I have a small action figure in my office that I played with every day as a kid. I think it was from an emergency show, but if so, I don’t know why he looks like a redheaded lumberjack. Either way, he carries my childhood inside of him like a guy the size of Paul Bunyan who goes home to take care of a baby rabbit with a tiny milk bottle, and covers it in a fleece he cut to cuddle it.

My grandmother has to use a magnifying glass to see things as she got older. For some reason, I didn’t put that together with her ability to drive a car and see well while doing it. She ended up getting into a car accident that she never really recovered from. I’m sure the lung cancer didn’t help. I crashed my car the night before I left for her funeral. I wasn’t sick, and I could see fine.

My daughter used to sleep in the pillow of my Vizsla’s stomach and suck her thumb and twirl her hair. Parenting is incredible. You walk around lonely until you create someone who is part of you. You will never feel lonely in the same way again. Then you get a divorce, and you only get half the days, and your old loneliness now seems like a distant star in a universe of despair.

I played games of human Frogger in New York City growing up, dodging yellow cabs and bike messengers with the deftness of an experienced breakdancer about to pop-n-lock their way out of a traffic ticket. I felt so independent as a child, able to walk freely into the world and come home with a candy bar to assuage my loneliness.

I used to like going to sleep in mom’s bed when I woke up in the middle of the night. When my stepdad moved in with us, it was more awkward. So, a lot of the time, I would go into their room and sleep on the floor with my two dogs, Bert and Ernie. I felt lonely and wonderful at the same time.

No one says, “Hey honey, I’m house.” Home is a state of mind. It was hard for anything to feel like home to me with my mom gone. Looking back, the difference between a house and a home, to me, was family. When I had my own family, I could’ve lived in a shack and still felt at home. Curated decorations help, but I still feel lonely when they are the only things to welcome me home.

I could overhear her whisper-yelling at my dad and then ramping up the volume for my benefit while I huddled in the basement room playing Bubble Bobble on Nintendo. Pop, pop - it was a fun game. “You do everything for the little Jew boy.” I couldn’t argue with her. I was technically a Jew boy, and my dad did do everything for me. She never called him a Jew man.

I wish my dad left me a 23-minute message once that I could replay for the rest of my life. I wish my grandmother left me a voicemail telling me just how much sugar she used to put in my hot Lipton tea. I even wish my stepmother would text me in what would have been broken Swedelish to get “baloney” sandwiches on a roll with “butr.” I wish my mom just said my name.

I had oatmeal for breakfast. Every time I eat oatmeal, which is a lot, I remember when my mom took me on a cruise to Bermuda when she was sick. I was actually doing a commercial for Macy’s for Father’s Day. Everyone pinched my cheeks the whole cruise. She was sick and pretending to be seasick when she had cancer, so she sent me down to get breakfast on my own. I was maybe seven. I was so shy, I forgot to find the sugar when I got the oatmeal. The texture was gooey and clumpy; it was fantastic, but I had never had oatmeal without sugar. It tasted like cardboard. My mom couldn’t get out of bed.

I know what type of person you are solely by whether or not you hold the door for others. This is the only thing that is truly black and white in the world. I used to think Missed Connections would work. Everyone who rode the subway in New York City did.

A summer day can feel like a blizzard even when it’s not cold. A sack of hammers landing on your big toe. A jellyfish sting that won’t stop stinging. Poison oak. Running fast around the corner of Old Man Jones’ abandoned garage and catching your inner forearm on a rusty nail. Grief is a sharp arrow.

I left Brooklyn Heights right as puberty was having a strong conversation with me. I left North Hollywood right after I got my driver’s license and was free to explore Southern California. I left boarding school for college right after my mom told me she was going to die. I left my first college before I ever played a second of varsity basketball.

I let my tears run into a jar that I hid under my desk in the back corner of my new room at a new college. I ate giant oatmeal raisin cookies at the mall with my stepbrother, and bought video games at Babbages, to assuage my inner turmoil. I pumped iron over and over until I looked like someone new. I didn’t cut my hair for a year. I was pedaling in place.

Tea snackered with white sugar. Danish sugar cookie tins. Bench seating in the kitchen. Why did I sell this house? Low carpet. Shag carpet. Linoleum floors. Pink cabinets. Pink house.

Trying to explain to people the abstract machinations of my life has been hard. I was in the room…no. I was holding both of my parents’ hands…no. I was right next to both of my parents when they died. Separately. Thirteen years apart. An avalanche of despair.

Hammer me until nails no longer feel like anything. Head hung. An ocean of tears pooling in my belly. Grief. Catatonic, yet walking.