It’s the fall in 2022, you celebrate your 49th birthday a few days after Thanksgiving, at work. You’ve worked in retail for 30 years, so you’re used to it. Every year, your birthday falls around the holiday, a few days before, sometimes on the holiday itself, or sometimes on Black Friday weekend. People are always surprised that the store you work at, the Louis Vuitton store in downtown Portland, is busy on Black Friday weekend, but so many people visit to save money, since there isn’t any sales tax in the state of Oregon.

You bike home like always, in the frigid late fall darkness, you stop for a slice of cake at the World’s Saddest Safeway on your way home, You open the door to your apartment: Ned greets you of course. He’s a little thinner than he was a month ago since the diagnosis, but he’s not in any pain. You’re grateful for that. You eat your cake, Ned purring softly on your lap, while watching Star Wars and mentally going over your checklist for Miami: balloon pump, rolls and rolls of duct tape, drone and batteries. Life is good, but you’re about to have both the best and worst year of your life.

You’re invited to collaborate with an artist you love and admire, Olivia Steele, at Art Basel. You land in Miami for the first time around 11:30, grab a taxi. You get to the Airbnb around midnight and unload all your art from the taxi, turn and look for your unit number in the unmanned pad as the taxi pulls away into the 90-degree humid December night. You pat your itchy, freshly-tattooed sleeve on your arm as you paw your right pants pocket for your phone. It’s not there, and you realize with horror that you’ve left it in the cab. You freeze in indecision: what the fuck did people do before cel phones? I was alive when cel phones didn’t exist! You shake off the panic. Just get into the room, just get the code for the room. You start calling your personal phone from your work phone, and you open the Find My Phone app on your iPad as you get the room code from your email: the dot representing your phone is virtually careening up the coast of Florida almost impossibly fast.

You put the code in for the door to the suite, as the door opens from the other side and a woman’s voice cautiously inquires: “Hello??” The two of you compare notes on the seeming double-booking as you profusely apologize for disturbing her and stumble over your own words trying to explain the situation. Together, you try to book a room elsewhere immediately, but it’s after midnight and no website system will let you book for a reservation starting the day before, silly. As you start spiraling further and wonder how exactly you’ll make art without your main tool for making it, you notice that her glance keeps drawing to the sleeve of your left arm and her brows furrow. You look down, and with a start you see that your recent tattoo is seeping blood and ink through your hoodie’s arm in the 90 degree heat. “Oh!”, you exclaim. “Uh. Yeah that’s my blood but it’s a fresh tattoo, I uh, wasn’t like shot or anything.” She noticeably relaxes.

The cabbie finally answers your call, agrees to return the phone. As he hands it to you 15 minutes later, he admonishes you in his soft Haitian accent: “You are SO lucky! I heard the noise of your phone ringing and thought it was something mechanical with my car until I got home; you were my last fare of the night.” He pauses, then continues: “You know, this was not in my cab.” Your head tilts. “You left your phone on top of my taxi.” He laughs as he sees your eyes grow wide. ‘So lucky” he mutters as you both get into his car to find a cheap hotel you can stay in for the night.

That week in Miami is a whirlwind; you get as much exposure to the glossy world of professional artists at pool parties in Miami Beach as you do the street art scene in Westwood, wandering the streets at night, meeting artists tagging walls. It’s there that you strike up a conversation with a man named Nolan, and you both realize you both live in Portland. You reconnect once you’re both back, and Nolan eventually becomes one of your most trusted friends and assists many of your installations. You return to your apartment in Portland, happy and exhausted, and Ned is there as always, if a little thinner this time.

Your dad had a bad fall late last year and is in hospice care, and you take time off the first week of January to see him, now that your PTO bucket has refreshed after the new year, He’s awake and alert, and better than you imagined. You and your siblings have taken turns visiting, and on this visit you go through photo albums back at his house, grabbing handfuls out of them. You bring them with you and he tells you stories about each of the pictures, you learn new tales about relatives and family friends,

You’re invited to collaborate at Zona Maco in Mexico City. Although the collaboration falls through, you still go that February, and you revel in exploring the city and doing installations there. It’s here that you see your future, in a way: traveling and making art and meeting curious, friendly people. You excitedly tell your dad all about it on a call after you get back. He tells you that he loves you, and he is proud of you.

You get the call on a Sunday morning in March as you’re about to leave for a manager meeting for work. Dad passed away in his sleep that morning and appeared to pass peacefully, was found by the morning nurse. Suddenly the tapestry of your life passes in front of you, and memories you thought long gone resurface.

