A cooper’s hawk that lives in Fort Greene Park comes to the maple behind my apartment to eat its catches. I have seen it two times now in as many years. I’m tempted to regard these rare sightings as some kind of portent, imbued as they are with the mysticism of any encounter with wilderness. The first time I saw the hawk, early on a January morning, I was taken by surprise, having lived here for years without seeing any in the gnarled old maple behind my building. I’d seen plenty of squirrels and sparrows, and a proud woodpecker who works on the crown of a severed trunk that rises over my deck. But the hawks I’d only ever seen in flight, or else perched on the highest treetops or brownstone cornices, looking down in kingly survey. These sightings seemed a blessing of sorts, an invocation of some ancient logic. The hawks know when and where to be, and if I meet them, some part of me must know as well. 

I had been sitting on my living room floor, legs crossed atop a folded blanket, propelled by some strange discipline that carried me from a rare fit of insomnia into the early morning. I can’t account for my wakefulness that day, for my deviation from the depressive groove I’d been so doggedly digging the last decade. But there I was, facing my window like an altar, like a television screen, and there was the hawk. Astonishment: the screen sucked me up like a portal, and in an instant I was a trespasser, no longer home, no longer safe, a stowaway on someone else’s vessel. A caller beckoned me to watch, and I watched, craning my neck like a child at the top of the stairs after bedtime.

It took a minute for my dumb domestic eyes to parse the scene as I peered through the dingy window into the gray morning. To see a hawk at eye level was remarkable, and doubly so to see it not just looking, but doing, doing something sacred and vicious in the thin mist of nautical dawn. It stood on a thick branch with its back to me, brown and white tail feathers bobbing as it hunched over the object of its efforts. What was it doing? Like a sudden answer, the hawk uprighted, yanking a thick skein of meat from the carcass of a pigeon it had pinned to the branch by its talons, a pitiful mass of feather and bone. It was eating. Eating and looking in turns, darting quick, jealous glances over its shoulder every few moments. 

If it saw me there behind the window, it didn’t let on. I couldn’t have threatened its grisly work if I’d wanted, slow and soft as I am, cocooned in brick. The hawk bent and uprighted again, in its beak a tangle of intestine like a slippery beaded necklace still caught on inner tissue, tensing against the wrenching force. Where had I seen this before? A scene from some childhood story came to mind: the young heroes huddled, barely taller than the kitchen table, watching breathless as a wizened crone unzips the body of some small creature, drawing out the loops of viscera in her bare hands to peer at them in the candlelight. Augury in entrails. What notion of the future could be clawed from an animal’s gut? But it seems a fitting method for prophecy. Such nosiness should come at a gruesome cost.

Faced with that hawk’s fierce vigilance from the confines of my carpeted home that morning, I thought I must be more prey than predator. I feel like prey these days: tired from eight hours’ sleep, always hurrying to the next task and hardly keeping up, while the vague dreams I carry to bed each night remain undone, as far away as ever. I eat my meals alone, sitting on the floor at my coffee table, my dog watching from the couch with passive interest. He keeps an eye on things, but he won’t be bothered to solicit a claim. Our den is no place for a wild contest.

We’re both predators by birth, he and I, and especially him with his gaping mouth of varied teeth, each one an expert tool for its particular job. We are far from the killing and carving of our meaty sustenance, but his wildish nature is buried shallow in his fearsome jaw, and if it goes too long unused he gets restless, and sniffs around for something to gnaw on. He doesn’t mind me when he eats, doesn’t even mind if I move his bowl to make room for the vacuum—he just follows the food where it goes and keeps about his business. We eat together, alongside each other, but without any company of our own kind. He certainly doesn’t mind it, and nor do I, though company wouldn’t require me to fight and claw for my supper. Talk, I’ve found, spoils my appetite. Loneliness is epidemic, the experts say, but in this regard I must be more predator: I prefer to eat alone.

Guts are like anything else: once you’re looking for them, they’re everywhere. And I’m not the only one looking. The artist Amanda Crouch has made a practice of finding guts, which she documents in her work Extispicy in the Everyday, a collection of photographs centered on visual patterns which evoke intestinal topography: tangles of thread and wire, the swirling layers of pastry in an oreja cookie, a hole in the ground cast in stark sunlight. Extispicy—divination by means of inspecting entrails—is quite a well established practice. The earliest evidence dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, where Sumerian priests derived meaning from the innards of sacrificed animals.

