some where better
than this
place

——delia
rainey


It’s early August and I’m waiting around for my life to start. Alone in my new room in Chicago, I watch the Errol Morris documentary about the portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman. On my chromebook computer, I watch her open up her flat files from the 60s through the 2000s. She handles her monster-sized polaroid film with ink diary captions on the bottom edge.

Elsa, charismatic and smiling, takes portraits of herself with her giant camera for her entire life. When the documentary came out in 2016, she was 80 years old. There she was: frizzy brown-gray hair and glasses, wearing a long skirt and old t-shirt, artist’s apron, and new balance shoes.

When she complains about her husband Harvey, how he walks alone at night to the bodega, how he never gets her presents on Valentine’s Day, she has an affectionate smirk. “Very stylish,” she says about the reflective vest she had a friend sew onto Harvey’s coat, so he could cross the street with little risk of getting hit by a car.

“Is photography the truth?” an interviewer asks her. She laughs: “Absolutely not!!” Errol Morris asks her whose idea it was to photograph Allen Ginsberg, one of her best friends, butt-naked, standing next to another portrait of himself on Polaroid film. “That was all him. He loved to be naked.” “So it wasn’t your idea at all?” “No. Of course not! A nice Jewish girl like me?” She cries when she looks at the photo. “I owe a lot of debt to Allen. The debt of friendship.”

Elsa Dorfman joins a stereotype of brilliant women artists who no one cared about until they hit their late 70s. She’s peeling back the protective paper to look at her work. She knows she’s good. Maybe her lack of fame has to do with her lack of drama, an absence of provocative sadness. Colossal portraits of regular families smiling, some of their eyes squint in the flash, wearing 90s clothes. This work is about affection.

“I’m totally not interested in capturing their souls,” she says. She’s interested in the preservation of the surfaces of people. Elsa admits, her photos gain more meaning after the person in the photo has gotten sick or died.

I imagine that all the old Jewish people in my life are sewing reflective neon onto the fronts and backs of my clothes. As I cross the street, they are looking down on me.







There are volumes and volumes of photo albums at my parents’ house. Film photography of our whole lives. My mom and dad never think of themselves as photographers. At a wedding shower years ago, my mom gave one piece of marriage advice: “Label your photos.” She said to my cousin’s girlfriend moving across the country: “Keep your photos on your carry-on, in case your luggage gets lost.” There’s a constant fear of losing the ones we love, the imagery of them.

Everyone’s pictures are digital now, Mom. What does the phrase “label your photos” mean anymore? Maybe that’s what I have been trying to do, writing this story, wanting to keep us.







Once, my mom told me that we, my three sisters and I, will all have to fight over who gets the photo albums. It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t always be stacked on the top shelf of the coat closet in my parents’ little brown house. At the end of the cul-de-sac, across the street from the Taco Bell, and the highway to get to the city limits of St. Louis. Dark coats dangle below the shelf, the skirt of the memory.







My sister N called me on the phone and told me about my dad’s brain damage on the left side of his brain. It’s the Thursday before Labor Day weekend. My boyfriend D is driving me back to St. Louis, but he has some errands first. He parked his car in front of a hipster bakery. I’m in the passenger seat, waiting for him to drop something off at B’s, hazard lights on. Someone once said, find something calming to focus on. So I look at the boy inside the cafe behind the counter. My eyes water on a tiny chalkboard.

I look at myself in the side mirror of the white car. My face dyed pink, like I was dipped in blood, then dried. The animal moaning in the woods but you can’t see what happened to her body. The woman splits open, her flesh is raw and ancient and contains the calls from every family member she has ever had.

D gets back in the car and apologizes for taking so long. We begin our long crawl out of Chicago rush-hour towards St. Louis. What is there to grasp onto, like a metal bar in a shower, a city of banisters? When I was walking down North last weekend, I thought I saw a stray lizard hand on the sidewalk. Pedestrians wander around, forever, historically, making shit up.

