Queens, New York

Still as my heart, awaiting its hour.
– Gustav Mahler

May 25, 2022

These are impossible days. How to write these impossible days.

I am knocking on the door of language. I am looking through the windows but the curtains are drawn. The lights are out. I press my palm against my chest, breathing into my heartbeat. Wanting to know if I am still here. Wanting to know where I am now. Where is here? I pluck an Ativan from a sandwich bag full of pills and dry swallow. If I cannot write these impossible days I will sleep. I will sleep until I can write. But the days keep coming.

It is late spring and the light is still growing, the days lengthening, widening. When I open the curtain I am swallowed by the gaping light.

June 1, 2022

Day of impossible days. The relentlessness of the present continuing. The spring insisting on widening the light, expanding toward summer. Grind me down to grit and toss me into the grass, like water exhausted from tumbling stones. Stones ground to smooth or maybe a sharpened edge. Maybe to slice open the gut. Maybe to let in the expanding light. The brightness is a bouquet of serrated beams. Grief is a blinding light, streaming intense, cooking the senses. To be dazzled by grief is to feel the self sliced into shards like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Turning, turning, into new shapes of the self, new patterns of the self, all of it cutting and fitting and not fitting and turning again.

Looking through the windows of language like looking through a kaleidoscope, the sounds of the self falling into new arrangements, reaching for a recognizable fragment of the self, hints of the former, anything to name it, but only cutting away what little remains with the burning, dazzling blade.

The light is coming in.

June 9, 2022

Impossible day.

The relentless present continuing. We are in New York.

We are:

Me. Kristen. Mom.

Jason. My ex-husband. Dad.

Miles. Our son. 16. Quiet.

Not Sophia, our daughter. 18. She is at the Connecticut State Medical Examiner’s lab. They are inspecting her body. Cutting her open. Testing her blood. Weighing her. They will write a report and release her to the funeral home when they’re done.

The funeral home director will call us. He will say, “We have Sophia in our care.” He will ask when we want to come. He will ask if we want to see her before sending her to the crematorium.

The medical examiner will send a report in the mail. It will say:

RE: Medical Record Amendment

M.E. Case Number: 22-107—, Sophia ——

Date of Death: 05/12/2022

Dear —:

The examinations pertaining to the death of Sophia —— have been completed and an
amended certificate of death filed with the Registrar of Vital Statistics in — . The cause of death has been determined to be Acute intoxication from the combined effects of fentanyl, escitalopram, and despropionyl fentanyl (4-anpp).

The manner of death has been determined to be Accident.

EXTERNAL EXAMINATION:

The body is of a well-developed, well-nourished, average-framed, 62”, 100 lb, white woman whose appearance is consistent with the given age of 18 years. The straight,
brown hair measures up to 6”. The nose and facial bones are in tact. The eyes have
brown irides and the conjunctivae are without hemorrhage, petechiae, or jaundice. The
external genitalia are of a normal woman.

POSTMORTEM CHANGES:

There is moderate rigor mortis of the upper and lower extremities, neck, and jaw.
Lividity is pink, fixed, and posterior. The body is cool.

CLOTHING:

The body is clad in a sports bra and shorts.

INTERNAL EXAMINATION:

BODY CAVITIES:

The organs are in their normal situs. The pleural and peritoneal cavities contain no
fluid, hemorrhage, or adhesion.

HEAD:

The scalp has no contusion. The skull has no fracture. There is no subgaleal, epidural,
subdural, or subarachnoid hemorrhage. The brain weighs 1370 grams and is normal in size and shape. The cerebral hemispheres are symmetrical with the usual pattern of sulci and gyri. The leptomeninges are thin and glistening.

[Thin and glistening, I will repeat these words and then think:
Sophia is cut open on a table in a lab and her brain is thin and glistening.]

The cerebral vessels are without aneurysms or atherosclerosis. The cranial nerves are normally distributed. The white and grey matter, deep nuclei, and ventricles are unremarkable. There are no focal lesions. The brainstem and cerebellum have the usual patterns on cut surface.

NECK:

The cervical vertebrae, hyoid bone, tracheal and laryngeal cartilages, and paratracheal soft tissues are without trauma. The upper airway is patent. The tongue is unremarkable.

CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM:

The heart weighs 250 grams and has a normal distribution of coronary arteries without
atherosclerotic stenosis of the epicardial vessels. The myocardium is homogenous, dark
red, and firm without pallor, hemorrhage, softening, or fibrosis. The left ventricle wall is
1.3 cm and the right is 0.4 cm thick. The endocardial surfaces and four cardiac valves are
unremarkable. The aorta is without atherosclerosis. The venae cavae and pulmonary
arteries are without thrombus or embolus.

[And here there are photos. I will not look at the photos]

In accordance with the Administrative Regulations of the Commission of Medicolegal
Investigations, additional copies of Medical Examiner’s Office reports may be furnished
to you upon payment of the fee indicated on the enclosed form. It has been our
experience, because these are technical, medical documents that families often prefer to
have the reports sent to a physician or an attorney. If you would like to have reports sent
to someone other than yourself, please supply his/her name and address on the form.

If you have any questions concerning the examination, cause or manner of death, please contact Dr. —, M.D. at (860) 679——.

Very Truly Yours,

——, M.D.

Chief Medical Examiner

We wait for the call and the letter as New York City swelters into summer.

June 28, 2022

“What if I die of a broken heart? That’s a real thing, you know,” I say to my best friend Christine, who does know. Christine is an endocrinologist.

“Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy,” she says.

And then, “It’s possible. It happens.”

And then, “Please don’t.”

Takotsubo is a Japanese word that means octopus pot. It’s a ceramic container used by Japanese fishermen to lure octopuses out of the sea. The takotsubo has a narrow opening and a rounded base. It’s set in the sand at low tide or attached to a line and dropped into the depths. An octopus is always searching for a good hidey-hole. Unlike a human heart, an octopus is a most mutable thing; her malleable body changing colors and textures to blend perfectly with her surroundings. The octopus has no idea she’s been trapped until she’s hauled up from her benthic depths and decides to take a peek outside. With her dominant eye, she discovers the sea itself has disappeared, and she is somehow now in the land of its reflection, the other side of a formerly unknown horizon.

In this strange, new environment all of her tricks - chromatophores harmonizing in texture and tone with the environment, intelligent agile tentacles hurling objects at anyone and anything suspicious, squirting a stream of water from her siphon, or vanishing in an ink cloud like a magician disappearing in a puff of colored smoke - fail her. Her life changes into something she can’t adapt to. Octopuses have nine brains: a central brain in the head with one-third of her neurons. The other two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are distributed evenly among their eight tentacles, called tentacle neuron clusters. Something called a neural ring connects the eight branches, allowing for information and decision-making to bypass the central brain. Even with nine brains, I imagine that when she reaches her tentacles through the opening of a takotsubo that’s been pulled up into the boat, there’s a panic that overtakes her. Her tentacles flail wildly, seeking something to attach her suckers to and escape.

When a human suffers from takotsubo cardiomyopathy, the heart’s left ventricle inflates, taking the shape of an octopus trap. This kind of cardiac arrest is caused by a sudden strong emotion, like terror, or grief.

How to write these impossible days.

I am knocking on the door of language. I am looking through windows and then drawing the curtains, pinching the slice of light. Jason sleeps in his bedroom, the windows above the busy boulevard. Miles sleeps in his bedroom next to his dad’s. I sleep on the couch in the living room, the heart of the apartment. A shadowed chamber. When I open the curtains there is a brick wall. I close them and listen to the mechanical churning of the a/c, the water dripping to somewhere.

I recline on the couch and press my palm against my squeezing heart, willing it to burst and be done with it. Do it or don’t, I say. My heart says nothing, it just beats. Squeezes and tightens in my chest and then rests. Always beating.

My friend Beau, a classical music aficionado, recommends Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. He tells me M4 is one of his “grieving symphonies.”

“Mahler 4 to assuage pain - to the extent anything can,” he texts.

“Wait’ll you hit the adagio, it’ll rip your heart out,” he texts.

My heart pinches against my breastbone. Keeps beating. Can I live without a heart? Can I rip it out and keep going? My heart beats against my palm, I feel the rhythm of my thoughts pulse through her chambers.

