My son asked if I’d be able to dance again.

The goal, I told him, is smaller than that. Just to stand. Just to walk across a room without the kneecap floating, without the joint filling like a river after rain. Standing too long can do it. Sitting too long. An accidental jump for joy. Suddenly the knee swells, and not only can it no longer bend, it can’t even entirely bear my weight.

Writing is bad for my knee. Standing is bad for my knee. Walking, swimming—forget dancing. Everything makes it blow up. And lately I’ve taken the damn thing in hand.

So it’s cortisone and physical therapy with the goal of trying to get the surrounding muscles to hold it together better.

I like saying it blows up because the idea of the knee exploding and then still remaining there speaks to me. The thing detonates and stays.

When the surgeon asked if there had been previous injuries, I said: a lifetime of them.

Three years ago, my giant dog lunged for a stick and took my knee with him—the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. A year before that, an ice-skating fall: the rink crowded and full of holes, and then the splice, me in free glide and then me on the ice, no fall in between, only the sudden edit.

And before that, the scar I still carry on my right knee from childhood. I was roller-skating with my uncle, and the next day, trying to follow him around the neighborhood, I went down on my knee into a strange pile of shattered plexiglass that tore a huge hole in it.

But my knees were manufactured poorly in the first place. As a kid, I had Chondromalacia patella, which often kept me out of gym classes. I was told that basically my kneecap, the little train tracks of it, weren’t holding, and so there was always that horrible clicking and slamming back into place, the floating kneecap returning where it was supposed to be.

The injuries came later, but for some reason they always seemed to find that same weak spot.

The knees come from my mother’s side of the family. Almost all of us have skinny legs and knobby knees. The knees are the least of what I inherited from them.

I had a lot of different families growing up. My almost-teenaged parents needed the different tribes to come together to help raise me. My father’s side was quieter, more solitary—noses buried in books, the sound of typewriters—a house of wood and stone, nothing like the sparkling chandeliers and noise of the other side of the family.

I grew up feeling like a burden, like I had interrupted everyone’s life. Everybody already had plans, trajectories, places they were headed, and my arrival cut across all of it.

So I learned to tread lightly. Every household had wildly different values and rules, and I learned to bend to them, just to make life easier—and because then there would be more room for love.

I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ home on my mother’s side. My aunts and uncles are only a few years older than me, and I was integrated more like a brother or sister than a niece. I loved them. I loved the noisy chaos of that home.

Gold-painted Rococo mirrors. Cupids on pillars. Giant fake grapes. Crystal chandeliers.

Holidays were a spectacle. There were so many gifts there was hardly any place to sit. Dinner under the prismed chandeliers—I loved listening to everyone laughing, yelling over each other from under the oak table, watching everybody’s feet.

At Christmas every year, everyone agreed to give only one gift, and every year it became a competition—unless you were the embarrassing person who followed the rules. We stuffed ourselves until our stomachs ached. Our presence was essential, non-negotiable, a matter of contract.

When I was little, one Christmas, my uncle Bob appeared with a gigantic box and set it in front of me. Inside was another box. Inside that, another. Nested boxes, each one smaller. At the center, there was nothing. That was the joke. But I still remember how it felt to keep opening. In that family, jokes were what joy looked like.

My uncles were always pulling pranks; the teasing was incessant and often went too far. I was dangled over banisters, chased in monster masks with butter knives. They would sneak into my room at night, crawling on their bellies to hide under the bed, waiting to jump out. My grandfather liked to joke that he would hang me from the ceiling by my toes.

That family was loud—laughing, everyone talking at the same time. You had to yell to be heard. The testosterone was palpable, and everything was a competition. It was important to be fun, to play, to laugh, even if you were the butt of the joke.

In the summer, the lake house was the family’s cathedral. Every Sunday, everyone had to be there. You had to bring your friends, whoever you were dating — they didn’t exist unless they were presented. Volleyball, skiing, diving off the double-decker pontoon, drinking, huge feasts—it was an enormous party. Presence was not optional.

It was so busy I’m not sure anyone noticed how little I fit in—how I was buried in a book or off playing pretend in some hidey-hole. They accepted me, took care of me, loved me like I was one of them. But there was always this invisible gap. Maybe they never noticed.

One summer I wrote a story set at the lake—The Possessed Paddle Boat—something about a haunting moving through all the familiar places. I carried the pages I’d painstakingly typed out around with me, trying to get people to read it.

When we went out on the boat, I thought I finally had a captive audience.

