In ways I can’t name, I am already gone.
On the paranormal, light, loss, and lullaby as contract.
This Substack began in a different place than where it ended.
Two nights ago, I woke from sleep to the sound of a music box. It was sharp, carnivalesque, and oddly close—hovering near my left ear. I had earlier returned from visiting a friend in the city, where we had high tea at the Mandarin Oriental, high above Columbus Circle, looking out over Central Park. There, we ate crab-kimchi tarts, radish and cucumber sandwiches, vanilla scones with ginger jelly and clotted cream. During lunch, my friend—who recently experienced a significant loss—and I spoke about grief, but also clairvoyance, telepathy, mediums, and the book Signs.
That night, back at my parents’ house, I rocked Aoife to sleep and went to bed early—only to be woken by the music. I couldn’t figure out where it had come from or how it had reached me.
The following day, Easter Sunday, my mom went down to the basement to investigate possible sources. She returned with two: both long packed away. Neither could have been near my ear the night before, but then again, aside from my pillow, nothing was.
First, we tried the twirling teddy bear on its green stand—a gift to the brother I never met from my mother’s closest friend. The now 41-year-old porcelain bear, when wound, lifted one leg in an unbalanced whirl. The melody it let out was fractured, the tune so old and worn it struggled to hold a note. I shook my head—it wasn’t what I had heard.
Then we played the second: a snow globe that belonged to my dad’s mom. As it played, flurries fell around two white-and-brown birds and the song spilled out in thin, tinkling notes. I turned to my mom and said, This.
Just like this.
Though the melody was fast-paced and right in sound, the song itself was harder to recognize—its notes interrupted by a steady clicking. Curious, I flipped the globe over to examine the source of the hiccup, only to find myself stunned. Palming the glass, I saw the bottom and that the bottom read, White Christmas.
What follows was not altered. It, including the passage about White Christmas—and my grandmother, was written the day before I went to the city, the day before my friend and I spoke of—and to—Signs, the day before I heard the music box song play near my ear. A music box song eerily similar to the snow globe my mom unearthed from the basement, a snow globe that once played mellifluously White Christmas for my grandmother, the same grandmother I decided to bright about only 36 hours earlier.
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Everything seemed to be going wrong while I was recording.
There was a faint but persistent background noise, a specter of a ghost.
My parents’ landline was ringing.
The abstract Picasso-like ceramic face I bought for $19.99 at Home Goods—the one I wanted to pair with a plant in a white pot and a white frame framing an orange-and-white vase—was not in the shot.
My inability to connect to the internet extender in the second-story loft was a source of lag.
My earbuds kept slipping from my ears, and I kept holding them to my cheeks like my grandmother’s clip-on pearls.
Midway through, Chrome told me I didn’t have enough storage to record, then the podcast host told me I was no longer recording.
When we were done, after I apologized profusely to the organizer, I cried—having asked for silence in the house for this singular moment.
When I finally dried my eyes, Aoife came barreling in—home from a walk along Connecticut’s shoreline with my parents and M. In her arms, Aoife was cradling a stuffed pink bunny, and the pink bunny was carrying a pink stuffed egg. She had won it in a crane game in a restaurant I used to go to with my own grandparents for belly-less clam strips in the summer. Her little burnt-orange dress with blue and red and forest-green flowers now so short you could almost see her diaper. She had grown an inch, maybe two, since I had last seen her—which was two hours ago and also yesterday and also six months ago.
*
This month, time passed quickly.
