Las Dos Amys

La Otra Amy

I remember reading that Jesus was 33 when he died. They say that, after his crucifixion, he was laid to rest in a cave in Golgotha outside of Jerusalem. That he rose again after three days.

It’s funny, because I was 33, too, when I died.

I also rose again. Well, most of me did. But it took much longer than three damn days.

I turned 33 in San Francisco, California. I was there on vacation with my boyfriend, Eike, at the time. We were happy. We took a ferry to Alcatraz and had expensive French macarons to celebrate my birthday. I can still feel that hot sun and the cool air, his hand in mind. The expansiveness. The joy. The safety. How handsome he was to me. How he belonged to me.

I had no fucking idea what was coming my way.

If I could go back now and meet the 33-year-old girl I was on that day, I would hug her, fiercely, and whisper that somehow it would all be okay in the end. She would look at me and know, somehow, that I am her future self, but wonder why she has gained 25 pounds and has more wrinkles and a weary look in her eyes. But more than anything, she would wonder why I was telling her that it would all be okay in the end.

“What will be okay in the end?” she would ask.

I would look into the calm oceans of her eyes and feel such a strong desire to reveal the future. But that isn’t how it works, is it? I couldn’t just tell her everything that is going to happen. Wouldn’t that effect the trajectory of… everything?

So I would just face her nostalgically and breathe. Breathe.

I wouldn’t tell her that her father’s ten-year prognosis isn’t correct—that it’s actually only seven months—that he will take his last breath in January 2019. That there will be moments she wishes are not reality. But they will be very, horribly real. Moments in hospitals and on phone calls that will break her heart and slice reality into pieces and shake it up.

I wouldn’t explain that she has to feel it all—that holding in all the pain will backfire in several ways, like insomnia, or losing handfuls of hair, or getting soft and round in the belly. And I certainly wouldn’t advise her to hug her dad close and feel how warm his body is while it’s still warm and full of circulating blood. I wouldn’t tell her that someday she will forget the way he smells, or how his voice sounds when he calls her his ‘little bee.’ Or that she will want nothing more than to receive one of his all-caps Facebook messages about the weather in Buffalo.

I couldn’t tell her that it took two and a half years to spread his ashes in the woods behind the house on Short Road. It would break her heart to know that no one takes care of those woods anymore since dad died, so they’re overgrown with twisted vines and thorny branches. She wouldn’t need to know that it was humid on that summer day she threw the ashes in the air with tear-blurred vision, dust clinging to her skin, and ask if he was there somewhere, watching. And that the feeling of closure she’d assumed the act would gift her, didn’t occur as she imagined.

He never talks back anymore.

I wouldn’t tell her that that handsome boyfriend she has, holding her hand and looking at me awkwardly beside her, won’t understand her grief and will sell their house just a month after her dad dies. And that she will feel herself drifting farther and farther from him and their life together, which feels like getting lost at sea in darkness.

It would be cruel to mention that she never finds her way back to him, and that everything he says in a letter after they break up about how grateful he is to have known and loved her will fade and distort and lose its meaning. Or that he will start texting a girl named Isabelle even before they break up and that he and Isabelle will be happily married by the fall of 2021. That Amy in San Francisco would never believe it. Never.

She would never believe me if I said then—to top it all off—in between all this pain, all this loss and darkness, that a pandemic is going to hit the planet and shake everything up. Everything. That there will be cold, empty nights on the couch, wondering if a person can die from loneliness?

She will die, not in the literal sense, but in her phoenix-like rebirth. She will have to build herself up time and again with each new shade of grief and understanding.

But I would never tell her any of this.

Don’t we all die several deaths in our lifetimes? Shed one thousand skins? Hear our bones straining under the weight of all the lives we are not living?

“It will all be okay in the end,” I would whisper to my younger self. “Because you’ll have yourself.”

When I back away from her, a mirage whose legitimacy she will question, will she cling to Eike like he’s the answer? Up until now, a man has always been the answer. She doesn’t know this on that day in San Francisco in 2018, but she is the answer. To everything. She is the answer.

If Jesus had lived to 36, would he have wanted to warn his 33-year-old self about his imminent death? About Judas’ betrayal? About all the pain awaiting him? Would he have run? Or taken more risks? Or loved harder? Would he have protected himself?

Or would he have let it all happen exactly as it had?

To become new. Transformed.