“Mahler 9 when I just want to surrender to the enormity of it, the ubiquity,” he continues. “When someone I love dies those are my go-to works. But I have to use earbuds and sit and listen. No other activity, no interruptions, just listening, and crying.”

I put in my earbuds and lie down on the couch, held by the me-shaped negative space my body has created in the four weeks and counting that I’ve been lying here. I scroll through a music streaming service’s myriad offering of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and choose one: Claudio Abbado conducts the Berlin Philharmonic, September 1999. I press play for the first time, not knowing that this will be the only piece of music I will listen to for the next year.

My breath finds the arrhythmic cello of the opening movement of the 9th. Breathe. Imagine my heart is a clay pot set in the sand at low tide. The water rushes in and it’s buried, with just a lip to kiss the sky, a last gasp at the surface of the breaking water. Sophia is there, I think. In the sky. I gulp for her and the water still comes. The whole of ocean rushes over me.

I think about what it would be like if I had nine brains to my body. What body parts would they be? Just like the octopus, my main brain would be in my head. This is my central brain. After that?

I breathe into my mind and my throat. I breathe into the chambers of my heart space. My mind follows the breath into my diaphragm, my uterus and perineum and down the backs of my legs, swirl the breath in my mind at my knees, then sweep the final length of my calves and out through my soles. I listen to the first movement opening up and let the tones and vibrations enter my ears and find my breath and watch this coalescence of someone else’s ideas with my inhale, a convergence of inspiration and spirit, and watch it all travel through me like a current of breath music.

I visualize my blood flowing through the rivers of my veins, eddying through the ventricles of my heart. I visualize my daughter and drop her into the current, and like ink from an octopus, her image clouds the stream and she swims away. In my mind, Mahler conducts my vision and I find her again in each of my palms and press her against my chest, then feel her transfer from my pulse in my wrists into my chest. With my eyes closed I watch as she’s swept up in my currents of blood, lighting through each tingling breast, swirling down behind my gut, into my uterus to haunt her first home, continuing through me down to the sole of each foot. Hitched to my breath, from the vantage point of my mind, I see Sophia move through my body. I ask each part of me how it knows her now, how it senses her now.

Gustav Mahler composed the Ninth when he was living in New York City, from 1907-1911. He arrived in December, just 5 months after his daughter died of scarlet fever. When little María died Mahler went to New York and composed his final two symphonies: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and the Ninth Symphony.

María died and Mahler went to New York.

Sophia died and I went to New York.

When daughters die we go to New York. We lie in dark apartments and feel the squeezing of our hearts. We transcribe the odd rhythms of our bodies into new languages. When Gustav and Alma learned their daughters were sick with scarlet fever they separated the girls - María, the eldest, from Anna, the youngest - and stayed with the little one, believing she was more vulnerable. Little Anna recovered, but María, with whom Gustav was particularly close, did not. I don’t know who was with the child when she passed, but it was not her mother or her father.

The family suffered. Alma’s mother had a heart attack. She was afraid of the treatment so Gustav, wanting to comfort her, elected to have his heart checked, too. This is what scholars say happened. I know his secret, though. This squeezing that they found. One can’t describe it - there isn’t language for this cruelest thing, this kind of grief. It is an illegible emotion. One can’t speak it or read it or write it. It is only made legible by the body itself. One must find it in the body and then it can be translated to language. Or music.

Mahler has his heart checked to show his mother-in-law there’s nothing to fear of the procedure. Except his heart is the one found to be defective. Arhythmic. Not functional for much longer, the doctor tells him. Mahler has finished his Eighth Symphony and, being obsessive about his work, already thinking through how to take on writing the next piece when he receives this news. A dead child. A defective heart. All of this on the doorstep of his ninth, a cursed symphony. The superstition is that composers don’t live to write their tenth, the ninth is a thing to approach with caution. What are you trying to accomplish with your work? Have you done so yet? What number are you on? Best get to it. Beethoven didn’t make it to ten.

Nor did Bruckner.

Nor did Schubert.

Nor did Atterberg.

Nor did Dvořák.

Nor did Glazunov.

The list goes on.

