Still, Life

The rain has stopped and the sun is out this morning. Small white petals from Bradford pear trees are scattered across the alley, shaken loose from days of wind and rain and replaced by bright green leaves that climb the tree’s thin limbs, reaching toward the sky. It is so beautiful: the sun, the blue, the tulips that decided this seems like a good year to congregate and have emerged in greater numbers than my garden has seen in a while.

I love a day like this, the kind that feels like shaking free of a gloom that was both physical and existential. The kind where you wake and think, “Ah, yes. This is why I keep moving forward.” If that day hasn’t found you yet, or if it found you and has now disappeared again, I hope it makes its way back to you soon.

Over the weekend, I cleared out my massage studio. On Tuesday, I dropped my keys off at the management office. I have spent the better part of fifteen years softening other people’s tension with my hands and my forearms, with elbows and thumbs that will probably always catch and click a bit whenever I move them now. It is hard work to turn your body into a tool for someone else’s relaxation and healing. Good work, but hard, and now, for the first time in my adult life really, I will barely be doing it at all. There is grief in this transition, but relief as well.

In honor of the Bradford pears and their stinky white flowers, in honor of spring and blossoms, in honor of emergence, perseverance, transition, I am sharing my story Still, Life (With Avocados), which was originally published in Capsule Stories Spring 2021 Edition.

One last quick reminder that I am organizing a zero-pressure, no-commitment writing group that will offer two opportunities a month to meet. The idea is to provide dedicated writing times for anyone who would benefit from having a set time and day to add to their schedule. If you would like to learn more or join the email list to receive the monthly schedule and meeting links, please fill out the form at this link. Or if you know anyone who might be interested, please feel free to pass it along to them!

Thanks as always for reading and for all your support!

Still, Life (With Avocados)

She traced a knife around the outside of the avocado, pried the two halves apart with her fingers, and dug out the pit with a spoon. She would cube the soft green flesh before scooping it into the bowl, the way her mother taught her, so it would mash down easily, leaving zero lumps. Nice and smooth. 

She would stick a toothpick into each side of the avocado pit and set the little contraption in a jar. The jar would sit on the windowsill in the dining room alongside all the others, avocado pits lined like votive candles at a prayer altar, though Elizabeth wasn’t much for praying. She had hope, though. A little at least. She hadn’t lost that completely in all of this. She hoped one of the pits would sprout soon, though none had yet and the entire enterprise was starting to feel like something you’d see on an episode of Hoarders—an unstable woman who spent her days gently cooing to her collection of avocado stones, pleading with them to show her some sign of life.

“You are not crazy,” she’d whisper to herself in the gray hush of the early morning, whenever she woke before the sun, that strange feeling having suddenly returned to the hollow beneath her solar plexus. A flutter, a pulse, like the beating of a moth’s wings against glass—the first signal of what lay ahead in the weeks to come, a steady downward spiral into darkness. The avocados helped, or she told herself they helped, and for now that was enough.

Half the battle was pretending you were okay. Waking up each morning to say, “Today will be fine.” Trying to speak the words into existence, slowly letting the lie turn into truth.

It would be easier now that the weather was shifting, hard ground softening into damp earth. The promise of spring. Mornings that smelled of dirt, rebirth, possibility. It had been nine months. Long enough for a baby to have been conceived, gestated, pushed from her body and placed into the waiting cup of her arms, its fragile head and useless neck tucked against the warm curve of her engorged breast. But they hadn’t been ready to have a baby and now they would never have one. Maybe she would, someday, with someone else, but never the two of them, blended together into one new soul.

That possible future, plus every other conceivable one and all those she could never even imagine, gone in an instant. Lost on impact along with him. Shattered glass and bent metal. Her whole life crushed beneath a single point of collision. She thought she too might die from the impact, the ripple effect into every corner of her life—the person she was, the one she would become, even the one she had been. That was perhaps the most surprising part, the way his absence changed her recollection of every conversation, every moment of strife. Why had she complained so much about always being the one to do laundry? Come back, she thought. Take a different route, don’t turn left and I promise I’ll never mention the laundry again. Had she told him she loved him often enough? Did she tell him every day? She should have told him every day. Every minute. Every time she thought, I hate you, she should have said aloud, I love you, instead. How unfair that you only learned what really mattered when it was too late. How unfair to mourn a version of him that would never exist more than she mourned the man she had known. To miss the possibility of his hands turning paper soft and wrinkled with age, more than the weight of his strong thigh slung across her hip at night.

