I have been up to my eyeballs in the everyday. My creative matter is stretched to its outer limits just trying to keep on top of being original. I want to lay down my arms. They ache from being held up all day, reaching for something I know is right there. Nothing can be captured. Which isn’t true. I’m just using the wrong net, and I don’t have time to look for my other ones. They used to be right next to my pith helmet, but they got tidied. So I’m letting everything run between my fingers. I have nothing to be exhausted about, but I can’t seem to find where my energy went. I’ve half a mind to crunch everything under the delete key. This is the hard part. Letting words be strung together. I don’t expect you to follow me. I’m not sure these memories that won’t go away were ever how they kept appearing in my mind.

My mother phoned the other day to let me know that a woman — who probably was marginally mean to me in high school — died of a brain aneurism in her sleep last weekend. The woman was only one year older than me. So I am thinking about death. Generically and specifically. This works quite well with my vivid imagination. One hundred cancers march through my body and one hundred last words are meticulously rehearsed. The game plan for what I would do if I had six months to live spirals and cascades along the inside of my mind’s eye. But it’s all so hilarious. Not the specific death, not my death exactly, but all death and all imagination of death. I grew up with ghost stories, urban legends, and Roald Dahl. Gruesome death and laughter intermingled. Black humour, the macabre: they scour along the outside edges of my joints and make clean and close that thing we are taught to fear and avoid and ignore. At best, accept with a straight spine. I don’t want to dance with Death, but I love his clackety bones. Personified, anthropomorphized, top hat and tails and tappety cane. We are el día de los muertos. I hope to wear a sequined gown and tango to my death.

Rebecca called tonight to tell me that she missed me. I didn’t have the heart to say I hadn’t recognized her voice. To tell the truth, we’d neither of us seen me in a while. She said she’d found a new way to hit those trills and vocal flips we’d abandoned long ago. I asked how she got my number. My politeness was killing. Both of us, in fact. The life we used to lead spun out in irregular rhymes. A rhythm that never resolved.

Words become a persona. They take the place of an understanding hand on your arm or a tired smile on a satisfying day. They become a juggling act. They jostle for position, push against each other and stomp on toes to get a front row seat. They keep their elbows up and sharpened. They give up and hang at the back — too cool for you. The persona becomes a skin, adhered and hardening against our minds. We are these words. Every day.