A Thousand Ways to Break a Fever
A Birthday Eve heat wave concert, the enduring power of beauty, plus a brand new exclusive to Substack poem
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It’s Tuesday at 6:57 pm and I am sitting in the 102 degree heat at Fenway Park in Boston (Field Box 12, row H, seat number two, to be exact) to see Hozier play to a nearly sold out crowd. I’ve been here once before for a baseball game, and once to do some background film acting work, but this is my first concert at the park. It is also my Birthday Eve, and my first time properly seeing Hozier in concert (well, to be fair, I did camp out across the street from his stage at the 2024 Boston Calling concert to catch what I could, journal in hand to jot down any ideas sparked by the music, but that could hardly be called official).
The golden hour is determined to live up to its name, and then some. The air is stifling, heavy, and full. The longed-for relief from the blistering sun is not to be. My face is flushed and my curls expand with the swelter. It’s as if every molecule that of Me makes its way to the surface of my skin and hovers, both buoyant and burdensome under the weight of the day.
I am both full and floating.
The heat has no plans to leave and we haven’t even heard the opening artist Gigi Perez yet, so I figure I might as well settle in for the long haul, as the sun herself has done. Slightly unsteady as I feel, I make myself take a deep breath and exhale slowly. I do this again. I sip some water as the plastic bottle crackles in my hands. As I consciously loosen my grip on the bottle, I try to put a little less effort towards fighting or fleeing the heat, and with some energy freed up somewhere inside, my mind and heart begin unspooling memories, both recent and remembered from long ago. It can feel so raw to remember. It can be such a joy to recall. Both, always, I remind myself.
This past weekend I spent precious time with my niece and nephew (two and five years old). In the midst of our overheated Boston apartment, I look around for things to delight them; it is easy. I offer them a creamy white seashell that I picked up more than a decade ago at Cavendish Beach on Prince Edward Island, and they clasp the new-to-them treasure with their tiny fingers. Instinctively, my nephew holds the shell up to his ear and grows quiet, listening for any sound at all from within the spirals. His sister and I don’t move. Somehow we all buy into this makeshift magical moment. Something sacred may be waiting to be received.
“What do you hear?” I finally ask, my voice a whisper.
He and my niece pass the shell back and forth between them, each holding the open end to their small ears, trying over and over again to discern any messages coming from within. At first, they could hear the ocean - no, just the sound of a shell - and then:
“Nothing!”
They speak seriously, quietly, and at one point, their voices match my whisper from a few moments before. Hearing their sweet voices, full of wonder in the heavy heat of the living room, feels like a prayer of sorts. In this moment, my apartment carries the coolness of a cathedral within its century old walls.
“Nothing!” The word echoes in my chest, like fingers beating out a rhythm on my heart.
I know what my niece and nephew mean. During the last few years, I’ve crawled through what feels like an endless landscape of losses of all different kinds. I still don’t see a destination ahead, but turning back doesn’t yield a vision of respite, so onward I go. My hands can feel permanently rung, and in an attempt to literally open to what might be trying to reach me (comfort, joy, a psychic sea change of sorts), I have developed a habit of unfurling my fingers and stretching my hands wide open in these moments of tightness, ready to receive.
I have often pressed my hands to the rough bark of The Giantess, a monstrous tree at the end of my street, hoping but failing to feel the kind of message I seek. I’m long past caring what the neighbors and their dogs think.
Even when I am rushed, I can’t seem to resist or refuse a message. As I scurry along to or from the train to Orchard House, I reach out my arm and let the tips of my fingers briefly tickle the trunks of the trees I pass. It’s a long shot, I think, but what if - what if? - one of these times, this ordinary contact unlocks something wild underneath the craggy skin of these living giants, transmitting a message that I desperately need to receive?
Will I be chosen to listen?
What words might make their way to my ears?
If something should speak - will I be willing to hear?
It’s a long shot, but the What If? keeps me extending my fingers each time.
