The future enters us, writes Rainer Maria Rilke, in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. Consider, for instance, his infant sister’s christening gown packed in a storage trunk after her passing. How it waits a year to be lifted from darkness before being slipped over his body. How, until he’s six or seven, Rilke’s mother, Sophie, dresses the poet—her replacement child, the embodiment of the baby girl she’d wanted badly but who’d only survived a week—like a little doll in chemise dresses and skirts ornamented with eyelet. Hanging over the would-be poet’s future: all that had come before he’d taken his first breath—his sibling’s death and parents’ detachment, smallpox surging through Europe, the rugged aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. I don’t know how Rilke felt about his mother or sister, only that the end is typically stitched into the beginning. We carry it with us. The mind, however, often buries the unwanted forecast—the way a parent, hovering over a child it recognizes as a shadow version of the self, chooses not to see what’s coming. When my biological father chased me barefoot into the street, calling me words I’d heard him use to berate my mother—stupid, worthless, crazy—the fifteen-year-old-me kept running until he hurled whore, then stopped to face him, laughing at the absurdity. Twice-kissed. That girl wasn’t a whore and knew it. And if, in fact, she wasn’t, that girl-who-was-me reasoned she was none of the things her father accused her of being. The look on his face: the first time realizing I was already good as gone. You’ll be back, he taunted. You’ll be back. And my former self laughed louder. The mind, you see, wants better weather. The mind wants to believe what suits it best. Not the nickel-sized hail flattening what’s taken years to seed, but the unlikely probability of clear skies and adequate light. From the time he first turned on me, my father probably sensed the estrangement that would happen eventually between us. Instead of recognizing me as half himself, he only saw a girl, meaning weak, good-for-one-thing, teach-her-a-lesson. Maybe it’s better to resist such predictions. Attacked as prophetic rather than factual, Robert FitzRoy, the man who invented the forecast, opened his throat with a razor. My father’s father shot himself in the chest. His death ruled an accident, my father fell from a building. Is the end stitched to the beginning? I believe he leapt.
//
And why does this iteration of masculinity—your father’s brand, apparently, and my father’s too—insist on humiliation and torment? If women and girls were as nothing as they claim, then why the need to wrangle them at all? I think of Rilke bearing the weight of his sister’s dresses, wonder what grief in that fabric stitched into the man he would become. I think of this, too, when my four-year-old son asks to play dress-up. He moves from costume to costume: a “nice vampire” munching raspberry toast for breakfast; a sea cucumber wallowing on the floor by mid-morning; next, a champion in a rainbow cape, a princess in a paper crown, a ghost, a tornado; then a wizard in a purple robe with gold lamé fringe by lunch. His play is a joy for me, though I worry whom he might encounter while I’m not around; I know there are people like our fathers, who would punish his delight. What does it matter what he wears? Some days I wake up and think I could use a little dress-up myself. I fear I am insane for moving us across the continent during the outbreak—from Oregon to Atlanta, where we know no one, see no one. But then I look out my window: There have been blue skies since September. The better weather of the future is what we hold onto. I love that fifteen-year-old you, by the way, who buried insult with a laugh. The closest I came to that was a knife. Did I tell you this? I was fourteen. My father had come home late and drunk, walked into the kitchen and sat down slurring. I’d been awake, thinking of every evil he’d ever done to my mother, my siblings, me, and he asked me to make him something to eat. I gritted my teeth and pulled out the cutting board. As soon as my hand grasped the knife, a terrible idea arrived: The end of him could also mean the end of everything I hated. I’m not a violent person, but I had so much rage that I believe I had the potential. He walked past, forgetting his hunger, stumbling. I took two stalking steps after him before he turned around. I hid the knife behind my back. The hallway was dark, and he stood with one eye shut, swooning, and said in his tenderest voice, I’m sorry. I do love you. I’m sorry I’m so messed up, before pushing open his bedroom door toward sleep. I put away the knife. Years later, I would think of that moment during a thunderstorm in New Mexico, the clouds roiling, heavy with downpour but holding dry. I was sitting on a metal bench, waiting for a late bus. My father stepped across the threshold of my mind, and I lifted the (imagined) knife again. I could see, all around me, small shoots of electricity rising from the ground and, realizing the danger I was in, I jumped up as lightning struck across the road, so close and spectacular it took a moment to blink the brightness out of my eyes. I don’t mean to say my feelings manifested there. I’m not foolish enough to believe I have such power. But I saw an alignment of weather and emotion—how my own rage had the potential to destroy me.