Ned gets weaker, the cancer eating his gut still doesn’t appear to be hurting him, which is a blessing. You make the impossible decision one morning when he pads softly into your bedroom and meows a soft, distressed sound. He is telling you, in as direct a way as he knows how, that things are about to take a much worse, much more painful turn. What was once your stout, proud, clumsy, loving 12 pound cat barely tips the scale at 5 pounds now, is a ghost of his former self. A few days later, the doctor and his assistant comes over. It is a difficult passing, as he is on your lap, your little fighter battles his hardest, but eventually succumbs, his body is impossibly, grotesquely limp as he is taken away. The apartment door closes behind them and you collapse.

Nothing that you have heard, or read, or intellectually “understood” about grief prepares you for the actual experience of losing two large pieces of your heart within a month of each other. Nothing could have braced you for the deep well of sorrow. The stages of grief don’t happen in a nice orderly, efficient clip, they are sloppy and messy and you flail around, going through the motions of life to keep from losing your fucking mind. The thing that does help, that offers a glimmer, is the art. Doing installations with your patient, wonderful friends in silence or while sharing what you’ve been feeling literally saves your life more than once.

Because of the public nature of your art you regularly get stopped almost daily by people recognizing your face. But now, you get stopped by strangers in the grocery store or running errands, expressing their condolences for your losses. You have to save a bit of energy every day to have the bandwidth to smile and nod, say thanks, be gracious to strangers with good intentions. Inside, you are screaming and crying, you get home and shake at how empty it now feels, you barter with the afterlife to please, please let Ned haunt you. You hear noises and creaks in the floorboards at night and hope it’s his untethered soul. Grief is the shittiest roommate ever.

The rest of summer flies by at a clip. You eat total and complete shit on your bike on your way to the studio one day, bruise a rib. A friend and fellow influencer pitches himself to be your business manager and proceeds to find you jobs at breakneck speed. You complete work on the first of your two books from Penguin, coming out in 2024.

You fly to Nashville for an art residency, your second residency of the year. Your friend and assistant Nolan, and other longtime friends join you to help in your mission to amplify the work of five artists: M.E., Erihii Nyamor, Shabazz Larkin, Megan Jordan, and Trenton Wheeler. Nothing can prepare you for how healing, how inspiring, and how grounding the week and half of collaborations is. For the first time since Ned and your dad passed, you feel a hope, a light in the inky darkness of your grief, you smile genuinely for the first time. At a wonderful Sunday Dinner hosted by M.E., you are moved to announce what you know in your heart: you are going to finally leave your job of ten years at Louis Vuitton, and become a full time artist.

You return to your empty apartment with a sense of hope and purpose. Quietly, but steadily, you wrap up your affairs in your role at the store. You leave without fanfare and with only the managers knowing you are leaving, you ask for their discretion, and it’s announced a few days later to the team. You leave for Albuquerque, your hometown, for your annual trip to the Balloon Fiesta a couple days later. It’s the first trip back since your dad’s memorial service and it’s one of two trips you would take to see your dad every year. You see your friends, you link up with the lovely crew of the hot air balloon Grand Britannia, and you feel your dad’s presence as the balloon leaves the ground on your first balloon ride.

As with most things, you decide to have your 50th birthday be a low-key one, and you celebrate it by spending it seeing your mom and sister and family for the first Thanksgiving in 30 years, a visit not possible for the decades during your retail career.

If the first 25 years of your life was spent stumbling around in your body and exploring your world, then the next 25 were spent finding and discovering your heart and the people you love, although you know you haven’t met all the people you will ever love. This is the beginning of the third and final act of your life. This is the cusp of everything. This will be your monument, your legacy.

You wake up in a field, a large one of grass. Looking at the massive sky, the purple mountains to one side, this must be New Mexico. In the distance, the hot air balloon bobs slowly in the gentle breeze, tethered to the ground, surrounded by the crew. They wave you over: “you’re late!” You run to them, hastily get in the gondola, the wicker basket creaking as the pilot blasts the envelope full of flames from the propane burners. The earth falls away, but around you, other colorful hot air balloons appear from below, some outpacing the ascending balloon that you’re in. The balloon rises higher and faster, and you look over. There’s your mom in one, your sister and her family in another, they all wave, rise higher. Your brother and sister Jon and Jeanne pass by too. There are your former coworkers in others, your friends, some current, some you haven’t seen in years. There’s your brother John, who passed when you were 18, smirking at you. It’s not cold, the air is fine and not thin as the multitudes of balloons rises higher and higher until you can see the curvature of the earth. The continents are visible down below the clouds. You look over, there is your dad, he is holding Ned in his arms. He waves and Ned bats at his waving hand.

The balloons rise higher and higher, they are now in space, they start drifting together, closer and closer. You don’t know what happens Your eyes widen as you crane your neck, finally see what’s above. Oh, this is about to get fucking good you think as you see what’s above. I get it now, this is why I’m here. “This is it guys!” you call out to the passengers in the other balloons. They see it too, they laugh and point upwards in response. This is it.