It’s June 24th again, and I remember that it was this time of year when my great grandfather Gaetano and great grandmother Guiseppa Lauricella were in the middle of crossing the Atlantic, on the edge of a new life. In my mind’s eye, I can see them aboard the Martha Washington, bound for New York City. They left Sicily on June 15th, 1912, never again to return, and in a few days’ time, they will disembark at Ellis Island on July 1st, 1912. They are long dead and buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, and yet speaking of them in the present tense allows them to remain alive for me. Even now, they are traveling over the deep, on the precipice of all that will be, and all that will eventually lead to me.
How did they ever find the strength and imagination to walk away from the craggy coastline of southern Sicily to seek something new Somewhere Else?
What kind of searing heat must have visited them, compelling and commanding enough to convince them to begin again?
When they took their last breath, more than 4,500 miles from home, did they feel it was all worth it? Would they do it again?
From here, I make contact with the simple silver band on my left hand, the surface slightly warmer in the heat. My grandfather Joseph, whom we called Papa, sat on a ship in the midst of a World War II riddled Pacific Ocean in order to make it home to marry my grandmother Vivian and eventually save enough to purchase this ring, now residing on my index finger, for their 25th wedding anniversary. He is both resting in his grave in Upstate New York and still out on the Pacific, at this moment. Like his parents who crossed the Atlantic in 1912, he had his own sea voyage that led him to life afterwards, What’s Next. Perhaps we are both awaiting the sunset to bring some relief before we start for home.
My Grandma Louise McKenna, known always as Lou, died at 44 years old. One of my favorite photos of her is of her by the pool at the family farm, my uncle’s arms wrapped around her in a playful loving embrace, tipping her towards the water while she laughs in protest.
I will be 42 at midnight. Somehow, in the liminal space of tonite, this two year age gap means that she still has more time. She’s still out there, in that space between here and Somewhere Else. Maybe in the time we have left together, I can find a way for her to stay, for both of us to receive some much needed relief from the heat, in every sense of the word. I couldn’t swim as a kid, and I remember hearing that neither could she.
If we could be sure that we would float, would we be willing to take each other’s soaking wet hands and dive in? Could we be brave together? Might I get to meet her in these cooler moments ahead?
It’s all here at once, and like the heat, it’s both unbearable and inescapable. So much change has swept through before and so much is still on the horizon. How to make it through without being burned? How will our boat survive while being buffeted?
Like the newly arrived summer season, I have had my own solstice of sorts this week. Like the sun in the northern hemisphere, I can feel the immense energy that resides within me coming to a pause at the pinnacle, enjoying a brief breath before making its way in the opposite direction. A little at a time. A liminal space. Almost always blurry with the thrum of change. Before and after. All here Now.
I wonder if one day, 100 years from now, someone, anyone, might permit me to cross their mind one humid June evening, and in the act of remembering, allow me to be alive once more, all over again, again and again. Oh, to be offered this gift of immortality.
Back at Fenway, 37,000 of us wait for the night to visit us, for the sky to take on that slightly softened but somehow more brilliant shade of blue, for the heat to cease, even slightly. Even after the formidable white hot heat of the day, I find myself surprised to feel a small but steady reserve of hope within me, a pull to perceive something beautiful, and a quiet sense of surrender to the heat (literally) of the moment. I feel grateful for its presence, and perhaps a little foolish, too. At one point does Hope evaporate? Vacate to a more reliable home? At what point does Beauty become irresponsible? How can both Hope and Beauty be certain that they are safe here, with me?
The June evening light is shy to arrive; I am drawn to its reticence. The weight of 102 degrees is less interested in retreating and not shy at all. We cannot seem to loosen its grip on us (how silly to think we could in the first place), so we sip the water we can. At one point I hold the fleeting freeze of a clear plastic water bottle to my wrist, my small way of doing what I can to try and cool the flush within. Faced with the icy blue of the bottle, the heat inside me seems to slow, to pause for a few moments, as if we are equally resisting and sharing space at this moment; a solstice of my own. In the end, the water begins to warm, the heat proves it cannot be stopped, and when the bottle is finally moved away, the heat is present as ever; determined, relentless, strong, pulsing.