The air felt colder. The sun felt warmer. I flew to California and then I flew back. I read the news and didn’t know what to do. I tried to understand what was happening on campuses, in Congress, overseas, with visas, and green cards, and prisons. I clicked into spreadsheets with law firms’ names highlighted in pink. I clicked into spreadsheets with law firms’ names highlighted in green. I read an article about a national marine monument ordered “open” to commercial fishing. I watched six wealthy women fly into space for eleven minutes. I saw one twirling a daisy around a lens as an ode to her daughter. I saw less of my own daughter. I wrote and rewrote a single paragraph. I left my phone in another room and felt a flicker of peace. I listened to a playlist called clair de lune type songs on repeat. I thought about how Aoife needs to learn to play the piano when Aoife was not in the room. I thought about how I should also learn to play the piano with Aoife in the room when Aoife was not in the room. When Aoife was not in the room, I typed. I researched. I dragged and dropped. I formatted. I reformatted. I bulleted. I re-bulleted. I downloaded fonts. I typed emails. I wrote reviews. I recorded podcasts. I missed a moment of her growth and then another. I didn’t see her learn to point out her magnets correctly—giraffe, panda, lion, tortuga. I didn’t see her blow bubbles through a pink plastic wand over my parents’ back porch. I didn’t see her practice yoga with M—mimicking Baby Cobra by lifting her tiny head. I missed her scrape her cheek, bump her elbow, stub her toe, say the word “cheese,” become obsessed with “Goo Goo” (Google Home).
And yet, every night, I took a step away from it all—the spreadsheet cells and 80-page decks and infinite headlines and let-them-eat-cakeness of the women who took to the air—to rock her to sleep.
The rocking not a nice-to-have.
The rocking: non-negotiable.
*
Sometimes, after her bottle, Aoife rolls over and puts her curled palm under her chin and she looks not like herself. She looks like someone else. She looks like long ago. She touches my nose and from behind her peach binkie says “nose.” She paints her little fingers over my eyes and says “eyes.” Then—at the last—she cups my mouth. I pretend-eat her fingers and wonder if she wants me to sing.
The singing started several months ago. My setlist small and patchwork, my voice off-key, yet sonorous. There is Over the Rainbow and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah with its over 80 verses, whom I only hear in Jeff Buckley’s voice. There’s Moon River and I’ll Be Seeing You and The Hunger Games' anthem The Hanging Tree, which I rightly juxtapose against Amazing Grace.
A month ago, while taking a Tabata ride with Peloton’s Ally Love, I heard Beyoncé’s rendition of Blackbird. Worrying over a newly scheduled second endoscopy for a third potential surgery, I bawled when Ally said, “You’re at the halfway point, and the way home is always easier.” I decided then and definitively that Blackbird and “singing in the dead of night” needed a spot in my set.
When I sing to Aoife, the lullabies which aren’t quite lullabies take the shape of sing-song, vocal riffs, tender fabrication.
When I get to the two lines in The Hanging Tree that are mutable—“Where dead man called out/For his love to flee,” “Wear a necklace of hope/Side by side with me”—I iterate, with most iterations stemming from the ideas of freedom, escape, flight.
When I get past the non-specifics in I’ll Be Seeing You—the seeing of the “you” in the sun and the moon and in the feeling of lightness and gaiety, to the tiniest, collapsed arc of the past relationship’s peaks—"in that small cafe, the park across the way, the children's carousel, the chestnut trees, the wishing well"—I lengthen the memory, take detours, hit roundabouts, make it my own: the maple leaf, a hummingbird, the pier and pylons, the bakery, the dying stream.
A few days ago, when Aoife had trouble sleeping and my usual setlist ended, I began to sing her White Christmas, a song that reminds me of my grandmother who loved to belt out Christmas carols on the way to New Haven every Christmas Eve—and a song I recently learned blared across Saigon in April 1975 as a coded evacuation signal, telling the Americans living and working in the city to “come home,” to make their way up and through the streets to the embassy. When I sang it, the confluence of the two images—my grandmother with licorice gummied in her molars, the Americans being called home—made me tear up, and, unhappy with the wobble in my voice, Aoife covered my mouth and said “No, Ma” or “No More.”
While her words were unclear, the meaning was. She was done with my singing, or at least done with Christmases and Christmases that were white.
