Astrid Liu, what was left

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what was left: 

hydrangea. orchid. camellia. 

trumpet flower. hibiscus. ylang ylang. 

i made a book of dried flowers that made me think of her each day i was in asia, wrote little notes, arranged each flower carefully on the page. we broke up before i could ever give it to them. i burned that book. this is the haphazard copy, the reject and the excess flowers, the second thoughts that were the only thing i left for myself. 

what was left:

creosote. maple leaves. plumeria. 

memories cradled in recycled pulp

pressed firm. 

use the ephemeral 

make something new. 

what was left: 

lilies. daisies. carnations. 

moth orchids. roses. 

alicia and kara and dure sent baskets and bouquets of white flowers in anticipation of the way your body slowly became more frail, more fragile. i never used to bring lilies home. it doesn't matter now. 

i can't bear to throw them out, though their blooms are wizened and dry. i can only sweep the litter left over. the soughing of broom bristles over the floor sound like the wheezing of your last breaths, your little head flopping over to my hand and away, unable to find comfort. 

this is all i have left of you. 

Ana Knudsen, Incomplete Notes on the Bach Chaconne in D Minor

Because not enough people think there is such a thing as good art and bad art, because to think so is elitist, because art is subjective, because art is about what it makes you feel, and because no one can tell you what to feel. Because you do not understand what it is about certain songs that make a lot of people feel one way or another but they do because perfect songs exist and because no one panics about this enough. Because yes, not everyone, because that would be impossible, because sometimes you do leave the theatre and have to pretend you liked the movie for what feels like forever until he thanks you for the ride home. Because there are a lot of movies that you feel to be subpar, because you feel this in the same way you feel there are movies that are better than others. Because everyone feels this deep down in their bones but as soon as you say so your dumb boyfriend(’s dad) jumps up like, “YOU CAN’T SAY THAT!!”, practically foaming at the mouth at the scent of blood. Because a long time ago, a bunch of men got together to decide that everything is relative and nothing matters and made everyone else believe this too, about art and first and foremost, so that they could kill people for money/sport. Because no one can explain how a song could sound so much like grief, because when someone suggested Bach wrote it for his wife when she died, everyone just ran with it. Because the song sounds so much like a song Bach would have written for his wife when she died that it could be about nothing else. Because when Schumann tried to transcribe it for the piano he found he only could if he wrote it for the left hand alone, because otherwise the feeling of the piece was lost, because the feeling of the piece was its soul, one that was desolate and alone, having found the limit between life and death. The violin can only sound three notes at once; Bach forces four or even five. The violinist is only able to sound them in time.

Rose Paulson, My Rock Collection (Incomplete)

1. Kronborg Castle, Denmark, March 2022. 

This is one of the only rocks that I remember finding. I was living in Latvia, and I traveled to Copenhagen with my friend and colleague, Sarah, who had family there. That morning, her uncle, aunt, and cousin picked us up from our Airbnb in the city. They knew that Sarah was a writer, and maybe they knew they that I was a writer, too, and they got the idea that she would like to see castle that Shakespeare used as inspiration for the castle in Hamlet. My most vivid memory of this day is that drive up along the coast. When they picked us up, they rearranged themselves so that Sarah could take the passenger seat and I could take the right back seat, so that we could both see the water. All I remember is focusing on my breathing, trying not to focus on the eighteen-year-old boy crammed in the middle seat next to me, trying to gather the strength to take my coat off, and trying as hard as I could to not throw up. My second most vivid memory is standing with Sarah in the bathroom of the castle, her saying, there’s almost nothing here about Hamlet. My third most vivid memory is standing on the beach next to the castle, the water a deep contemplative blue, the five of us silently looking combing through the rocks. Sarah’s father pointed out a few stones made from eroded brick and then pointed to the castle, also made of brick. “You could take one of these,” he said. “That’s a souvenir you can’t buy in the gift shop.” 