“Wanna pick out some music to listen to?” D tries to soothe me. Across the divide of seats, he squeezes my hand so hard, he knows I’m numb. D changes lanes right as another car changes lanes, but he swerves out of the way. Nonchalant near-death. I look over at a billboard about Verizon phones. Pages of words line the city, flapping, air-drying. A city as two continuous pages of black lines. I wrap my arms in a hoop above my head in the car, sobbing. The drive back to my hometown, a tunnel of corn and brown and sometimes clouds. The sunset clouds blush with red tones.

Stopping for gas, we make sure it’s a gas station with a Subway. D and I are obsessed with Subway. My eyes are puffed out like I’m allergic to myself. I tell the sandwich artist I want olives and pickles. The employees are pleasant teenagers. In my blurred perception, they are having the time of their lives, working at Subway on a Thursday night in rural Illinois. D makes a joke with them about how their bread knives seem especially sharp tonight. Connection to strangers, small talk, coping mechanism.

I head to the bathroom to pee out all the Sprite. In there, a young mother and her toddler are standing by the sink, brushing their teeth. The mother takes a plastic bag of clothes out of the daughter’s disney backpack. She makes an effort to look up at me and smile. She says to her kid, “Say hi.” I smile back, trembling. Families are always in transition. My niece and nephew are two and five. A small split, a gap, a cutting and breaking of tissue, can take you away from me. I walk through the fluorescent glass store to the car. Falling deep into the seat, I turn into leather. There is not a worse day of my life that I know. D hands me a bag of gummy worms that are all different flavors of red.

The night before, I looked at his face and said, “When something bad happens to your family, does it make you think about the history of everything that has ever happened to your family?” I looked at his face and said, “My dream used to be that I wanted to be a writer. Now my dream is that I want to hang out with my Dad.”







My mom points to my body. “Your dad picked out your name before you were born,” she says. “Did you know that? He heard it on the radio, an author’s name. He came home and said, I just heard the most beautiful name in the world.”

I hold my dad’s left hand, the one that works. Our hands are both square and tan, short fingernails. “Your eyes are green like your dad’s, I never noticed that.” “They get even greener if I’ve been crying.” Like grass after it has rained. A memory of a green and brown river, square hands pull me out of the rushing water, dirty orange life vest up to my ears. My dad can say, “yes”, “no,” “ok,” “yeah,” “alright.” It’s weird because I’m 26 and I always thought that I was named after a Bob Dylan song. “____ was a gambling girl, gambled all around…” Maybe it was Johnny Cash: “____’s gone, one more round, ____’s gone.”

Halfway under a white sheet and an old comforter, I wake up in my parents’ bedroom alone. The whole room feels brown and flat. Their bed, hard and centered like the plateau of the house.

A fuzzy curtain leaks tiny bits of blue light. Baby blue. At the hospital, I look at my mom’s notebook. She has names of all the doctors, words the doctors had said, the time when my dad was sent to the emergency room after he wouldn’t wake up from surgery. At the bottom of the page she wrote: blur

Through my mom’s handwriting, I wrote. When I was a kid, my twin sister H and I would draw pictures and tell my mom what to say. My scribe. We had a series of stories about a rat family. Blobs of four gray rodents with scuttle legs, visiting an arcade, neat pen bubbling below. On the family photos, my mom writes: the date, the names of the people, where we were.

On all my baby pictures with my twin, my mom wrote our names or initials under our bodies to distinguish us. We were doubled, exactly alike in dark soft baby hair, big cheeks and big eyes. In early photographs of my life, it’s hard to place who I am without her writing.

I’ve been sleeping in my mom’s bed with her for the past couple nights. I sleep on my dad’s side of the bed, on the memory foam pillow. She’s been having panic attacks, her heart beating like crazy. I don’t know if she wants to be touched. I sit next to her, practice the breathing exercise: in…….. and out…….... Mom, I’m here.

We woke up at 4:30am and got to the Intensive Care Unit around 5am. This is the first hospital. It’s a quieter one in the white-flight suburbs of St. Louis. My dad is still drowsy from the anti-seizure meds. I can’t remember why he’s on anti-seizure meds, since he didn’t have a seizure. Maybe they didn’t know that yet. He is recovering from the mistakes of doctors.