//
Twice the age of those teenage selves when we first met, I remember you ordered carnitas—corn tortillas, diced white onion, cilantro—and ate with your hands. I remember, too, your friendliness, how you put me at ease across the wide pine table, smiling brightly, quick to laugh at my jokes. Talking shop, the classes we’d teach that semester, plans for our then-unpublished books, we’d walked along the rim of Lake Mendota before stopping off for lunch. It was hot. My black flats left blisters. Did we mention troubled upbringings, the faraway decades we’d somehow escaped? I was raised in a county known for dairies; you, a former shipping port. I’d like to ferry the teenagers we were from their respective rooms in California and Oregon and put them side by side on a sidewalk on a similar afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin. I’d like to eavesdrop, hear them gossip about music and lust, Catholic school, and the Holy Sacrament of Confirmation. I’d like to hear where they think they’re headed, which is nothing like where they’ll end up. Dumb luck, all of it: those girls surviving what we survived, their lives intersecting years later in a state to which neither of them belonged. When I was little, my father made a hobby of chasing storms. I remember sitting on his lap one night as we drove deeper into the country: the darkened acres trembling and wet. A slim partition held disaster back—even then, I knew it. I could barely see past the wheel. Rain caned our gold hatchback; a glare, erasing the line between the tar-black road and fields. What scared me wasn’t what I saw but what I couldn’t: a place neither asleep nor awake—the nowhere, in other words, where we’re all headed. Not long after you and I met, a lightning strike hit Madison. Do you remember? When the power went out, I worked in the dark. I wonder what you were doing that night in your own apartment across town—probably making one of those delicious soups that would keep me warm through winter. Meanwhile, I was eating beans out of a can, scribbling lines I’d later discard: When a daughter becomes a knife, / when a daughter cuts her way / out of this world, how / can you, father, possibly follow?
//
I remember that meal and all the meals after, when each time we waded deeper into laughter and confession, revealing the extent to which we already knew one another—how each window fogged with conversation, and outside the Wisconsin snow accumulated into astonishing solidity. If I tried to chart our friendship, I might draw an infinity symbol—not because I believe in any human forever, but for the shape of it: you moving along your loop and me moving along mine, unknown to each other, but mirrored, moving slowly toward an inevitable axis. This is, perhaps, the shape of all friendships, though not other kinds of love that demand physical proximity to survive. In this time of illness, friendship might be the perfect form of love: one that can be sustained without touch. I think of you most when I’m walking outside alone, careful to cross the street if I see anyone approaching. I’m not sure my asthmatic lungs could handle the virus. In March, when the pandemic began to show itself in America, hitting my home state hard in early spring, the trees ignored our mood, blooming as fragrant and flagrant as kids on spring break. I wonder what the world looks like where you are overseas: Do flowering trees bloom in Dubai? Does the gulf edging the city let in salt air and sharp light? Each time I stepped out of my front door I was struck with the scent of daffodils and wet earth and thought of Eliot’s The Waste Land: April is the cruelest month. I read that during the worst wave of infection in Spain, officials designated an ice-skating rink as a makeshift morgue. When I quiet my myopic fretting long enough, there’s only one other thought that surfaces: So many people are still dying.
//
A record winter, our season in Wisconsin. I lost three shovels (a running joke, remember?)—broken, stolen, abandoned. Snow accumulated in the corners of parking lots, dirty mounds taller than cars made momentarily beautiful again with each new squall. The city’s annual road-salt budget dipped into the red well before Christmas, the plows’ death rattle an echoing chorus. One morning in February, I walked toward campus to retrieve a stack of papers. From nowhere, lake-wind whipped a contact from my eye, freezing it to the side of my face (I didn’t even know such things were possible). Peeling it from my cheek, without thinking, I put the lens on my tongue, icy tear like a bead of brine gone soft in the heat of my mouth. Is this what extremes bring us to? My stupid self swallowing her sight by the side of the road in a blizzard while even the convenience stores shuttered? I ended up with pneumonia—go figure! What is the simplest way to say this … ? Here, in Dubai, a city of many extremes, I worry for your lungs. It seems an odd thing now, a strange degree of intimacy after all these years, but the shape of your lungs keeps coming back to me, as if an oracle had been written there waiting to be transcribed. There is absence (the fact of our distance, a decade-plus of friendship spanning states and continents)—and there is absence, the daily count of the newly dead. Is infinity a snake of love circling back to consume or outrun itself? Or is it a set of parentheses inside of which two Is cross; the way our lives move apart and together and apart again, before intersecting once more?
