the only markers of time are before and after his death.
Where I once lived in a damn goth 1980s/1990s diorama or dollhouse (set in a pseudo-Blade Runner future), now my consciousness is in the kitchen of the Oracle and my body hovers elsewhere, in suspended animation. The vitals work, and on the surface, there only seems to be a slight shift to others. (Some see a smile on my face and think, there she is, back to “normal”). But deep within, beneath entire lifetimes, the memory masses, the tectonic plates of us, our bodies and minds have crumbled, dissolved, merged into an enmeshed cosmic pile.
A version of me died with him that day. I tried in vain to preserve that person—for him. The oceans of time rage in the distance (read: the lake from my window), a massive wall of waves always coming to wholly drown me. At any moment.
And as I think of it, the last time this dollhouse analogy (Ibsen) sprung forth was after L and I separated / divorced in 2008. I’d written a poetry book about it called HONEY IS A SHE (Plastique Press). The cover:
So through a morass of primordial sap (ancient Lithuanian amber) I can see my former self, almost behind exhibit glass, my past life suspended in time: the face I wore, my hair, my voice—every part of me when I was with him. Then I disappear before myself. The person I was with him, clothes now removed (see paper doll above), sinking down, screaming back at this new imposter inhabiting my body in the present—a body that has physiologically altered itself around this pain. When Aubrey Plaza lost her partner, she likened this feeling to the movie The Gorge: there is a gaping chasm that only you can see all the time and sometimes you plunge into it, and sometimes you stand at the lip of it, just peering down.
And when this endless, gut-wrenching, daily Freaky Friday moment happens to me (and will for the rest of my life; “it doesn’t end” is a mantra I have with another dear friend who lost her partner within months of mine) I am not surprised it leads me instinctively to legacy building as grief-tending method. What is normal for me, and for Larry, is/was creating. Writing. Placing words down for expression and posterity.
Legacy
I consider myself lucky to have had an immensely talented partner who had a deep passion for poetry.
I have abundant books and poems, videos and photos of readings to always dive into. And my grief tending / legacy building happens incrementally each night, as I am working on compiling an almost 500-page, posthumous uncollected works to be published in mid-late 2026 and tag-team editing his Canadian book due out in 2027.
It is a meditation, this experience. Like a sacred ritual, it has carefully shuttled me through the cycle of this first year without him. (I don’t call it a process. The way the word minimizes grief and loss, that it is step-related, chronologically based, that it will “end” is a patently false, limited way to think of it. Much like the word “widow”, it’s a word I really make a concerted effort to avoid.)
So every night, for months, at first, I would sit by the small altar I created and read his work aloud to him by candlelight. Then it became clear, once all the poems were read—all nearly 3,000 of them, hardcopy—it was time to begin grouping them, detecting themes/tropes/patterns and arrange them in some sort of book form.
The love poems were first. Countless bittersweet moments I relived: our first poem exchanges after we met, our first kiss, our intense physical attraction, the unwavering devotion to one another. My heart broke in a million pieces reading each intricate etching to me.
Winds There's nothing in the way you move that's even remotely like a wind. Nothing even like the khamsin, which is Arabic meaning fiftieth, as it blows, sweltering, Say, for 50 days across the Sahara. When you rise in the morning and take off your pajamas you're more like the night before, dark thoughts dripping with dreams. But outside a wind will blow, because it's morning and autumn’s bleak light stares down between venetian blinds. The window is guilty of wind, but you seem innocent and beautiful. But you are never like a wind such as the simoon, which, again, is Arabic for poison. You are the cure for something within me. From the east all things come, they don't say this, I do. Right now, the only thing that matters is that you aren't some sirocco, but something solid and intoxicating. Even now there is a morning, really, like a wind, meaning nothing, which blows sweltering just like last night. There's nothing in the way you move that's even remotely like the wind. Beside me the night’s silence breathes dark thoughts, you, who are solid and intoxicating.
Yet it fills me with such gratitude to have been loved this way, and in that moment in time (late 90s), but it also revealed the cracks, the imperfections. The fights, the struggles, our traumas, baggage and hang-ups, the unfair external challenges. These were the darkest, most tender nights—Eurydice and Orpheus nights—when all I wanted was to descend into underworld and bring him back with me. A painful replay of the story of our love ending in traumatic tragedy. On loop. As he wrote in a refrain from poem called Requiem (return return):
Requiem
Dying, the fire gives its last bit of flame
before being consumed by the dark.
No one was ever there to note its passing,
only the wind through the trees, a circling bird.
Secrets too high in altitude to ever be understood.
Here where the spirits gather, only one thing may be
fathomed: a chill moves the body, closes the last light
over the waters, utters only the same syllables:
return return
Next there were natural / pastoral poems.
Then animal poems.
All of the poems steeped in Thoreau-like reverence and observational depth—even wonder—for the forest and the creatures who inhabit it.
Then the odes to artists, writers, and musicians.
Arranging the poems, reading them again with deep respect like a type of scripture, has been allowing me to hold the grief, but it is introducing an urge to control the timeline of it (see below).
It is at this moment, however, where I see myself veering off an imaginary timeline—a subconscious paradigm I’ve created that would unfold, called “perfectly” timed grief—a fiction not aligned necessarily with the graph on the left (above) but not necessarily fully absorbing the graph on the right.
And I have a fear, which is, as I’ve discovered, natural when a bereaved partner becomes “addicted” to legacy building: it is when the “projects” run out.
When the majority of the books are compiled, when the tributes stop, when the year anniversary of his death arrives (in four weeks), I will lose not only him again and again, but the security of this meditation—uncovering these sacred, fragile treasures nightly. While I vow to ensure his work—all of it—will be archived, published, and written about, there will be a day I will run out of ways to “keep him alive”.
And then I will, as I already have in slight doses, have to turn to myself.
More in February.