grief trip

Stockholm, Costa Rica, Atlanta // January 6, 2025

A couple years ago I wrote about a mouse running in circles. I said that, at first, I found it cute, but as it ran and ran and ran, I started to feel the desperation. An old man next to me said the mouse does that because of some brain parasite. He said it’d do that until it died. I couldn’t stand to see it happen.

I saw a dog barking up a tree the other day.

A guy in my phone disappeared again. I don’t hold it against him. It gets a bit easier every time. I barely even feel anything at this point. Mostly just concern. Maybe he’s dead. What do I do if he’s dead?

I remember New Year’s Eve in Gainesville, Florida. My family and I would go down to Tampa for Christmas with my mother’s side and down to Palm Beach for Hanukkah with my father’s. The spiritual incongruity was so American it ended up working in its own way. Like some sort of new American Jewish Catholic thing. Regardless, we’d drive the beat-up Chevy Suburban from Palm Beach all the way back up to Atlanta. The drive was long and filled with fried food and sparkly rom coms on the little car TV. We had to cut the drive in half most years and spend the night in Gainesville, the college town where my parents met. We stayed in this one Hilton in the suburbs of the city, about a fifteen-minute drive from the University of Florida and another five hours back home. These trips home often aligned with the coming of the New Year, which we almost always spent in the hotel hot tub out in the Florida night. You could hear fireworks in the distance. The kinds of crickets you only get in Florida. Frogs and cars in the way gone. We were always alone out there. My dad would have the whole family, three kids and my mom, go around and list some predictions for the coming year. These usually consisted of straightforward statements like “Apple will release a smartphone you can wear on your wrist” or “Batman dies in a new movie” or other things like that. I remember my dad one year, maybe that moment between 2011 and 2012 where things stopped being real, predicted “the global economy will collapse and most of the world will experience natural disasters.” I guess something changed that year. I don’t know what. Since then, the predictions have been a mix of “the world is ending” and “the Barbie Movie 2 will break box office records”. I guess there’s a median in that and I think that median is global warming. Or whatever it’s called.

In third grade, the science teacher taught us about the end of the world. She said that every year the planet gets hotter because we are burning fuel made of dinosaurs. And I thought “how sad”. And I meant the dinosaurs.

My grandfather died this past February. It broke something in me. He died listening to a recording of me singing an Italian aria about lost love or something. He left my grandmother a lot of money. I can’t figure out how much, but it’s a lot. She decided to take my extended family (about eleven of us total) to Costa Rica on some sort of grief trip. Let it all out. She hired this guy Stanley who my dead grandpa apparently swore by. Whatever Poppy says. Stanley booked us a five-night stay in a five-star resort about a million miles up a mountain. He told my grandmother (easily convinced) that the resort is in the “cloud forest”. Apparently, she asked him if that’s in the rain forest and he said, “no, it’s above it.” He told her it wouldn’t rain too often. We planned everything outdoors, adhering to his advice. It poured nonstop all six days and five nights. It was like the sky opened up and just let it all out. Grief trip. We spent the week soaked. The humidity was so high, dryness quickly became a figment of our collective imagination. We drank every night and rode horses. Mine was named Cocoa. Like cocaine or chocolate. He was fast and I loved him like a brother.

I spent that week mostly tipsy, half submerged in a hot tub listening to the rain on the trees. Poppy used to hum. He’d hum all the time. Absolutely nonstop. Story goes he even hummed in his sleep. He’d hum these little tunes. Some of them were real, mostly Aida or Mozart stuff. Sometimes he’d freestyle. Towards the end of his 94 years, the humming became a way to confirm he was alive. Humming? Breathing. Whew. We’re sitting at the breakfast table in a fancy wooden dining hall, the only one in the resort. The walls are all glass and then trees forever. Fog all around. Rain sounds on the roof. Quiet morning. My grandmother spots a little bird. It’s so small it’s more like a bug. Dad says, “look at the hummingbird” and my grandmother says, “Poppy Bird.” Poppy Bird.

Before the grief trip, I was in Sweden for a week visiting some friends and doing things for my magazine. Great time. Magical, even. Jonny brought me to his parents’ home in the fjords and they fed me well and let me sleep late in their guest house. Jonny’s little things scattered all over the place. What a gift, to know people and love them. To get to hold the guitar they used to play when they were thirteen. To play that guitar.

I fell in love last time I was in Sweden. About eight months prior to this most recent trip. Twice, I fell in love. One of them stuck. This guy Jan. We met at a little wine bar, and he cried when I told him about my lost years. My pants throbbed something crazy by the time we said goodbye. So we didn’t say goodbye. We had sex and some other things too. And we cried in the shower. And he told me a few times about his dead mother. And I cried that night. I cried the next few nights.

