open the windows

Letting light in again.

How do you write when you’re sad

Ways to be creative again

How to stop having nightmares

My best friend passed away and now nothing makes sense

These are all Google searches I’ve entered into my iPhone at midnight, thoughts that pinprick my brain while I’m chopping onions for dinner like the tears at the corners of my eyes, and things I’ve tried to muster the energy to process over the last few weeks.

The thing about being a writer is that your words are your most natural form of expression. When you can’t find the words out loud to share with your loved ones, you turn to the Notes app or open up a Google Doc or grab a journal.

The beauty about living on not-quite-an-island is that when you have to take a ferry from the hospital, from the house where your best friend was dying from cancer, you are given the gift of space to process and write for that 40-minute journey.

She looked peaceful while sleeping today

She remembered my name

She opened her eyes and recognized me

She ate a ton of blueberries

After each visit to her, I took copious notes like an archivist preserving the history of a specific moment in time, fossilizing each day, because with terminal brain cancer, each visit means they are slipping further away from you. The amount of time before their memory resets shortens from five minutes to three minutes to sleeping, and 1.5 years later after their diagnosis, you do not know if they know you anymore.

On the ferry on the way to Aisha, I would write her a letter to remind her of the person I knew her to be, the friend she was to me, the person she still was underneath the tumors and radiation and medication. I wanted to open up all the tabs in her mind that had closed, forgotten, cleared their history, and needed to bring those back to Page 1 in her brain. I read these letters out loud to her, whether we were sitting on her parent’s couch, on the armchair near her hospital bed, or towards the end, while she was sleeping.

When we first met in my second year at college, you were impressed that I used red chilies in my stirfry. You introduced me to cooking with sambal and my life has never been the same since.

“Huh,” she mused.

When I turned 21, you bussed back and forth from campus for three hours to find me a rare Arabian jasmine plant, because jasmine is my favorite scent. When you arrived halfway through the birthday party with the plant in hand, we cried as we exchanged gifts because I’d found the perfect Tree of Life poster for you that day.

“Really?” she said each time I told her this story. 

When we moved in together, you gave me the biggest bedroom because you liked to work in the kitchen under fluorescent lighting. You vacuumed it and left me food in the fridge when you knew my long-distance boyfriend was flying in to surprise me.

With her eyes widening, she laughed “God, that sounds about right.” 

When we were in our wellness era, we did kundalini yoga on Friday nights and fell asleep during yin yoga. When we were tired, we would buy the falafel special on Tuesdays and eat it on our couch from the thrift store and pirate The Mindy Project. When I moved into my second apartment without you, you brought me a cactus in a ceramic white pot that I have carried to every home since. 

“You still have it?” 

“What does it look like?”

“Wow.”

Sitting together for hours, she would read and reread these letters and struggled to keep those windows in her mind open. Sometimes they let the light in, other times, she couldn’t see what was outside. I tried to paint the pictures for her as vividly as I could, to desperately clear the fog and clean the condensation on the windows, until the end, so she could remember that she would be remembered.

After she passed

These days

I struggle to let the light in too

But the windows want to stay open. 

The salty breeze from the ocean wafts through our home, the papery-yellow daffodils yawn and perk up suddenly through the soil, the deer are back and napping in the backyard, the days are longer and brighter outside, and I like to think that those are reminders from her to open my eyes —

That I am lucky to still be able to —

Drink in sunshine when I’m sad

Smell the jasmine my mother planted in my garden

Hug my daughter each morning

Cook with sambal

Celebrate another birthday

So even though some days The Office is all that’s keeping me going, when the sun sneaks through the gaps under the blackout curtains, I get out of bed, I water her cactus perched on the bookshelf, and I crack the windows open.

Message received.