Meg after burying herself under moss in Armstrong Park, February 2022. Photo by the author.

Grief is a fair-weather friend. In the moments of crisis and chaos, it holds back, waiting patiently for the waters to calm so it can clear its throat and say, “Excuse me...” I’d been wondering when it would knock on my door through all this — knock and present itself properly, I mean — and at last, it did. It arrived the day we found out Roe vs. Wade had been overturned, when my first thought was: I’m glad Meg isn’t here to see this.

I met Meghan Marohn in the summer of 2019. My boyfriend at the time knew her from environmental activism in Troy, New York, and they’d been arrested together at an Extinction Rebellion protest earlier that year. They’d all laid down, “like selkies” she said, on the Brooklyn Bridge. They blocked traffic to try to convince someone, somewhere, to give a shit that the planet is dying around us and taking us with it.

Meg was released from jail early that day. A call came in from home: there’d been a family emergency. She assumed immediately that it was about her father, who has cancer. It wasn’t. Her mother, Ellen, also a teacher like Meg, had suffered an aneurysm and was dying in the hospital. Meg made it up to Albany just in time to say goodbye before her mother’s body went cold.

I met her after all this, after yet another piece of her heart had been torn out and thrown across the veil. She was remarkably calm about it that night we met, when we sat in her apartment on Old Sixth under the Christmas lights and the scraps of typewriter poetry all over the walls. She was going to Ireland soon, to wander hilltops and churches performing ceremonies for her mother in the land of her ancestors. That night, we wrote prayers on bits of paper and burned them in the candles. I don’t remember why. It just seemed like the thing to do.

I met her again two months later, after the dissolution of my relationship. We hardly knew each other, but I found myself asking if I could stay with her for a few days while I figured out where to go next. She said yes. I don’t know what compelled me to ask. Maybe a part of me knew. Maybe it was just that right away, everything about her felt like home.

Maybe it was the hair, wild like wind and the color of cinnamon, or the typewriter poems on the walls. Maybe it was the purple light coming from the living room. Maybe it was the way she held ritual like a reminder of all we’ve lost and keep losing. Maybe it was her biting intelligence that cut clean like a surgeon’s knife through the garden of softness she grew around her. Maybe it was her laugh, or the way she’d nod eagerly and smile when excited, childlike in the stale, hollow world of the adults.

I fell in love with her instantly, like we all did. I was just lucky enough that she felt the same.

Five months later would see me across the continent, having arrived once more at my mother’s house in Olympia in the early days of Covid lockdowns. Meg called me to say that she’d fallen in love with a journalist in Washington. He was promising her everything: a partnership, the partnership. He’d said her mother’s spirit guided them together. He wanted her to come out to be with him for the pandemic, and she wasn’t sure whether or not to go.

I forget what I said to her, if anything I said had any influence, but she went. She drove for days across the country while the world was closing down, and she did it all for love. The manic chaos of March 2020 was in full swing.

She called a week after arriving, having doubts. It became quickly apparent that the partnership was not all that had been promised. It felt all wrong and backwards, like the love was hollow, and she was growing afraid of him. I heard the tremble in her voice and begged her to get out of there. Come stay with us for a week, get some space, we’ll figure it out from here.

That is what she did. She arrived with her enormous jacket, the color of a sunrise in Utah. She arrived with all her books. She arrived and made us rose tea with cardamom, honey and almond milk. She arrived and found the trail behind my mother’s house led into a forest where she’d walk barefoot and light sage. We held a ceremony with her family and friends over the phone to honor the anniversary of her mother’s death.

We felt Ellen there with us every day, in that house. The color green looked brighter out the door.

Her weeklong stay turned into a month and then another. We kept waking up at the same time each night, in strangely synchronized fits of insomnia. We’d bump into each other out in the yard and laugh under the moon. One night, it was so bright that we followed it out to the driveway and lay there, absorbing it, white and clean like a piece of paper.

