suddenly I see - kt tunsall  

shazammed over avocado toast, playing so obsurely under chatter that I could barely hear it, listening with my eyes closed willing it a little louder, my phone resting atop my head 

It's a song about Patti Smith, and I am walking this path purely on faith that Good for Something is somehow lighting it. Patti Smith is one of the patron saints of trust in the magic of this world. I'll take that shout out.

We do the class about brain death. The 4th years come back to sit at each table and facilitate talking, they do this for free, 8-10 students per table, 120 total, the 4h years rotate and stay after to talk more. They mean so well that it feels like a fist squeezing around my heart. Like that always did, does. They do it because these classes, the ethics and the writing and the spaces to Think About Shit, are the real lifeline when it goes south, which it does relentlessly. 

People are shockingly built to die, and fresh out the gate you might get a 31 year old hiker just dropped dead, so unfathomable that death isn't a moment, it's a space of time you allow before you profuse the brain and prove it, time needed or the family's brains just can't compute. The baby M1s can't know that it will be them who marks time for living brains to accept dead ones. That that's the job. 

I used to ask OG sometimes why the sudden dying all over in the first place. "Just blew a gasket," he'd say. And I'd think back at him do not blow a gasket, don't accept that you might ever do that, and I would knit his own horrifying explanations back over him like an inside out sweater-spell, cuddlearmor against any gasket blowings.

I can't witch-knit love armor for all these people. But maybe I can help cast this circle around them so they can heal themselves. The longer I'm here, the more I get the feeling that's what my Priest wants. He wants me to cast a protection circle around the work, build one (a department to shelter them). And he might actually get me to do that (!). Well intentioned priests and snakecharming witches have an odd affinity for one another. The Priest talks about me like I'm already his (married). Right in front of the fiance. And he might not be wrong.