I arrived at Night Drawer drawing club three or so weeks ago—five minutes after Olive broke up with me on the phone and a few days into my prostate gone tender and painful and making my feet tingle and terrifying, yet another forced search for new housing heavy on my mind—to find the prompt that evening was “Smiling through it all.”

I was not in shock, or else something was alive and engaged and warm and plainly not traumatized inside of it, undiminished. The early passage of equanimity was no less honest than the stabbing heart-and-crotch pain a couple mornings after and the quieter lovelorn-and-perineal malaise two weeks hence.

The broadly alternating, often overlapping passages of sober appreciation and heavy, measured sorrow were peaceful compared to the violent and long-crippling agony of my last great grief eight years ago. 

I really was okay that evening at Night Drawer. I explained my submission to no one and I might not have even shown it or submitted it; I actually don’t remember. This disregard for the prospect of disclosing it then issued from a quieting of concern, not a forgetful and dissociative haze, nor any appreciably antagonistic dismissivness—these distinctions might not have been absolute but they were considerable and substantial. I don’t know if this compares to your recent loss and experience of grief. Some of my subsequent depression in bed was indeed dissociative and disengaged, but it didn’t pull me down as far or as long as it has before. What the hell; let’s call this one an earned interim of grief rather than a clinically framed “episode.” A part of me wishes I felt more obstinate and shredded and furious at my circumstances and shortcomings again this time around; another part is proud and grateful I’m not. I reserve the right to lose my shit with a cleaner burning fire about any of this and reconstitute myself again down the line, a forty-something fucking phoenix reborn. I hope this is the start of collecting a charged reservoir of piss and vinegar to call my own at the dawn of middle age, the course of the Tao shifting and moving through me with the eternal natural force of water, gravity and ammonia.

Whatever its valence and affect—acrid or fair on the breeze, morose or joyful, deeply penetrating and/or serene, “The grace of age is we learn to accept.” I am become less embarrassed by the lowbrow wellsprings of some of the wise melodic words that have lodged themselves in me—wisdom is humble and everywhere; we take it wherever we find it and whenever we find ourselves ready for it—the above quote comes from a moribund, elderly, nameless female alien Pilot crab creature in an otherwise very shitty Season 4 episode of the relatively inspired and occasionally wildly brilliant early 2000s SciFi Channel original series “Farscape.” She and her symbiotic space whale host had just then decided to give up their long-cherished dream of fading in the secret sacred Leviathan burial nebula in order to kamikaze into a landed fleet of nearby space fascists on the hunt. I intend to live well into advanced age and I aim to go out with the same spirit and thrust as that doddering, gentle, hurtling celestial mass of life-bonded cetacean and crustacean.