Look at these hands—one slightly larger than the other…
Look at these hands—one slightly larger than the other, like mismatched quotation marks around an unfinished sentence. The way my Gerald's were, before the arthritis made them into question marks. Stained with invisible ink from stories that write themselves in the dark. Hawaiian shirt missing the third button since 1993, the gap a tiny window where the universe peeks through...
I'm thirty-five but inside I'm still eight. The age I was when she taught me to make sandwiches. "Shannon-bear," she said, "the secret ingredient is touching the food with happy hands." My hands aren't happy anymore. They're just hands. They put chips in bags. They take money. They give change.
But sometimes—sometimes someone eats my tacos and their face does the thing. The thing where they remember being okay. And then my hands remember being happy. Just for a second. Like finding a penny that's heads-up. Lucky but small.
The bracelet on my ankle is from when friends were forever. Before I learned forever has an expiration date. Like milk. Like moms.
In my next play, we all get wings. But we still choose to walk. Together. On whatever beach remains. Through whatever silence comes. Making noise. Making meaning. Making do. Making peace with time. Making time with peace. Making, making, making.
I'm thirty-five but inside I'm still eight. The age I was when she taught me to make sandwiches. "Shannon-bear," she said, "the secret ingredient is touching the food with happy hands." My hands aren't happy anymore. They're just hands. They put chips in bags. They take money. They give change.
The bracelet on my ankle is from when friends were forever. Before I learned forever has an expiration date. Like milk. Like moms.
"The playwright realizes she's been writing the same play eighteen different ways. The hospital and the beach are the same place—temporary spaces where people gather to transition. The patients and her friends are the same people—everyone she's ever loved is everyone she's ever lost is everyone she's ever been. The war and the waves are the same destroyer—time dressed in different costumes. The only difference is—" What's the difference?
Okay. This is from "Rounds"—it's about morning rounds but everyone's a clown. Not clowns like circus. Clowns like humans trying to be professional about death. "DOCTOR BOZO enters, her red nose blinking in time with the heart monitor. She checks the patient's pulse with a rubber chicken. It's medical. It's meaningful. It's Tuesday. The chicken has a medical degree. From Harvard. The patient laughs. Laughter is the best medicine except for actual medicine which is the actual best medicine but laughter is free and doesn't require prior authorization. The insurance company is also clowns. Different kind of clowns. Less funny. More tears."
I'm writing about everything. The hospital, the beach, us, the— How do you make sense of a world where children die at Tuesday and hermit crabs live forever? Where bombs sound like thunder but thunder never sounds like bombs because thunder has dignity? Where you can save someone's body but their mind has already packed its bags and left for a country that doesn't exist on any map but is somehow more real than here?
December 15th, 2019. I was making my disappearance notes—yes, I keep a journal of everything that vanishes. Started with small things. Paper clips. The good pen. The ability to see faces without calculating survival odds. Then bigger: glaciers (faster than expected), species (Latin names like funeral hymns), the will to get out of bed (Tuesday through Friday). But that day, I noted: "Mrs. Chen from 4B disappeared." Thought she'd died. The way she watered plants suggested someone saying lengthy goodbyes. Turns out she'd moved to Phoenix to become a DJ at 87. Sometimes disappearances are just transformations with bad communication. Sometimes death is just life wearing a disguise so good it fools even itself.
From beyond, I can confirm: death smells like pool chlorine and birthday cake. Plan accordingly. Bring snacks to funerals. The living get hungry watching the dead not eat. We're very filling, the dead. We take up so much room with our absence. Also—Shannon, potato absolutely counts. Death makes you generous with vegetables. I'm practically vegan now. Because I don't eat. Because I'm eaten. By time. By memory. By love.
Look at these hands—one slightly larger than the other, like mismatched quotation marks around an unfinished sentence. Stained with invisible ink from stories that write themselves in the dark. Hawaiian shirt missing the third button since 1993, the gap a tiny window where the universe peeks through. This is a body that has forgotten how to swim but remembers how to drown with perfect technique. Watch how the left eye twitches when silence becomes too loud—Morse code for "I'm still here." I am becoming real through my imperfections, like light needs cracks to prove walls exist. The Walkman in my pocket still holds the same mixtape from thirty-seven summers ago. Side B has never been played. It waits like a held breath. The pause between heartbeats where God lives.
