Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don’t always take into account.

How good it is to love live things, even when what they’ve done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into our own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.

Months later, when we went on our first date, I tried to seem put together, I wore a shawl she had given me. And her ring. I thought everything was behind me: death, and dying, and sickness. I didn’t know I was changing my life – that I would have done anything, that what was left of me would become so ruthless to survive.

But what I forgot was that it was our plan, not hers, not the one doing the dying, this was a plan for those who still had a next. See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest.

Don’t think about Laika in orbit. Don’t think about cringe and catastrophe.

I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding onto it.

All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself.

I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.