I’m sorry. The truth is you were just a sad consolatory stand-in while I waited for the real world (for years and years) to publish my fiction. And now it is publishing my fiction. And now I must admit that I love paper and ink and bookstores and killing trees far far more than I ever loved you.

In all seriousness, those of you who have followed the strange life of this website know that I am notorious for starting and stopping it on a whim. It’s like an old lover I get nostalgic about and try to resurrect every couple of years, only to realize I am no longer 14 and it is no longer 1999 and some relationships are better left dead.

If you have been a faithful fan of my writing, please know that it has meant the world to me. I am writing more than I ever have–just not here. If you want to know where you can read my fiction in print, please send an email to marissaperry@gmail.com with the word “subscribe” somewhere in the subject line. I’ll be using a mailing-list to update friends about my publications. And if you have ideas for what the f I should do with this website, please email me those too.

Oh what haven’t you heard already—everyone has a story of some sad and skeletal beloved, wasting away with the poison still in their blood; you know all about their bald heads and glossy stares and the opiates that kill the pain but make them hallucinate late at night; they call you from the other room so you too can see the specters of their madness (snakes; spies; santa claus; men in trenchcoats on direct orders from the reaper). You know none of it is real and yet sometimes you wonder. This is that ineffable unknowable threshold; they are already moving away from this world, reeling in the strange darkness of a mind detaching itself from all senses, and who knows what exists in these blind interstitials between waking life and death? Perhaps all is imagination here: perhaps what they dream becomes the truth, what they fear rises up from the dust of their lives and demands acknowledgment before they can leave completely—

These are the things you catch yourself thinking, months later, when you lie down to sleep too late at night and are pulled back, back, back, to the morning on the day your father dies. He has spent all night in that dark gully of his own disassembling; he knows he is losing all lucidity; that there are precious few moments left for him to say what he needs to say before language itself disappears completely— I’ve been awake for hours, five hours, two hours, for the past five hours going over and over in my mind, it’s so tricky, so tricky, but I found the cure; I dreamed, I thought, I found the cure– But there wasn’t enough time, and see it was a double-edged thing because I was going to live and I was going to save all of these millions of people. But no, oh god, oh. Daddy, what is it? I wish I had been more clever.

I dream of an old and ugly house—burnt by the sun and rotted by rain, left to dissemble herself, plank by plank and brick by brick, on the outskirts of some lonely shrinking town. She smells of moldering wood and forest lichens, her gutters choked with vegetation, her attic moaning in the heat. Insects burrow in her hollows—architecting cities and tunnel highways, tending nurseries and graveyards all their own; they feed on the withering carcass: her pine wood, her sagging beams, her body consumed by scavengers and slowly returning itself to the earth.

She is a ruin. From the road you can see her roof beginning to cave. Her windows have been picked clean of their glass–just swathes of shadow now, swallowing the thin winter light. I want to stop and look at her. I want to tell the cars who are passing her by, hour after hour, day after day, that the wreckage is beautiful. Let me show you. Follow me down the rotted staircase that slopes to one side, down to the basement that smells of ash and ancient quarries, limestone and powdered cement: the dust itself a miracle: the dust itself containing the invisible blueprint (a staircase; a helix) of some human being who once stood in this spot and breathed. It’s these ghosts I’m dying to hear.

Imagine it from the beginning: before myself and my sister, before the house and the gardens and the quiet wedding, before the happy long-lived marriage and my father’s death, before anyone else in the world had ever even imagined they might exist together: my parents held each other in some dark and unknown room and fell from a startling height.

Imagine them! My mother walking down the hallway of the college, still in her twenties, in a pencil skirt and violet blouse—wearing turquoise eyeshadow in stark contrast with her dark brown hair (permed beyond comprehension). It is 1977. There is some undetected but primeval electricity in the air. My dad stares at her ass. He is married and fifteen years older, but he dreams of that ass, in the coming days and weeks and months, as they become closer and closer as friends. He is not exceptionally surprised at this desire; he has lusted (treacherously) for other women since his marriage; he has kissed others; he has not been an ideal husband. But no, no, it is something else this time—something more dangerous, more transformative and it catches him offguard; he finds himself dreaming of her brain: its gray folds and bundled nerves and all the invisible signs and semiotics that pass between their pathways, and he wants to know them. He wants to stay awake all night just talking to her, as if he is the first explorer to come upon some wondrous unimagined world. Valuable, inexhaustible, marvelous, arousing; perpetually beautiful; it is as though a match were struck in the furnace of his soul—a soul that had, until now, cast only a pale anemic light in the cave of some peaceable but ordinary life. But now, now, she laughs and it fills the universe and the sun itself is a whimpering ridiculous flame compared to this—this—affair.