//
Since touch is no longer possible with others, I find I touch myself less as well: hardly bothering with the cleaning and dressing of my body. Honestly, be glad you’re not next to me now, four days without a shower, my own stink apparently not ripe enough to move me toward water or even a hairbrush. The problem is work: childcare, housework, emotional work, work-work, all in the same place. That ouroboros you mention: with so much time and nowhere to go, what else would it do but spend an infinity swallowing itself? As the pandemic wears on I feel this symbol deepening into my days, not as a promise of return, but a curse of repetition. Circling the room, circling the yard, circling the hours of work-sleep-work-sleep, watching toothpaste swirl down the drain. The monotony of the mundane stripped of pleasure. Snakes are twisted up, of course, with the image of feminine power, which I have come to identify less with fertility or sex than with the power of simply keeping on—without hope of reprieve or sustenance, without even the help of limbs. The feminine power of drudgery. It’s hard to say what motivates a reptile, its senses so different from our own, but I’ve read that pythons are careful mothers, forsaking food for nine months to warm their eggs, then two weeks more after the hatchlings emerge to make sure the babies live through their first shed. After a while I begin to wonder if such gestures are not so much a sign of love but pathology. Take the Japanese red bug that must work tirelessly to feed her newly hatched brood only one kind of food, tapping each red berry she finds on the forest floor to ensure its optimum ripeness lest her young refuse them. She goes out, comes back to the nest, then goes out again, until the obvious conclusion: She works herself to death, and her children consume her red body like the sweetest berry. How do I know this? It’s in a documentary my children have watched ten times in the past two weeks. I know, I know, I shouldn’t complain. I should feel grateful; we have food and none of us is sick. It’s the stupid plight of those of us who have plenty to think about “the before times”—by which I mean a few months ago. In the few moments I have to myself between lying down and falling asleep, I often count back through my list of befores: before COVID-19, before children, before marriage, before 9/11, before college, before adolescence, before knowing about my father’s addiction. If I go back far enough, I remember a house way out in the wilds of Washington, with grass so tall I could hide beneath the wisps of green, not beholden to anyone or anything, turning my body into a thing so silent and still.
//
Of the snakes I grew up fearing in California—rattlers sheltering under warm rocks at Potwisha or vibrating the tall grasses that flanked Three Rivers’ trails—it was a non-venomous corn snake, slinked round my wrist like a bright corsage, that latched to my forearm and left a pair of hot red kisses where its barbed teeth punctured my skin. Six months employed at a pet shop, I’d begun scrubbing the serpent’s den after changing the hamsters’ bedding when the snake mistook its morning cleaning for feeding. There are degrees of intimacy that go unnoticed until they’re taken away. We had at least four morphs of corn snakes in that store, though it was only after being bitten that I began to notice the way my snake (as I came to think of it) liked to dangle from the tree in its terrarium, coiling toward the heat lamp on foggy mornings, its tangerine body the color of a cupcake clotted with cream. I was sad when it sold. Why do we grow attached to things that wound us? Or should I reserve the we? Why do I? My children, for instance, from the very beginning striking at me from the inside. Hyperemesis, gestational diabetes, vertigo, partial blindness, umbilical clotting, internal bleeding—my medical files grew so thick that by the third trimester, my pregnancy’s record weighed half as much as the infants I delivered. Or the peculiar attachment to my biological father, which, unlike what I feel for my son and daughter, has nothing to do with love, but the unresting need to try to understand the taproot of one man’s cruelty. This, too, is a curse of repetition, as you call it: the tilling of fact and of memory, of stirring what’s been compacted. Maybe I should be more careful before sticking my hands in the dirt. Who knows what I’ll dredge up.