I watch the sunrise over the highway from the hospital window, but my dad is facing the other way, towards the gaudy pastel curtain that separates him. In the frame of the window, I locate the baby blue sky, a rippling of pink creams in. I see an American flag waving on a stick somewhere on a building. These are images I was trying to focus my reality on.

In the hospital, it’s breakfast time. I feed my dad scrambled eggs dotted with pepper. A yellow fragment on the fork, I feed my dad a star. Through parted lips, he makes a small sound - “huh” - if you know my dad, you know this is a particle of him laughing. Our green eyes touch in the empty space. I hope my eyes are relaying my funny thought: I’m feeding you like how you used to feed me

A doctor walks towards my dad’s hospital bed. I point to my body. “I’m the daughter.” If a bedroom is a museum of two peoples’ lives, can I be the docent? Can I stand here in an all-black outfit and tell you the story, tell you the facts? If you get too close, I’ll say, “Please don’t touch.”

Here in the gallery, you will see a side table stacked with white button-down shirts. Next, a rectangular mirror above the wooden dresser, with photographs stuck in the place between the frame and the glass.

My dad’s surgery was on August 29th, 2018, his 64th birthday. A standard rotator cuff procedure. He works-out at the Y multiple times a week, and tore some tendons all the way.

When he called me on the phone and told me that he had to get surgery, and on his birthday!, I had just moved to Chicago. We both said, “What a bummer.” He would have to be in a sling for the next six weeks. I told him: What bad timing, right when I move. I wish I could be there to watch movies with you. One of the best moments of my summer was watching Putney Swope with my dad and eating pistachios, laughing our asses off. “This is an old cult movie I used to watch at the midnight showings with my best friend when we were in high school.” Labeled memory. I posted some old photos on instagram that morning: “Happy Birthday to my Dad”

My parents had all the photo albums out on the dining room table. They were trying to find pictures of my oldest sister N wearing her backpack going to kindergarten in the late 80s. Her son T, my nephew, their grandson, is starting kindergarten now. N texts us his picture, smiling in the front yard, turned so you can see his new purple backpack. Same dark hair and tan skin.

No one’s at my parents’ house but me, doing laundry before I move to Chicago. As I flip through the photos, I hold my iPhone up to the clear plastic sleeves, trying not to catch the glare. I think: I’m going to need these. I want to discover my family before I existed. My older sisters are smiling and curly, in pastel pink sweatshirts and overalls, playing with leaves in the yard. With big 80s glasses and his shirt tucked into jeans, my dad is playing guitar on the patio. I start crying, the images overwhelm me. My parents gave us this childhood, a safe world of love. The kind of upbringing that I want to remember, even when I can’t.

Two hands together. The cake is brown. Let the babies blow out the candles for you. My mom’s bulging and structured handwriting transcribes the image: “Dennis’s Birthday ’87.” The letter ‘B’ for birthday looks like two pillows. Rest your head, Dad. Bits of Yiddish, lay down keppie.

In the hospital hours, I click on a PDF on my phone that I’m supposed to read for my first day of grad school. The class is called ‘Place, Space, and Landscape.’ The document is titled, ‘Maps of the Imagination: the Writer as Cartographer.’ There’s a medical drawing of a brain, checkered with lines. Compartmentalize. Location of the organs.

The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and controls language. Half of the body doesn’t work. Half of the bedroom is empty. My mom speaks, translator. I point to my body. The nurse asks, “Is this your favorite daughter?” Lips part, “No.” We’re all laughing. My dad tries to explain himself, “Well…” I know, I know.

My sister calls me and tells me my dad stayed up all night saying, “it’s over it’s over it’s over it’s over it’s over it’s over it’s over it’s over” ~ baby blue baby blue baby blue baby blue baby blue







I’m trying to do some research about what happened to my dad. The first websites that pop up on my search are sites for lawyers:

There are many causes of brain injury, including motor vehicle accidents, falls, and being struck by an object. However, medical malpractice is another cause of brain injuries. With general anesthesia, patients are put to sleep during their surgeries. And although anesthesiologists often tell patients the side effects associated with the use of general anesthesia, the risks—such as brain damage and death—are often skipped over.