Mahler, clever as an octopus, finds a workaround. He writes it, a ninth symphony. His next symphony after the eighth. But he writes the music and borrows text from a new German translation of the poetic works of Li Bai, Qian Qi, Meng Haoran and Wang Wei. He writes some lines of poetry (he can do it all!) and includes them, as well. He titles it Das Leider von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). And then a subtitle: A Symphony for Tenor, Alto (or Baritone) Voice and Orchestra. In this way, Mahler uses collaboration to bargain. He uses subtitle as denial. It is his ninth work but not his official Ninth Symphony. He’s collaborating with poets. Two vocalists join the orchestra to perform the voicing, to make legible the abstraction of his art. And then Mahler writes his official Ninth Symphony. Acceptance.

After an octopus lays her eggs, she dies. Scientists describe the end of life as the “octopus death spiral.” Their deaths are tragic: a hunger strike, a self-destructive progression caused by hormonal shifts after the work, the clutch of eggs, is created. Professor Clifton Ragsdale at the University of Chicago describes it as “a progression of changes where they seem to go crazy right before they die.” Some octopuses in captivity even seem to speed this up by mutilating themselves by tangling their arms [thin and glistening]. Like an octopus, Mahler doesn’t live long enough to conduct, or even attend a performance of Das Leider von der Erde or the Ninth Symphony. He begins composing his tenth and then his heart gives out.

July 10, 2022

In my dream Sophia is driving. The car is rolling backwards, accelerating to the point of speeding out of control down a hill, over lawns, green space. She covers her face and I’m pleading with her from the passenger seat.

Brake! I say. Stop the car! I say. Sophia, brake! Brake! Brake!

Sophia cries into her hands.

I love you! I love you! I love you! I say. I pull the emergency brake and feel the car slow. I reach over her and turn the steering wheel. We are still in reverse but I am able to alter the trajectory of the car now that it’s slowing. I don’t look back - the direction we’re heading - I just continue to steady the slowing car. I’m still telling her I love her and when the car finally rests, I wrap my arms around her. She cries and cries into her hands, she can’t take them from her face and she doesn’t stop crying.

I wake up.

Does an octopus dream? Can you imagine 9 brains dreaming? Can you imagine losing a brain, growing a new one, and how that might change the dreamscape? The wake-scape? Where does the octopus hold her memories? Is it possible that the trauma of losing a limb [thin and glistening] is not an experience an octopus has? Do the other tentacles look for the lost tentacle, mourn the loss, compare the new growth to what had been there before? Scientists have found that the neural loops in octopus arms possibly create their own form of memory. In a 2016 review of Peter-Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds, writer Carl Safina tells us: “She senses light and responds…An octopus is so suffused with its nervous system that it has no clear brain-body boundary.” There is no central/peripheral nervous system division. It is all the central nervous system distributed. Whole body thinking. Where are my tentacle neuron clusters?

I play Mahler’s Ninth and ask my body what it knows. I consult all parts and decide my additional eight brains are distributed thus: one in each palm, one in each sole. One in each breast. My gut, of course. My uterus. For two months I concentrate on what the world feels like through each of these brains – all of them thin and glistening - as I step through time and space, gingerly testing the borders of the darkened heart of Jason’s apartment.

One morning I awaken and my breasts have swollen and are tender to the touch. While in the shower, with the warm water soothing my skin, I gently massage each breast, kneading the dense tissue around my nipples with my fingers. My nipples are sore and feel chafed when I touch them or when I turn the front of my body into the shower stream. I cup my breasts and their weight is substantial in my hands. This is unusual. I’m a small-framed woman, weighing just over 100lbs. The only time in my life that I’ve filled a bra was when I was pregnant, and then nursing.

I turn away from the stream, allowing the water to run down my back as I apply gentle, comforting pressure to my breasts. As I continue this massage, a bead of brown milk blooms at my right nipple. I press a little harder and the bead becomes a trickle, the brown milk now dripping from each breast. I taste it and it’s sour and only comes when I coax it, this strange weeping.

What does the rest of my body know of this time? Grief is physical. It gets in the body and it does what it wants, each part an instrument expressing some sorrow, playing its part of my symphony, The Song of the Body. The milk will come for more than a year until one day in July it stops. I don’t know what to do with this information from these two of my tentacle neuron clusters, or breast neuron clusters. Sometimes grief makes the body illegible to itself. Sometimes grief is a brain injury.

