behind every living soul are thirty ghosts
My best friend's mom's best friend just died. Aww, JoJo!
Shaped like an L from the car accident that finally had them taking the keys.
(Not that there was anything left in her midsection from all the crazy surgeries over the years.)
With that smoker's "ooooooh" every time someone walked by with a lit Marlboro.
The isle of street kittens worthy of Dr. Moreau in her backyard due to their multitudinal generations of inbreeding.
(The line from "crazy cat lady" to "better have the Humane Society or Animal Control (or both) on speed dial" was crossed a decade ago when that one beast with an external inflamed artery instead of a nose couldn't crawl anymore.)
That she said, two minutes after interacting with me for the first time in when I was sixteen, "Ooh he's gay. He doesn't know it yet, but he's gay. Poor thing."
(Me at the time, popsicle in hand: "Hey, I resemble that remark!")
She survived longer and more tenaciously than her completely deranged chihuahua LuLu, who shrieked so mercilessly and so piercingly that she had to have her own roped-off bedroom, and would make circles from the doggie gate to the TV to the embroidered settee to screech at whoever was laughing at her from the door. (Seriously, even those who loved both JoJo and animals begged her to put LuLu out of her misery at least a decade before she finally kicked the bucket.)
Somehow she could always chuckle after silent observation about all the absurdities around her. Maybe it was because after one son died of an overdose and her daughter went AWOL for decades (there goes that word again) and returned with drugs filling half of her empty being; her other son, the whip-smart, charming, vivacious one who saw her through her best years as a glorified Mrs. Madrigal operating from her consignment shop in the Castro, died of that mystery illness attacking gay men in the '80s.
Maybe it's because of that, she survived far more years than her reverse mortgage or her niece who wanted half the house expected. Maybe it's because of all that, isolation was not new to her compared to these newly-initiated pandemic shelterers. Maybe this all was absurd to her -- the flaring earth, the civil war, the idiocracy eating itself alive.
Maybe, because she just died today in the middle of the sky changing from brown to red as the Earth reminds us that we're just blips in a natural cycle that are driving ourselves to an early end, that I'm worried that she she will be lost if not for little stories like these, no matter how embarrassing or vulnerable, as the four souls left who knew and loved her deeply slowly become ghosts in turn.
Shaped like an L from the car accident that finally had them taking the keys.
(Not that there was anything left in her midsection from all the crazy surgeries over the years.)
With that smoker's "ooooooh" every time someone walked by with a lit Marlboro.
The isle of street kittens worthy of Dr. Moreau in her backyard due to their multitudinal generations of inbreeding.
(The line from "crazy cat lady" to "better have the Humane Society or Animal Control (or both) on speed dial" was crossed a decade ago when that one beast with an external inflamed artery instead of a nose couldn't crawl anymore.)
That she said, two minutes after interacting with me for the first time in when I was sixteen, "Ooh he's gay. He doesn't know it yet, but he's gay. Poor thing."
(Me at the time, popsicle in hand: "Hey, I resemble that remark!")
She survived longer and more tenaciously than her completely deranged chihuahua LuLu, who shrieked so mercilessly and so piercingly that she had to have her own roped-off bedroom, and would make circles from the doggie gate to the TV to the embroidered settee to screech at whoever was laughing at her from the door. (Seriously, even those who loved both JoJo and animals begged her to put LuLu out of her misery at least a decade before she finally kicked the bucket.)
Somehow she could always chuckle after silent observation about all the absurdities around her. Maybe it was because after one son died of an overdose and her daughter went AWOL for decades (there goes that word again) and returned with drugs filling half of her empty being; her other son, the whip-smart, charming, vivacious one who saw her through her best years as a glorified Mrs. Madrigal operating from her consignment shop in the Castro, died of that mystery illness attacking gay men in the '80s.
Maybe it's because of that, she survived far more years than her reverse mortgage or her niece who wanted half the house expected. Maybe it's because of all that, isolation was not new to her compared to these newly-initiated pandemic shelterers. Maybe this all was absurd to her -- the flaring earth, the civil war, the idiocracy eating itself alive.
Maybe, because she just died today in the middle of the sky changing from brown to red as the Earth reminds us that we're just blips in a natural cycle that are driving ourselves to an early end, that I'm worried that she she will be lost if not for little stories like these, no matter how embarrassing or vulnerable, as the four souls left who knew and loved her deeply slowly become ghosts in turn.