But Meghan was in pain, beneath it all. She’d take long drives up Highway 101 because she didn’t want to trouble us all with her grief, no matter how many times we asked to be troubled. One day she took me with her. We put on “Take a Minute” by K’Naan and laughed at how shockingly normal it all felt, to drive with the windows down, me with my American Spirits and her with Bun, the rabbit stuffed animal she’d put to her nose and breathe in like the smell of safety. We’d forgotten, in those early days of quarantine, how much was still alive, but there was springtime living all around us.

We drove until we saw a perfect road that ran between two forested mountains. We followed it down to a river. I still don’t know the name of that river, but if you follow 101 up the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, you’ll know it when you see it. That was April, the month we found the rough throne carved from a log in that magical Narnia forest, the month we read aloud from Kurt Cobain’s diary, when she drove with me to Portland to buy another shitty van, when she read tarot cards for my sister and excitedly showed me a photo of Pamela Colman Smith saying, “Have you ever seen anyone who looks more like a time-traveler?”

In May, she came down with me to Arcata to pick up the stuff I’d left behind. We listened to Ali’s Tarot readings through the redwoods. We laid in the sun by the Trinity River. She hid in my old yellow bedroom when the pain got too bad. Back north, we marched together down the streets of Olympia when the world finally woke up again. George Floyd’s name was everywhere. The cops kept to side streets on their bicycles and we watched them watch us.

In June, we got into a fight and made up in time to visit the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone together, where she wanted to interview people for a radio program back east. On the fake grass at the park on Pine Street, we marveled at the smell of free food and the piles of free clothes and the waves of free people and for once, we didn’t ache for how the world could be. Here, we could enjoy what it already was.

But all that could be never lasts, does it?

The protests died out. The police came back in. The spring turned into summer and Meghan drove home. We talked every day, about everything and nothing and the everything in nothing. She was going to come back at the end of the summer, once she was sure her father could be cared for. No one else came to help her with him, and her return west was postponed for a year. One more year of teaching in New York and she’d come back. That was the plan.

That fucking school. It was wearing her down like sandpaper. At meetings in September, they’d ask what everyone had done that summer. So-and-so bought a house! Such-and-such built a deck! Meghan went to the top of a quartz mountain for a workshop called “Every Anus is a Portal” and flew to Ireland to do ceremonies for her mother’s ghost. She’d laugh at herself, at her incongruity in the world around her, but beneath all the laughter, there was always pain. Pain at the men who had hurt her. Pain at how bad the world is. Pain at how the pandemic was impacting her students. Pain at not having children of her own.

One last year of teaching turned into another. One more year, she said, and then she’d come back west to Washington and we’d help her get set up in a new life.

She never finished out this school year.

Meghan was haunted as long as I’d known her. She was haunted by Ellen and the spirits of so many other loved ones lost, by capitalism and the grinding stress of making it through each day, by the men who had assaulted her physically and the dozens of others who’d assaulted her heart and her mind with their utter failure to understand a thing. She was haunted by the racism in Troy, by the school system, by the chronic ache of feeling so alone. She was haunted when one of her students was shot to death. She was haunted by the tension in the school, with the administration and the faculty and that one damn coworker who’s name I got so sick of hearing. (If you’re reading this, you know who you are: Fuck you.)

By the start of this year, it was clear the Meg I knew had all but given way to pain. Her messages were waterfalls of disjointed emotion. Something in her was broken, shattered by loving too much and seeing too much and being too right in a world gone wrong. I watched her press herself against that wall of suffering, try to use its force to set herself upright, until some new act of quotidian cruelty would come and knock the wind from her again.

In February, she came to visit me in New Orleans. I invited her because I missed her, but also because I was worried about her. We all were. She almost didn’t make the trip, and I begged her: Please, just come. Just get out of there. She arrived in Algiers Point, giggling with her Uber driver, and I almost knocked her over with the hug. It was the first time in nearly two years that we’d seen one another in person.