When I arrived in Sweden a few weeks ago, I made my way to the baggage claim and waited and waited only to realize they’d left my bag in the USA. I lost my mind because I love my things because they are a part of me. I texted Jan. He’d been kind of distant for the last few weeks. I told him they lost my bags. He was apologetic, but from afar. Something came up inside me, an image of Jan kissing this other guy. Some guy who looked like me but wasn’t me. His hair was thicker, and his sides tucked neatly into his hip bones like a real boy. I asked Jan, “are you seeing someone?” He said yes. Or something like that. And a crying smiley face. I said,

When they told me they lost my bag I was thinking it would be nice to just wear your clothes and use your toothbrush and your body wash and stuff

I will redirect

And change the way I think.

Jonny and Anna lent me underwear and socks. The bag arrived in time for me to read some poems in the bathroom of some bar in Södermalm. The second guy I fell in love with, Måns, he called me late one night. I couldn’t answer at the time, so I texted asking if he’s alright. He said, “not really”. I hope I can see him some day. I hope forgiveness is a thing. It must be because I’m not dead yet.

Scene from the suburbs.

Clara and I spent the week in Sweden together. She’s a poet from the area. We met through Jonny and others and were briefly, informally engaged to marry. She loves so abundantly, with the spirit of a real American rockstar trapped in a malaise-fogged socialist country. We drank beers at noon and shared cigarettes in the 2pm sunset. Snus with coffee. Real quiet mornings in the suburbs. One night, Clara donned a bright red ball gown for a formal poetry event she was paid to host. Up there on stage, she sparkled like Dolly Parton. A real American. Virgin Mary shit. Madonna shit. When I left for the airport at 2am a few days later, Clara and I both cried a bit because she’s the kind of person who feels things and then feels them again. We hugged for a long time. I spent the rest of the night alone in the airport. I couldn’t sleep with my contact lenses in and couldn’t find a mirror to use to take them out, so I stared at the ceiling and sweat through my coat and tie.

When I got back to the USA, my parents cut down the tree outside my bedroom window. They want to sell the house and the house sellers told them to kill the tree. So they killed it. Dead tree. The window is exposed now. You can see me from the street. Just up there in my room.

The New Year came and brought with it some real chill in the air. I wrote a poem for Dennis Cooper called THE SIXTH SENSE. It goes like this:

I cried watching The Sixth Sense the

other day on a flight to Costa Rica.

My grandpa died this year. Grandma

doesn’t want any of his biological kids

getting his fortune, so she took us, his

step-grandkids, on a trip to this five star

resort in the clouds.

I cried watching The Sixth Sense

because no-one believes the little boy

when he says he sees dead people.

There’s a small waterfall here about

two mils from the edge of the resort

property. Maybe twenty feet tall. They

call it “La Pequeña Virgen”. The Little

Virgin. There’s a small idol of the Virgin

Mary at the very top. I tried to take a

picture but we were driving by too fast.

I went to the doctor the other day and

they took my blood. The tests said it’s

all normal. Just blood.

It’s sad Bruce Willis can’t speak

anymore. He must feel trapped like the

kid in the movie when the bullies lock

him in that closet at the top of the spiral

staircase. But Bruce Willis can’t scream

for his mom. Bruce Willis can’t say

anything at all.

So I cried watching The Sixth Sense on

the airplane flying over Mexico because

the kid reminds me a lot of Ziggy from

your book “Try”, and me.

And you.

Yeah, I’m in love with a ghost. Wish I

could send a photo of that. Gonna buy a

gun and shoot it at the sky.

Dennis replied,

Charlie. That was beautiful. I’m honored to have been called to your mind thereby. And Merry Xmas back to you.

These kinds of correspondences make me feel like a house cat. They robbed my apartment in Montréal on Christmas Eve. I spoke to the cops for thirty minutes a couple thousand miles away. They said the place was a mess. The superintendent blamed me. I wonder what they took, what they deemed worthy. I know they took my nice winter coat. My mom got it for me exactly a year before the robbery. I got a new coat, but it’s not the same so I see it as a kind of orphan. Like you and like me too. Like how you will never be mine.

Did you change your number? My texts aren’t going through. Huh.

Scene one:

I’m alone in the bar again. I brought a book, but it’s too dark to read. So I’m just sipping this beer and thinking of you. Of course. We should move to New York and take what we want from the world. We should get rich and buy a house on the water. And a boat. And we can raise kids there, on the boat and in the house. We can vacation in Spain when you get your holiday bonus. I’ll sell my books to whoever’s dumb enough to buy them. I’ll write just a few and then retire because I’m not a writer. I’m yours.

The bartender pours me another beer. Blond something, both the beer and the bartender. She’s in a nice dress. There’s a cop show on the TV. A guy just died I think.

Scene two:

Clara and I in the oldest bar in the world. Lights real dim, stone arches up to form an old style ceiling. The kind that holds you like a crucible. Or a lady, I guess. Jan’s in my phone somewhere. In the back of my head too. Somewhere on my body there’s a tattoo of the whole world splitting in two. One side is me. One side is you.

I’m headed back to Montréal now. I’ll probably be deported by August. I was never meant to be. Here or who I am. I’m covered in reminders of that guy who dreamt me up a decade ago. I am exactly who I always wanted to be. And I am still.