The pages got soaked almost immediately when one of my uncles drenched the boat with a cannonball. They went flying everywhere. I knelt down to gather them, then sat on them to keep them from blowing away while everyone kept calling out to me, “Why aren’t you coming in the water?” I didn’t want to admit to them that the pages were that important to me, so I pretended to be sick, and no one ever asked to read it.

My grandfather was at the head of the raucous family, pitting brothers and sisters against each other. If you ever got offended, he was just joking.

I always felt protective of my best friend around him because there was a kind of sexual predation in the electricity around him. I understood before I knew what it was.

He enjoyed frightening people. That was one of his greatest joys. He liked sports cars, showing off money, driving too fast, and jet skis. The whole game of the jet ski was to throw you off.

My best friend and I were late-stage teenagers by then—self-conscious enough that the last thing we wanted was to be thrown off—so we were hanging on for dear life while he swerved back and forth. Then he jerked so hard that we all flew off, and the jet ski spun and hit him in the head.

He drove himself to the hospital, bleeding—wouldn’t even let us drive him.

That image stays with me. It was him: the joking cruelty, the performance, the refusal to be helped, the pride. I can still see him afterward—electric with that nervous energy of his, a bandage wrapped around his head, those skinny, wiry legs bouncing under him. His knees in constant frenetic motion.

The knobby knees come from him.

The most painful moment in that family wasn’t with him but with my grandmother, who took me aside to tell me I should try harder to act like other people. Stop trying to stand out all the time. She was from Slovakia, and everything in her life was about not being seen as different.

I tried to explain that I wasn’t trying to stand out. This was not a performance. I was different. I was trying to fit in. It just wasn’t working.

Every time I went to see the family, somewhere on the highway on the way home, alone again, I would start crying without quite knowing why.

My uncle Bob was the one exception in the family, the person I felt I could be most myself with. When I was in high school, we were both obsessed with The Cure, listened to The Head on the Door together, and talked about writing. He was the only one in that family who bridged the gap.

When I was nineteen, I wrote a piece of fiction, and I recently found the notes Bob gave me—saturated with ink, every page, every margin, every sentence questioned. At the time, I found it flattering that he’d taken so much time. Looking at it now, as an editor, it feels overwhelming—like pushing a kid off their stride the first time they’re on skates. But I didn’t read it that way then. Then, it felt like being seen.

I spent ten years living all over — Guatemala, Colorado, Rhode Island, then Australia and Europe. I kept building a life outside the family’s field of vision. Different cultures, different ways of being. For the first time, I could decide who I was without reference to anyone else.

No one from the family called to ask where I was or what I was doing. I was simply expected. If I was outside the family contract, I was in breach of it.

When Bob invited me to his wedding, I still thought we were close, despite my geographic distance.

I realized right away that something had shifted. At dinner, I wasn’t seated with the brothers and sisters. I wasn’t with the cousins either. I was seated all the way in the back with my grandmother’s cousin from Slovakia, who told me things I had never heard from my grandmother, too traumatized by her own childhood to speak of it.

Although I loved the stories, I found myself gazing all the way across the ballroom at the family I had once been a part of.

Bob had proposed by hiding a diamond ring inside a bottle he’d found diving in the lake—something he’d become obsessed with. I was already making art, broke, and had traveled all the way there for the wedding. I decided to make them something instead of buying a gift. Something intimate, layered—our own private language, I thought.

I made nested boxes. Each one held a line of a poem—about love, about glass bottles and diamonds and water. Each layer was threaded so you had to keep opening, following it inward. The entire poem, with the last line about the diamond in the water, was at the center.

I stood there and watched Bob, stone-faced, rip through the entire thing and throw it aside.

He never said anything to me about it.

Maybe he was as disappointed by that empty box as I had been.

By the time my grandfather died, I was already out of the family. But everyone had already fractured—in-fighting and bloody disputes. I did not go to his funeral, and though I shed a few tears, they weren’t for the man himself. I recognized that he was a major throne in my personal pantheon, and that his death marked the end of the family I had loved growing up.

In France, people love word games. Maybe it’s Lacan’s fault. With knees—genou—you can easily transpose it into je, nous: I and we. More than once, people have tried to psychoanalyze my knee problems, asking whether I had I-we trouble.

I answer dryly that if my body is speaking a language, it’s probably English. In English, we’d talk about supplication, or surrender. But the French question hits closer to home than I like.

As an only child, compulsively solitary, the space between je and nous has always caused me trouble. How much of the I is really mine, and how much was built trying to survive the we?

