THE YEAR
I am running out of days where I can say "this time last year" and mean a time where Ryan was alive.
I begin writing this on Saturday. By Wednesday, that phrase, "this time last year," will be another thing taken from me.
I have been writing all year in stops and starts. All year. I have started essay after essay and set it aside. Or, no, nothing so deliberate; I have set nothing aside. I have failed to stop the slip through my fingers. I have strayed. I have wanted to finish everything. I have wanted the first thing I publish to be perfect and profound and masterful and moving.
I have a dozen essays I can't seem to finish, so I am writing this to try and break the seal. Like when you're out drinking and you pee and then have to pee every twenty minutes forever.
A friend used this phrase recently and it reminded me I did not know it before winter, when a different friend who is a stranger again got up from the booth and said "I'm gonna pee, and you know what that means." I didn't. He said it meant he was "going to be in the bathroom a lot." I asked if this was a euphemism for something. I thought maybe it was a euphemism for doing cocaine. I developed this theory based on the fact that, earlier, he had been doing cocaine. No, he said, just breaking the seal. I googled it as he walked away toward the back of the bar.
I used to write. Then I didn’t for half a decade. Couldn’t. Then I started trying. Then I wrote something because Pauli asked me if I would.
I had been wanting to write again since even before I stopped, but it didn’t begin to feel possible until I sent Ryan a piece of embarrassing poetry from my early twenties and his response included these bullets:
“One of the things I like about you in general, but also in the writing of yours that I've seen, and would like to see more of is: an absolute passion and lust for pleasure. But crucially, in my observation at least, you are incredibly attuned and tender towards life in a way that implies an anxiousness to encompass all that you love. I find this not just endearing, both in writing and life, but also something that more people should aspire to.”
“Your vendetta against things so boring as taste and boundaries is always well-executed. This is mostly because you obliterate boundaries of entry with pure adrenaline that is caught up in your evident love of language. But crucially, you never lose sight of what language really is: a means of bringing people together and making a kind of wholeness.”
“Note I have on my pad of paper after reading this: one cannot go quietly into the night, maybe Blake meant a "rager" and not ‘raging.’”
“One thing that unites all of my favorite writers and readers is a tendency towards the self-mythologizing aspect of language and writing. The way in which writing can be used to make life truly more exciting and borderline legendary. Whether it's Bolano or Japandroids, its the art I really like. It feels like we have that in common.”
Ryan, a proficient and accomplished poet, never made me feel like less of a writer or even a lesser one. Not once.
The poem was about Smash Mouth.
Something I wrote in my notes app back in August:
"I am sitting on the train from Boston to New York. I am trying to believe I can write again. I am writing again.
For years, I put off writing. If I wrote, I felt incapable of finishing it, though now I am not sure that was not another way of stalling.
For years, I put off writing and making complete what little I jotted down because the lapse had become big enough, the chasm so great, that I increasingly felt that what I put into the world must be a return, and a triumphant one. I needed to prove to the people who believed in my writing all those years ago that I was still good. I needed to prove to myself, and to many of them, that not only was I still good, I was better. That, despite my lack of practice, my long years lost to scrolling, my craft had advanced, ever-forward, ever-upward, parallel with the time that had passed. This, I know now, had a lot to do with fear.
For the past year, I put off writing and making complete what little I jotted down because whatever I wrote would become the first thing I published since Ryan died. The first thing after ten long months of all eyes on me, of feeling, as I told Mickey cross-legged on the dock yesterday, both scrutinized and invisible."
Maybe I did know it, that phrase. Breaking the seal. Maybe I learned it in one of the parts of me not recovered from obliteration.
I wrote “not yet recovered” on my first pass. There are still days I suppose all of me will find me again.
On days of smallness, I am angry at the people who have told me I seem fine, I seem like I'm so strong, it seems like I am doing great and having a great time in all of my posts.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a tiktok featuring text at the top that said "pov: you're at your best friends funeral." Beneath it, a girl with tears streaming down her face and a cup of white wine in hand slurs “I just wanted to ask. Who the fuck gets murdered. Like. It’s not Lifetime.” A girl offscreen says “How dramatic of you.” The girl with the wine says “We get it.” I laugh and laugh and the only thing that stops me from replaying it for longer than a couple of minutes is the extreme urge to send it to my friends.
