People are sometimes too interested in “what happened”—the plod of plot and action. Sometimes the rest of the story, or perhaps the heart of the story, is carried by image, repetition, tiny intensities not captured fully from plot and action. A very intense drama played out in my relationship with Devin. You will not find it on these pages. The drama is not the story, or, the story of why and how relationships dissolve or crescendo is every story, living inside all of us to differing degrees, rising and falling in waves. When I focus on moments, on small intensities that may or may not interest anyone else, I’m reminding us how those tiny pieces of a life are sometimes carrying bigger meanings than the big, dull, thunderous calamities that befall us all.
If I track not just plot and action, but impressions, emotional intensities, associations, repetitions, images, can I transmogrify and reframe the story?
What “happened” is Devin and I loved each other into the death of our marriage, which is not any kind of unique story. Oceans of women have fallen for dangerous men, or angry men, or depressed men, or death-driven men. Legions of marriages fail.
For Devin, death was still beautiful, more beautiful than me by far. For me, death was alchemizing, a space of generative possibility.I don’t want to write about the plot of what happened to him.
I want to find the heart of the story underneath that.
*
52-year-old Caucasian male, reportedly found within a pit adjacent to a crane that he apparently fell from while climbing the tower, approximately 80 feet.
Multiple external and internal traumatic injuries.
See toxicology report: elevated levels of alcohol; acute alcohol intoxication.
Tattoos include “Carpe Diem,” “Don’t Try,” “Unaffiliated,” and “Artistic Disorder,” as well as the Chinese symbol for longevity.
The case report lists his death as Accident/Suicide.
What a narrative space between accident and suicide.
The accident report says that he said that night he was going for a walk. I already knew Devin had a history of suicidal ideation. I already knew he had been to rehab and detox, which entered the narrative of the report, too. According to the report, he had just climbed the same tower on New Year’s Day.
I know Devin climbed various towers in Alabama in his late teens and early twenties before I met him. He told me the stories.
I do want to write about his death, but not the one that has been so carefully and terribly documented.
I want to revision his story away from that idiotic obituary, away from the accident report and autopsy. I want to write him back to life, even if it kills me, an impossible story. Or I want to write open a space where what he loved lives, which in the end, was not me, even if it was, briefly. I understand now that love is always the fall.
Devin loved his father, who left his mother when he was a boy, a man who drank too much and sometimes jumped out of planes. Sky diver.
Devin loved drinking.
Devin loved the I Ching.
Devin loved the poetry of Charles Bukowski and the music of Jim Morrison, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, and the Black Crowes.
Devin loved Butoh theater.
Devin loved—or became obsessed with, which may be what love is for an artist—drawing and painting abstract disfigured faces.
I know why Devin loved his father. He loved and followed his father for the same reasons that Icarus did. Once Devin told me a story about going with his father on a jump. Though he was not old enough to jump as a child, a child with hair that fell in waves as black as space, a child with shoulder blades jut-cut like a bird at his back and a rib cage that swelled with the uncontainable imagination of a boy thrumming his chest, he would go with his father.
He’d watch his father zip up his silver flight suit and tighten the straps of his parachute and secure his helmet and goggles. Just before the leap into nothingness his father would turn to him, give him a thumbs-up, and say, “You only live once!” Devin would then watch his father jump into nothing, quietly counting in his head, one two three, to calm himself. And Devin would be left standing between earth and sky, the sky pulling toward space and the earth pulling toward ground, like he was the small beating heart and guts between, the only thing connecting anything to anything, the only thing keeping everything from falling apart.
And then his father would be gone, just like when his father left Devin’s mother when they divorced, and Devin would be left standing between earth and sky, the sky pulling toward space and the earth pulling toward ground, like he was the small beating heart and guts between, the only thing connecting anything to anything, the only thing keeping everything from falling apart.
I remember thinking how hard it is for a boy like that to keep from falling. To hold on.
