Maybe it’s because I finished a very messy-feeling first draft of Geranium today and sent it to my friend to look over, or maybe it’s because I walked home from dinner and the Oh Sees show rather than taking an Uber, but I am a bit adrift looking back on everything that’s happened in the short-ish 13 years since I graduated from college. When I was a junior I met my friend Courtney at a writing conference and we started trading poems sometimes over email. Her pieces always felt shocked, like they had just been pulled from the dryer and had something to say about it, and they made the hair on my arms stand up whenever I read them. She was nice about it, but my poems were not even close and one time after a particularly bad attempt at being clever, she told me to stop. “You need to read Jack Gilbert” she wrote, and followed up either then or a bit later with a commandment that stated that I was created to write prose poetry, or something sort of theatrical to that effect. I didn’t know what that was, but I got a copy of Refusing Heaven like she ordered and set off into the vast, metallic expanse of Gilbert’s Pittsburghian strict joy.

She passed away at the end of last year, and I don’t like talking about it all that much. I sat with Allie and Logan at her funeral, two of my best friends whom I met through her, and I couldn’t stop thinking about a line from the first Jack Gilbert poem she sent me all those years ago: “But anything/worth doing is worth doing badly.” I think it’s natural when someone you care about that much passes away to feel like you failed them, but after a few weeks I realized I was just having a hard time coming to terms with how much I did not want her to be dead. My lifelong struggle with grief has always been with how simple it is, and this particular version was no exception. What I really meant by wishing I had emailed her last summer when I remembered I had never sent her a copy of Ramona like she asked, was that I wish that it did not matter that I forgot. Voila.

On my drive home from her funeral I told her that it was the worst time I’d ever had in Fairfax county and laughed about the time she showed up to drinks years earlier dressed like Miss Havisham or something close to it. Maybe she said something back, and maybe she didn’t, driving at night through the piedmont is a fickle business and Virginians are particularly good of hearing what they want to hear. But after that I cried about writing for a healthy chunk of miles, I guess, or the things writing does to us in addition to what it brings through us. Or maybe it was only over what life does to us, and writing had nothing to do with it. I’m not sure. But since then, I’ve continued to go back to two pieces: the first Jack Gilbert poem she ever made me read, and best poem I think she ever wrote. I’ll change my mind about that at least a few more times, but tonight it’s true and I’m going to leave both of them with you: