in memory

i remember holding your book in my hands on a plane flying from the west coast to the east, a fat ass alaskan insurance agent on one side who kept trying to give me his “card,” kept asking me for mine, sitting behind a woman whose sprayed up hair was taller than the seat back, i mean what goes on there, the big stiff hair of women, sitting and thinking i’m at 30,000 feet in a tin germ tube, i opened again your book and read.

“the depressed person.”  i bust a gut and laughed out loud hard enough to blow snot into the big hair’s seat back.  and thought YES! this is my sister!  YES! this is my mother, exactly!  my sister and mother and the suicide blood running through their veins. how i had to live a life swimming through their heavy waters.  how accurate and hilarious the story, and then there was the apple in my throat and my eyes going all kid well up with water on me.  because it wasn’t just my sister.  my mother.  it was me riding on the plane with yet another marriage gone torture chamber busto. me wearing my brand new American d.u.i. after a head on collision that very nearly killed me. i very nearly killed me. it was depression.  that second self. sitting in the seat next to us.

i turned my head and saw acorss the little aisle a woman reading a different book, and god damn if she didn’t look exactly like virginia woolf, who stuffed rocks in her pockets and walked into a river, who said someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

i went into your words again.

in the sky, somewhere over the crammed together strip mall we call the united states.

the stories of one person always save the lives of some other person.

i’m sitting here reading. reading.