I Know You Are Lightning

Thank You Letter to Andrea Gibson

All day I’d been wanting to watch Come See Me in the Good Light,
but some things you don’t watch with the sound of children
spilling through the doorways of your life like the weather.
Some things require a hush,
the kind that aches behind your ribs
long before the first scene begins.

So, I waited
until the storm outside tucked itself into the corners of the house
and the last dish was dried
and the kids were kissed
and the dogs had stopped asking the universe
for one more walk.

One minute in—
I was already crying.
Not the polite kind.
The kind that opens a door in the body
and lets all the ghosts tumble out,
laughing and dying and shining
in the same ten seconds.

After the credits rolled, the kids came back into my room
for one last goodnight,
Except it turned into all of us chanting
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,
our voices climbing a rope of light so thin
it could snap

Cancer is the monster whose name
I stopped saying out loud years ago.
After surviving it twice,
after watching my mother survive it twice,
I treat cancer like an earthquake whose fault line I avoid
so I won’t tempt the ground to open and swallow me whole.

But this film wasn’t about cancer.
It was about love wearing every coat in the closet,
love brushing your hair back the way God would
if God had softer hands.
Still, when the credits rolled
I sobbed like someone had told me
the sun had vanished forever.

Because Andrea
was no longer in the world.

I have a memory of them
—or maybe it’s just a dream I loaned my heart—
standing on a dirt path in Michigan
at the Womyn’s Music Festival.
They’re near the watermelon patch,
laughing with a group of queers like us
They glow like they know something
about how to survive loss and return to joy.

I’d seen them on the day stage
And the goosebumps hadn’t left my body yet.
Goosebumps: the skin saying
“This moment is real enough to change you.”

That was more than twenty years ago.
But memory is a messy archivist.
Maybe it was Andrea,
Maybe it was someone who shared their frequency,
their light.
Except—there was no one like them.
Not then.
Not ever.

When they announced that final performance in Colorado last spring,
I asked if they might be coming to San Diego.
Two months later,
they were gone.

I still don’t understand death.
I’ve stood at the door of it twice,
pressing my ear to the wood
while my whole body begged:
Please, not yet.
I remember crying so hard
I threw up in my bed.
I wasn’t afraid.
I was obliterated by fear—
the kind that paralyzes its victim.

Things are not supposed to be this way,
looped in my mind, over and over again
like a cruel lullaby.

Things are not supposed to be this way.

My friend Wendy Root—
a healer with an ocean in her voice
and galaxies in her palms—
talked me through the terror
long enough for me to drive to her.
We spent three days
pulling the fear out of my spine
unspooling it like old wire.

When I left,
I didn’t know if I’d be dead in three months,
But I knew life was holy.
Euphoric.
A lover who sometimes bites,
But always kisses later.

Andrea lived like that—
as if every morning was a wedding
between their soul
and the entire world.

I can’t stop crying because
They were the lifeline,
The lightning you can hold.

When they died, I thought:
If cancer can take them, it can take any of us.
I am a plebe,
a commoner,
not the Martian/Atlantean, they thought the word meant
before Megan corrected them in the documentary.

God, the way they saw the world—
everything shimmering,
every impossible thing possible.

How are we supposed to be down here
without their light
to guide us home?

But the thing is—
we aren’t without them.
They’re scattered everywhere now.

In the sunset on my dog walks,
in my six-year-old holding up a tiny shimmering stone and whispering,
“Don’t throw it away, Mama.
It’s too much beauty.”

Tonight I told my 90-year-old mother
about another loss.
Another luminous stranger:
Her name was Dawn.
Gone in the quick, cruel way
cancer steals.
She was more than a friend, less than a stranger
I met her three times.
Three times was enough to know
she carried light the way some people carry keys—
ready to bust open any lock.

She helped me rescue my Velveteen,
pregnant with fourteen puppies.
She saved so many animals
at Tina Jo’s Promise in Baja.
The horse rescue she ran with her wife Tina Jo
where they believe
in second chances.

I didn’t know Dawn was sick.
I missed Tina Jo’s Facebook post.
I was busy surviving the move
that nearly split me open—
leaving San Diego with
three kids, four dogs, seven cats,
and my ninety-year-old mother.
Alone.

I never said goodbye.
I never said thank you
for being one of the luminous ones.

The crying will stop soon.
It always does.
And I’ll remember the laughter,
the entanglement,
the octopoidal magic—
as Andrea’s wife, Megan, called it—
stretching its arms
across the dark.

Please watch this film.

It’s a love letter
to anyone who has ever been brave enough
to be alive.

I guarantee you, when the credits roll, you will remember why you’re here.