the day after the funeral

I woke up yesterday morning after the funeral at my in-laws' apartment in Brooklyn with a couple verses vying for my attention. Something about the combination of a childish rhyme and a teenage suicide wouldn't let me go until I gave it whatever life I could. Life. Ha. I scribbled it down in the back of the memoir I'm reading.

Writing helps me maneuver through this death. Okay okay, it helps me maneuver through life. I am thankful for my writing habit—it's here when I need it, now more than ever.

surviving stuart

The phone call came at one this morning. Hours later, surfing the sheets with a bone-weary body and a busted mind I was composing this post. The last time I looked at the clock it was 5:28. I finally fell asleep only to have a nightmare about raccoons on my front stoop, five or six of them digging in my garbage. One of them lunged at me and I awoke with a start and remembered. Stuart's dead.