Tangled hair holds more than salt—it holds the antiseptic smell of Beirut corridors, 2011, where floor tiles counted bodies and ceiling tiles counted souls. These shoulders, see how they curve inward, protecting a heart that beats in triage rhythm: save-lose-save-lose-learn. Notebook pages stuck to my arms like bandages—half medical notes, half dialogue, fully prayer. I am the doctor who couldn't heal time itself, now the playwright who can't stop rewriting the ending because all endings are false doors. Notice: I am always looking for something just out of frame—the place where healing begins before healing begins. My pager, disconnected since 2019, still weighs down my left pocket. I carry it like a small coffin for the god of immediate answers. Next to it: a pen that bleeds meaning. Each word costs a drop. I pay gladly.
Observe the perfect posture hiding a crumbling spine—architecture of polite devastation. Bow tie made of kelp—absurd yet formal, like wearing the ocean's business card. These feet have never touched ground without apologizing first, as if earth were a sleeping lover. My laugh lines run perpendicular to my worry lines, creating a crosshatch of comedy and crisis, a plaid pattern of feeling. I exist in the space between a bow and a pratfall—the pause where dignity and disaster exchange phone numbers. Still wearing the class ring from '92, now green with verdigris, oxidizing into honesty. Sometimes I taste copper when I smile—the flavor of trying too hard. I keep everyone's secrets in my perfect posture. Especially Penelope's plays. I've read them all. Even the ones she burned. Fire just makes words louder.
Reading glasses holding no glass since the prescription changed in 2003, seeing everything through nothing—the opposite of blindness is not sight but acceptance. Pearls that are actually small shells strung on fishing line—each one from a funeral. Twenty-three shells. Twenty-three last breaths crystallized. This body knows every proper way to do improper things, like screaming politely or dying with good manners. My dignity is a performance I've forgotten how to stop—method acting as existence. See this pinky—permanently extended since finishing school, 1988, even in sleep. Even in grief. Even while dreaming of running through airports. In the dreams, I still run properly. Catastrophe with correct form.
Grief has made my edges soft and my center sharp, like sea glass that can still cut but chooses not to. This cooler I drag has my mother's initials (EMW, 1951-2020) but my father's weight—inherited heaviness with monogrammed handles. Inside: a hospital bracelet that still smells like her wrist, birthday cake candles (never lit) waiting for a celebration that missed its cue, and yes, actual ice. Frozen water holding its breath. Sand permanently embedded in the creases of my palms like a fortune I can't read—illegible prophecy in the life line. I measure time in melt rates: how long ice stays ice, how long dead stays dead, how long tears stay salt before becoming ocean. My shadow is always longer than it should be—darkness practicing for when I'm gone. The friendship bracelet from 1994 still circles my ankle, faded but unbroken. Thierry braided it while explaining decomposition rates. "Everything returns," he said. "Just not in the same shape." The bracelet listens to my pulse through my ankle. Still counting.
This frame contains no body, just the memory of weight—gravity's aftertaste. Speaking from inside things—umbrellas, picture frames, the space between words where meaning gets its running start. Departed October 12th, 2021, 3:47 PM, but who's counting? Everyone. Everyone counts. Death gave me the best seat in the house—front row to the show where everyone's both actor and audience. I am more real now that I'm not. Watch how light passes through me but leaves a shadow anyway—proof that nothing disappears, it just gets promoted to memory. My last text was "bring chips." I meant it existentially. I meant it literally. I meant it as my final poem. The crunch of chips is the sound of the living insisting on living. Listen. That's all. Just listen.
Ah! You're here! You're all here! You're about to open your comprehensive field guide. You think you're watching us, but watch—you're seeing yourself at seventeen, building this same sandcastle. Summer of '87. The sand hasn't changed. You have. Your dead cells are in this beach. We've been coming here so long, we're literally part of the landscape. The beach is made of us. We're made of beach. It's very circular. Like time. Like tides. Like the way goodbye holds hands with hello.