The signs vary. Black spots on the organs, the curve and length of the colon, the coils of intestine like rings of a bisected tree trunk—all these could be read as portents both individual and collective. Guts which appeared in the likeness of Humbaba, the ancient protector of cedar forests, were a harbinger of impending revolution. Archaeologists theorize that the whorl of entrails at least partially inspired the labyrinthine spiral pattern that appears in many ancient cultures. We’ve developed quite a fascination with this pattern, and it seems we may have a penchant for rendering it in the world. We seek out a labyrinth outside of us since our feet can’t walk the one inside, and if we can’t find one, we build it. That such far-reaching futures and monumental designs could be derived from the animal body seems fitting. We are all pieces of some larger whole, and this final stretch of digestive tract we carry in our abdomens is the portal through which what we consume returns to the rest. 

My own guts are uneasy. My appetite shifts beneath my feet. Presumptions I’ve come to rely on slide away like rootless soil. Food that used to pacify me sits bland and inert in my stomach; the old pastimes and fixations have staled and soured. My restlessness goes unremedied, and I pace the floors of my own labyrinth without intention, veering wildly in hopes of a way out. I’m stumbling with hands outstretched, careening into walls and doors, waiting in pitch black for a clarity I cannot summon by want alone. Or maybe I could, if only my want were directed at something I could name, a destination or a circumstance the pursuit of which would break my inertia. But the want is untold, it has no container and cannot be reduced to the terms of ambition. I’m awaiting an earthquake, a cataclysm that will swallow up the knotty sheets of undergrowth and leave behind a life unbidden, something bare and brazen that will stand in the sun. 

At a loss, I’ve grasped at every flash of light that catches my eye. Should I move to a new city? Start a new career? Take a lover with his own ambitions to subsume my uncertainties? I play at divination, reaching wildly for signs that will relieve me of the waiting, that will anoint a clear path through the darkness. I follow each blinking lantern to its bitter, dead end, scrabbling desperately against the bedrock before I turn to wander again in the dark, black crescent moons of dirt packed under my fingernails. What gruesome cost would I pay to know my future, to be certain of my own heart?

This maze has no center—the only way out is through. I won’t walk the ground I’ve trod a second time. But the ground has surely been walked by others before me, the riddle puzzled a thousand times by a thousand pairs of feet, the dirt beat smooth by the myriad lives whose courses have converged into mine. Those footsteps wind a thread of blood across the floor, sometimes knotted or braided or worn to a single strand, but never broken. It is here I have no face, no eyes to note the red against the blackness. I can only feel, feel for the straining bloodline of fiber in the dirt, the wriggling prehensile softness of a knowledge deep below the winding roots.

I see the hawk in the maple again almost a year later. This time it’s afternoon, and I am cat sitting. I pick up the cat and carry him to the window, and we are both a rapt audience for ten minutes or so. The cat’s eyes dart knowingly, and I wonder what he might understand in the hawk’s jerky movements up and down, what he sees that I miss. The hawk looks back at us, it surely sees us, two predators encased in glass. It doesn’t mind. It holds the slippery sigil of the future in its mouth, and swallows it whole.

I am in bed with Bobby, on the left side near the back wall. I am sitting up, and he is reclining on a pile of pillows of various shapes and sizes, the result of our attempts to approximate comfort. Everybody Loves Raymond is playing on the large TV mounted on the wall opposite the bed, though I’m not sure either of us is really watching. I’m holding my phone in my left hand, using my thumb to painstakingly text a man who is far too eager to be my boyfriend after only three weeks of dating, one of which I’ve spent here in Puerto Rico. The A/C is on, and I’m wearing the sweatshirt I brought for the plane ride even though the sun is bright and warm through the window by the bed. Outside it’s a normal day in Vieques. Honeymooners are on the beaches, expats are getting drunk in the bars on the boardwalk, locals are fishing and gardening and sitting on their porches. It feels almost like a luxury to lounge indoors watching shitty TV, smoking pot and staring at my phone for hours on end. I’d feel guilty for wasting the Caribbean weather, but I get a free pass because Bobby is dying.