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After texting it to half a dozen group chats, I return to the video and make the mistake I have been making for almost my entire life. I read the comments. What I find there prompts this frenzied note-to-self:
"at some point write about that who tf gets murdered tiktok
who are the people who can afford to be serious about everything? probably nothing has ever happened to them or mattered
it also betrays this stupidly unempathetically linear view of grief; there would come time for sorrow; there would come stretches of not being able to get out of bed; they would recede and then come back, and in receding not disappear but simply become ambient rather than insurmountably oppressive
the people who demand a particular disposition in the immediate wake of mourning seem to believe that this is the worst. that the worst moment will only come once, and we must meet it with decorum. they are the same people who sneer, some believed-imperceptible twitch of the eyebrow in disapproval — of sobbing on a random tuesday because the breeze hit you a certain way on a certain corner. who will ask ‘shouldn't you be over it by now?’ — who say ‘moved on’ like that is a thing that exists, that happens, for anybody truly involved."
Early this September, I stood in the Music Hall of Williamsburg with a friend I met in Florida at 20, who, after that, met my dead boyfriend and my dead boyfriend's dead best friend while everyone was still alive but long before I met anyone there but her, and another friend who was my dead boyfriend's dead best friend and before that my dead boyfriend's dead best friend's best friend and now he is all of those things. We are watcing a different friend, once and forever a classmate of my dead boyfriend's and of my dead boyfriend’s dead best friend, up on stage. We are proud and we are in awe and we are happy and we are alive. They are not alive but they are there.
This is supposed to be hard to follow. One day I will write about this with greater clarity, and maybe my memoir will include a fold-out diagram like fantasy books have maps, but for now here is what matters:
There is so much beauty and sweetness in my life, and I think so many of us were meant for each other.
This is the love story, too. This, too, is the love of my life.
In a post from the week Ryan died:
"i am surrounded by incredible friends who are taking care of me. i am surrounded by the family ryan built and nurtured and brought me into. i am not alone."
In an instagram post from New Year’s Eve:
"when ryan died, i grabbed his last pack of yellow american spirits from the sidewalk. i didn’t know they were his last pack; i couldn’t comprehend he was dead. i wanted to keep them safe because i knew he would want them when we’d eventually leave the hospital. i wanted to keep them safe even though i really wanted him to smoke less. when we’d argue about it, i always said: i want a long life with you. (i showed him ‘be careful with yourself’ by julia jacklin which opens “please stop smoking / i want your life to last a long time / if you don’t stop smoking / i’ll have to start shortening mine”) i turned over the pack again and again in my hand that whole day — in the hospital, in the police precinct, in the DA’s office, in ryan’s apartment, on his stoop, at his vigil. i touched it every day of that terrible week, thinking each time about how he had held it in his palm. after we buried him, i gathered only his closest friends — which meant, of course, too many people to count — and we all smoked his last cigarettes (and the half-smoked joint i didn’t know was in there until i passed them out) together by the ocean.
i can’t bring myself to write about this year just yet, but this moment captured by our friend steph larsen is a good little slice of what its final months have been like: unimaginable darkness, but also stubborn and true light. i don’t know how i could possibly have endured any of this or all that is to come without, for starters, the people on that muddy slip, or the people watching our little ritual from the balcony, or all the other little rituals we’ve invented and observed. i will spend the rest of my life missing ryan, the love of my life and the love in it, but not a moment of it will be spent alone."
From November:
In April, I am invited to read in Ridgewood as part of a series about shame.
I stitch together fragments from many of the things I am writing. It begins:
"I almost read something else because I felt like what I brought here had to be polished, or good, and then I realized that was itself a function of shame. so it’s this series of fragments instead.
[…]
In the wreckage, I am devastated but not despairing, decimated but not destroyed.
This seems at times to shock or disappoint or appall people, those who come to me supposing they know what I must feel about the world just because they know — not through my disclosure — what it has done to me."
From November:
"Sometimes I do not know what I am hoping for. Only that I am hoping. That I am oriented toward a future I want to be in if it will have me.
Sometimes I am stubborn about my joy before I can see it as something I deserve, something that belongs to me.
I trick myself with defiance: Sometimes I can only talk about my hope or resilience with self-deprecation, as though trying to signal ‘I know how this sounds, I know how dumb it might be, I know this is a recklessness.’
I want you to know I know what I’m doing."
From a journal entry:
"it is october 2 and ryan is dead but it is also october 25 and ryan is dead and every day will be like this forever."
From a journal entry the next day:
"my state-appointed grief counselor said something that made me picture two rooms, a doorway separating them, or perhaps a membrane. all the elements of this, the traumas and the smaller traumas composing them, would pass over in time. right now, all of them — orbs and sharp things — are in one room and i am in the other. they are being kept from me until i am ready. i am being kept safe. but what is safe now?
there are things in that first room from before, too. bad and good. how much he loved me."
I have wanted the first thing I publish to be perfect. Something that justified me.
But I am running out of time. I want something out there before the year is over. Before the anniversary. This is "the year" now. This is the calendar. October to October to October to October.