Part of the Mahler’s 9th is a derivative of an earlier work, his Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children. This is a five-song cycle written 1901-1904. Mahler is writing about the loss of several of his siblings during their early impoverished childhood in Bohemia. He uses five of the German poet Friedrich Rückert’s poems for lyrics. Rückert, devastated by the loss of two of his children to scarlet fever, spent one year in a grief mania, writing poems. He wrote 428. Mahler wrote both Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and his Ninth Symphony during the four years between María’s death and his own.

Leonard Bernstein interprets the arhythmic cello, a recurring motif of the Ninth introduced in the first movement, as a representation of Mahler’s defective heart. It beats this way through four astonishing movements. Mahler, famous (or infamous) for annotating his compositions in German, is specific about the atmosphere he’s creating with this work. It is an abstract meditation on life, and through his German notes in each measure, he directs the musicians to play in a particular way to invoke a particular feeling.

After months of listening to the Abbado/Berlin Phil recording on repeat, I decided to look at the score. I wanted to see what this piece of music looks like, the marks Mahler made on the page. A quick Google search links me to a .pdf in the public domain. I download it. Print it out. Listen to the recording and look at the music, pressing my palms into the quarter notes, the half notes, the slurs. I hold the printout of Mahler’s brilliant composition as if I’m holding an ancient scroll, searching for a translation of the staff, the notes, the timing. In Italian, as expected, the tempo and movements, the title of the work, Neunte Symphonie, in a gorgeous art deco font. Gustav Mahler, (1860-1911) at the top right of score.

And then Mahler’s German annotations, a multitude of them, granular, the work of a micro-manager from hell, obsessively detailing how his ninth, an abstract meditation on life itself, should be played. I think about when Mahler wrote this - two years after María died - and as I round the corner on the first year of my own grief, I begin to translate his annotations. Maybe there are directions here for me, how to keep going. How to play this next movement. I want granular details. I want my survival to be micro-managed because even though I am doing it, I still don’t know how.

How do I play it? He directs:

Eingeklammerte Noten sind nicht zu spielen. - Pedal noch bedarf -Hoch -Oberstimme leicht hervortretend -Tief -Etwas frischer -Fließend -Aber nicht schleppend -Plötzlich Seher mäßig und zurückhaltend -Nicht eilen -Nacht etwas zögernd -Allmählich übergehen zu -Ausdrucksvoll -Allmählich fließender -Mit wut -Nicht zu schnell -Leiden schaftlicht -Über der rechten -Plötzlich langsamer -Des tempo so weit mäßigen, als nötig -Stark! -Schattenhaft -Weich -Hervortretend -Etwas drängend -Sehr zart -Bewegter -Höchste kraft -Mit höchster Gewalt -Einhaltend -Gehalten -Wie ein schwerer Kondukt -Wie von Anfang -Anwachsend -Plötzlich bedeutend langsamer und leise -Nicht mehr so langsam -Etwas belebter -Weich -Sehr zögernd -Schwebend -Zart hervortretend -In tempo eines gemächlichen ländlers -Etwas täppisch und sehr derb -Schwerfällig -Keck -Flott -Nicht eilen bis zum Schloß -Sehr trotzig -Wuchtig -Wie früher -Etwas gehalten -Mit großer Empfindung -Plötzlich wieder sehr langsam, (wie zu Anfang), und etwas zögernd -Aber unmerklich -Wie im leizten Takts -Übergreifen -Wieder alter -Stets sehr gehalten -Verklingend -Heftig ausbrechend -Noch breiter als zu Anfang - Sehr getrogen -Lang gezogen -Langsam und bis zum schluß -Äußerst langsam -Ersterbend -Ersterbend -Sehr zart aber ausdrucksvoll -Mist innigster Empfindung -Ersterbend -Ersterbend -

I use Google to translate. Not being a German speaker, my translation is literal, rather than interpretive or conceptual. This suits me fine, to be clumsy in knowing this new landscape of my life. This land of grief with no language.