I find a dead black butterfly with iridescent blue tips outside the hospital entrance. I stick the bug in my notebook like a pressed flower. When I was between my niece and nephew’s ages, my mom’s dad died of mouth cancer, my grandpa M. He was a bug exterminator, and in retirement he worked at the insectarium at the St. Louis Zoo. He gave H and I hissing cockroaches as pets. When you are three years-old, your memories start to stick to your brain. My first memories of my whole life are of my mom in deep grief. I’m confused. I’m the size of a short plant, staring at her from the crack in her bedroom door to the brown room. I remember thinking that I wasn’t supposed to see her like that.

The hospital has a garden and lily pad pond that you can go to around the back. It’s dedicated to patients and their families. Right by the highway, this place is so isolated, so peaceful, drowning in quiet and bees buzzing. It makes me feel even more panicked. Artificial beauty is forced on my vision, but I’m not buying it. I can’t feel it. H, my mom, and I walk through the dangling summer flowers, saying nothing. Some little kids painted stepping stones about HOPE and LOVE. From afar, I watch my mom walk slowly towards a bench under a gazebo. She sits down. Her hands lift up. She is sobbing. “I thought he would be better by now.” All around us, the bugs of Midwest summer are grinding.

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag begins: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” I hold onto the word spell like a charm. The charm is clenched in my hand, like I’m a witch, and the charm cuts into my palm.

The male nurses are probably younger than me, docile white dudes in scrubs. They are saying to my dad in their sweet nurse voices, “You’re doing great, Dennis.” Some older Jewish stranger in a polo comes in for two minutes and says, “You’re gonna walk out of here in no time, Dennis!” My mom smirks at all of us sisters as he walks out, taking great pleasure in the fact that we had no idea who the fuck he was. “That guy is your dad’s cousin. The dentist.”

Once my dad is in rehab, my cousin J stops by for a short visit on his way home from work in the suburbs: “We need you, Uncle Dennis.” He is crying. In my family, people only cry when someone dies, when someone is born, when someone has a bar mitzvah, when someone gets married. In Jewish Sunday school, they teach us, this is your life cycle. These are the biggest events of your life.







In the documentary, Elsa Dorfman holds up a Polaroid portrait of her parents, herself, and her young son Isaac with Legos against a red backdrop. Errol Morris asks her the significance of the color red, but she says there is none. “It was just there.”

When my dad first got out of the rotator cuff procedure, the doctors could not explain what happened. The first week in the hospital, I remember so many doctors and neurologists coming into the room, shrugging. The anesthesiologist visited him in the ICU many times. Sucking up? We need to get some paperwork of his oxygen levels, to give to the lawyers. I remember someone saying that some papers were missing, but my mom says they were all there. How strange that I misunderstood the blank spaces.


Sensory disturbances, weakness or paralysis on the right side of the body.

Speech and language problems (aphasia).

Difficulties in recognizing objects (agnosia).

Problems with daily activities, routines that used to go well (apraxia).

Reduced memory for verbal (spoken) matters.

Decrease in analytical skills.

Problems with chronology (in order of time, cause and effect)

Reduced timing and speed of skills

Confusing left and right

Difficulty in dealing with numbers, understand numbers and dealing with money

Become slow

Exhibit insecure, anxious and withdrawn behavior

Risk of depression

Chance of changing moods, easily overwhelmed by emotions


Elsa Dorfman holds up another self portrait in the documentary. The picture of her body is stained with light, half of her body turning into a golden ghost, warping. “It’s like the camera knew what I was going through.”

I was trying to think of an exciting form for this essay, but there is none. I want to make a collage to stitch myself up at night, but no matter. At one point, I was in a meeting with a professor who I’d be working for, and then five minutes later, I was wandering down State Street blackout drunk with the news that my dad didn’t wake up from surgery. I thought he died. Alone in a city of tall metal. Nothing was important anymore. Girl in desperation, mouth open, hands like claws curling towards her eyes.

