Abundance (WIP)
a journal about not becoming a parent
I know that I am surrounded by kin and will become an ancestor, unbridled by bloodlines after me. I was derived from the earth and I’ll return to it when it calls me back. And all the space in between will be spent in connection.
There is nothing missing. There is an abundance of everything. Love and struggle and resilience, anxiety and grief, growth, violence and gratitude and all the bits that make us up.
Abundance. Yeah. That feels right. An abundance of everything—together.
“The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.”
-Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
This project is photographed and assembled with informed consent of the people represented.
Shannon at my house for my birthday
We were talking about grief.
We grieved for each other this year. Our loss—the mutual and collective loss.
The magnitude of our struggle designed the equal and opposite reaction.
And still, we continue to grieve.
Note on a beverage napkin from Ashlie
I love you too, Ash. Thank you for this and all of it.
Emily’s refuge in the window at my house and Emily at home
I’m inclined to ask—
who is caring for the caretaker?
It’s not him.
You are all my pleasures.
I. It was one of those snow days in the city when the state workers get out early and we all walk to the bar for activities. I don’t remember what was on the jukebox but I could venture to guess that Veronica probably played Paradise By The Dashboard Light for me. I love a fucking power ballad and a snow day, playing pool, unabashed joy and all of you.
II. It might have been the night after the full moon that you went down on me on the roof or another night. Maybe the night we were sitting at the pub and you said something dirty to MJ and then ran your hand up my thigh and whispered something in my ear about wanting your hand to be your mouth.
Steve, Rik, Andy, Lucy, and Veronica playing pool and the clothes we stripped off in the hall one night
Self portrait in a bathroom mirror and my bathroom door
I: My back has felt like shit since I can remember.
Probably the consequence of being a bartender for a decade then being draped in camera gear, poor posture and variations of being rode hard and put away wet.
Or maybe my body remembers something before me.
II: It was after dark and I had been sitting in the living room reading when I got up to pee. Pee with the door open. It’s what you do when you live alone. Most of the time I don’t even turn on the light in the bathroom. I washed my hands in the dark, leaned against the door frame and stared down the hall into the tungsten incandescence of the living room.
Sometimes I just gotta remind myself to breathe deeply so I can feel it.
Dad’s side of the bed and Michael at a cabin in the Poconos
This memory is all a vague figure–the sensation of my hands shaking, head throbbing, soft morning light and a pause in the door, your belly moving up and down. Up and down.
I go into the woods with Michael to fill my belly for you now. All that breath you couldn’t catch.
Veronica resting with cocktail in hand after helping me unpack and the shadow of the monstera on a full moon
When the task has been too overwhelming, we’ve shown up for each other and the moon.
A dried bouquet and Will standing behind the dormant rosebush in his backyard
I couldn’t bare to lose you too.
We seldom talk about it these days though—just enough to acknowledge it but not so often that we’re wading in the muck.
The sponge painted wall of my childhood bedroom and lunch with Dan; Bathsheba, Barbados.
Mom had the wall in my bedroom sponge painted by the neighbor when we moved in. I feel like that sort of thing was popular in the late 80s and early 90s but I mostly saw it on furniture.
Mom really went for it though. Pink sponges with blue and green ribbons patterned across the wall behind my bed. It was perfectly imperfect for a 4 year old about to move into her big kid room with a big kid bed.
The house sold in September this year.
All this to say, the things that are familiar to us change and sometimes childhood homes get sold. I pray on all my gratitudes, which are so many, including the time to grieve, a friend like you and a life like this.
My nephew, Anthony, and his friend, Kyler, using chicken livers as bait—fishing on Luna Lake, Ohio
Lucy in the backyard with a sparkler
Dad’s cardigan, Dad’s ashtray with spent cones, Dan’s silhouette at our house
I. I saw you in the mountains. It was driving up to Nesquehoning through state game lands and somewhere between the shiny new pickup trucks that lined the edge of the woods and burly men in orange carrying their rifles. Could have sworn I saw the dark green Blazer blending into the rhododendrons and your figure in the tree line.
You never did come home with a deer. Mom always said you just loved being out in the woods.
II. I’m saying final goodbyes in this home with the stale smell of menthol cigarettes still buried in the walls.
You’ll have been gone for ten years this December.
I couldn’t have imagined that I would want this in my home until I did. I thought my life would look too different from yours.
III. In May we became a two person household.
A cohabiting platonic relationship so typically severed from the importance of care and energy given to it.
Our milestones are changing.