Devin told me up there, fatherless, at the mouth of the plane door, that’s when he’d begin to shake. He told me he always stood too close to the airplane’s wide-open mouth of a door and he never felt secured enough like a boy his age should be. He’d hold on to some straps, thwapping in the high wind, his hair a storm on his head.
And he told me he would wonder, would his father’s body float perfectly to the ground, safe and sound? Or would it be crushed into a thousand star shards on the surface of the earth?
Later, back on the ground, his father would slap him round the shoulders and pull him into his body and say, “We lived another day, god damn it, didn’t we just?” And he’d crack open a Coors Light to celebrate.
Devin told me that when he was on the plane in the sky, he’d stand at the open door shaking, and he’d close his eyes and hold his breath and let go of the straps he was clutching for dear life after his father leapt.
He’d whisper,
One
Two
Three
The voice of a boy.
That’s how he’d get his breathing to go back into his chest like a normal person instead of a light-as-air boy standing too close to the edge of the world, a father gone to flight or atmospheric drift or wherever fathers go to be gone. Devin would open his eyes and scan the skies for a speck of a man with an orange parachute.
Even after Devin was an adult, in moments that felt like the edge of something, he’d repeat one two three, after lovers and marriages and affairs and dramatic breakups and dismal divorces, after arguments and binges and violations and violences, after addictions, after incarcerations, after returns and rejections and resolutions and ruin, after all the great leaps and the terrible dives that make up a life, he’d say out loud to no one in particular, like an inside joke, or the opposite of prayer, or the sounds humans make when they are afraid to do something difficult or banal:
one
two
three
The beautiful leap or fall unended, forever suspended; winged.
I know how storytelling holds us.
I know why Devin loved to drink. I know why we met each other in that ocean called alcohol. Suspend the story before it swallows us.
I know why he loved the poetry of Charles Bukowski and the music of Jim Morrison, because I have now met many men who carry synchronistic attachments to them as larger-than-life figures, often extraordinarily creative men with absent fathers.
I know how to read the faces he painted.
Each line, each brushstroke, goes into my body like a second language. A blur reads like that liminal place between us we rarely inhabited but longed for, like when we were kiss-close and boundaries dissolved, but still left us lost. Love didn’t help. A jagged burst or crooked scratch reads to me like a code for I want in, I want out, I am alive, I am dead, this is the precipice of my face.
And I know why he loved Butoh theater so much. The faces he drew and painted seemed to stand in for all the things he wanted to say or feel about his own identity. He loved the way Butoh faces were like death masks, or deranged beauty. But what I know scares me.
*
Most histories of Butoh theater begin by describing the form as Japanese dance theater, movement, performance. Most histories also mention how the art form followed World War II, rising in 1959 through the collaboration of its founders Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata. From there, a wide array of language is used to describe the core emotions and concepts around Butoh theater practices, including but not limited to: performing physical and emotional distress, gestures that are grotesque, playful, taboo, extreme, absurd, sexually graphic.
Devin’s interest was not so much in the history of the form but in the aesthetics of “the squat, earthbound physique,” the natural movements of regular people, the crude physicality and rude gestures, the visceral and embodied sexual excess and closeness-to-death imagery, decay, a kind of violent dance between creation and destruction. The grimacing faces blurring the line between life and death, beauty and horror. The emphasis on bringing humanity back to primal, elemental forces in some liminal space between pleasure and pain. I know because I watched his face.
He was interested in Butoh-Kaden, the world of bird and beast.
Crow on the road, thick bills, shiny black feathers, round back, the caw.
The stretch of a crow’s neck.
Crow in the snow, perched, shivering, protruding breast, pecking.
I can still hear him reading to me about the crow in Butoh, with the echo of his last name following me forever: “A crowd of the dead sent to hell. Extreme hunger. Food turns into smoke as soon as it is brought to the mouth. Desperate ghosts. Assimilate materials, dry and slightly distinguished from each other.” Gather as crow. Somehow the lines got into my body the way poetry does, by amplifying affect and bypassing sense, grammar, the plod and plot of regular sentences. I remember the night he read those lines to me and then performed “crow” naked and drunk in front of me while I wrapped myself up in the covers of our bed. He was good at it. His black hair. His black eyes. His arms suspended. His legs in a twitch-walk. His head jerking here, then there. I was high. I was so in love the love swallowed me whole. It took almost nothing for me to believe he was an actual crow. When we fucked later, I closed my eyes and I saw a million black and blue feathers.