A journal entry from last December:
"killer parties by the hold steady just came on at dweebs and it brought me back to ryan — to massive nights, in general and last year. 'we departed from our bodies.' i was just talking to chris about the wake and the open casket, how what mattered about ryan wasn't in there.
i want grief to make me bolder but i feel myself retreating into timidity.
nathaniel on the walk to the johnson's last night: "home is where the heart is."
my heart is everywhere and it is also buried.”
I spend all year writing crumbs to follow back to it someday.
From November:
A journal entry from New Year's Day, written here in Providence:
"it is a new year at last after three terrible months. it is my first year without ryan and it stretches out before me impossibly, dauntingly.
but this morning i woke up with clarity and resolve, with gratitude and hope. i felt in my guts that i will be okay this year. i will be good. it will be so, so hard but i have made it through every other thing i thought would destroy me."
I think now I have wanted to publish something whole to prove I am whole.
I have always written, in part, to convince myself.
A journal entry from late August:
"after the long and lifesaving haze of bar after bar after bar, of filling every moment with people, i am excited to reorient myself toward my goals and dreams.
i am terrified of the anniversary.
but this feels, again, at last, like a beginning."
There is something I wrote and finished but I don’t count it.
The day Ryan died, gathered in his apartment, we talked about his birthday party. It was Monday and the party was supposed to be on Saturday. None of us could imagine a future beyond that day. At the same time, we all know in our bones and hearts and guts it still has to happen.
By the end of the week, we’ve moved the party from Ryan’s apartment to Gage & Tollner — not because it is far more befitting of Ryan’s black tie attire dresscode but because it is safe. Ryan’s apartment is not safe. It is a grotesque circus. A rotation of gawkers and New York Post reporters who make me want so badly to believe in hell. The day of the party, I realize this is my only chance to say anything. From the first day, I am forbidden from talking to press, from posting; I am advised against existing anywhere I may be seen. I cannot say anything but all I want to do is talk about Ryan.
That morning, I ask Ari and Acadia if I can give a toast. Of course I can. All day, I write. I am surprised my brain works at all and I am impeded by my medium (I have never gotten good at writing on my phone, which is all I have most of this time) but I write. I realize as I am writing that I am writing toward a future.
I don’t count it because it is exactly the kind of thing I am trying not to write. It is the kind of thing that makes me worry I not only did not improve all these years, I regressed. I let something atrophy. (This is how I feel about this newsletter right now, too.)
But rememebering and returning to it now, even as I wince at its clunky syntax and all-around incoherence, all I really feel for the girl writing it is awe.
“ryan was the love of my life, and also the love in it. he filled every moment we spent together making it impossible to doubt or escape how much he loved me, or how much he loved each of of you.
i’ve been fortunate enough to meet most of you — and those i haven’t met i can guarantee i have heard of. with fondness, with love, with sharp specificity. ryan joked about and apologized for how much he forgot things — one part nature, three parts an inordinate amount of traumatic head injuries — and he did, but never the important things. never what the people he loved treasured or accomplished or needed. the ways they shaped him, the times they carried him. he devoted his life — not just life as in time but life as in energy, as in force — to his friends. helping you, spending time with you, making you better, letting you make him better.
we will spend our lives writing and reading and talking about ryan’s work, his legacy as a leftist organizer and leftist poet. we will spend next week reading about the whole of his too-short life. but tonight, i want to talk about the legacy of ryan’s love, his unmatched commitment to building and tending to friendships.
tonight is the night he planned to bring us all together. ryan told me, as he likely told many of you, that he had lost his joy for his birthdays, hadn’t wanted to truly celebrate his for a long time. he used to throw ragers but, in the great before and after moment of his life, october became too heavy with his grief for eli to feel anything but dread in its approach. this was the year he would change that, which is why he assigned a strict black tie dress code, threatening violence if we came in anything less than our best. i was so thrilled to see him embrace the level of glamour he deserved.
like his organizing and his poetry, ryan’s work as a friend was idealistic not in ignorance of the world's darkness, but in the face of it. staring it down, looking it right in the eyes. to live in a world so dark that the unthinkable act that took ryan from us happened and burst ever outward with light instead of retreating into darkness was just one marvel of his stubborn courage.
many of you have told me about your regrets in your friendships with ryan, or your gratitude at his grace. none of it was an accident. none of it was undeserved. it wasn’t just ryan’s generosity — it was his ability to see the good in each of you. and it was also the good in each of you. nobody is here by mistake. i have heard about every single one of you.
yesterday, we began our first ryan year without ryan. it will be a hard, hard year. we will grieve and hurt and struggle to keep our heads above water.