//
We remain in the land of the living, yet I feel pressured by forces beyond my control, a terrible structure I am too insignificant to change. When I was younger I liked reading esoteric texts that promised to divine what exists in the after, but now death to me is nothing: the ego stretched into space, infinity. This sounds sadder than I mean. When my anxiety begins to ripple, I picture the sky then the atmosphere, then our solar system, then the Milky Way, and so on, until I’m far enough away to not matter at all, to not be a singular soul in this dying body—by which I mean dying in the way all of us always are. My youngest boy still wants me to hold his hand as he falls asleep at night. A few nights ago, he confessed in the darkness of his room, I don’t know when I’m going to die, a statement he meant as a question. This question of existential suffering, at the center of everything human, was the catalyst for Rilke’s Duino Elegies—a book that took him a decade to write, interrupted by World War I and a global pandemic. Who has twisted us around like this, he muses, so that / no matter what we do, we are in the posture / of someone going away? Silence expanded in the room. I told my son, as gently as I could, No one ever knows that about their lives. He replied, almost immediately, I don’t like that. I don’t want to be the billionth person to write about the human curse of mortality, but here I am. What is there to do about it? Nothing. We look for signs, but our perspectives are so subjective. By the time I finish this, my part of the world will be rotating into night, so yours will be turning into morning. Before I sleep, I have one more snake for you: a dream snake, from a decade ago. I was seeing a therapist, trying to leave a man who didn’t respect me, barely saw me, but wanted to keep me, and spent nearly a year describing only my layered and murky sadness, a constriction I couldn’t pinpoint. I didn’t tell her about the days and nights we fought: how he terrified me, how I’d stopped sleeping. I said only that I experienced my life as if behind a thick wall of glass, a mind-made terrarium. Then one night I dreamt I stood in the kitchen of my childhood home as a viper slithered in from beneath the door and raced toward me, climbing up my body with incredible speed and wrapping itself around my neck, its fangs open, hissing. I stood there paralyzed, trying to think of a way to unwrap the viper from my neck (pulling tighter and tighter) without hurting it. When I told my therapist the dream, I remember her amazement: Why in the world would you worry about the viper? It seems so obvious now. I could almost laugh about it if it didn’t represent years of my life. But there’s a happy ending to my little omen, and I had the dream again a few months later, once I’d left that man. When the viper slithered in, I stopped it with a command: No. You don’t live here. Leave me and never return. A simple order, but one the snake obeyed.
//
I think a lot about our children and how this strange season will shape their imaginations and dreams. An odd reversal: when we were kids, the sickness we most feared raged in not in public spaces but the closed circuits of our homes, our fathers leaving little room for anything but willed obedience. The greatest threats happened after school in our kitchens, backyards on Easter or Fourth of July, some dark corner of the garage when our mothers were still at work. You, fighting in Oregon; me, trying to survive central California. Life or death suspended in a look, a breath, an impending punishment, unpredictability being the only consistent given. Now, to protect our children, we keep them with us. Stay indoors, draw them closer. Don’t touch anything, I hear myself repeat on rare occasions that my family leaves our villa, passing through temperature checks and body scans to enter one of Dubai’s massive shopping malls where we watch skiers whisk down indoor runs of manmade snow. Don’t touch an-y-thing, I hiss, nudging my daughter away from the window. She wants to go in. To build a snowman or take a photo with the imported penguins. Not today—my rebuttal one of calculated risk. That phrase! As if we could predict, somehow, the minute a storm will make landfall, the instant a diamondback will strike, whether addiction or manic depression will break a family this generation or the next. Though I see what you mean about our inevitable disappearance, I take no comfort in the universality of death. Maybe I’m just a coward. I’ve spent so many nights afraid. The winter you and I lived in Wisconsin, after reading reports about a man stalking single women and breaking into their apartments overnight, I used to put a chair stacked with plates at the edge of my front door. Is there a moment before annihilation, a final psalm before lasting sleep—those seconds, electric like lightning before it shocks the blossoming tree? Is the tail-end of that moment—my father’s body (falling fast) meeting concrete, or the last syllable of the final word you said to your dad the afternoon he left—a death before death? Is it rehearsal? Before we met, I moved about doing sensible and senseless things, thinking little about infinity or illness, about how the orchard of my life had already been planted and was growing in ways I couldn’t see. I never would have guessed where I was going based on where I’d been. I couldn’t have predicted you. But the season of our before is part of what binds us together—the back-story, written across decades. I wouldn’t dream of sanctioning the hurt you suffered as a kid in Portland or your ex-lover’s transgressions, but I’m grateful I’m here to answer them, that we traveled together in the before-years, the crossing of our paths waiting half a lifetime away.