I didn’t think it would be the last.

By then, everything about her felt different. She was so thin, so anxious, talking nonstop and jumping like a rabbit at every little noise. We watched Howards End and made dinner. We talked about everything that’d been going on with her. I showed her the café with the awning that made me feel like a pirate. We had drinks and ate gumbo and bought ourselves Mardi Gras masks. Hers was green and shaped like the moon.

These are the fragments I have left.

You must understand that Meghan was among that special class of people who consistently take photos of the moon and remain committed to the practice no matter the outcome of the image.

If that doesn’t say it all — that and the constant care she gave to her students and all the times she’d quote Joanna Newsom and the way she’d give up everything for love and write free typewriter poems for strangers at the farmer’s market and the time she called me overcome with awe at hearing coy dogs running with her through the woods and the books she gave to all of us for every occasion and the tenderness she held for Tupac and the way she could never wrap her mind around cruelty… what I mean is, it never occurred to her even once to stop trying.

In March she texted me:

“I’ve been scared as fuck at school.” We talked about impotence and grief at all the cruelty, about getting out of there, about that fucking man again.

“Waterfalls of the heart,” she said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, does love have to have a gender?” she said.

“Great blue heron tracks in the snow last week,” with a corresponding photo.

“Sometimes even something that seems cheesy on the surface may be a machine of eliciting even deeper trust, even if only so you ethically and lovingly part,” at my break-up.

“What should we wish or do on this full moon?”

I wish I could capture her for you, make an image to take that radiant, celestial light and demonstrate its magic in a way we all can share. I wish there were some way for you to understand me when I say that Meghan is — or more likely, was — the flower that springs up through cracks in the sidewalk. The childish enthusiasm for a sacred world the way children are conduits of God before their prayers are trampled over. The girl with enough love never to question love’s reality, forever furious at the world for pretending it isn’t what it is. The way the moon, like the womb, holds all that pain and pulls the tides to remind us that we’re water and crying is the way we let the truth out.

What can all these fragments even hope to offer anymore? The truth will always be greater than anything I can capture here. The truth is, she’s gone. I don’t think she’s coming back.

Before she left New Orleans, we went to Armstrong Park and she buried herself in moss under a tree. I don’t know if it was a premonition or just incidental, but a month or so later was the last time anyone saw her.

She’d gone to stay at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Her suffering at school had grown so bad that they’d offered her a leave of absence. The plan was for her to drive west in June, to move in with my mother and set up a new life in Washington. I would be in New York in May, I said. I’d help her pack up and we’d do the trip together. She was resolved to put the pain behind her.

On the morning of Sunday, March 27th, she asked an employee of the inn for directions to Church Street. Looking at a map, my guess is that she’d meant the one in Stockbridge, the one with the graveyards, where she often liked to walk to be with spirits.

Instead, her car was found on Church Street in Lee, a few miles away, at the edge of a hiking trail in a small and unremarkable wooded park. On Tuesday the 29th, her family reported her missing. The same day, a neighbor in Lee reported her car after they’d noticed it parked for a few days in bad weather. The last pings from her phone died out that Sunday, not in the park, but across the street, up in the hills in what is plainly residential property.

I walked that road. The data makes no sense.

Her car was found unlocked. The keys, along with her laptop, her phone, her hotel key, her wallet, Bun the stuffed rabbit and her bag, were also gone. Police searched the park. They searched the properties. They sent divers into the pond. They checked any security camera they could find nearby. She didn’t cross the bridge over the Housatonic River, and I heard they looked in there too. They had dogs and drones and lines of searchers and nothing has been found.

To this day, that is all we know. If the police know any more, they aren’t talking yet. We have fragments that don’t add up to anything like a story.

