april: molting

i am laughing at my fate.

In April I ride a Ferris wheel of my emotions. I am insane with euphoria, embittered with betrayal. I want to know which feeling is most real, which is most me, but they are too fleeting to pinpoint. I ride the wheel in circles. I am dizzied with distress, I am radiant with resilience, I am laughing at my fate.

I wake up and have to be reminded of all of the facts about my life again, as if I have forgotten them. I wake up with a hole in my stomach, I can touch it with both hands.

For four days I learn to make a map of my anatomy, finding feelings in the divots between flesh and bone, muscle and tendon. I press each point hard, the sensation like pressing on a bruise. I am seeking some sense of release.

Did your world implode? Did you feel the universe shift around you, sucking you in just to spit you out, leaving you astounded and alone? Did you think, this cannot be happening in the most fleetingly beautiful season of the year?

Did it happen anyway?

Did your pain highlight the surrounding beauty or mute it? Did you find the world more miraculous around you, or less so? What I want to know is, in times of trouble, does the world magnify and mirror your pain, or does it do the opposite?

Does it offer you a moment of reprieve?

(L: Sidewalk of Trampled Blossoms, R: Revenge by Yoko Ogawa)

I grieved a death with no body, a loss that infected every cell of my blood but was invisible to the outside world. What was real and what was imagined? I held a blossom in my hand and thought it was real, it was tangible, it could be touched. I held my pain in my hand and thought the same.

I was blind to any art I encountered, though I found a sense of magic in the molting trees, the branches peppered pink and green, the sidewalks full of forgotten shreds, tossed petals waiting to become trampled. I always associate April with new growth, but I forget that April is also immersed in loss.

By the time the pink cherry blossoms bloom, the magnolias are already wilting, the daffodils have withered, the weeping cherry blossoms have cried their petals away.

(L: Having and Being Had by Eula Bliss, R: Brooklyn Mid-Bloom)

I find portals through the phone. They say the phone works two ways, which means if you can call anyone, and they can also call you. But did you know that the phone can also move you back in time, forward in space?

My friend and I speak stories from the past until we are again eighteen, recounting all of the things we said to each other, when we didn’t yet know what the future could hold. I am amazed how painless it is to traverse the past. It doesn’t hurt at all.

Deborah Levy said it’s a suffering world and a nourishing one. There are many things that provide sustenance.¹

I read a book I’ve read before, about work and labor. I read a book made up entirely of two conversations, mirror halves, one by a father, one by a son. I read a book about grief and remember what I have always known, that life carries no fairness, relies on no logic. At times I focused singularly, I felt solace within the books. At others I felt, the vast pointlessness, as if I were playing a rigged game.

I worry about the lives of everyone I know, but never my own. I remind myself that this is its own unique talent.

April 2026

• Having and Being Had by Eula Bliss (Riverhead Books, Published 2020)

  • Thoughts: Always in fashion to re-question capitalism

• Revenge by Yoko Ogawa, Translated by Stephen Snyder (Picador, Published 2025)

  • Thoughts: The dark thrill of feminine anger

• Transcription by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Published 2026)

  • Thoughts: The medium is the message

• Grief is the Things with Feathers by Max Porter (Graywolf Press, Published 2016)

  • Thoughts: No two griefs feel the same

(Found Tree Trunk Shrine)

Waldman, Katy. “Deborah Levy’s Search for a Major Female Character.” The New Yorker, 18 June 2023, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/deborah-levys-search-for-a-major-female-character.

1.