One night before I fell asleep he asked me, do you think a face could be a crow? I thought about that question all night. I took it into our lives. His question haunted me.
I remember the day he first read to me about Yoshiyuku Takada. A modern performance group, Sankai Juku, founded by Ushio Amagatsu in 1975, brought a series of Butoh performances to America in 1984. He read aloud to me the passages that described what happened to Yoshiyuku Takada. My face got hot. I was holding a secret.
On September 10, 1985, the Sankai Juku dance company performed Butoh in Pioneer Square in Seattle, Washington. The dancers hung from a building upside down from ropes tied to their ankles, a gesture meant to metaphorize life and death. A minute or so after the dance began, the rope holding performer Yoshiyuku Takada broke. He fell six stories—eighty feet—to his death.
During his fall, he did not flail or scream, and when he hit the pavement, his body makeup—the traditional white, in this case, covered in flour—“sent up a small puff of powder into the air.”
The crowd assembled screamed and gasped and then went silent. Some embraced. Others cried. Many who were there at the time say they carry the memory of his fall and his body hitting the ground in their own bodies, that they are haunted by the fall.
The performance was titled Jomon Sho, or Homage to Prehistory, subtitled “Dance of Life and Death.”
I stayed very quiet, listening to Devin tell me what I already knew.
*
I was in a bar across the street that day. In Seattle. I was twenty-two. We would not meet for some years. It’s just a memory I carry. When Devin read to me about the event, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. It felt like I brought some terrible fall to him that mesmerized him—two realities, one real, one imagined, colliding.
I remember how moved he was by the story, moved to tears, moved to drinking all night, all week, how he dreamed of him, how he wrote about him, how he painted about him, how he was haunted by this man’s story. That’s how artists take what moves them in the world into their lives and bodies.
I fell for Devin the way he fell for him. The beauty of the fall.
*
I was not studying Butoh theater, but as I look back, I can see that I too was moving deathward—my passions were women artists on some kind of edge, like Marguerite Duras, Kathy Acker, Virginia Woolf, or death-driven friends like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath—how they drank each other in. I had a scotch in one hand and rocks in my pocket. Devin looked so beautiful to me. I already carried a beautiful death in my body, my baby daughter. If the journey was unto death, I was ready. Or so I thought.
My growing solitude—my hunger for aloneness that was just getting born in me—did not serve our story well. The life force emerging in me wrecked the plot of us.But then more and more books happened to me, and something ignited in me that was not Devin’s death drive, but something else, and our stories began to pull apart. From this distance, I can see the fractals of our lives splitting off in different directions like the arborization of dendrites. For Devin, death was still beautiful, more beautiful than me by far. For me, death was alchemizing, a space of generative possibility.
I’m not sure there is any other way to say this: lines I read in books written by women became larger than my love—which was like a gap, a cavern, some irrecoverable space between us. I birthed my own imagination, which in turn birthed my solitude. More and more writing came out of me. I wrote these lines from Marguerite Duras with a purple Sharpie on the wall of our bedroom, like some giant magical message I found in a bottle. I couldn’t help it:
The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others. That is one kind of solitude. It is the solitude of the author, of writing. To begin with, one must ask oneself what the silence surrounding one is—with practically every step one takes in a house, at every moment of the day, in every kind of light, whether light from outside or from lamps lit in daytime. This real, corporeal solitude becomes the inviolable silence of writing. I’ve never spoken of this to anyone. By the time of my first solitude, I had already discovered that what I had to do was write.