What’s the point of writing about all this? What am I supposed to do with it? I have to write it down somewhere. On the scraps of the Subway receipt. On the bag of gummy worms. I don’t know how long it will take him to get back to where he was, or if he ever will. There’s a lot of painful moments from the ICU that I won’t write down. Those memories are for me only. I don’t want those memories to be distorted by the clunkiness of essay, of photography, turning into archives. I don’t want to remember them.

My mom wears both of their wedding rings on her finger, doubled. In the hospital, I hear her say to my dad, “Let’s renew our vows when this is all over.”

“When this is all over” is a phrase that used to give me hope back then. “When this is all over” doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, it doesn’t make any sense. “When this is all over” is a false fragment for those newly in grief. I’m grateful for this knowledge, that the recovery from traumatic brain injury, the recovery from living, never ends.

When the first of my cousins got married in the early 2010s, we joked that he had “won”. He beat all the other cousins, some also in long-term relationships, in getting married first. At the time, my dad overheard the joke. In a serious voice, he said, “You only win when you die.” I remember thinking it was such an absurd and dark thing to say. My dad is kind of a cynical person sometimes. I can view his statement as a kind of brutalist monogamous outlook on marriage, or I can view it as a realististic viewpoint on the hardships of lifelong love. You only win when you die, because living and loving for so long is hard work. In the Jewish life cycle, we die, and then we are remembered. We don’t have a heaven or afterlife in Jewish culture. Here on earth, we are all we have.







My dad is a loner who goes to shows and bars. He wears our bands’ t-shirts on the weekends. He bought my mom binoculars so they could watch the birds. He bought my mom a banjo and banjo lessons. He reads biographies of baseball players and musicians. He has always rooted for the underdog. He plays tee-ball in the backyard with my nephew T. He has this joke about salt that he always tells at the dinner table. I’m laughing, just writing about it. My parents never go on big fancy vacations, but they will travel to cities like Bloomington, Indiana for a concert they really want to see.

Throughout my whole childhood, my dad played folk, rock, blues, and soul records. My dad plays Bob Dylan songs on the guitar in the basement alone. He keeps collections of Wheaties boxes with baseball players on them, political election buttons, matchbooks from hotels, cardboard drink coasters. He taught H how to play guitar when she was ten, the same age he was when he taught himself. My dad can whistle the harmonica parts through his teeth.

As a kid, my dad always hated his birthday. It meant that school was starting up again. Humid suffering of August steaming through St. Louis. It meant that summer was over.

I went on tour with H’s band for a week in July of 2018, just tagging along. It was my last summer to spend with her before I moved to Chicago. I love touring. A new city every night, dive bars, and sleeping on the floor. In Richmond, we stopped at a contemporary art museum in our spare time. The last exhibition we saw was all the way on the third floor. Two sculptural stacks of white paper by Felix Gonzalez Torres. The public was encouraged to take a piece of paper home. In the museum, we each took a white sheet, dual emotion, A side, B side:

“Somewhere better than this place.” / “Nowhere better than this place.”

H visits my dad at the rehab center almost every day. She calls me and tells me she brought her guitar and my dad’s songbooks. The left side of the brain controls language, but singing and music are in a completely different part of the brain. My dad can’t have conversations. He can’t speak up for himself. He can’t ask the doctors questions, so my mom asks for him. But he can clearly sing the words to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”







My parents are very private people. Writing about them gives me anxiety. I don’t want them to find this document and feel hurt that I revealed them, or described them wrong. Memories are not the truth. This story is still happening. My dad was supposed to have surgery on his shoulder and then come home the same day. Writing that down does not change the outcome.

When I write about my family, am I appropriating their pain? I am not there. I was there Labor Day weekend, but now I’m in Chicago. “You have to go to school,” my sisters said. “Dad would want you to be there.” Every time I’m on the phone with my mom, she says, “You’re where you’re supposed to be.” I can never tell who she’s trying to convince.