I learned to bend.

When I think about legs, I think about roots. If we were like trees, our roots wouldn’t be the tips of our toes. They would be buried deeper—in attachment, in what we value, and in the coded trunk-vines of DNA.

My kids are not much like me at all. They are both committed to being as normal as possible—Alex P. Keatons after all the weird art shows and strange itinerant life I dragged them through. They’re athletes, which I never was. Even back in those old gym-class days, it was no great loss to sit out. I already had other things in mind.

My boys were incredible at capoeira. I still see them mid-air, the grace of their flips and kicks.

They don’t have knobby knees.

Now when we come back to America, though we don’t see the fractured family, my boys love skiing and gliding on the water like the great-uncles they don’t remember meeting.

I think about the code I passed on to them. There are roots I hope they didn’t receive. But I see it—when they hide in dark corners to jump-scare me, when we tease each other, when we laugh easily together at the dinner table.

When they tell me exactly what I want to hear, I worry about the performative self, their desire for normalcy. I worry that what I passed on was not the part that learned to stand, but the part that learned to bend.

I got away from that family, but I have it inscribed in my body. I drag this left leg into every room I enter, into this new family I’ve made.

What I want for my sons is to not need to perform to be loved. To not have to be fun, or easy, or whoever they think I want them to be. To just be who they are.

My mother still doesn’t understand why I’ve come to hate holidays—the dressing up of expectations, the performance of intimacy, a code of obligations that has nothing to do with love.

I don’t want my family to be a cathedral. I don’t want anyone to kneel here. Bend, sure. But there’s room in our house for us to be who we are. And as damaged as I am, there’s room for me too.

I used to think the goal was to be fixed. Now I understand it’s smaller than that. Not to stop the knee from bending, but to build enough muscle around it that I get to choose when to bend, and when to stand.

I don’t want to perform anymore.

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Keep an eye out for my next memoir chapter that is all about the fiction that Bob critiqued.

If you like this, read the other available memoir chapter:

and you will start to recognize the different textures of my family tapestry from this essay:

These vignette memoirs are stray, peripheral stories from my life. Written monthly toward a book, each one goes back to look for what I didn’t know I was losing.

Go ahead. Try putting Kevin Smith into Google. I have. Many times. It’s useless. And if anyone could have actually molecularized, it would be Kevin Smith. After all, that was the plan: to unself.

Long before he disappeared from view, I’d already lost him in Tucson, Arizona, in 1997.

I met Kevin when I was coming off a nervous breakdown, living in a kind of ecstatic state. Living alone for the first time, I was falling into solitude the way one falls in love.

It was a private experiment in meeting the loneliness of my childhood with chosen solitude—a manic mission, working at a cellular level, rooting around for old wounds. I was digging deep into the latchkey kid I’d been, shuffled between houses; my life a series of bags packed into cars. Living alone now meant having a single place to root into after years of inhabiting other people’s homes. As a child, I’d survived by building an interior world; now I was doing the same thing deliberately, choosing solitude. I wanted to break down every part of my old pain and be free of it. To be free of myself.

I installed surveillance cameras inside my mind, distanced myself from friends, and did vocal fasts1. I interrupted my sleep every few hours to let the dream-state spill into waking life. I wanted everything lit up, everything exposed. I wanted to dissolve completely.

I would sit out on a legless armchair in my desert garden under the Hale-Bopp comet, listening to Peter Gabriel’s Passion, slipping into ecstatic states, writing poetry that felt transcendental. I reached states where I thought I was seeing slits in reality, glimpsing a texture on the other side. And the desert was my conduit—the underwater world of the Sonoran Desert, her weird winds, her alien flowers, her immense skies. It transported me. I was on my own planet.

Enter Kevin.

He didn’t disturb my solitude. He entered it.

Kevin looked like any other good-looking suburban hippie on the University of Arizona campus. Vans and brand-new Grateful Dead tie-dyes and baggy jeans with too many pockets. Long, iron-straight blond hair. Green eyes. A pretty face with strong bones.

He was funny, confident, and calm.

And yet, beneath his ordinary name and appearance, he was doing the same work I was.

We became a pair. Not a couple. We’d both taken vows of celibacy. But we were always together. Sitting in cafes for hours. Going on long walks with my weird, borrowed dog, Whisky, with his oddly short legs. Talking. Reading. Scheming.

I opened the dark door of my solitude to him, and we became inseparable.

We had one aim, and it was everything: dismantle the ego, dissolve the individual self, transmute, become part of the whole.

