I began this essay in an unheated painting studio beside the Hudson River. None of the windows had curtains, so I could see seabirds gather on the river below and move loosely into the sky, like shifting papers settling into place.

Hours earlier, the man I was with left the studio to make a call, his fingers tightly curled around his phone. He preferred compliments tied to a particular moment or sensation. Called me a paperweight, because he felt like loose papers, and I liked to lie on top of him and feel the smooth skin of his back rise and fall against my stomach.

I was reading Welcome Home, the hybrid memoir, assorted letters and photos of writer Lucia Berlin. I was looking for myself in her words, which isn’t a fair way to read but made me feel less alone.

In one letter, Lucia Berlin writes of about struggling to make her relationship work with musician Race Newton, “like me and Race—so awkward and clumsy but with it, trying to make a life—like trying to pick up a petal when you are drunk. This is worthwhile and positive … I believe in this—it is so unnatural to me—it is hard.”

I saw my boyfriend approach the river and bend forward into the wind. His back was partially turned, so I couldn’t tell if he was shouting, as he had been earlier, or listening intently. From far enough away, they look the same.

I turned to a page where Lucia Berlin describes trying to please her first husband, a sculptor, “I held the hot part of the cup and gave him the handle. I ironed his jockey shorts so they would be warm … I wore heavy eye makeup and no lipstick … he would arrange my body parts. Tilt my chin up, or turn it slightly to the left, take my hands off the table, have me leaning on one elbow with one hand open as if testing for rain, cross or uncross my legs. He said that I smiled too much and made too much noise during sex.”

We were close to that point.

I felt a metallic anxiety rising from my lower stomach to my chest. My boyfriend said he was just stepping out to call his brother, but he’d been gone for hours and wasn’t responding to texts or calls.

I couldn’t concentrate on reading Welcome Home, so I copied one of my favorite passages into a notebook, “Mamie and Granpa lived on Upson Avenue, close to the smelter, so day and night the skies would suddenly grow dark with smoke. Dark cascading waves, eye-stinging and nauseatingly strong with sulfur and other metallic fumes. Lovely, though, because the sun glinted into the smoke, highlighting a billowing, iridescent kaleidoscope of colors—acid green, fuchsia, Prussian blue.”

No one tells you how much of life is washing dishes, making small talk with people you don’t really like … how much you lose when you care. Willfully believing in who or what you want sometimes feels like the only way to believe in anything at all.

As Lucia Berlin writes, “The weariness is the only thing that bugs me—count your change—everyone does that in every way … It’s so much more (positive) to accept or reject all the way, even if you’re wrong.”

I watched the sunset spread through the water, then disappear. Eventually, I saw only a few lights from a distant bridge and my own face reflected in the glass.

My boyfriend liked my hair off my neck, so I twisted it into a loose bun, slipped my arms into a beautiful rust-colored silk dress borrowed from a friend, applied matte-red lipstick with an eyeshadow brush to blend the color more closely into my lips. I was so thin I could see my ribs when I glimpsed my bare back in the mirror, but I felt like my body was taking up more and more space in the studio.

I looked at Lucia Berlin’s face on the back cover of “Welcome Home.” Violet eyes. Flawless skin. Like an old movie star, Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner come to mind, the type of beauty that looks touched … Then, I remembered Lucia Berlin’s first husband ran away to Italy for more money and a woman with a straighter nose.

When my boyfriend finally came back inside, his voice had an edge I didn’t recognize. His eyes scanned his studio and lingered on the nozzle of a soap dispenser I’d left at the “wrong” angle. The muscles in his neck and shoulders tensed. Each word I said brought us closer and closer to the edge in his voice.

It’s like water had suddenly spilled all over the wood floor. I didn’t care who spilled it, I just wanted a dry floor, and if there were no towels, I would use my shirt, my hands, anything. I counted to 5, then 5 series of 5, then 5 series of 5 series of 5 …

He calmed down and said quietly, “You’re about to get hurt.”

Then he smoothed his hair back from his forehead with both hands, a nervous habit, and I listened to the next thing he said. He was speaking a language I understand.

As Lucia Berlin writes of her third husband, Buddy Berlin, “I was still pretty sick—I mean sick, like an illness, my masochism, which is like dope, the extreme of masochism-suicide, a denial—and I didn’t know then (honestly) what Buddy was—everything that I hate—suicide like the snakes that devour each other. I don’t know what I wanted more, to destroy or be swallowed—but I didn’t know this, I didn’t see how horrible I was—then I did, in myself.”

Outside the window, I watched the sky go dark, then light again. I watched seabirds gather on the water and move loosely into the sky, like shifting papers. Something. Like scattered papers.

I copied the passage below into a spiral notebook and crossed out every sentence but the last: “Every morning, when the gulls came, for the next year or so, we would look into each other’s eyes, confirming the happiness and gratitude we felt, too fearful to actually say it out loud. And then we stopped that look, and for all I know, the gulls stopped coming.”

I started to pack and my boyfriend hugged me from behind. He wrapped his arms around my waist, I wrapped my arms around his arms. His skin felt like my skin, and for a moment, I thought we were just two people who got close enough to make mistakes.

My mouth was so dry when I left. I had trouble getting the suitcase over the curb gracefully by myself, but I did it. Without grace.

Lucia Berlin ends “Welcome Home” with a description of Buddy Berlin in the midst of heroin withdrawal: “Buddy lay curled up and shaking violently on the front seat.”

The publisher explains that Lucia Berlin’s memoir was unfinished at the time of her death, but I wonder. The book ends when she knows why Buddy Berlin is shaking but still believes he’ll stop, when it still seems possible that the rest of her life will include him—if not in reality, then at least on the page. Sometimes it’s easier to believe will pain end than to accept that, after a certain point, maybe love should fail.

I think of my boyfriend sleeping with a pillow over one ear to keep his thoughts from drifting away in the night. The smooth skin of his back rising and falling against my stomach. His delicate fingers reaching for my hand, even in the car … I love so much about him—but when I close my eyes, I hear him monitoring my breath in the dark, I begin monitoring my own breath, and it gets hard to breathe.

I finished “Welcome Home” in a cheap hotel room in Brooklyn. The people above me were having the type of sex that sounds like a wet bar of soap smacking your palm. My notebook pages were filled with drawings of knots that look like rivers that look like knots. I rewrote passages from Lucia Berlin’s letters. She ends one, “PS) Robins! It seems impossible.”

I love this post-script. It’s so intimate. As though, Lucia Berlin finished the letter, looked into the empty space beneath her name, and added what she saw apart from everything else.

I underline it once. Then, again.

Caitlin Lorraine Johnson is a poet and arts writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. More here.

ᒪᑌᑕIᗩ ᗷEᖇᒪIᑎ / ᖇOᗷIᑎᔕ