Like all kinds of desire, heat can be tamed temporarily but once cold compresses of all kinds are removed, it tends to come roaring back. It rages. Reddens. Despite the way the scorched sensation exhausts me, I’m also comforted by its stubbornness. Much as we rail against it, heat will not relent until it’s good and ready to leave. Under the Fenway sky, I find myself praying that whatever sense I possess that resembles anything like Hope will continue to be as unyielding for me as this recording breaking heat wave has been for the city. A record breaking Hope wave; if only.
Gigi Perez makes her way to the stage, and though I have never heard her sing before, she sounds like an old friend.
“If my dreams come up empty, and I wash up on the shore, you would find me at the beach in every life, through every door.”
At the Beach, In Every Life by Gigi Perez
She understands my need to return, return, return, again and again: to poetry, to art making, to the ocean, to the kindred spirits I have found (and who have found me), to the Hope and Beauty that seek me even when I hide. Even during this evening of hiding in a crowd, I have been found in so many small ways.
Once Gigi has taken her final bow and while we wait for Hozier to come out, I find myself reciting the first stanza of These Are the Days by Emily Dickinson aloud. In another life, I can imagine Emily and Gigi and Hozier sharing conversations about poetry, about how to be willing to be sought by Hope and Beauty, and what it feels like to constantly rearrange the pieces of yourself in ways that allow you to keep putting one foot in front of the other when you know you can’t.
I can imagine their voices going back and forth. No, I can hear them in conversation at this moment. Fame and notoriety distort the threads that weave us together. Creative souls and kindreds always share roots and branches, always, no matter how we measure the distance between us (in millions of dollars or by dates of death).
It feels sudden, since the crew has just finished finalizing his band’s set up and it’s not quite dark yet, but he doesn’t make us wait. Hozier walks out, and the wave of voices around me rises, my voice part of the swell, all of us caught off guard and all the more ecstatic for the early start. The heat cannot hold us down. The music rings out.
These days, in some ways, I’ve been feeling more connected than ever before, and in other ways, I have been feeling more lonely than ever, Grief having moved in last month, with no plans to leave anytime soon. I don’t want a roommate, and yet here I stand alongside 37,000 other human beings that have walked past security with their own Grief (and love and fear and joy and their own infinite laundry list of Big Feelings) in tow. Something else has moved in. I feel a kind of unexpected belonging visit me.
“She blows outta nowhere, Roman candle of the wild….”
Jackie and Wilson by Hozier
Hozier may be onstage, but he belongs here with us, too. Artists manage to surf the surface somehow, appearing effortless, but they are still in the same sea that we all swim (or flail around) in. We all gather, wearing our Grief, not surrendering to it willingly, determined to make something of the craters in our hearts. We sing, we sway, and for one muggy night, we suspend our disbelief that the world could be blindingly beautiful. As we are entertained, we too entertain the possibility that our lives are perhaps not the sum total of the slings and arrows, the sorrows, and the gorgeous, once glittering dreams that have slipped from our wanting hands, but rather a lifetime of symphonies that we have yet to compose, to shout, to writhe to, with what we have left.
“I'm starvin', darlin', let me put my lips to somethin'
Let me wrap my teeth around the world
Start carvin', darlin', I want to smell the dinner cookin'
I want to feel the edges start to burn”
Eat Your Young by Hozier
His voice is here, now, resounding against the concrete, the clubs, the corner stores, the clutches of roses caught in the chain link fences in Fenway. Like Orpheus, I wonder if the stones recognize his tones, having heard them accompanied by my own imperfect voice in the Beacon Street air on the thousand walks I have made from the D line train station home. Tonite sings the same voice but different. Here, unmediated. Thick as the heat. Anything but meager. I recognize the real thing, and so do the stones.
These days, words get stuck in my throat and when I try to tell the truth about how lonely I feel, how it feels as though an earthquake has smashed my plans for the future, I seem to choke.
I stand quite still through the first four or five songs, both afraid to become overheated and uncertain that I want to break the spell of the music with movement. At some point, I warm up and realize that I am singing and swaying and sweating and don’t care at all what the people around me think of this kind of devotion. The haze persists, yet I feel far more free from the heat, from the dark pool I’ve been swimming in for the last month, than I could have anticipated an hour ago.