I brought Alan Watts, Auden, and poetry. Kevin brought Buddhism and practice. He was steadier. I was more literary, more ecstatic, more DIY.

I remember us sitting in my apartment, long and narrow, almost like a tunnel. I’d taped a thin silver string along the wall, and we used my place the way we used everything, interpreting it, mapping it like it was the universe, layers of consciousness. We dissected a Charles Simic poem like it was DNA, as if the entire structure of life were encoded there.

We were trying to read the universe as a coherent text. Everything meant something.

Somewhere in there, I developed a crush. I think I was in awe of him. His size. His calm. His solidity. I felt small next to him, shy in a way I usually wasn’t. I remember when he took me in his arms; me curled tiny into his fleece, how big and soft he was, how incredible he smelled, like woods, hot stones, ozone.

But I wasn’t his type, and I was in ragged shape in those days, with long stringy hair and the college ten, uninterested in my appearance for the first time since my wild, boy-crazy years of juggling multiple passionate, frenetic love affairs.

I remember being quiet with him. More serious. He wanted me to play more.

Once we got stoned together and he launched into this gorilla impression, puffing out his cheeks, banging his chest, committing to it, making me cry with laughter. He wanted me to play too. But I just sat there, stunned.

Despite being half in love with him, it was enough to spend all our time together, bound by the same inward pursuit.

We planned a trip to the Rincon Mountains. We were going to take mushrooms, meditate, connect to the desert and the mountains—unbecome. We picked up the mushrooms from a friend of Kevin’s, who’d grown them in his basement, a nice, goofy college hippie. At the last minute, he decided to join us. Kevin’s spiritual life was incognito with everyone but me, hidden behind an ordinary mask. Kevin and I exchanged a glance: this is what our communicating universe was offering.

The wind came sweeping up the mountain from the desert valley, moving through the pines. Almost immediately, Kevin seemed to merge with the trees. That is the image I still hold of him. Thick, rooted. Swaying in the wind.

I went out on the ridge and connected to the wind, closing my eyes, focusing on its rise through the valley, feeling it come, and letting it move me. But—

Our companion wasn’t so doing well. He became convinced that spirits in the wind were attacking him. Every gust sent him into panic. I ended up sitting by the fire with his head in my lap. My voice was the only thing that calmed him. He said my words rose from the fire and wove a dome around us, driving the terrors away; as the stories came, I saw them streaming from my mouth as gold strands. I told stories all night, becoming the Bard. Kevin stayed with the trees.

On the drive down, Kevin and I sat in the front seat whispering about doing it again after break. We didn’t yet know how much would change.

Things started changing fast when Kevin met Emma over winter break.

Something felt wrong, but I told myself it was jealousy. Until then, there had only been us. He was mysterious about her at first, then began spending time with her acolytes. Did the work matter more to him than I did?

He said she reads you through the world. She can look at what’s happening around you and see where you’re stuck, where you’re still glued to your trauma, mistaking it for yourself.

Then he said it. “She is the world.”

“Like all of us?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But different. She is The Everything.”

“Like… God?” My voice did a little squeak I tried to cover up. He was sitting there with his chin slightly raised, that beautiful hair spilling over his shoulders. I twisted a strand of my hair, trying to look casual, suddenly aware of how shaky I felt.

“She incarnated here,” he said.

Something dropped in me. I tried to play it off, but the sinking feeling had already arrived. I knew I was losing him.

I tried to convince myself, too. In some ways this felt like a logical continuation of what we’d been doing all along. I never liked the word God, which always felt dogmatic and petty, but what spoke to me was Alan Watts’s idea of the infinite pretending to be us, a forgetful thumb of the whole, hiding from itself so it could experience the slow delight of remembering.

But the manifestation of the universe in a middle-aged woman named Emma, even for me, that was a stretch.

Kevin didn’t push. He just said she’d like to meet me when I was ready.

I met the acolytes first, and felt an immediate, instinctive aversion. There was one stringy guy with a dark ponytail and an insincere exuberance that made my skin crawl. Kevin spent a lot of time with him. I couldn’t tell if my unease came from the fact that he reminded me of myself, or from the creeping sense that he was my replacement.

Emma and I met at Epic Cafe, sitting on iron chairs that lurched every time we moved. I’d been told Whisky wasn’t allowed. Animals, apparently, interfered.

When she greeted me, despite my crossed-arm skepticism, she took my hands and told me how happy she was to meet me. I felt something give. A slow, glowing rapture opened in my chest, like sunlight. I felt seen.

