An incomplete list of things that have made me angry today.

1. There was powdered sugar on some of the baked goods at the cafe.

2. I saw people standing around talking at the farmers market.

3. I could not remember something I liked.

Walking toward me, a few blocks down, I see a dark man silhouetted, smoking. I imagine hugging him. When he passes, he barely meets my eye. As if he knows I might press him into my chest and inhale his smoke. I wonder, what if our mouths were on the opposite side of our heads? What if everyone was the same height?

I think about the redhead I was friends with in high school and how her tits bounced when she drove her Saab fast down gravel roads. I think about her sour laugh and feel I might calm down soon. My fury is tethered to the anchor of my grief. I can only sometimes lift it. Mostly, I camouflage it with humor, rich foods, and wordplay. I feel a cavern in my chest, loneliness. I will try to fill it with an overpriced breakfast sandwich and an outfit that makes it look like I belong here.

Pain radiates from my ankle bone. I looked it up to name it. The ‘Medial Malleolus’ is an inconvenient lump. Sometimes, I scrape it with my shoe when I run. Once I break the skin, I can’t stop kicking it. I spend whole seasons with a scab seeping into my sock. I am lonely. I crave someone, and recoil, remembering his reckless notions. I wonder if other people are tied to sorrow. How do they remember their friends from high school and their lovers from college? Was everyone riding in cars, smoking cigarettes, listening to Smashing Pumpkins? Before they understood what the yowling was about.

I have always known. My darkest gift is my grief. Superior to my peers because I knew how shitty life could be. I remember my older sister, who was ten, holding the phone, her thin fingers wrapped around that large receiver, the spiral cord hanging below her knees. I remember the pastel landscape paintings on the walls, double-matted, pressed behind glass in large metal frames. Her feet barely touched the floor even as she sat forward on the chair. She might as well have been driving a pickup, or wrestling an alligator. She was calling 1,878 miles away. Her voice was breaking dishes in a sink. Mom, you need to come get us. Dad is dead.

Years later, her heart broke. The doctors called it a genetic condition. I think it was the weight of that phone in her hand, on August 13, 1992. They filled the cavern in her chest with a different heart. Because medicine is science fiction. I can do things, I know how to fix bikes and make waffles. I could probably undo the knot. I could release my grief. It has been long enough. I am a tree that has grown around barbed wire. I may have to cut myself down some.

I am not always mad at pastries. Sometimes powdered sugar reminds me of the mountains in autumn. Which reminds me of my uncle, who is also dead. But he told me, one hundred times, either everything will work out, and it will be okay, or everything won't, and it will be okay. I silently apologize to the bakers who spoiled so many croissants, they must have been at work before the sun rose. My loathing for people standing around at farmers markets will never fade. I pray the thing I like finds me again.