2. Nerja, Spain, March 2022.

I’m almost certain I’m right about this one. I’d spent a week visiting M. in Madrid and then we rented a car to drive south and spend a weekend at the beach. When I visited Madrid the month before, I’d felt revived by the sun after living through a long, gloomy, northern winter. But this week, wind storms from the Sahara desert had blown dust (sand?) all the way to Spain, and the streets and skies of Madrid were brown with dust. M. had called in sick one day at work, citing her asthma, so we could go to the Royal Palace. South in Nerja, the skies were cloudy and thunderstorms were forming. I think these pieces of sea glass come from this trip because I remember M. telling me that her mom collected it. 

I had to look through old photos to remind myself of what happen on this trip. In every photo I am smiling, or I’ve pushed my cheek against M.’s, her red hair curling on my face. In one video I try to take a sip of red wine without making a face, and when I can’t I laugh, and I can hear M.’s laughter too, off camera. My hair is long and it parts on the side. For the whole week I wear M.’s clothes. In several of these photos, M. is sorting through rocks on the beach, wearing my backpack, and no matter how much I zoom in, I can’t see what rock she is holding. Now, I look through my collection and find a red stone that looks like it could have come from this beach, but I’m not sure. In one photo, which my phone tells me was sent from M., I am holding a smooth gray stone in my palm, an enormous, almost devilish grin on my face, triumphant at my find. I don’t recognize this rock. It isn’t in my collection. 

3. Riga, Latvia, 2021-2022

These are the stones and shells that I imagine I picked up while I lived in Riga, but I’m not sure. Something about Riga that took me a long time to understand is that it is close to the sea, but it is not on the sea. Of course I understood this in a literal sense; I had taken the train out to the beach; my colleague often talked about her commute from her beachside suburb; I’d gone down to the river and saw the distant pier and knew we were connected to something larger. But the closeness was a gradual realization. I looked down and saw that the sidewalk was filled with waddling seagulls. I swept the floor of my apartment and realized that my boots had been tracking in sand. I think these ones are from the beach, but I’m not sure. 

4. Tucson, Arizona, USA, March 2024. 

A gift from G., several weeks after we started seeing each other. They said it was called a “TV rock” because if you place it on an image you can see the image clearly, as if it’s on TV. They explained the optical sciences behind it because I don’t remember the details. They had presented this gift with a note written on the back of a movie ticket from the first time we hung out. At some point right before we parted I was turning the rock over in my fingers and it broke. I still think it’s pretty cool. 

5. Amsterdam, Netherlands, January 2025

I’m lying about the date and the location, but I’ll tell the story anyway. I was at a conference on international diplomacy, paid for the US government, at least indirectly. This part is somehow true. I was surrounded by well-dressed, high-achieving young people—half Americans, half Europeans—and although I was mostly quiet in the seminars I came alive at night. Large groups of us wandered the streets in the evenings, and the Europeans who had visited previously told us which bars to go to. N. was wearing a red velvet corduroy jacket. I remember saying it was nice that there was another queer woman here, and she linked her arm around mine, and we walked like that for a while. She was taller than me. She told me the story of how she grew up in Brazil but moved abroad thanks to her Portuguese passport. She encouraged me—also raised across the ocean, almost holding a European passport—to do the same. She showed me a photo of what she looked like back in Brazil, how different she had been, and explained how her life was so much better now. I thought she looked pretty even then. We went into a bodega and N. told me to buy Delirium Tremens, a blue and purple bottle with an elephant on it. She said it would have me seeing elephants. Perhaps this is where you realize that this story takes place in Belgium. All of this so far has otherwise been true. I can’t say the things I wish had been true. 

6. Tucson, Arizona, USA, February 2025

My gem show haul, minus the bismuth because it is special to me, and also breakable. Self explanatory. 

Leah Mensch, On Absurdity (and for the Love of the Bit)

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Before I moved to Arizona, I spent a miserable year at a different program in New York. It wasn’t the right fit for me, but some of the misery was my own making. I was depressed. My professor thought a book about Kate Braverman was a terrible idea. This was not why I was depressed but it certainly didn’t help. I was also twenty-two. I just didn’t know how to take care of myself, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. What twenty-two year old does? My mother’s whole Arab-Jewish family lived in Brooklyn. It was an intense proximity to a family trauma landscape I didn’t—couldn’t—prepare myself for. They loved me. But I didn’t know how to process my grief. What 22-year-old does? 