As the luminous-eyed, middle-aged Black woman in front of me talked about the delight of eating ice cream for the first time after the incarnation, she turned childlike. She winked and said she eats an ice cream a day now, then threw back her head and let out a full, heart-ringing laugh. I couldn’t help laughing with her.

“Imagine being everything,” she said, “and not being able to taste anything.”

I remember how I felt talking to her. A shivering delight. An excitement so bright it made me sweat and tremble, my breath quick and shallow.

She told me she’d been a regular human being. An abused woman. A mother. And then it happened. God entered her. She dissolved.

“Are you ready to see?” she asked.

We sat together under the tram lines at Fourth Avenue and Sixth Street on the hot pavement. I sat cross-legged, sweat pooling behind my knees, hands trembling. We waited. We observed.

An old beige sedan was parked in front of us. A little girl was alone in the back seat, looking miserable. She was all folded into herself when she bolted up, scanning the street through the windows. She looked so fragile, so unprotected. So terribly alone.

Emma began narrating what she observed without interpreting, just describing. “The girl is alone in the car. What is she looking for?”

I had been that girl. Something old in me rose up howling, and I broke down in tears, full-body sobbing, while Emma held me.

Even now, the image makes the hair on my arms rise. That little girl, alone.

Emma left me there, blown open tears still streaming down my face. She said we’d meet again in a few days. She had a proposition for me.

I dragged myself home and buried my face in Whisky’s fur. I cried into the night.

We met at Fourth Avenue Park a few days later on a shabby little stretch of dead grass. I couldn’t bring Whisky. Kevin explained something about animals absorbing too much psychic energy. I accepted it, but it bugged me. Wasn’t Whisky a thumb too?

She told me a great evolution was coming for humanity. She needed doorkeepers. Gatekeepers. Nine roles. Nine thrones, or doors. She said something about the Kings of David. It was an honor, she said. And a sacrifice.

I tried to imagine it, but all I saw was myself on some ridiculous ceremonial throne, draped in an ermine cloak.

I imagined an enormous doorway with a nebula glowing on the other side. And to tell the truth, it sounded a little boring, all that staring into the glorious abyss. A big, boring job. Wouldn’t be much room for creative play, or exploration, or even writing with all that celestial responsibility.

Then again, there wouldn’t be a me left to be creative, would there?

I’d never see her again if I answered no, she told me.

I knew I wasn’t going to do it. And it’s hard to explain why this felt so sad, how it sat like a rock in my throat on the long walk home. Knowing I was losing Kevin. The thought of never seeing Emma again made me want to cry like a child. The world felt bigger and colder, and I felt small and unmoored.

But that evening, back in my garden chair, looking at Hale-Bopp again, listening to Passion, my serious, old-man-eyed Whisky sitting beside me, I started thinking about what I really wanted.

Did I want to dissolve, or was it the process of dissolving that appealed to me? I imagined it as blue dust, the edges of me going molecular and glowing, the membrane of myself thinning, evanescing, becoming vast. Stardust.

But did I want that?

Wasn’t the experience here the thumb? The ice cream? The slow walk across the universe? To go on foot instead of taking the fast train to enlightenment, when there was so much here.

Wasn’t the world exquisite?

And I decided then and there to remain Sandolore. To stay on Earth in this flawed, strange little self. To experience life, make art, write.

That was enough.

Of course, I said no, and we never met again.

Almost immediately, my relationship with Kevin changed. The last time I saw him, he was sitting at a cafe near campus wearing his ordinary self. I said hello; it felt like he had become just some random person. I knew it was over.

I still think about Kevin Smith sometimes. Whatever became of him? Did he go on to live an ordinary human life? Was all of that spiritual intensity just a phase, a story in someone’s quirky memoirs?

Or did he dissolve into microparticles?

I’ll admit it. I’ve searched LinkedIn, peering into men’s faces. Could that be him? Is he bald now? Hunched over my screen, staring at all these ordinary men, I realized that Kevin would have aged as much as I have; I try to find him in their eyes.

With a name like mine, I am the easiest person in the world to find. If he were still on the material plane, if I hadn’t just been a brief waypoint on a much larger path, he could have found me. If I’d mattered.

So maybe it’s best this way.

To tell you the truth, I’d like to imagine him out there somewhere, in ermine, holding some great door open for us.

Or better still, to hold the image of him on that ridge above the desert, smiling, towering, swaying like a tree in the hot desert winds.