make it a celebration.

on synchronicity, surgery, and liberation.

Even though it’s been almost twenty years now since my dad passed away, the anniversary being this month on the 24th, I still find myself in conversation with him, especially when I can’t quite see the next step to take. Not as much as when I was younger, but sometimes in those moments where I feel like I’m on a tightrope, feeling cautious about each step forward.

There’s been so much silence in my life lately and I’ve been fighting the impulse to fill it. Last month in particular, around my birthday, I just asked simply: “You still there?”

A few days later I got a request to host a one-off class at CUNY Medical School, and not thinking much of it I followed my GPS uptown. Something about the walk to campus from the subway felt familiar in my bones in a preverbal way. All of a sudden it clicked into place. I remembered taking the Red & Tan in with my dad to City College where he taught until he got sick.

He’d sit me on the scratchy bus seat next to him with a bag of chocolate Flipz as he looked through the stories he was going to teach. I sat at the back of the classroom, my feet swinging above the muted tiles, and listened to his students go on and on about meaning making. I was maybe five or six years old. I followed him through the cafeteria, and as he worsened, sometimes I was the one who helped lead us back home.

“Oh,” I said, laughing to myself as the bloom of West Harlem cherry blossoms filled the streets ahead of me. “There you are.”

When I met my host, she had on a “Trust God” t-shirt. She seemed like a safe person to tell of the synchronicity. She smiled and said, “My dad worked for City College, too.”

I hid the fact for a long time that my dad was a writer all throughout college and halfway through graduate school until some of these synchronicities got too loud to keep hidden—two of his old friends crossed paths with me at Rutgers and I was outed. Or, rather, I had a choice. Did my identity as a writer really hinge on me not being seen as the daughter of another? Why did I fear that so much? Was it a sense of being in another’s shadow? Being seen as a copycat? A nepo baby? Why that instead of part of a lineage?

I think it’s because it mattered so much to me then to know that I was choosing this path for myself and to know I was belonging to the spaces I was in because of my own talents. Most of my dad’s books had short small press runs anyway, and as my dreams grew bigger I worried, in an even more private way, he might judge me for taking a different path.

I take synchronicities as nudges—whether with him or other important people in my life. I don’t always know what to do with them, those significant encounters, but I notice them, collect them, keep them as evidence that the tethers are still there between us and hope their meanings will be revealed to me in doing so. But it can be hard at times to wonder if you’re the only one who notices, if chance encounters register as significantly for others as they do for you.

I wrote about my dad, synchronicity, and imagination for StoryQuarterly as I was graduating from my MFA at Rutgers in 2018, the secret now fully out, and in the years that followed I continued finding bits of my dad scattered on my path. Hosting a screening of his film The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, which had a resurgence after 40 years of public disappearance, which I also wrote about here and here, but I do still struggle with how to balance his story alongside my own. When to stand alongside and when to stand alone.

Lately, I’ve been reading more strictly other women writers (my current pile below).

But really what I’ve been doing is spending most of my time away from the page listening. Last week, I got to see Beth Howard, the Appalachia Peoples Union Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice, for her launch of Song for a Hard-Hit People at Housing Works in Soho on invitation from friend and dedicated anti-racist organizer alyssa smaldino who was co-hosting the event alongside the launch of her magazine documenting white anti-racist organizing efforts, Libertroph (and who—synchronicity!—had a poem next to mine in the latest issue of Courage to Care’s journal The Arrow for their special issue on water as movement practice).

A few days later I went to an incredible panel for PEN World Voices on “The Lives of Animals: The False Divide Between Humans and Non-Humans” with Sangamithra Iyer, María Ospina, Kate Zambreno, and Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian. It felt like the exact room I needed to be in, surrounded by writers and readers who don’t need to be convinced animals belong in literature in what may seem at first to be strange or unruly ways.

Then, on Saturday, I loaded Ziggy up and we spent the afternoon in Prospect Park with friends I hadn’t seen in quite a while, many of whom took care of Ziggy for the hardest years of me learning to balance my mom’s illness with teaching and writing and simply trying to make a life. They showed up time and again when I was panicked for last minute care and struggled to make it home in time.

Then, Sunday, I got in some good movement at a theater and stayed at work on this new story.

I have surgery tomorrow, so how could I not also make that symbolic? I wrote about the first of these surgeries in a poem that no, dear put out, which I read publicly for the first time when I was in Knoxville for a residency. I was thinking of those weeks in Tennessee at Beth Howard’s launch. Last minute, we turned our reading into a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi—it was the summer post-Roe—and I felt really energized by how explicitly the southern artists I was reading with wove their art with activism.

A woman came up to me after and asked, “Was that an IUD poem?” I nodded, laughing: “Yup.” She had to get hers surgically removed, too. Now, five years later, almost to the day, the scarring left from that first surgery has to come out. It’s a pretty vulnerable surgery to get, minimal as it is, and sometimes even feels embarrassing to mention. But why? I’m not the one who left the scars.

One of my friends encouraged me to see the surgery as a celebration, especially with it occurring on a holiday dedicated to liberation (Cinco de Mayo). A clearing, the welcome of a healed womb, a healed home.

I’ll take it.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get done this coming week or what recovery will look like, but as far as messages from the beyond go, I think I’ll keep this one close.

And, to whoever is out there listening, I hope you will let your synchronicities speak to you, too. That we can discover their meaning—

j