It’s been over three months since she disappeared—fifteen weeks this Sunday. Fifteen weeks of waiting and praying and mourning and distracting and going over every detail and wishing there was anything more I could do. Fifteen weeks of waking up from dreams where she’d appear and I’d beg her to tell me what happened and she’d shake her head and say, softly, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Fifteen weeks and I can’t put the pieces together. None of us can. There’s an argument to be made for a suicide and an argument to be made for an accident and an argument to be made that she just up and disappeared, but there is no evidence for any of that. The police say there’s no evidence of foul play either, but there is also no evidence of anything.

She just vanished. With every passing day without a body, I wonder more about foul play. My mind can fall down rabbit-holes to unbearable atrocities. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the facts to seal them shut.

With nothing but fragments, we must find some story to tell ourselves.

Meg loved the show Outlander. She’d convinced the church to play the theme song at her mother’s funeral, not telling them what it really was. It goes:

“Sing me a song of a lass that is gone.
Say, could that lass be I?
Merry of soul she sailed on a day
over the sea to Skye.”

I guess all this is my song. A song of a wild witch with a tender heart, of a friend and a sister and a mentor and a wanderer and a conduit and, by her own words, a cosmic egg, forever trying to hatch something that could make up for the love we don’t give.

Meg the Cosmic Egg. That’s how she lives in my phone.

I write this while looking at the kilt she gave me for Christmas, next to the book on Scottish tartans and the clans they represent. These are the fragments I have left.

Did she touch a magic stone and get deposited in a different time? Is she back there now, unwriting where we all went wrong and weaving the present differently? Will I wake up tomorrow in a parallel dimension she crafted for me? Will I wake up tomorrow to the news that she’s home? Will I wake up tomorrow to the news that they found her body? I can’t imagine what she’d look like cold, without all that warmth that spilled out wherever she went.

Meghan, sister, I am glad you weren’t here for the news about Roe. I am sad you weren’t here to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once with me. I moved back to the Northeast, you know, just to be closer I guess. I’m going to stay here for now. If you come back, I’ll stop talking shit about Grimes. You can have my typewriter. We can move to Putnam, New York, get property by the border, drink ice water — you know, real witch life.

But I don’t think you’re coming back this time.

Some days, it’s okay you’re not here. I can feel you all the same, where the pieces of you scattered like dandelion seeds and grew something magic I still get to be a part of.

Today, I feel your absence. I feel the spaces in between all the memories, all the things I would’ve done if I’d known, all the things I still have left to say to you.

I wanted to tell you that I called out to Ellen when I first heard the news of your disappearance. I heard her in my mind, matter-of-fact as anything, say that you were with her. I wanted to tell you that I left that farm in Vieques. I bought a white candle in San Juan and a girl I’d just met led us in a ceremony for you. I read everyone your piece in Scheerpost. The sun set over the sea. I wanted to tell you that I ran through the streets of Condado screaming along to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes as loud as I could, loud enough for you to hear me.

When I got to the beach, I felt you in the wind, a burst from the sea and the sky like you opening your wings, crying out a wild song, “Love, you motherfuckers, because nothing else in the world is real!” You’d have said “mother-effers,” I know.

And so with love, I sing for you:

“Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
mountains of rain and sun.
All that was good, all that was fair,
all that was me is gone.”

It’s sinking in, at last, that you are gone. A part of me left forever with you, and all I have left now are voicemails and books and some pictures of the moon.

Fragments.

What I want now is to live up to your example. I want to make up for the pain by loving with all my might. I wish that love could wash clean the wound of not seeing your name ringing on my phone. Meg, the Cosmic Egg. We’d be in Washington by now, you and I. We’d have listened to Pink Floyd on the drive. You’d have given me books for my birthday this year. The Heights of Machu Picchu, probably, so I could understand.

Today, I’m drinking rose tea with cardamom, honey and almond milk. It tastes like springtime in Olympia, like sitting in the yard with you, like that tree you hugged down by the river. It tastes like our endless car ride phone calls. It tastes like typewriter poems. It tastes like a good picture of the moon.