How is it that by rising when you feel like rotting that you might actually glimpse something good from a greater height?
I don’t know how much more weight my heart can take before it breaks for good.
I also didn’t know just how much love could reside in these chambers, relentlessly feeding the rest of me. Can I ever truly fathom what cannot be measured?
Do you think I'd give up
That this might've shook the love from me
Or that I was on the brink?
How could you think, darling, I'd scare so easily?
Now that it's done
There's not one thing that I would change
My life was a storm, since I was born
How could I fear any hurricane?
If someone asked me at the end
I'll tell them put me back in it
Darling, I would do it again….
Francesca by Hozier
I want - no, need - more than anything in this moment to believe that I will always be able to find that balance between my heart splintering into pieces and Hope calling me back like Persephone coaxing the spring back into being. Like the bit of breeze that is beginning to blow over the park, I must choose again and again to let myself be led back to what feels beautiful, even when it comes in bits and pieces. I always want to choose to do it again.
What are we, this night, if not temporarily organized starstuff making miracles (and music) despite, or perhaps, because of the losses we endure?
When I am at a concert, I love looking around at the crowd to truly take in just how many of us are gathered here in this place. Amongst us all at Fenway, it’s easy to imagine we have somehow unwound time and are sitting at the Theatre of Megalopolis in ancient Greece. Or that we are each one of countless humans who have sat around a campfire for hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of midnights, raising our voices against the darkness, confessing our dreams and deepest fears to one another, and imagining the future.
Where did we come from?
Where are we going?
How do we make it through this moment?
I want to stay here forever with all these souls, not siloed inside my own head, spinning stories of how I’m different and broken and hopeless and separate. Maybe there’s a reason why human beings so close together generate heat. Why did we ever think we were meant to stay warm alone?
This is what we humans do, isn’t it? Gather, wail with grief, joy, with the simple desire to say, “We were here. We ARE here.” The drums and the screams and the laughter that explodes from our guts die away, but something stays. As the playwright Eugène Ionesco says, “We will leave some traces, for we are people and not cities.”
The air remembers, long after the sound falls away. Such festivities leave fingerprints.
I am timeless, and this night is eternal. In fact, even as I write this days later, I rest in the sensation of still sitting in that seat at Fenway. I am here and I am there, still. A part of me always will be. Straddling time, forever.
The sky darkens and still, the heat remains, like hot hands holding me tightly, and I can’t tell if it’s out of love or fear. Either way, I am held. Wedged in this moment, not easily released. It feels good to not feel like I’m floating away. Something about summer, even with (especially with?) soaring temperatures make me feel sticky, sturdy, as if I will be able to stay.
Like they tend to do with the trees, I feel my fingers unfurl when I sense that there may be a message to be heard. The release begins when I can sense Presence hovering just above, like a hummingbird waiting for just the right moment to land. Desiring to take in every molecule of joy I can, as if by osmosis, I move my hands slightly away from my body and gently turn them upward, one on top of the other, with room in between to breathe, to sense the signal.
This gesture feels like offering a gift and readying myself to receive one in the same moment. It’s a rough ritual, but it’s holy. If I happen to be wearing sunglasses at such a moment, I take them off, too. I don’t want anything coming in between me and the direct experience of this moment. I wonder if I might be a Transcendentalist after all.
My fingers knew before it started. The opening chords of Take Me to Church come next, echoing across the park. I unwind my fingers from around themselves and gently, reverently, hold my hands in front of me, one on top of the other, palms up and open. Muscle memory. If I want to intercept a message, I need to unfurl. If nothing else - if no such message will ever actually arrive in my ears - I want to live the rest of all the days of my life knowing that this night, I let go, that I stopped trying to grab at the people, the places, the lives not meant for me, and stood still, an eclipse with borrowed breath, ready to sense what I could, and be satisfied with what shows itself to me. I also wanted to be fully free to send my own message to whoever might need to hear it. Out of the shadows slinks so many reasons to stay alive, to savor.