     So instead, in New York,  I was a bystander to my own rage, unraveling down the city streets: when someone sat too close to me on the subway, I wanted to pull my mask down and scream; when a man elbowed me in Times Square on the way to the doctor’s office, I pictured my fist shattering his jaw; when my classmates told me my work was funny, I wanted to pound my fist on the table and say fuck every one of you.  Braverman was my pain doppelgänger back then: when I wrote about her walking around in the bathrobe, drugged up on lorazepam in the hills of Napa Valley, I was tracing the path of my own concurrent unraveling; I wrote about her desperate letters to cousin Rachel—I knew nobody would give me our history, and so I took it—⁠on the M train after my cousin  an Arabic Torah across the table, and I turned the page in the wrong direction, brought non-kosher wine. My classmates were not interested in these images, brutally anchoring my work, and were instead pointing to moments that elucidated humor, asking me to spend more time writing about the phone call with the woman from Sonoma State, the story about the time Michael called me in the morning’s early hours from Greece. Your work is funny, people would often tell me. I hated this, as if humor somehow negated scholarly value.

  But the writers around me weren’t wrong. Or rather, we were all right. My work was brutal and it was also really funny. It was really fucking funny to be so obsessed with an obscure dead poet that I found myself on the phone with an 80 year old former friend of hers every Saturday night, that the Sonoma State library groaned when they saw my correspondence, so desperate to get Braverman’s master’s thesis. But it was easier to blame a classmate’s lacking intellect than to admit how vulnerable I felt with Braverman’s wounds, my wounds—many of which I had never tried to pair with words—festering on the workshop table. My classmates saw something inside my work I was trying to resist. They were vying to communicate that, despite the stale crackers and the weeks crossed off a calendar sans a single shower, despite Braverman’s pleas for community and her 5150 in Napa Valley, I was making them laugh.

*

I grew up with a mother who valued the absurd as much as she valued love. (That is to say, a lot). She taught me to laugh at everything—most importantly, myself. We spoke in our best butchered Boston accents around the house—sometimes in public by accident—and purposefully misspelled words in texts to one another. We gleefully announced our stomach issues in disgusting detail and, when we drove to Tucson together, stopped at most of the attractions along the way. The world’s largest rocking chair in Illinois, the world’s largest pistachio in Pistachioland, New Mexico. ( I cannot say I recommend either of these things). Camus’ philosophy of the absurd was maybe the first instance of a body collision with theory. I was nineteen, generally uninterested in what old white guy theorists had to say. And yet. To him, absurdity was what made life worth living. Or to put it simply, we’re all trying to derive purpose from our lives in a world that is, for the most part, indifferent toward us. The absurdity lives in the dissonance, the fact that we want to be alive nevertheless. He felt leaning into the absurdity and dissonance, rather than avoiding it, would make being alive a little easier. I’ve wanted to write about absurdity for years, but something always got in the way.  My mom knows grief as intimately as anyone. Her dad died when she was twelve. By the time she was thirteen, she was separated from her entire family. She never hid her sadness from me, but she also laughed a lot, and I never saw these two at odds with one another.  I think people who have experienced a central grief, a grief like my mother’s, have an eye for the absurd. They have to. How else could she have gone on? 

*

When I arrived in Arizona, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep writing anymore. This seems ridiculous now, but at the time, it felt so real to me. Well no. I wanted to write. I wanted to write a book about Kate Braverman. She was all I thought about. But I didn’t know how, or if, it would be possible. When she died in 2019, she left so little behind. Every path led to what felt like a dead end. It turns out, I just needed to learn how to laugh again. To chase absurdity instead of my book. They’re of the same origin anyway, at least for me.  If you’re wondering if Kate Braverman fits into this, it is not a matter of if, but how. In the last decade of her life, she tried to kill herself at least six times. Sometimes when I think about this, I feel nauseous. It’s not a surprise, really. But it’s also not something she ever talked about publicly. I didn’t know until a few years after she died. And yet, despite decades of clinical depression, she didn’t die by suicide. And this matters.    Kate was incredibly funny. This was something that did once surprise me. But now I think, of course she was. Two weeks before she died, she finished a novel about quantum entanglement. It’s only borderline readable, suffused with typos and repeating scenes and characters shapeshifting names and bodies. But god, it’s so funny. At one point, a wife tells her husband she’s started a blog. 
     You have fifteen followers, he says. 
     Three more than Jesus, she replies, apparently still counting Judas. 