My kin is here.
Living room shelves in my childhood home and Dan at home making coffee
Our past and present are additive.
And here is a form of institutional memory—the lightness of home.
The wall of my bedroom in the morning, Lucy on the sidewalk in the evening
I marvel often.
At the warmth the sunrise paints on the walls of my bedroom.
At your bright mischief on evenings when you refuse to eat the meals I’ve cooked but beg for me to read you a bedtime story.
A Barbados bullfinch, Feaster waking up
I. Little bullfinch, daring to come close enough to attempt to steal seeds from my breakfast. I have searched the internet a dozen times or so–I swear that at some point I was told that the Barbados Bullfinch would tend to live near people because they got lonely. But I’m now resigned to the thought that maybe it was just local lore. Feeling gratitude for our implied companionship though, a dance around my balcony in the morning.
II. One morning a week–no work, no overtime–to wake before you and feel our softness under the sheets and the cool spring air drifting in the window. I clumsily turn my body into yours and run my hand down your side. You are so beautiful in my bed and if I prop the pillow just right, I can peer from behind your clavicle at the reflection of your draped figure in the mirror on the back of the door.
It’s brief though. And tomorrow you will rise before the sun and again the day after and the day after and the day after that and so on.
“I just don’t want to die on that dock.”
Emily at the beach house in Ocean City, MD
Lucy and Michael at the beach house in Ocean City, MD
Lucy’s drawing at the beach house in Ocean City, MD
Kaiti, Lucy, and Go Fish at the beach house in Ocean City, MD
The ferris wheel at Knoebels
Lucy and Feaster on the beach in Ocean City, MD
I want to eat the seasonal fruit. The strawberries you buy at the roadside stand on the way to the beach house. The fruit that sweetens our bellies before walking down to the ocean. I want to eat the seasonal fruit and then watch Feaster and Lucy build a sand castle and hold Emily’s hand in the sunshine and watch Kaiti run maniacally into the waves.
I want to eat the seasonal fruit. The apple on a stick that the lady with a cart dips in hot caramel–that you realize is going to be very difficult to eat but very delicious. I want to eat the seasonal fruit and then take the long way home through state game lands with trees adorned in gold.
Fresh strawberries on the table at the beach house in Ocean City, MD and Kaiti eating a caramel apple at Knoebels
Ashlie, sunken into the couch after hiking in Lost City, WV
I made dinner the night before and Dan mistook the gravy I made for salad dressing. Struck with confusion in the moment, you and I let him pour it liberally over his salad. When he realized what he had done, we all roared with laughter.
That morning, we climbed the mountain, hiked the Virginia/West Virginia line and collapsed into the couch.
Leaf portraits on Midtown sidewalks
The leaves printed themselves onto the sidewalks–invoking their memory for a while as we enter another grey Pennsylvania winter.
The gritty rainbow of salt on Frances’ back window from the New York winter and Frances standing in front of the coffee shop in my neighborhood
Orion, chasing the light in the hall
You’re chasing the light, ripping through the house and I’m desperately trying to wrangle you into your blue puffy winter coat. We gotta walk the two blocks to daycare and it’s bitter cold out there, kiddo.
John and Fritz in their kitchen
Pittsburgh, PA
Feaster lounging in a hammock, a roadside surf shop in Cabarete
Veronica setting the table for her vernal equinox gathering
V danced through the doorway and threw her arms open to present an adorned dining room table: candles and flowers, a beautiful rose and almond cake she baked, a tart of some kind, a rogue white cat (Frenchie) prowling about, a poem that Dan sent, bubble wands, and a collection of seed packets.
I went outside and pressed tiny seeds into one of the garden boxes in the backyard and with them a small, crudely torn slip of paper with a scribbled intention. “Love in a Mist,” a whimsical dancer of a flower struck me as apt to sow for a vernal gathering.
We’re all here in ceremony–emerging from another winter.
Dan having a cigarette in Feaster’s backyard before dinner
This fucking city. It destroyed both of us back then. And when you left, I understood why.
I know that over the course of our lives we will be undone and done again and over and over, but Denver nearly killed you too. And when I asked you if you wanted to come back and live with me, I knew that you needed to save yourself.
Two years in and the weight has returned to your bones and you’ve found some clarity.
But you’ve also tried, unsuccessfully, to quit smoking half a dozen times in the same tenure.
Kaiti, painting watercolors in the dining room
Kaiti fishing on the Susquehanna
Kaiti’s tackle box
Travis & Kaiti on the river steps