I’m in my apartment, staring at my laptop, eating plain pasta with olive oil. For my ‘Place, Space, and Landscape’ class, I was assigned to read ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy. I think this is so stupid. Like an action novel, a chick flick for men. Apocalypse gore, trauma porn. When I pick up the book, I read the whole thing in four hours. I entered their paranoia of the future and their perseverance to keep going. Where does their hope come from? Keep living, and for what? Just like a horror movie, there’s a lot of surprise attacks of cannibals and suspense of “bad guys” following behind in the prose. Child and father, against all odds! To be immersed in their fake terror, their fictional crying instead of my own becomes my escape.

In my kitchen by the tall cabinets, that’s where I stood when my sister N told me on the phone, “I have some bad news.” The diagnosis of the dark spot on his brain. Every phone call I get since provokes the blood-call in me. My ancestors are calling out each others’ names in the woods.







After arriving in Chicago on an early August night at my new apartment, I called my mom on the phone. This was before. D and I had driven his old Honda CRV through the cornfield depths on a 90 degree day, windows down, our cat locked up in a cat carrier stacked on top of all my stuff. I would turn my head to check on her, her eyes closed in the hot wind.

My mom told me that this was all so exciting. It reminded her of when my dad and her moved to L.A., when she was going to grad school at UCLA for archeology. “It brings back some good memories.” Before they got married in the bug exterminator’s backyard, underneath a dried hornet’s nest. Before N, A, H, and me. Someone who unearths bones and fossils from the dirt. Someone who studies how people of the past lived, kept living. Legend of my family goes, my parents brought their whole record collection along the car ride when moving to L.A. The records sat in the car, like a living passenger. My parents stayed at shitty motels, “ones that didn’t even have a TV!”, and they would carry all the records inside every night, so they wouldn’t get warped in the heat.

Back then, my dad was trying to be a film editor. He quit, because the process was so expensive. Elsa Dorfman cuts in: “They don’t make film like that anymore! Now all of a sudden, these cameras are like artifacts, like ashtrays!!” My dad loves to watch movies. We go to a documentary film festival every year as a family. At any given night in the brown house, my dad switches the channel to see what’s on Turner Classic Movies. Black and white people across their tiny TV screen, and my dad eating some sort of frozen dinner or Chinese food. I can hear the beep of the microwave. He’d say to me, to anyone listening, “This is one of the best movies of all time.” In a big gestural way, everything is either the best or the worst. He would then get out his film history encyclopedia, this thick yellowed bible, and look it up.

One of Elsa Dorfman’s most famous portrait series is of Bob Dylan in the green room before a show. Most of the pictures are of Bob alone, acoustic guitar on his knee, cigarette in his mouth. There’s a goofy feather in his wide-brimmed hat. His face is painted chalky white, illuminated like a moon, so that you can see him on the stage from far away in the arena, my dad taught me.







I research TED talks and other articles about people who have recovered from TBI - traumatic brain injury. They are all about young athletes who had near-deadly sports accidents. Some of the stories are about people who have had strokes, but they are all in their 40s. None about men in their 60s. None about medical malpractice of blood pressure dropping during surgery. There’s a skier from Finland, beefy and handsome, wearing a beanie that says FIGHT BACK. He gives his TED talk, speaking so slowly, people in the Youtube comments suggest watching the video at double speed. It’s too hard for me to watch. They have their whole lives ahead of them. Where is my dad’s story? The museum only depicts stories that the public wants to hear.

Some middle-aged guy walks into my dad’s rehab place, saying hi to everyone, just touring around. Turns out, the dude was there five years ago in the same condition as my dad. He couldn’t walk or talk. It took him years to relearn these things. For just a spell, the kingdom of the sick. No one ever told us that my dad could recover from this. Why would they hide that from us? The cold-faced doctors. So that we wouldn’t get our hopes up? Fuck them.

My dad’s best friend calls my parents at the rehab center. He asks my dad a million questions, as they do, these anxious older Jewish men. He seems confused when my dad can’t respond. Even though he knows.