In another scene, the same wife goes off on a tangent about her husband’s obnoxious qualities. It’s the absurdity of their argument that leaves me laughing while I’m driving around Tucson. “ It’s a symbolic hairbringer,” she says. “ I’m not sitting in a motel 6 while you lecture me about the grandeur of Rome, while you wax poetics about aqueducts. We don’t have the same schedule. We don’t even brush our teeth in the same sink.” Her husband is surprised. “You brush your teeth?,” he says.  Then, toward the end of the novel, Braverman writes my favorite line, attributed to no character:

"Consciousness is an honor and a privilege even if much of it is spent in a bathrobe in a major depression while everyone you love leaves you and your publishers bury all your books."

To me, these are her last words. Maybe my beginning. 

*

When my friend Moisés defended his nonfiction thesis in 2023, my partner Geramee asked him what his favorite part of his book was. That the manuscript is very big and heavy, Moisés said. And I can bash my head into it if I want. Then, he looked at both of us, seriously. When I could make myself laugh, that was my favorite part, he said. That was when I believed in the book. 

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When I started dating Geramee two and a half years ago, I was worried about loving someone else with a history of major depression. I felt like I had only just stabilized, and the process wasn’t easy. It was a voluntary hospitalization and a move across the country, sertraline and a lot of miles run along the Rillito River Path. I felt fragile. I was fragile. I’m still fragile, but not because I’m one misstep away from catastrophe, but because I’m human. And I’m ok with this. 

     And it turns out loving someone else with a history of major depression has been, mostly, a joy. Because despite the horrors of daily life, and there are many, there have always been many, even before this political administration, we can make each other spit-out-your-seltzer laugh at the end of the day. Last week, Geramee had a hole in their pants. I am still laughing about this, actually. I found the hole, I got to announce the hole, which was delightful in a chaotic neutral sense. Maybe chaotic evil? 
     My first year in the MFA, also Geramee’s last, I had a dream one night that someone put a sandwich in the tiny cabinet. I’m talking a full on Jersey Mike’s sub with salami and lettuce and mayonnaise and all of the things you would not want to put in the University of Arizona’s smallest museum. It was just the sub, in its full immaculate straight-out-of-the-bag form, and nothing else. I woke Geramee up in the middle of the night to tell them about this dream. Ever since then, I have been minorly fixated on putting a sandwich in the tiny cabinet before I graduate. I am not going to do this for food waste and inflation reasons, but I still think this is one of the funniest dreams I’ve ever had. I’m working in that spirit. Or at least I’m trying. 

*

No one loves absurdity, by which I mean the bit, as much as Ander Monson. The guy wrote a book about Predator. He reviews potato chips on his Instagram account. He accidentally convinced several students that all his thesis advisees do their defense at the Arby’s on 22nd Street. You know, the Arby’s with a pool and a waterslide. The one with an attached bank and notary. Yesterday he DM’d me a video of someone making a La Croix Bar out of a crowbar they found in their backyard. (This is exactly what it sounds like).  I submitted a thirty page essay about Kate Braverman for my MFA application and he said what the hell, sure.    Also, his 50th birthday is April 9th. Soon he will start wearing Kirkland branded jeans and playing Spelling Bee after Wordle and Connections. This is what people in their fifties do. He will drink All Day Rose seltzer constantly despite the tariffs. I heard he asked for fifty sweet potatoes instead of a cake. If you see the Goo Goo dolls around Tucson next week, it’s because they’re gonna be performing live in his backyard. 
I’m supposed to be working on my thesis, but I made this tiny cabinet instead. I’ve spent a lot of time chasing the bit during my time here, mostly at Ander’s direction. And I know my life is better for it. My work is, too. After six years of failure, this was all it took, apparently, to finally write about absurdity.