“That's a fine lookin' high horse
What you got in the stable?
We've a lot of starvin' faithful
That looks tasty, that looks plenty
This is hungry work”
Take Me to Church by Hozier
These days, I don’t always want to speak, but I sing as if I am praying for my life (and in a way, I am) and wonder why church never felt this way. As a child, I was a sinner. Like Emily Dickinson, I was a No-Hoper. I spent most of my life feeling silenced by the system of religion and its opinions on how I approached spirituality. Now I see that there simply wasn't a sanctuary fit for someone as real as myself: flawed, ambitious, impossibly sensitive, and swollen with what felt like the whole of the universe in my chest.
Amen, amen, amen….
Take Me to Church by Hozier
To be able to sing “Amen” out of doors in a chorus of tens of thousands of other humans, on the eve of my birth, out from underneath the watchful eyes of my Catholic church childhood - there are hardly words worthy of this feeling.
I let go. I sing, I sweat, I signal to the skies themselves any way that I can, that I can, in fact, be brave - that I may already be, in ways I never asked to be. This primal desire to not hold on to anything at all sweeps me away. I keep my palms open, upturned. Like the hummingbird, this is my way of proving, of trusting, that I can be held by the weight of my own body, by the air, by the earth itself.
Gripping is not necessary.
It never was.
As often happens, poetry pops into my mind to meet the moment. Emily Dickinson, as often is the case:
These Fevered Days—to take them to the Forest
Where Waters cool around the mosses crawl—
And shade is all that devastates the stillness
Seems it sometimes this would be all—
These Fevered Days by Emily Dickinson
Perhaps, it’s only by wrapping our arms around the dark that we can find some relief from our own fevered days?
Tonite, Fenway is the forest. The canvas of sound provides the coolness, the music is the moss, and the Boston skyline has shape shifted into the shade.
I didn’t cradle anything solid in my outstretched, gazing palms tonite except the pillows of heat, but the presence of riches is palpable. It is enough. Instead of pulling away from the heat, it felt like a relief in itself to cease trying to push it away, and instead, see what happened when I let something soft and silent and salient simply stay. When the struggle ceases, what can I sink into?
When my time comes around
Lay me gently in the cold, dark earth
No grave can hold my body down
I'll crawl home to her
Work Song by Hozier
If Grief has bestowed any message unto my needy ears during her stay this time - if I’ve witnessed any kind of resurrection as of late - it’s that the dark can be a door through which I can meet creativity in a far more intimate way than I ever imagined possible. She is a lover that cannot be lost, from whose touch I cannot turn away. Beauty cannot be buried; it continues to rise for me, dirt covered and crusty, but here nonetheless.
The stadium lights don’t allow me to see the stars that hang above this city that is my soul ground. They are there anyway. For now, the fireworks suffice.
We walk the two miles back to the apartment, a reverse pilgrimage of sorts. Nothing pulls me towards home exactly (I’d prefer to return to Fenway for more music), and yet, home is where I must go in this moment. I pray I can bring the sense of eternity I’ve possessed this evening with me into bed, into tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) and that somehow, someday, it makes it possible for me to want to stay in all the moments to come, too.
The next day, I recalled a story about the famous violinist Itzak Perlman who tells of how at the start of a concert, one of the strings on his violin broke, and rather than stop the performance or replace his instrument, he simply adjusted and continued to play.
Itzak later explained, "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."
It’s just the truth: I feel more lost than I have in a very long time; I am terrified I won’t ever make it back to anything that remotely resembles a path. Yet, of all that I do not know, I do know I am an artist and a seeker of beauty even in - or rather, especially in - the midst of brutality. Right now I somewhat resent my task of making do with what I have left, but it’s there in front of me nonetheless. And oh, what I have left.
I love singing, even when my voice cracks. I pray that the melodies that float forth from my bruised mouth are enough.
Below is a remixed poem, my own take on These Are the Days by Emily Dickinson; borrowing a few lines from her original, doing my best to retain most of the structure and slant rhyme, I graft in my own lines and images.
As always, I hope you read something you loved, and if you did, that you share it with someone you love.
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