Notes in brackets are not to be played

Pedal as necessary

Play it high, great, elevated, hell

Play it upper voice slightly protruding

Play it deep, low, profound

Play it a little fresher

Play it fluently, flowing, running, moving

Play it but not sluggish

Play it suddenly very moderate and reserved

Play it do not rush

Play it still a bit hesitant

Play it gradually transition to

Play it expressive, eloquent, powerful

Play it gradually more fluent

Play it with anger

Play it not too fast

Play it passionate, ardent

Play it above the right

Play it suddenly slower

Play it moderate the tempo as much as necessary

Play it strong!

Play it shadow-like, vague

Play it soft

Play it emerging

Play it somewhat urgent

Play it very tender

Play it more moved, varied, busy

Play it highest power

Play it with supreme force

Play it complying

Play it held, hold, keep, maintain

Play it like a heavy conduit, conduct

Play it like from the beginning

Play it growing, increasing

Play it suddenly significantly slower and quieter

Play it not so slow anymore

Play it somewhat busier

Play it soft, tender

Play it very hesitant

Play it floating

Play it tenderly emerging

Play it at the pace of leisurely country people

Play it somewhat clumsy and coarse

Play it ponderous

Play it bold

Play it fast, quick, lively

Play it don’t rush to the end

Play it very defiant

Play it massive

Play it like in old times

Play it held something

Play it with great feeling

Play it suddenly very slowly again, (as at the beginning), and somewhat hesitantly

Play it but imperceptibly

Play it as in the last measure

Play it encroach, infringe, cross one’s hands

Play it old again

Play it always very well kept

Play it fading away

Play it erupting violently

Play it even wider than at the beginning

Play it very worn

Play it drawn long, sustained

Play it slowly and to the end

Play it extremely slow

Play it dying

Play it dying

Play it very delicate but expressive

Play it with the deepest feeling

Play it dying

Play it dying

Throughout the score, which is a life, Mahler tells us how to play it: Spielen. Spielen. Spielen. All the way to the end: Spielen. Play it. Play it. Spielen. Play it.

I am looking for a map. If I am going to Spielen, to play it, this life, I have to rally my nine brains. I have to gather all of my sensational intelligence. I have to learn how to play it.

The last time I saw Sophia was when I landed at an airport in Leticia, Colombia. I connected to the shitty free Wifi and rang her up on FaceTime. I wanted to let her know that I made it safely, because it was always me who we presumed to be closer to danger since I was traveling into the Amazon. She was supposed to be safe with her father and brother, or at her aunt’s house, or with her grandparents. She was rotating among these households while I traveled to research for a writing project. We were talking about where she and I would go when I returned. Maybe Atlanta. Maybe New Orleans. We were staying open to possibility. Whatever was next, we were going together. But first I was going into the jungle.

“It’s finally nice here,” she said. She was at the park with her cousin and her cousin’s two young daughters. Early May can often be cool in the Northeast, but this day was a blue sky, bright sunshine promising one. Sophia was smiling, beautiful. Her dark hair plated in two, her brown eyes big and clear as the day, fringed by her naturally long lashes. The connection cut in and out, her image pixellating and then reconfiguring itself to her smiling face, her pink lips like petals. A minor constellation of freckles on the bridge of her nose. The audio stretched like dark matter being sucked into a black hole. She giggled. Her delight at being in the sun with these two little girls and her cousin was effervescent. These, all of the girls of my family, all of them lovely, spending the first nice day of the year playing in the young clover at the park. My beautiful, intelligent, comical, creative daughter saying, “I can’t wait to see you!” and, “It’s almost time for you to come home!” We ended the call and I went outside and climbed into a tuk-tuk waiting to take me to the river.

After four days in the village of Mocagua, I stepped onto the floating wooden palette that served as the water taxi station. The planks beneath my feet were soft, the grain yawning open in the hot, wet air. Tethered to the muddy shore with fraying rope and repurposed boards, the water taxi platform rocked and bobbed whenever a boat sped past powered by the whining rip of an outboard motor. The abundant verdure crept and clung, grasped forward into the sunlight, covering everything from beneath the surface of the muddy waters, the habitat of caiman and piranha, but I saw neither. I felt safe. As the water taxi pulled up, I repositioned my pack from my back to my belly so the weight of my clothes, snake boots, and notebooks wouldn’t pull me overboard when climbing up onto the bow.