but we will also keep doing the things ryan loved doing with us, or loved watching us do from afar, and we will do it with even more urgency and zeal than before. we will go to shows and go to protests and go to bars and go to baseball games and we will go to boston, yes, on purpose and we will go on hikes and we will go on walks and we will eat vodka slices and we will throw parties and we will go to readings and we will write and we will sing and we will dance and we will yell and we will laugh and we will watch the simpsons until our eyelids are heavy and we will drink and we will drink and we will ingest substances that bring us, yes, closer to death but also closer to the light ryan was always chasing, always a moth to. and all the while we will feel his immeasurable, inescapable, devouring absence, but we will meet it as a challenge and as an invitation instead of as an impediment.
many of you have told me you’re grateful we are together in this grief. many of you have told me we’re stuck together now, as though this unthinkable tragedy will not let us get away from each other.
but ryan didn’t put us in each others’ lives to grieve him, though now we will do that together, too. he put us in each others’ lives because he saw lights in us he knew belonged together — he saw the constellation we would become. so as we go forward from this terrible, terrible moment, it is not only to experience the hurt together. it is to live together — as vibrantly and urgently and beautifully as ryan would want. as ryan did.
these days — and tonight especially — are about setting a flame to every good thing ryan put in us. not to burn them down, but to illuminate them. to fortify them. to fortify ourselves, each other. we need to make all of it as bright as possible, because this is the week we seal it inside of ourselves to carry it every single moment for the rest of our lives.
we are gathered here by grief, yes, but also by love. by ryan’s. by ours. this is an ending, but it is also a beginning. i have never been more certain than with ryan, and i have never been more uncertain than this moment. but i am certain, tonight, of one thing: we are going to make him proud."
How much did I believe that? Did I believe it? Not in totality. Not yet. Did I have faith in it? I did. What else was there to do?
In December, Ryan’s alma mater rededicated a little free library to him and Eli. I was invited to read. I stitched together incomplete pieces of incomplete essays. Towards the end:
“How Jack spent the first weeks typing away on his phone, the same way Ryan always did, not removed from the moment but deeper in it, a historian of essence. How, on the first day, Joe breaks a long silence by saying: “Well. We should probably throw on some stupid music videos in his honor.” How the night Kissinger died, my phone explodes with dozens of texts, all-caps, each saying LET’S FUCKING GOOOOO.
He comes to me in his family’s love. His father’s hand on my shoulder when I am sobbing at Thanksgiving, so full of the gentleness he taught Ryan. His mother signing off every phone call with “Remember that we love you,” her care and grace a lighthouse through the fog when it threatens to swallow me.
He comes to me in kindnesses. Hannah’s hand in mine. Acadia’s kiss on my forehead. Nikki holding me when I finally break down both before and after Coyote Club. Mickey’s voice on the phone anchoring me in the unending storm. Jaqi’s hands cradling my face, saying “You are family to me now.” The Nemetz Todds gathered around me, time and time again, bearing witness to a grief they shouldn’t have to know as well as they do; I say, through tears, I don’t know how to have a family, and Eli’s dad says: This is how.
I follow this chain of light through the labyrinth, hand over hand over hand.
I am trying to forge from this void a doorway instead of letting it collapse into a black hole. I am trying to see grief as an invitation.
Ryan and I promised our lives to one another with certainty and glee. That future is only mine now, but my heart is still his. To draw the curtains and recoil from the world he so loved and fought to make better would not be a life. So here I am, Ryan, eyes open, out with lanterns, looking for you everywhere, keeping my promise.”
I am finishing this on yet another train back to New York. It is a journey so familiar to me it feels like a place itself instead of a traversal between two cities. There is stillness in the hurtling forward.
That is what this year has felt like. A place. A stillness, a hurtling. A forced faith in some sort of arrival. A futile wish against arrival for fear or dread of the disorienting emergence.
In October, so many people emerge from writing retirement I lose count. It is not out of obligation, but out of need. Compulsive, reflexive. Retrieval and deliverance. Most of us comment at some point or over and over that this is just another way Ryan got the last laugh. We all wanted to write again, even (and especially) those who had long denied it. But Ryan wanted it — from and for us — most of all.
One night in January, a friend asks to see me. (In a journal entry about this night: “he texts me he’s drunk and having a rough time and i drop everything, rush to hart bar, take an uber, and i feel ryan with me then”) He is one of the only ways I make it through this year. He is one of the only people whose opinion on my writing truly matters to me. Even in his crisis, even blackout drunk, he wants to know how I am, and then he wants to know if I’m writing. I don’t remember how I answer but it doesn’t matter because he can see right through.
“Just write, Claudia. Just write something.”
Then: “Write something perfect. Just write something so perfect.”
Then: “Everything you’ve written has been perfect.”
Beautiful, Claudia
This is gorgeous, Claudia. Please never stop writing <3