My parents exist together in secret for as long as they can, but it is not enough. My father would tell me later, years later, how wrecked and awful those first destroying days had been when they unlocked the nuclear truth of their love; he told me how his teenage daughter sat on his lap and begged and begged and begged for him to stay. But he had already glimpsed a life of happiness. He had already been carried away. He chose to love my mother. And thirty years later I would watch my parents together and know how much that meant.

• My parents at their wedding
• My favorite picture of them, gray and kissing in a photo booth, a few months before my father’s death
• Our family all together

There is a river that runs in my head that knows no destination, no springwell or determined terminus, but I am always looking outward for some sign of the welcoming sea; you know that murky belt where freshwater merges with the salt of the ocean, brown and surging in and out with the tides that are turned by that fat winter moon. I am certain there is an inlet, an outlet, somewhere in the globe of my brain—replenishing salts, mixing and moving, reaching out to the new world at the same time it sighs and carries her inward, again, back and forth, against the current and then towards the future—renewing the water of my soul.

My dad died last week and I’m taking a little break from public writing. I’ll be back soon again, though, I promise.

The man in the moon kept witness, after midnight, after the neighbors had gone to their quiet quilted beds: I stepped barefoot off the back porch and into our yard. I was half-naked, half-dreaming, intending to skinny-dip and hoping to slough off the dead cells of these dying days (have I told you? my father is dying)—but she was already waiting for me at the iron gate. A possum and her babies. Gilt by the sulfur light. She gave me a warning look. She said without making a sound, This is primordial choreography; This is all I know.

I’m slogging through the years, stealing paragraphs and abandoning others, and it’s fun and humbling and something I should have done a long time ago. More ancient updates coming soon!

I. Anticipatoria

Imagine an island made of ash—cooled lava that yawns like a black sea before you, cracked and crevassed, hardened now but not forever. You might walk a good distance, a mile or so, looking for some sign of life, and sometimes you will find it. I saw an ancient woman with her dog once—a hideous hairless dog with yellow teeth and bugged-out eyes nervously shaking in the woman’s hands—and I asked her something (I don’t remember what), and she turned her head to face me, so slowly, quietly, that I thought whole universes might have collapsed and been born again in the time it took for her to make that subtle gesture, but of course on other planets it might have only been a single second. That is the first thing you learn about this place—time is an untamed creature. There is no formal curvature of space, no patterned fabric or universal law, and so you forget how to tell a story. Time itself is flattened, bloated, twisted, bent, stretched and swallowed, doubling and redoubling back upon itself, until the beginning seems like a dream you imagined once and the end is an invisible ghost. But the woman—the one with the dog—she said, “I can’t believe it. I forgot to bring toothpaste. I forgot those little bottles of travel shampoo.”

“But you remembered your dog,” I said.

“Yes,” she said and gripped him even tighter to his chest. The thing shivered. “But he’s leaving soon.”

In the distance you could see the blown top of the volcano, with its jagged edges like a broken tooth, beginning to belch fat clouds of steam that signaled its coming eruption. But how long did we have? I had not found my father yet. I had been told (in another life, in another galaxy it seemed to me then) he would be taken away by the molten river, dissolved, returned to the dust and the ash—and this was the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. The sickening knowing dread.

There is so much color. So much disorientation (the walk out of a saturday matinee). So much crystalline preservation, remodeled phrases, premeditated holding–so many spontaneous shifts and subtle nuances. So much doubt and so much security–the paradoxical vulnerability and simultaenous strength.

Impossible to see objectively: water is suddenly brighter, words suddenly more heavy (tactile and olfactory now–with layers behind layers–is nothing superficial?). The multiplication of laughter. Ordinary things are suddenly beautiful. Doubts birthed and slaughtered in a matter of minutes. This indescribable paradise that runs alongside this perilous edge.