The taxi driver took my paper ticket and handed me a life jacket as I stepped down into the cabin, which was already filled with travelers from other villages further along the Colombian Amazon. Most were headed to Leticia to catch a flight back to Bogotá, but in Leticia, I’d find another tuk-tuk to take me deeper into the jungle.

About 20 minutes into the two-hour journey, some darker clouds gathered and menaced the blue sky. The taxi driver stopped the boat in the middle of the river and climbed up on the roof to cover the sides of our open vessel with a tarp. The boat rocked in its own wake from the sudden stop, drifted counterclockwise in the brown water.

In this heat, in this humidity, the tarp sealing in the open sides of the boat created a slickening on every surface – metal seats covered in cracked pleather, plastic or fiberglass bottom of the boat, everyone’s skin – were moistened to a slippery sheen. Breathing the thick air felt like swallowing warm water. And yet, as the engine slipped into gear and we purred forward once again toward the dense plumb clouds, no rains fell. No lightning quickened in the sky. The storm is further off, I remember thinking. Still, and despite the additional discomfort of being bubbled up with 30 other people in one of the most humid climates on earth, I appreciated the captain’s caution. I came into this environment alone and hoped that I would make it out alive.

A line of tuk-tuk drivers waited at the fluvial station. I disembarked the water taxi and walked toward them, and several walked quickly toward me, wanting my business. One of them lifted my pack, with me still attached, and I quickly freed my arms from its loops. He put it on the luggage rack behind the back seat and I heaved myself in to keep up. His motor sputtered as he weaved through the tuk-tuk line. We careened down the main road of Leticia, then exited onto a muddy track for several miles. I sat in the middle of the seat, holding tight to the back of the driver’s chair, so as not to fall out. He navigated through the mud and deep trenches with aplomb, and all I could think about was how I couldn’t wait to get to the next WiFi connection to FaceTime Sophia and tell her about the mud, the trees, the monkeys, the tarantulas and the snakes.

One of my guides had taken me deep into the jungle to see the aguaje tree, the tree of life. The seed is the size of my palm. I asked him if I could bring it back to my room and take a photo, and when he agreed I zipped it into the pocket of my hiking pants. Sophia and I had many potted plants and flowers, which we would press and use in our art projects. I had just been accepted into a residential program to learn to make paper from plants, something we were both excited to learn how to do. The aguaje seed is very special and the tree has medicinal properties. I knew seeing this seed would impress her.

My tuk-tuk driver pulled into the village where I would camp and meet my next guide. As soon as I knocked on the office door of the director to check in I asked for the WiFi password. As I signed all of my wavers and paid my reservation fees I could feel my phone pinging, loading a week’s worth of texts and emails. I was expecting this, but when I looked at my phone and saw the banners on my home screen, I knew something wasn’t right.

Kristen, call me! Please, call me! from my ex-husband.

Mom, are you there? I’m scared from my son.

Kristen, call Dad as soon as you get this from my mom.

And then:

I’m so sorry!

We love you so much! I’m so sorry!

Kristen, I’m so sorry! We’re here for you, whatever you need. Call anytime, I mean it.

I FaceTimed Sophia. No answer.

I tried again. Still no answer.

I sent an iMessage. Hey, what’s going on? I’m so worried!

I tried my ex-husband on WhatsApp.

No answer.

I FaceTimed my mom and finally the line connected. The video was choppy, the audio hardly better. “You have to call Dad,” she said, “please, just call your father.” She was crying.

“Mom! I can’t! The connection – just tell me!”

“No,” she said, her voice breaking. The audio breaking. The video breaking.

“Please, Mom,” I pleaded, “the connection…you have to tell me!” My mind reeled.

Someone was dead. I knew someone was dead.

“Sophia,” she was saying, “it’s Sophia.”

Learning your child is dead is like an octopus reaching through the opening of a takotsubo, expecting to feel the sea, but instead feeling the ever-expanding nothing we call sky.

What is this place?

I dare to play it, with all of my intelligence, thin and glistening.

The Song of the Body

Kristen Leigh