what to do in an emergency

demeter. 

'Tis the season for time travel. I walk with a friend, and we notice the outline of light around a cluster of trees. On all sides, knots of leaves and darkened sun, a woodpecker works hard on a branch, or maybe this isn't work at all to a woodpecker; it's simply living. In almost the same place on the trail, an owl took our breath away to the minute the week before. For a moment, I feel the same longing I often feel when my kids are within reach. I miss them, but they are right there. I think it's my future self reminding me to stay as close as I can to the moment. She whispers, Don't leave. Everything waits. And the things that won't weren't mine anyway. I hold them closer, stop everything else, and smell their hair. Look at Luna's cheeks and see them like little half-moons reflecting off her poreless skin. Rafi wears glasses now, and I notice how she pushes them up the bridge of her nose in a manner that appears to say they are less of an accessory and more of a new body part. Remember how she put them on for the first time, eyes widening, shoulders rising, and says, everything looks so crisp. Suadade. The Portuguese word that rivers between love and sadness comes to mind. Witnessing the world change before her eyes happens so fast, and then there's no turning back. But we're still on the couch, and thankfully, I can still reach over and hold her hand. Catch my breath. Set it all gently down. A few days ago, we ride home from the walkathon together. Fonz and Luna leave before us. The day before, we await evacuation orders until the fire a mile from us is contained. There's a moment where I wonder if I'm missing out on the joke. It's not funny. Stop me if you've heard this one before: She walks nineteen miles in a pair of my shoes. I walk some of those miles with her. We take the pretty way home. She picks songs, and we sing together, dancing in our seats. No matter how hard I try, I'm unsure if I can fold all the last twelve months into a neat shape. I'm here, and I'm also tracking the distance between something now and a year ago. I keep saying 'last year' as though all that has happened falls squarely inside the walls of a calendar year. It spills out over lifetimes. But still, as I try to build some sort of structure between the variation - the seasons of this grief and illness and change and subsequent transformation, I am still becoming. Still undergoing. I begin a list of what I know now that I did not consider before - if only as markers to delineate the before me with the becoming me. Both are blurry at best. 1) Don't go to Disneyland to solve your problems. The girls and I tried this last November. Go to celebrate wins. But if you have problems and you happen to be at Disneyland, take each dip into darkness as a step toward acceptance. When you enter a tunnel on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, raise your arms with your palms facing up, fall into the dark, loud, and uncertain way forward, and feel how familiar nothingness is. Let yourself be turned around in the vortex of lights on Space Mountain. Let the roar take you anywhere else. Be like nothing floating against the mysterious night sky in Pirates of The Caribbean. Lose track of time waiting for the Haunted Mansion, let go of day or night, and go into the center of death and remember it is also birth. Take a picture with Geppetto, the lonely man who made a boy from wood to be his son. Go on a submarine to watch lava flow. Enter a whale and sink into a tiny world where your childhood shrinks into your pocket. Sit next to your kids and squeeze their hands three times, which means I love you, and feel them squeeze yours back four times; I love you, too. 2) A list of things I need to do in an emergency. When I stop breathing, I have to breathe. It may take a while for my lungs to fill up with air again - they sometimes fill with fire, and when that happens, it's hard for me to talk. It's hard to say what needs to be heard the most. It comes out in a fierce wave of flame, but what I mean is I am so fucking scared it's as hot as the core of the earth burning in my torso. To cool down, I have to imagine the reflection of a snowcapped mountain on a glassy lake shell - the quiet of the air above trees. A bird in a silent soar. A glacier. Get inside the glacier. I have to think of the sound of leaves collapsing beneath my feet. My kids sleeping. How Luna's fingers gently hold her face while she dreams of being weightless, a part of tides, the swirl and sheen of an abalone shell. The sweetness of Rafi's greeting every morning. How they hold me so tightly that I can't breathe, and then I can feel the softness of spring grass and the kiss of sun brushing against my skin. A firehose. The rescue. I am smoldering and not burning. The embers are receding into nothing. 3) Swim where the water's warm. This makes sense. And I try to remember to do this. Even in a pool. I like swimming in the colder months because the pool is heated. I like mapping the mist rising off the water. How Luna says on the ride to school this morning, Today would be a good day to visit the fairy forest, Mama. Look at all the mist. I see who she is, and it's majestic. We do this yesterday. We go to the fairy forest, chasing mist. There are circles of redwoods. They rise into the sky, and their roots connect to the earth. I recognize this from a meditation. We get dirty, pile back into my car, and go somewhere else. I'm hopeful we take who we are in the forest with us rather than leave those parts behind as we unwittingly can. 4) Everything seems like a rehearsal these days, but it isn't; it's the big show. Maybe it's me, and I'm the one annunciating like I'm on stage playing for an audience, but I see it all as theater. We assume roles and the dialogue or dialect of our character and take ourselves onto the endless stage in full costume. Some of us more than others. Of course, isn't this how it always is. A spell is cast in syllables, and I find myself praying that it reaches through my veins into the cosmos and touches down into the dirt beneath the dirt and into the fire at the earth's center. 5) To hold on, you must also let go. One night, while Fonz and Luna read together in the living room, Rafi asks strategically, knowing she has me all to herself for a limited time, if we can lay together in my bed. She tells me she feels a little alone these days. Like no one understands her life. First, a comet sears through my heart, and then I breathe. She says some more about what this feels like. I nod. I've been ten, almost eleven, before and going through something. But this is different. We deconstruct our lives for a disease. We watch it rage into places we thought were untouchable - this was the first year - on or off the calendar, I can't tell you. We talk about the communal paths we shared with friends and family around us and how cancer pulled us over to a different path. At first, it was so hard to figure out where we were, what to say or do, how to keep living as though our lives hadn't blown apart. We became foreigners in a familiar land. So strange and so lonely. And that year was hard. Impossible at times. And just when we got through, we got ready for the next hard and unfamiliar thing. But we did it. And we all live to tell the tale. Rafi nods. I tell her that we've changed paths again. We're still discovering this new one. She looks at me from behind her glasses; she seems both older and more vulnerable at the same time. We talk about our new path and how it intersects again with our old path, where we find our friends and family and find our way forward, but as who we are now. I tell her this path isn't as scary, but we carry something with us that we didn't before. We must make room for how we've changed. Our newness and the unknown that surely awaits. Because of what we carry, we must set other things down when it's too much to hold. We keep what's important. And our hearts always know what that is. I have to restrain myself from grabbing her and pulling her into my lap like a baby. 6) I see that empty space doesn't serve the future of my kids, and yet we live in a world fixated on filling any empty space with the future of our kids. But when the unplanned thing comes, and it moves your life over from one place on the page to another, namely, the margin of error becomes the majority of your life, and the small space left on the edges is where your life resembles others, you learn about space in general.

Over a very specific breakfast of Goddess Melon, cottage cheese, toast with butter and jam, the girls and I discuss our bookends: menopause and puberty, and how they're both filled with many things and also undefinable by specific time and order. After I jot down my list, I lie on the floor again. Maybe there is indecision on my skin. Maybe there is nothing to know more than this. I ask my heart. It says something about time again and something about circles. My feet hurt suddenly and they get hot. I plan to look this up on my phone like it is an oracle. But first, I lovingly set something down that I can no longer carry.