deep in the ocean, there lies a wave for you

Now it’s become that the walk to and from yoga is too dangerous. I saw what I look like when I’m about to cry because I did it in the mirrored elevator at work today. I think I must look like that for the entire trek down 16th, Columbia, and onto 18th. At 16th and Irving there’s an apartment Clark and I once looked at for maybe 20 minutes. At 16th and Columbia is the Argonne, where we lived for a year. Then the CVS where I picked up his prescriptions. Then Crumbs & Coffee, where he’d pull up and I’d run in to get sausage, egg and cheese bagels and coffee before every early morning journey we took to the oncologist in Baltimore. The Safeway, where he went after an outburst spurred by the fact that our apartment fridge contained none of his favorite condiments. He came back with kimchi, brown mustard and real mayonnaise. City Bikes, where he bought his Masi, and the crappy bodega-type store next to it where he’d mock the jewelry in the window by offering to buy it for me for my birthday or for when we got engaged. Asylum, where we had twice weekly taco nights. Even from the yoga studio, I can see Biltmore Street, which I haven’t been down since I left that day in May after Jon carried him down the stairs and into the back of the car. I went to one of my favorite places to eat, Open City, after yoga the other day, and had to walk across that bridge. One of Clark’s old doctors from NIH lives on Lanier, she once told us, and I wonder if I’ll ever run into her, and if I did, what she would say to me. Then the bridge, and the other end of Biltmore Street. I would shuffle-run across that bridge from the Metro station at Woodley every day. Sometimes I’d do it twice a day, because Clark couldn’t wake up at noon to take his pain medicine, even though I’d call his phone between 10 and 20 times. I’d have to be there, shake him, watch him down the pills and go back to work, which was always harder than leaving in the morning.

We ate there once. Grabbed coffee from that place. Peered in the window of that store together. Don’t step on the grates, he’d say, you might fall through. And I still can’t.