It’s hard to know where to begin, though in the days after my mother’s death, I've felt, and I feel, a beginning.

Everything I’ve written in the last few weeks has been in one of my two ongoing notebooks, handwritten. I think I’ve devoted just one hour to transcription.

Many more hours reading. Thinking. Everything that comes under the umbrella of “grieving,” I may have done it.

My mother was buried under a Taurus sun and a Scorpio moon. These are my natal placements—the locations of the sun and moon when I was born. Is this full circle?

I love the signs in the cemetery that remind us that coyotes may pass through at any moment.

More than once, the image from the movie Poltergeist has come to mind, where the house, having basically vomited up all the dead bodies buried underneath it in its final scene, folds into itself, over and over, until it becomes nothing but a beam of light that extinguishes itself. That is how this has felt. My mother, gone, along with her house, my childhood home: poof. A beam of light, eaten and swallowed by darkness.

Did this also happen to the house in the original Carrie? Remember that mother?

In between: a stash of unusual ashtrays unearthed from my mother’s garage, where S. had stowed them. Respite from the intense pain I’d been experiencing for months and months. I lapped up Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth just like I thought I would. Read this excellent essay by Stephanie Wambugu, author of the deeply engrossing and haunting Lonely Crowds, about Repetition, and Hjorth’s work in general.

Ashtrays like the ones we found remind me of my mother.

I also finished reading Darcy Steinke’s book This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith. I’d wondered, again, if this was fitting reading for this period I’m in, where pain, both bodily and emotionally, feel like they’ve plagued me. Interestingly, my pain began lifting while I read this book. I was walking through yet another door.

Speaking of thresholds, I read Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes. Every computer wants to change the title to Thresholds. The empty bubbles suggesting holes throughout the text calmed me, though the text was often troubling, in the best way.

Do you ever hold onto a book you’ve been excited to read and not read it immediately? That's what I’ve done to Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. I bought it when it came out, then wanted to savor just having it without diving in. Wtf is that?? Whatever it is, I did it, so when I started, I went slowly, then restarted it, and then, dove in. I’d also purposely not read anything about the book prior to reading it. So when I realized this was a book that lovingly and spiritedly troubles and emphasizes and shapeshifts a MOTHER figure, it felt like this was the right book for me to be reading right now. Truly, literally LMAO. And also CMAO.

CMAO

CMAO

CMAO

and also laughing.

In the midst of everything, my essay about designing my therapy office was published online and in print in the Los Angeles Times IMAGE Magazine.

Buy Excavation, Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja from Bookshop.org for a discount, plus support your local independent bookstore at the same time.