Although he isn’t dying, just yet. Right now, he’s half-asleep, moaning softly every few breaths. I’m using my right hand to lightly scratch the top of his head, opening and closing my fingers like a jellyfish. His scalp is gossamer beneath my fingers and I worry I must be chafing it, but he complains any time I stop, so I keep going. My arm gets tired, but I keep going, dispensing this measly consolation to a man who has asked me for a miracle. He’s asked for other things, which I’ve done: I’ve rolled him about three dozen joints, set up some new channels on the TV, fixed the wifi and his phone. But today he’s asked if I can help him get better, and I haven’t done that and won’t be able to. He’s dying, we all know it, but I guess he’s holding out hope or just isn’t ready to talk about it like that.

When he had his first tumor removed five years ago, he liked to joke that that was how I came into the world, propagating from his abdomen like a lump of cancer cells. Doctors marveled at me, scientists wanted to study me, but I hopped off the operating table and skipped town before they had the chance. I prided myself on not being shocked by his gallows humor, though I wonder in retrospect if that particular joke was a step too close to the truth. We can’t have spent more than six months together, all told, so how is it that we came to this place, where our closeness is the punchline to a joke about his tumor? 

We met just as the first clusters of defective cells were beginning to form in his gut, lurking and multiplying in the dark where no one would see them for years. I came to Vieques on a college trip the year I turned 21. He was 55, born just two years before my father, but a little worse for wear after decades of fighting. He’d fought the U.S. Navy, and he lectured about the island’s history of expropriation and military violence when my professors brought us to meet him. He’d been fighting the bureaucrats responsible for the historical museum he managed and the colonial fort that housed it. And with all his heart, he was fighting still for the survival of the small radio station he ran from the fort’s ground floor, interviewing the community and broadcasting calypso classics all the way to San Tomás and Santa Cruz. 

He called himself a patriot on that sunny first day, the fresh sea air floating through the windows behind him and ruffling his long, gray-streaked hair, and he told us he considered it his duty as such to hold his government accountable for the acts it committed in his name. I was stunned, shaken awake by the revolutionary notion that I could love my country and thereby demand better of it, that patriotism was not reserved for the compliant. I had found a teacher, and as I stood on the sun-warmed brick of the fort wall, peering out across the sea at the faint mass of the main island ten miles away, I knew I’d be back. I turned my life upside down more than once to come back to him, and in time I understood that I turned his life, too. 

His wife, a woman from the main island, had come to Vieques, like him, to join the protests against the Navy. “We never had kids,” he told me, “we were committed to the struggle.” I didn’t meet her until my second trip down, and she didn’t start recognizing me until the third or fourth. Even then, she’d just call me la nena, “the little girl,” and although I knew she might be forgetting my name, I liked the one she’d chosen for me. She would snap at Bobby for correcting my poor Spanish grammar, which I throttled from my germanic tongue in an accent that, to her, must have sounded much like his. 

We both struggled to describe our connection to the people around us in terms that fit. We were closer than friends, we had more in common. It didn’t feel like visiting a friend, that walk up the steep driveway to his deck where he’d stand waiting for me, grinning in the sun with a lit joint while Peter Tosh blasted from the kitchen. It felt like coming home. I took to calling him my godfather when I mentioned him to acquaintances in the States, letting that be a shorthand for our closeness without all the context. More than once, he introduced me as his nieta postiza, his fake granddaughter, though he was hardly old enough to be a grandfather to me. Entiendo, a friend of his told me after one such introduction, la familia que la vida nos regala. The family that life gives us.

I came down whenever I could afford to, first with a grant for an undergraduate thesis, and later in the name of doctoral research, to visit the archive that was conveniently also housed in Bobby’s fort. He would float in and out of my workspace all day, babbling relentlessly at me in Spanish and English, never letting me work in peace, helping me delay the realization that I didn’t want a PhD. I pretended to be annoyed for a few years, until his diagnosis and the torment of chemotherapy forced me to acknowledge that someday he’d stop annoying me for good. From then on, I volleyed his impishness back to him, our rallies devolving until they became a shared language of our own, shot through with silliness and esoteric Seinfeld references. His wife had never met anyone who could keep up with him, she said, and I divulged that I was Jewish by way of explanation, though I knew it was deeper than that.

I’ve often felt like we were cut from the same tree, like I was some appendage of his that had detached in the bardo, fallen to Earth, and sprouted a generation later and four states away. I found my way back, his long lost playmate, his Super Girl, his Wonder Woman. I don’t feel like a hero now. I’m practically ignoring him, not that he’s giving me much to ignore. I’ve tried to be more present, to breathe in when he breathes out, transmuting his pain with my breath like the monks do. It didn’t work, though, so now I just stick with scratching his head.