*
In Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Adina—the alien-turned-girl—faxes her superiors and reflects on humanity’s rituals around pain:
“When we are in pain, human beings sing Amazing Grace. It has transcended religious, cultural, and racial context and is about the basest of human culture, which is suffering. The more we live, the more we lose, the more we believe we are lost. The song says, if you remain elegant you will be found. It might take a while…Hang in there and you will receive grace. Grace is unmerited kindness. Unmerited because you are a wretch which is a synonym for human which is a synonym for flawed. Grace, a place to store loss.”
Not all lullabies I’ve learned are lullabies. Some are containers for loss, for remembering the losing that has yet to come. Some are more about finding. Some are about freedom. Some are spells disguised as songs. Some are safeguards, preserving the present. Some are simply survival.
In Basque songs, mothers tell their babies not to cry, because the wolves might hear. In a Sardinian lullaby, there’s a line: “Sleep, sleep, little one / or the hunger will come for you.”
Lullabies live as contracts—between mother and child, darkness and light, love and letting go. You sing what you can’t say, are too ashamed to speak. I’m tired. I tried my best. I’m doing all I can. I want to be here. For you—and forever. But I miss you. I am already leaving you in ways I can’t name. In ways I can’t name, I am already gone.
Even in the softest songs, there’s something beneath the rocking, beneath the shush. Apology coded as melody. Mourning as memory. The song says sleep, but it also says, I’m sorry. Stay safe. Stay mine. Be strong.
It is the longest—hardest—goodbye.
*
Outside of my branding work, I am working on a project that involves cyanotype—particularly, cyanotypes of flowers and botanicals. I’ve been perusing Pinterest for the ghostlike presences of maidenhair fern, ginkgo leaves, Queen Anne’s lace, anemones, chicory, yarrow, violet. They are high contrast, radiating, raggedy, clustered. With thin petals and thick centers, light in this medium is at the flowers’ mercy—some of it passing through, some blocking it. The cyanotype capturing what was once as what is forever, saying, This bloomed. This was here—all in a deep Prussian blue.
I’ve learned the here here starts quietly, though. The making: just a surface, just a solution.
When creating a cyanotype, a person coats a porous surface with a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. When dry—or damp, they place an object on it—a rose petal, a piece of lace, a negative, a feather, one’s own finger, one’s own hand. When done, they expose it to sunlight for several minutes and rinse it in water—the exposed parts turning over, turning blue. The result: a ghost-recording of what was touched, of what once was.
Please just go to sleep was once a thought I had when I rocked Aoife to sleep—but not anymore. Anymore, when I rock her, I am thinking about how the act is important—even if it’s only fifteen minutes, even if it’s as long as an hour. I think that she is safe. That she is warm. That she has milk. That she has a residue of my voice. I am thinking I am singing to her to make her strong. The words don’t matter. They’re pure invention. They’re simply air. It’s the warmth in my throat. It’s the hum in her ear. My fingertip on a coated paper. My voice: the cessation of the darkness and the arrival of a stubborn kind of light.
*
This week, when I saw my baby come in with her little pink rabbit carrying its little pink egg, I didn’t think anything of it—was still thinking selfishly of the podcast, of my work, of everything I had to get done. But then when I pressed my parents, M, about the crane game, I remembered.
I remembered the machine with its white lights. I remembered how my sister and I would slip quarters into its mouth while sitting with my parents and my grandparents in the waiting room of the restaurant. I remembered if it was a Saturday and the wait was over an hour, we would go to the bar for sesame sticks and bright red Shirley Temples, maraschino cherries drifting atop like jewels. The restaurant sat atop what had once been something else—the restaurant’s old murals an ode to an older park, what they called Connecticut’s Coney Island. A park with a wooden rollercoaster and racetrack and 1,500-foot pier, named for the savin trees and the rocky coast.
Now the restaurant and the park it sits atop just a negative. Just air. The shape of something that once touched light, or warmth in the throat. Like the children’s carousel and the chestnut trees, the sound of White Christmas over a speaker in Saigon and a tired mother and her tired baby—rocking, a lone cherry bobbing jewel-like in a crystal glass.