H says she’ll go out to shows or to the bar, but no one asks her how she’s doing, how he’s doing. They don’t know, or they do, and don’t say anything at all. “They don’t get it. They don’t understand. Besides us, no one really gets what’s going on.”







I’m on the phone with my mom. She tells me a story about starting grad school in the 70s. She got anxious waiting for the semester to start, so she decided to visit campus. The bus was taking too long. She started walking. She ended up walking all the way there. From her apartment to UCLA, it took two hours. When she got there, campus was deserted. No one was there, not even her advisor. It was still summer. She walked around for a while. Then she went home.

Whenever I couldn’t sleep as a little kid, my dad would tell me, “Think about the word peace.” My dad is a really meditative guy, he loves candles and incense. The color of my nighttime memories of my childhood at my parents house look dark brown in my head. My most well-known vision is the memorized maze of walking down the short length of my parents’ house at night. A house of pacing, well-lived wood floors. Peace peace peace peace peace peace peace peace.

The brain can rewire, rewrite the lines to a different route. Like a new highway being built, it takes some years for everything to come together. We attempt to adapt. Can the body really heal from anything? In the museum, I stand in front of everything I love. My eyes turn so green, they drip down, they fall off, green brown river, cross the Mississippi, back to Chicago, turn on a podcast to get my mind off it, “mind off”, the podcast is about checklists, the podcast is about how surgeons need to keep checklists in order to reduce mistakes during surgeries. Outside the car window, the clouds are sunburned, heavy over the fields.

H, Tuesday, September 18th, 2018: “Just visited Dad for a bit - He’s talking rly well!! He told the therapist all of his daughters’ names and ages and said he lives in St. Louis and grew up in University City.” ~ “Had a dream Dad was walking and that mom and Dad bought new couches.”

N, Saturday, September 8th, 2018: “This xanax is amazing. I asked if he had a little hope and he said I think so”

Mom, Monday, September 17th, 2018: “Dad took 18 steps today in PT.”

Forwarded text from Mom, Sunday, September 9th, 2018: “We just went through the deck of cards naming each one 3 times, he was great.”

A, Thursday, September 6th, 2018 (with picture): “Dad’s dressed and ready to go [to rehab.] We’re waiting on the ok and watching a Bob Dylan video! Mom says not to forward the pic to anyone”

N, Thursday September 20th, 2018: “I went to see mom and dad at lunch for a second - a super part time speech therapist was there...she hadn’t seen dad since his second day! She said: When I saw him before, it was hard to say one word. Now he is saying six word sentences! They read and wrote together. She said so much progress this early is a really good sign.”

The documentary is called ‘The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography’ because Elsa always takes two portraits of her subjects, lets them keep one, and then she keeps the other one for her flat files: the b-side. She explains that the discarded photo might have a mistake, someone’s making a funny face or something. It’s usually the best one.

Elsa Dorfman said, “If you’re a kind of oh, this will be the same forever person, or if you’re a photographer and you’re always nailing down what’s the now, when you realize it doesn’t matter how much you try to nail down the now, the now is racing beyond you.”

In the picture, my dad is holding my sister when she was my nephew’s age. On the vintage floral chair that sits in the basement now, exposed yellowed stuffing, next to my dad’s guitar. My sister is holding a blanket and her eyes are closed, a peaceful cherub in red sweatpants. My dad’s smile turns up his dark mustache. Black Bob Dylan t-shirt. His hairy arms enclose her like the fence of a house.

H’s poem, Tuesday, September 18th, 2018: “My head feels funny since u moved / My dad says night sky calms your mind / I think about him all the time / When he’s all better we’ll sit outside and laugh about this shitty time.”

I want to send my dad a text on his flip phone, but it’s on the brown dresser in the brown room. I want to send my dad an email to his Yahoo account. I want to eat pistachios and put our shells in the same bowl. I want to write a sentence in the clouds so that my dad can see it from his rehab window. I want to write words that are just water. I want to write devotion devotion devotion devotion devotion devotion devotion.