A splash page in sequential art is full imagery—one panel, one page—and in the way comic books exaggerate everything in a visual metaphor:

I had a kid’s birthday party hat on while peering over the balcony rails of my apartment to see what the commotion was. In the street I saw a swarm of fire trucks, at least six police cars with cops running into my building from all corners and—across the street—three charter buses emptying out troops of girl scouts returning to their anxious parents waiting on the sidewalk after an all-day field trip that I had seen them board for departure in the morning. Just behind me, inside my apartment, was my youngest and family happily eating her birthday cake after blowing out the candle.

I thought about not using her real name, my neighbor, Annie, but Annie was a real woman. She used to be my babysitter, herself not that much older than me. If Annie had lived on the front side of the building you would have learned about her in the news. But she lived on the backside of the building, so the splash page would’ve had to stretch out a little further behind my apartment. And so, because of where Annie lived, from my balcony I saw girls scouts, sirens and a birthday cake and not Annie’s body laying in the rectangular body-size flower pot of the backyard of my childhood games, where her body slammed down into after having thrown herself from the balcony of the fifteenth floor.

Annie’s death affects me on all sorts of levels.

Though her death adds to a regular stream of death in an aging building (my parents among them) Annie was not old, and she was a constant tug on the heart and soul for my mother and me. And, this was a very violent death. When I went to Annie’s funeral service (attended mostly by elderly neighbors and her mother and uncle—I heard the funeral home staff talking about how they had to assure her mother that it was worth having a funeral, that surely someone would come) here is how I described Annie: my beautiful teenaged babysitter, Annie with the short red hair, stark lipstick, ankle-length skinny jeans and ballet flats. Her mother’s eyes lit up when I described her this way; an unrecognizable Annie from what was shared in her eulogy of her young adult life into adulthood: a tortured woman who longed for intimate love, in and out of psychiatric episodes, who had boyfriends who were (her mother described carefully) “very, very mean to her.”

At some point when I became a teenager myself, Annie in her early twenties, I noticed a shift in her from my outsider gaze. She stopped smiling. She stopped talking. She averted my gaze when I tried to make eye contact and smile hello to her. If I was shopping at Barnes & Noble where she was a manager for a time, I tried to respect her privacy and space by not spending time in a section she was working in, though I noticed her neatly organizing the books, busy between shelves. Cleaning and organizing, her mother would share in her eulogy, she loved doing. For years I’ve been haunted by the whispers I’d hear in my ears: There’s no way she’ll be okay after what they did to her… Almost twenty years of asking myself and my mother: What happened to Annie?

 Annie’s death also touches upon what a story of mine coming out next year remarks on: the age group of a woman’s biggest risk of suicide, her perimenopausal and menopausal years. Essentially what the character in that story does, what so many of my characters do in erasing themselves from life in some form. The rabbi at the service and Annie’s mother kept remarking how she was a tortured soul, how her act was a means of relief for her.

Thinking of Annie with the red hair (at least, that’s how I remember her hair at one point of her life), I am confronted too with the harsh reality of my preferred literature. My favorite novel (words and cover) is The Mexican Flyboy by Alfredo Véa.

Throughout the novel, a red-haired woman falls from the sky skydiving, but chooses not to open her parachute. There are layers here to the fallen Earth-bound Sophia (much of my writing also reflects this). The cover conveys an important theme of the book: going back in time and rescuing good people before their unjust deaths, the hero swooping in and holding them in his arms as he flies off with them using the Greek Antikythera mechanism. There’s red-haired Jean Grey Phoenix taking her life on the Blue Area of the moon, and my Nuyorican red-haired Jean taking her life in a brownstone. There’s the heroine I admired since reading about her in high school when I met her through the words of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Why heroine? Because I admired that she had the guts to throw herself in front of a train and assign herself that agency.

 In my own works, her theme echoes. My immediate response of the news was to remember why I wrote a Utopian story based on a world of women only, free from the afflicted pains of men, The Event Don Juan of Mycelia. In Memories of Myrrh (the novel form of The Funeral Singer), I recall the widow Sophia responding to a question regarding someone who died in her life, them asking her what happened to them. Her response? This bitter life. It didn’t help that soon after Annie dying, I read The Great Chimera, a work that hit me harder than Tolstoy.

 How I regularly remember Annie is me passing by her in the hallway of the lobby, she going one way, I the other. She putting her eyes to the floor when she saw me (her head was already in a slouch). When she used to leave the house, that is. In these moments I reached out to her soul with love, wanting to smile at her, afraid that maybe I reminded her of something that made her retract. I remember the breeze of her passing body, her fleeting existence as I asked inside: Annie, what happened?

 How to keep celebrating? My kid was a kid celebrating her eighth birthday, happy with cake as another life ended. What happened, mommy? Though I continue to lose many of my filters, I still at moments, pause. Adulthood makes you into a dishonest asshole to entice the young that it’s worth dreaming on this wretched planet that is also, beautiful. How to keep celebrating while I had a live Kickstarter while my mind was on this? Do we have the right to be happy under fascism, which we are now living through in the US? A little less than nine years ago I responded to agent edits on a manuscript on a laptop as I sat bedside the ICU unit of one of my children, wondering if she’d be brain dead, while bleeding into a maxi pad assuming it was yet another miscarriage of a failed pregnancy (she’d stick and become my third kid having now her eighth birthday, but I’d also bleed out into unconsciousness right after delivering her). Life has hardened me as my father trained me for like some Gen X Jedi (if you can withstand me, then you will be able to withstand the world), as life did, into a laborer with other lives relying on me that I’m here for, despite. I think the best salve for what is my own unique life perspective is summed up in the genius of the movie Rogue One, the end scene on Scarif: you know it’s all going to end. You gave it all your heart and your best shot for the greater good. You might as well enjoy the beauty of an apocalyptic death star ray giving you the image of a calming sunset, a man beside you telling you that your father would’ve been proud of you while nuclear winds warmly blow through your hair, letting it take you, while holding each other.

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