//
I couldn’t have predicted you, either. Love is like that. So is art. As the mundane whelms us, I try to remember our capacity for surprise, that there is a future into which we will someday emerge. Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened / like winter, which even now is passing, wrote Rilke in Sonnets to Orpheus—another poet, searching for his beloved in the underworld. Rilke struck on the sonnet cycle after learning that his daughter’s childhood friend, a nineteen-year-old dancer and musician, had succumbed to leukemia. Much has been made of how the loss of this girl was the catalyst for Rilke’s “savage creative storm” at the Château de Muzot that winter. But I believe Vera Oukama Knoop was just a doorway into a deeper pain. Rilke was haunted by his sister. In every sense, her death made his life possible. You learn from your parents how to care for yourself. His mother tried to resurrect her lost daughter in him, and he resurrects her again into poetry: And almost a girl it was who emerged / from this joyful unity of song and lyre. The sequence is, as you probably know, considered one of two masterpieces, both finished in the same month: February, 1922. I’m not into numerology, but the coincidences start to stack: two masterpieces in the second month of the year, in the 22nd year of the century, written to resurrect two lives, Rilke’s and his sister’s. The imagination can defy death. So, yes, the end is stitched into the beginning, as you say. Meanwhile, winter is here, but not like the damp of Oregon or the stinging cold of the Midwest. In Georgia, winter is just the longest autumn, the days’ light alternating between a warm gold and a crisp gray. It’s glorious. The tallest maples hold onto their red or russet leaves. My boys run around in short sleeves most afternoons. I wouldn’t know it was December, except I’ve spent the last nine months longing for a new year. I know the simple changing of the month—a human construction of time—won’t magically assuage the global situation. In every article I read about the virus, the rate of infection is only going up. Yet, there’s also good news: video clips of vaccinations in the UK are circulating. We watch with joy as people offer their arms to medical workers with needles. And here’s an additional delight: One of the first people vaccinated in England is a man named William Shakespeare. So, Shakespeare’s been spared from plague a second time, I think, as my eldest son runs in from his imagined backyard theatre, where he’s been shooting invisible arrows at monsters. He goes to his room to tear another loop from his chain of gold and black paper, so he knows how many days left until the solstice. I am with him, counting down.
//
In the midst of postpartum insomnia, I began listening to archived episodes of BBC Radio’s The Shipping Forecast—the nightly lull of gale force warnings and the conditions of wind, weather, visibility, and ice that stirred the British Isles’ coasts eventually nudging me to sleep. What I loved most was the program’s peculiar surge of information: how a disembodied voice sent out her nightly calculations across long-wave frequencies in an effort to keep seamen safe. I loved, too, knowing the considerable distance those warnings traveled across place and time to reach me several continents away. There was something soothing in the Forecast’s repetition, its calm acknowledgment of imminent danger. Even its orchestral theme, “Sailing By,” seemed to hold and affirm both death and life: a slow waltz whose notes, like the sea, fall and rise by degrees of accumulation and disappearance. Seven Decembers after abandoning the show, I started streaming it again on afternoon walks through our neighborhood of Umm Suqeim. As in Georgia, Dubai’s winter seems an inversion. No sweaters or scarves. Temperatures peak in the upper 80s. What, I wonder, has prepared us for this? Prepared us for the shock of popsicles and swimsuits on Christmas Eve? Remembering snowy afternoons with you in Madison or the fog-soaked days of childhood, I suppose that everything that happens coexists in a single season. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter / that only by wintering through it will your heart survive, wrote Rilke in 1922, two years after flu had claimed the lives of forty million people. He’d survived. As had our fathers’ fathers. These days it’s like we’re living in the underworld, waiting out hours in the upside down of a parallel universe whose daily book of grief extends itself page by page, forcing us to confront our impermanence. Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell whether it’s Thursday or Sunday. When my son asks me to recount some particularity about a myth for e-learning, I can’t say with conviction whether Eurydice was fleeing or dancing when the death-snake bit her heel. Outside, in our back garden, squash flower while marigolds erupt. I flick away a few aphids, adjust my earbuds. A block from our villa, I cue the Shipping Forecast’s introduction and hear the rush of a few stray notes. Squally showers are expected in the Hebrides. Easterly of FitzRoy/Sole, they’re calling ice. The sounds of what we must weather together keep coming and coming. I don’t know what Orpheus (or any of this) is meant to teach us. Only that, about the before-times, which had mostly to do with great losses and love, he kept singing.
***
Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.
