my grief over burvil’s absence has taken the form of antique blue glassware, i tell my art therapist.

she asks me to draw what self care means to me.

a crayon drawing of blue glasses arranged on an undrawn window sill emerges. there are pink flowers in two of the vases.

i actually have this window sill.

except, in reality, it is full of milk glass bud vases with half burnt candle sticks, all from the thrift store, stuck in.

the blue glass is scattered about my home.

it has very almost been six months.

i waver between giggling and grieving and glassware.

glassware because it’s fragile.

let us pause and think about the journey of a piece of glass. from the 1970s, the 50s, the 30s.

what a life!

a glass almost as old as burvil!

a piece of glass, fragile as glass is, that has survived burvil. imagine.

i am trying to.

how extraordinary for something so fragile to have been so cared for that it makes it here, to be with us now.

i’m writing about christa mcauliffe. which means i’m writing about trauma and grief and death and the emotions of children and self-harm and cabbage patch dolls and disaster and stories and empathy and feeling and palestine and pain.

it may be that other women in my family had endometriosis and did not know it. i think of them as my organs pull away from me now.

there is so much we do not know of others, so much we do not know of ourselves.

i want to surround myself with her, curl up in her.

i want to cry for days, weeks.

i have dreams where i’m exploring her attic on inverness, where i’m trying desperately not to touch the pink insulation while touching all the fabric scraps, while running my fingers over my aunt’s discarded copy of princess daisy, twisting my fingers in the yards of green jersey i’d later steal to fashion a grecian, one-shouldered dress out of safety pins, which i would model alone in my bedroom as a teen.

burvil was laughter, treasure, secrets, soothing, relief, release, vanilla wafers, marjorie main, the as the world turns theme song, the sound of steam from the iron, dominoes (the game, not the pizza), spaghetti sauce, spaghetti sauce, spaghetti sauce, spaghetti sauce, spaghetti sauce, sears catalogues in the floor of the downstairs closet, wood paneling, peppermints.

i wake up on a saturday morning in an incredibly giggly mood which, within half an hour, shifts to deep grief. i miss burvil, i tell my boyfriend, who first met me 19 days after her death.

i did not feel like an open wound then, perhaps because the wound had been leaky for years, as she slowly left us, the glimmer nonetheless still always in her eye.

i was in new york when she died, and in my tours of the thrift stores, i mindlessly acquired every blue dress i found that looked like it might fit.

i’ve worn one. to my birthday eve party. the others are too painful. i cannot.

glass is fragile, like us.

the cats knocked over the poster from 74th nakba day approximately three hours after i had framed it. as a result the image of shireen abu akleh lies behind glass shards taped together.

broken, but pieced back together. it is here.

the blue glass also is here, having survived decades. it comes from another century, another lifetime, another world, to arrive now.

we are all of us so many pieces of so many people lost, who we carry with us here, in this moment, in this world, whole universes of whole universes, lost and gone, worlds in worlds, all those lost worlds and loves within us, here and now.