Devin said, staring at my wall scroll, “In the I Ching, no blame. A place of transition has been reached. Free choice can enter.” We laughed. We fucked. Were we speaking to each other in code all those years? A line, an image, a performance moment, a drawing, one story at a time?
My growing solitude—my hunger for aloneness that was just getting born in me—did not serve our story well. The life force emerging in me wrecked the plot of us.
*
I have a black book. I call it the Book of Devin. At the end of our marriage, Devin traveled away from me to France and carried the black sketchbook with him. He filled it with sketches and writing. Upon his return, amidst the demise of our marriage, he mailed it to me.
I have ten thousand feelings about the contents of the Book of Devin, even about the book as an object when I hold it, the hard black cover, the insides vibrating. Besides the countless sketches and poems and entries, one page haunts me like no other.
I don’t know what to do, Lidia. I think I must for the first time in my life be honest with everyone. You know I love you. I will never love again like the way we loved. We are always in each other’s heads and hearts—marked. No matter what. Yes. I love Christy. I think she may be pregnant with my child. My second child in the world. If so I will be a father. Nothing scares me more. Now. I’ve fallen in love with a woman in Paris named Audrey—23—heroin addict, valium addict, when she opens her eyes in the morning the first thing she does is reach for her purse—1 valium and a cigarette—just to wake up. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what decisions to make. My life is a mess—but that is another story—a boring one. I think you are the only person in the world I trust completely. And you know that you know me better than anyone. Any advice? Hahahahaha. I’ve made this mess. I know. But I don’t know what to do. I simply don’t know. I know this will hurt you. But I think I must be honest. With me. With you. With Christy. With Audrey. I’m so tired of lies. I hate myself because of them. If you please I will continue a bit more. I have a new tattoo. On my ring finger. Audrey has the same. We got them together. Our relationship is not about sex. In fact, we had sex only one time. We ate too many valium, wine, ecstasy, etc….I don’t even remember if I came. She is an artist. This is not bad. She is lost. She doesn’t speak to her parents. She became addicted to heroin at sixteen. Her parents put her in a psych hospital. She hates them. Her only boyfriend—Thomas—died of an overdose. Only 20 years old. She has been clean for about a year except for 4 days about 2 weeks before I came along. Binger. Her hands shake. She is asthmatic. She smokes 3 packs of cigarettes a day. She is very pretty. I fell in love. She wants me to come live in Paris. I don’t think so. She is too different. Very nervous. Jealous. Addicted. I love her because she is you at 23. I don’t want to hurt you. I want to be honest for the first time in my life.
*
For many years, I could not read the Book of Devin without breaking down or throwing up. And yet I’d look at it. After he died, I put the book in a drawer. I could not open it. But the trace of everything I felt kept showing up on my body—like a rash from nowhere, or a pain in my spine or neck or hip, or scar tissue. Nonsensical words like lucid dreaming at odd times during the day or night: No one is ever again going to say those kinds of things to me again love language is death language no one is ever again going to mail me a book like they pulled out their own heart put it in an envelope sent it sailing across oceans and time to the one person they thought could carry it sometimes I’m scared it’s my fault he’s dead what if I had stayed with him through more crucibles as bad as it got as much as he hurt me even once pointing a gun at me and asking me to stop loving him and sleeping with other women and drinking to oblivion and the words he said the most awful words that only people who love each other so much they could die would ever say to each other don’t we make those promises to have and to hold in sickness and in death or is it health who means them why what if I could have helped him to stop drinking to heal I now know about myself I can take a great deal of punishment which I knew as a child internalized as an adult why didn’t I just take it isn’t that what I’m good at what if he was reaching out trusting that I’d catch him right when I walked away and made a boundary so that I could save myself what if it was my love that killed him because I left how many women have endured loving men who hurt them was that the story I was supposed to endure am I a monster for choosing a self a life stepping into a different story am I a monster am I a monster?
I don’t know what to do with words like that so I do what I do know how to do. I throw them into stories; I watch them move and I can walk again.
__________________________________
From Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch. Copyright © 2025. Available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
