March 1 - 7
I am going on book tour.
It feels like the moon. I know it is there but what is it like? How do you get there?
Can you pack cranberry extract in powder form in your carry-on? I take out my phone and look this up. I end up in a Reddit subthread where men show their before and after pictures from doing chin tuck exercises.
I walk into Indigo at the mall and my book is on the wall beside other books. Somehow, my name came into Indigo without me. It’s here, waiting for me.
I struggle to sleep all week. My heart races (unusual). Once I am asleep, I wake at 1, then 3, then, 4, then 5 (also unusual). There are other things too: a family pet cancer crisis, a lot of tears. A week of meetings with logistics that feel fuzzy to my tired brain. I have not responded to over fifteen text messages. I respond to one message from a month ago. So, fourteen now.
I am packing my roller bag but having difficulty getting a full breath of air. Where is Kurtis? I’m listening for him. I can’t put anything into my suitcase that makes any sense. Will belts hold me together? Why do socks take up so much space? I unearth a small coin purse and in it are loose coins I recall Kurtis handing to me because he did not want the change in his pockets. A flare of grief—white hot and insistent.
Are you excited? It must be so exciting. How exciting.
Yes, yes yes. It is exciting.
I’m listening for him shrieking about all the cities I am lucky enough to tour in. He does a wahooooooooo! like no one else.
My neck goes out because of course it does. My chiropractor tells me I have a long neck. That this is not necessarily bad. There is a pause where neither of us say it but both of us think it: it is not necessarily bad for my chiropractor.
I go sign stock at Indigo but I forget to bring a pen so I sign with a store Sharpie and it takes some time for my signature to look like mine again.
Bring pens for tour, I write in my phone.
I gel my nails myself: galactic cat eye lilac sparkle because it is more forgiving then the cherry red I initially thought I might do. It takes hours and I listen to Gilmore Girls while I do it. Rory is mean and is surprised when this makes people dislike her. I love this show but I think Rory is the least of it?
Black jeans with wavy rows of black rhinestones for the launch party in my hometown at an art gallery. It snows a foot and a half the day before and continues to snow. I get to the gallery early and help my mother and father set up tables laden with croissant sandwiches, bright purple dried fruit crisps, sliced meat and cheese, an entire table for cupcakes — my parents have brought all of this for me, for the party.
Elsewhere in the gallery, Kurtis’s friend K from architecture school sets up the chairs, tests the microphone, pours wine.
100 people have RSVP’d but I can’t fathom that I know 100 people. And in the snow?
A bookseller comes in through the door, her jacket dusted in ice. She is wearing a long floral skirt I admire. In her arms: a box full of the book. My book.
I eat a red velvet cupcake—my favorite—and mean to eat more later but people are arriving and I am swept away, never to return to the food table.
Eat before the event, that is what H and L told me. Now, I realize why.
Over 100 people attend. Someone from high school I haven’t seen since, someone else from my childhood cul-de-sac, another from university — all these moments in time stepping through the door. People I know from the Internet, now shaking my hand. I feel like I know you already! The books sell out and I give the copy I read from to a reader in the signing line. I still don’t have the right pens, I realize. An old friend asks me why I didn’t write the memoir as fiction. Why not make it….less personal?
I don’t have a good answer, just a true one: it never occurred to me that the book could be anything but.
Someone else hugs me and then coughs violently. I eye the hand sanitizer at the door. Impossibly far away. Someone else brings me a glass of water without me asking and I gulp at it with gratitude. It is chilled and crisp. I should have brought a water bottle with me.
He would have loved all of it. I feel a soft gratitude, tender at the edges but steady. At the end of the evening: my sister helping wash dishes, my parents stacking chairs, my nan in a soft pink coat giving me a hug. A scattering of my friends drinking a last glass before the icy drive away. I am good tired.
*
Four hours of sleep before my 3AM alarm, signaling the first flight to San Francisco which is blessedly simple, like the grey rainy train into the city where the hotel room is ready early, where I collapse on the bed and listen to the sounds of children screaming outside. The hotel is near a daycare and I’m so used to the barrage of recess that I don’t realize at first that is what I am hearing. The hotel room is very cute, coastal California: all nubby green tweed and desert taupe rattan. There is a large television on which I hope to watch the Love Is Blind series finale. I watch no other reality television except this show, first brought to me by Kurtis who watched season one on his own. When he was finished, despite my protests that I didn’t do reality, he insisted that I would have a lot to say about it. I still save notes in my mind to tell him.
I am I didn’t sleep much tired.
I ignore the emails I should answer. I search bakeries near me, good online. I eat a protein bar because L told me to pack snacks that were also meals. There is complimentary green tea in the hotel lobby but when I go back for it, the caffeine bar has vanished. I should nap but I write these notes instead.
In San Francisco, my name is on a marquee outside the bookstore. I see it from across the street once a car covered in spinning cameras pulls over and a man opens the door and climbs inside. I mistook the car for a parking monitor but it is an unmanned taxi.
They are not going well, I am informed. They keep running people over.