I'm cleaning up here.

This domain has been a place to practice my essays, examine the oddness of my speech and query for deeper meaning.

It seems to be only useful to me; how rude to require so much space.

The problem seems to be that I've had no clear image of my social role; I come and go too frequently, learning to be nomadic long before I adopted that label. That ambiguity seems selfish, self-harming, and harmful to all of my relationships.

I have, at moments, experimented with abandoning even the idea of 'friends'; a mental exercise in rearranging all of my connections so that people became 'colleagues', or 'pals', or a 'buddy'. The only reason I've gotten close to anyone at all seems to be our full disdain for labels or rules; perhaps we are saying good-bye to one another now also.

I could belabor the causes of my irresponsibility over the last few years; though I'll summarize by saying that I became housing-insecure a few months before my grandpa died in 2019. I was running from my family then, and I got pulled back to his deathbed when I was still angry as hell at the people around me.

Because of this death, I failed to realize I messed up a budding relationship. I messed up badly, bringing all of my issues into her home when she was asking for me to be someone finally reliable after years absent. I failed to make sense or find meaning in nearly anything she said.

When our relationship broke, she described my condition as a mental health issue - perhaps I'd done nothing to dissuade this, after the abuse I'd been through from my family. That abuse had included forced psychotherapy (an experience that would recur), so I simply lost any and all faith the day she walked away from me; my disdain for an easily co-opted healthcare regime, and for my family who co-opted it, was easy to extend to this friend who could not read the pain in my eyes. The feeling was easy to spread to all of my friends.

Somehow, seven years passed.

Each moment felt like being chased.

Today I'm going to see my dying grandma - again, and now in hospice care. her husband passed seven years ago, and I was there at the moment he passed, and I feel a need to be here at the moment my grandma goes, also. I did take her married surname from my mom, and this is side of the family that always displayed far more sense to me.

At this moment in my life, I'm seeing or reading of friends raising children. My siblings both began raising newborns this summer. There is a mad rush of fertility, perhaps. And here I am, a death doula.

I don't have anyone to share the feelings; my siblings went home to their children, and I've formalized my relationships with parents to the degree that we no longer share meals. Why did I feel a need to build such boundaries? I'm sure the grief of death affects me too much. I'm sure I'll need the boundaries when I say goodbye to them again in a few days.

I'm sure I did too much, years ago, to try to rely on people during my grief when they were also insecure.

Of course I feel as though all I've done is fallen over the last seven years.... and look at all of us. Who could possibly claim success?

I'm glad, for the moment, that my grandma's death remains ahead of me. Death has a reality, if you can gaze seriously enough, wherein each moment has meaning.

How odd for a death to be so prolonged.

I plan to go back east soon to help on journalism focused on reductions in gun violence.

How odd for a death to be so prolonged, and how odd to be glad, for the moment, that my grandma's death remains ahead of me. Maybe there's more I need to say.