Every so often he groans loudly with frustration, and it’s time to help him get up and rearrange the pillows, or retrieve his phone which has fallen between the bed and the side table, or make him warm saltwater to gargle. I hope it isn’t the saltwater, which he spits out into a plastic quart container he keeps calling “the spittoon.” The misnomer I find funny—I can’t imagine him chewing tobacco, he despises cigarettes—but rinsing the “spittoon” in the bathroom sink grosses me out so bad I gag. It’s the only thing so far that’s really gotten to me, out of all his bodily upsets, and I know it will only get worse. I remember from my grandmother’s death how preoccupied everyone was with her swallowing, how the decline of that one simple reflex in our throat heralds finality. The rest of us may have days or even weeks left, but once we can’t swallow anymore, it’s the end of the road. What awaits in that final contraction, when the portal that admits our communion with the world creaks to a close?

When Bobby settles back down, I can hardly get to my side of the bed before he’s asking me to please scratch his head again. He smiles at me sheepishly, like he knows he’s being a baby, but I’m grateful for this request, for this small thing I can actually give him. It feels pathetic in the face of everything, this expansion and contraction of my right hand against his metastasis. Every part of him feels fainter, like a dimmer switch is slowly and brutally going down on us. His hair has thinned into a feathery cloud, and it hovers around him like a dandelion seed head, like one strong gust will carry it out the window and into the world, where it will sprout into a thousand little Bobbys. Each one will run around talking the ears off anyone who crosses his path, grinning the maniacal grin of a man who takes nothing seriously and everything to heart.

I hadn’t expected him to be this far gone. We’d planned a visit, not a goodbye, but this is how it goes sometimes with cancer, I guess—years of vague, meandering menace and now this sudden drop into a place where the sickness is bigger than him somehow, like something inside of him has mutinied and there’s no going back. I knew when I walked in the door five days ago and saw him on the bed, a handsome skeleton after a lifetime of chubbiness. He eats soggy Cheerios and takes sips of watered-down Ensure, which he keeps reminding me is what they ate during the hunger strike he staged when he served time in a federal prison for his activism against the Navy. It’s hard to imagine him in a prison cell, and I wonder if he still visits that place in his nightmares.

Bobby’s wife has been calling him el nene, “the baby.” She’s puttering in the kitchen, making fresh juice with oranges and beets and carrots that she’ll bring in with a snack like we’re little kids on a playdate. He wants coffee, but he’s not allowed. She wants him to be comfortable, which is what I want, too, because I love him. It feels wrong that she has to do this, has to watch him hurt so much and make choices for him, and I almost make myself sick thinking about having to do the same for someone else one day. They’ve been in love for forty years, and this is happily ever after.

On the wood panel wall by the porch door is a large black and white portrait of them from the 80s, leaning into each other and looking softly up at the camera. Tucked into the frame, over the glass, is a smaller photo, this one in color, of them embracing in the dining room in front of a wall of framed protest art, their home a testament to their activism. I take a picture on my phone for safekeeping and poke around looking for more. Later, Bobby’s wife brings me a folder of old photos, and I go through them, making copies for myself: Bobby in the 60s with his brothers in front of their house in Boston, Bobby in a tallis and kippah for his bar mitzvah portrait, Bobby with dark brown hair on the beach. He looks just like himself in every one.

At the bottom of the stack is a photo of them together, crouching in the driveway, petting a cat by their front porch steps. There is always a gaggle of cats around, which Bobby’s wife happily feeds and chatters at, although they only claim one of them, a timid tortie called Susie, as a pet. Susie has only ever glared at me from the shadows behind the kitchen until this morning, when she jumps up onto the bed and freezes mid-step to hold my gaze for a moment before cozying up to Bobby, who has raised his hand to pet her. I know she’s still wary of me, but we’ve found common ground, united for now by our need to take care.

How does it feel to be here, in bed with Bobby who is dying? Months and years later, I will look back on this moment with an inarticulable horror, my mouth agape at the wordless nightmare of seeing a friend in so much pain and being unable to help. But right now, in this moment, I am close enough to see that I am helping, that we’ve been helping each other in our own way ever since we met, and that this is just how we’re helping each other today. We are the family that life has given, and this what family is for. 

In bed with Bobby, I don’t feel horror at his pain or sadness at his departure. I feel the cool air from the A/C floating over us, the tender light of the afternoon sun going down, little Susie’s snores and Bobby’s sighs rustling the air. “Hey, Bobby,” I say, “my arm is falling asleep,” and he grunts his acknowledgment. I take my hand away from his head, but as soon as I do, I realize that I don’t want to stop touching him, that the fragile warmth of his skin against my fingertips has been soothing me, too. I move my arm toward him, palm facing upward in the space between us, and he puts his hand in mine.

About a year ago, having spent my literate years without any personal writing practice, I began to write daily. This wasn’t really a writing “practice,” nor was it journaling in the sense I had always imagined–a diaristic accounting of events and how I felt about them. I wasn’t writing to hone my skills toward any particular end; I wasn’t deliberately sowing the seeds of a memoir or a similar offering. Instead, this writing emerged as a companion to various activities that might strike an observer as “spiritual,” but which I consider practical modes of care, like brushing teeth, going to work, and bathing, among other sundries.

The writing has been uncomplicated, I think, because I haven’t thought to share it with anyone else, I’ve had no expectations of a “release” and subsequent evaluation. Unlike past attempts at journaling, it has required no effort or motivation at all to start writing each day, even when no particular topic comes to mind. And the act itself yields fruit: every time, within a page or so, the writing reveals something to me that I hadn’t expected, hadn’t sought out. Whether I arrive at my notebook with a problem in mind or start, as I often do, by writing I’m not sure what to say today…, invariably the questions I begin with are turned on their head; my own fundamental assumptions refuted and a new mode established, not of questions but of clarities, decisive and plain as a ringing bell. Afterwards I am usually much calmer than when I started, and if not, I’m at least clear on what I need to do (usually, I need to make breakfast). 

Over the course of this year of writing, I’ve sometimes found myself revisiting particular passages, refining them, working them into something like a structure that I then return to, seek shelter in, and derive comfort from. These bits of writing often turn more tightly around a theme than my daily streams of thought, or else they just aren’t so specific to my life situation. On these occasions, it’s occurred to me that I might share my words more broadly, and I’ve done so once in a public blog and a few times on social media. Those experiences have been affirming, but with sharing comes a host of familiar challenges I’ve been reluctant to face.

Each time I’ve considered sharing more, I’ve felt a part of myself take the wheel. This part assumes the role of a kind of talent manager, and quickly sets about strategizing various elements of how this sharing will take place: What will my platform be? What will I name this project? What is my “brand identity?” How will others perceive me? How do I want others to perceive me? Do I want others to perceive me at all? This line of thinking has the opposite effect of the writing, and muddles me so thoroughly that I throw up my hands and move on to other things (like breakfast).

Like most people, I have a history of performing in order to secure the positive feedback that for a long time was my only source of self worth. My specific performance style has been intellectual, and my self worth depended on others perceiving me as intelligent, witty, wise beyond my years. Failing that, my self worth depended on making others feel stupid and small. It’s been a long journey out of that thicket, and I have no interest in returning for an extended stay. But having spent some of the last year in various positions of solitude, I find that my own stores are full for winter, that I have filled them myself, and that in fact I have a surplus I don’t want to waste. 

The purpose of this work I have been doing privately, it turns out, is to share its fruit with others. I’m afraid of this path that might take the writing-as-care away from me, might lead me to contort myself back into an old transactional mindset, but I’ve come to see this fear has been obscuring another possibility: that I might learn a new way of doing things. I want to learn the art of sharing from this full place, of sharing without performing, without expecting or subsisting on a reward. To do so, I have to take some risks. The thicket of self loathing, in any case, is not a static place we escape from once and for all. It is a dance I am learning, a balance that begins to feel less fragile as I cultivate joy in the movement.

So, I’m trying this out. Feel free to join me, and here’s what you can expect if you do:

1. I will not commit to any regular cadence for this project. I’m unlikely to write more than once a month or less than six times a year. You will never hear from me twice in the same week.

2. I will be honest. This is not to say that I won’t write lies (I won’t), but more so that I will be earnest, that I will try my best not to manage how you perceive me, that I will find my own voice.

3. I will write what I know. My aim is to share what I have learned. Sometimes I might enlist the expertise of others or describe aspects of my own life situation to support this aim, but for the most part these essays will be meditative, not investigative or autobiographical.

That’s all for now. Take care,

Helen

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