Dead Letter Department #57

there she is, all golden & shit

20 things i’ve loved since last we met

  1. the little pocket dance/glance back over the shoulder people do when they’re getting up from a seat they’ve been in for a long time—wallet, keys, phone, okay, I’m leaving now.
  2. how groups at the airport establish a hundred little countries at the gate, with snacks & phones & turned in body language, dissolving & reforming every time another plane takes off.
  3. curry udon noodles with a gekikara fireball & onsen egg on top
  4. teaching myself how to find the green anemones in the tidepools even when the tide is out, & then seeing them everywhere
  5. bitter melon & shrimp dumplings
  6. the way everything is different in California: palms just growing casually in traffic medians, poppies on the hillsides, great blooms of unfamiliar flowers everywhere i looked. the water tasted bad but the light was incredible, & it seemed like every hill we crested was a prettier view than the one before.
  7. mango vanilla popsicles, the cure for whatever ails me
  8. the moment when the plane lets go of the earth & everything lightens
  9. accidentally parking at a very fancy gym in downtown san francisco & getting to watch people who valet park to work out
  10. going to H Mart for the first time & buying absolutely every snack & produce item i fancied
  11. watching the parasailers come down off the hills & over the city from our rented apartment, little shapes sailing out over the tight-packed rainbow of townhouses, the velvet green spreads of the parks, the sheer silk of Lake Merced (even if I did, in a painkiller haze, refer to them as ‘the jumpy boys & those things they fly.’)
  12. tylenol, my best friend
  13. watching my friend get reunited with her dog after their longest ever separation—20 straight minutes of husky screaming in high pitched joy. i tried to film it & only got a random still shot of someone’s ankle which serves me right for not living in the moment
  14. getting the surgical drains out
  15. taking the compression vest off for good, after three full weeks of having it on for 23 hours and 45 minutes a day.
  16. wearing a t-shirt
  17. wearing a hoodie but not for covering up purposes, just because it’s cold out
  18. walking down the street to put magazines in the tiny free library & for the first time in years, in decades, not being debilitatingly aware of my tits
  19. starting to sit up straight again (this one will be a process)
  20. watching it go from a wound to an incision to the beginnings of a scar, except of course for those gnarly drain sites that will take their own sweet time healing up

more soon, dear readers, & in the meantime, you can always write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com