She sunk the tines of a fork into the cubes of avocado and let the tension in her shoulders release a little more with each gentle smush.

The tree across the alley had begun to sprout. She could see it from her kitchen window, the tiny white buds like blemishes popping through the skin of the tree bark. It was one of those stinky trees—she could never remember what they were called—the little white flowers filling the air with a scent that made her nose scrunch up the moment she stepped outside to pull the garbage cans to the curb.

“Ah, the sweet smell of spring,” he would joke each year, hands on his hips, sucking a deep breath in through his nose. This year it would have to be her, taking the deep breath, making the joke. It was so painful, all the ways the world kept reminding her of what she had lost.

It had been almost unbearable this winter. Trapped in the house all alone. All the empty spaces. It felt absurd that she ever believed their place was too small.

She had started talking to him after an unexpected winter storm left icicles draped across every tree branch and electric wire. “What do we do if the power goes out?” she had asked him, as if he was sitting beside her on the couch, right there, ready to answer. It wasn’t a wish, not a call to some unseen realm where she believed he was listening, waiting for a distant day when she would join him. She thought that she could conjure him. If she asked the right questions, kept talking, an incessant babble that started in the morning and continued until she finally drifted to sleep at night, he would appear. She would bring him back, force him to stand in front of her and grab her by the shoulders the way he did that one night when they’d had too much to drink at Celeste’s engagement party and she’d started a fight about why he hadn’t proposed to her yet. On and on she went. She kept shouting at him through the closed bathroom door as he washed his face, brushed his teeth. Grabbed his arm as he went to pull back the covers and said, “No, let’s talk about this. We don’t go to bed angry.” He’d cupped his hands around her shoulders and squeezed hard, too hard. “For fuck’s sake, Liza. Just shut up and go to sleep.” The following week he’d asked her to marry him. He’d had the ring for three months.

Of course he never appeared, but after a week of drab weather and her nonstop chatter like the hum of a refrigerator filling the house with a steady, persistent sound, she thought she could see him. He was hazy at first, a form in the background of a close-up photograph, a blur of color and undefined shape. But then more and more he was there, moving through the house as he always had, standing beside her at the kitchen counter in the morning while she poured herself a bowl of cereal. She’d pour a second bowl and slide it over to him where it would stay all day, and into the next. Each day a new bowl was added until a week had passed and her countertop was clogged with bowls of soggy cereal and the house smelled of fetid milk.

“Oh, honey,” Celeste had said when she swung by Elizabeth’s house one evening with an already uncorked bottle of wine, a giant bag of peanut M&Ms, and a list of every action movie currently available on Netflix. She folded Elizabeth into the soft cushion of her body, quietly cleaned up the kitchen, gently suggested that perhaps a hobby would be helpful, something calming on which Elizabeth could focus her energy, like knitting or calligraphy.

Elizabeth had chosen the avocado pits instead. She imagined filling her yard with avocado trees, walking out in the morning—cool air, wet grass, soft golden light filtering through the leaves. With a basket on her arm, she’d slowly collect the ripening fruit. Maybe she would build a vegetable garden, plant a few berry bushes, turn her small yard into an orchard and live entirely off the land.

She stuck three toothpicks into the pit, filled a jar with water and gently set the avocado pit into place. She carried the jar into the dining room and shifted the other jars around on the windowsill to create space.

“Hello, my lovelies,” she whispered to the jars. “Can you even believe this beautiful morning we’re getting? What do you think about a bit of fresh air today?” She pushed open the window and a burst of cool, damp air rushed in. She inhaled it deeply. The sweet smell of spring. The scent of the world pushing forward, starting over. Of roots awakening, yawning and stretching their arms wide. Of green life blinking open in the sunlight.

She inspected each of the avocado pits for signs of growth. No roots snaking down into the water. No cracks in the smooth brown shells of the seeds. No tiny sprouts pushing skyward.

“You can do this,” she said, gently touching the top of each pit with the tip of her finger. “Take your time. There’s no rush.” She would wait patiently. It was amazing, she thought, how sometimes the world changed in an instant, flipped upside down so that one second it looked one way and the next it was completely unrecognizable. And how other times it changed only by force, through steady deliberate effort, the quiet will to push forward again and again, up and out of the dark, to make a series of tiny cracks through the hard surface of the world, everything slowly bringing itself back to life. It was glorious really. Painful and heartbreaking, and quite nearly too much to bear, but beautiful in both its complexity and simplicity.

The avocado pits would grow. She could feel it. She believed it.

“You’re doing fine,” she said aloud. “Keep going. You’re doing fine.”

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