The movers are already leaving Brooklyn, and I can’t leave the apartment. Everything I own in my adult life here in New York City is either at my cousin’s house in New Jersey or in the moving truck headed to a storage unit in Manhattan. There is nothing left in this two-bedroom apartment with a living room skylight that knowingly belongs to me said for the paper napkins from my Bat Mitzvah and my great-grandmother’s handkerchiefs, which I will have accidentally left in a plastic bag underneath the kitchen sink. And still, I can’t move. I am stuck standing on the edge of the living room in front of the brown couch I never liked. I am stuck wrapped in my black winter jacket because it is the middle of November in New York. I am stuck. How am I supposed to walk away from this burial, I ask myself? And then it hits me: I know what to do when something is dead. I pull the Mourner’s Kaddish up on my iPhone. I strain my eyes through a brewing burst of tears. Alone—in the middle of what is no longer my home, in the middle of what was once ours—I recite the ancient Aramaic. Only then, am I able to leave.

A friend once told me: death and weddings, it’s what Jews do best. I’ve been to over 70 weddings in my life, a large percent of which have been Jewish, or interfaith with one Jewish partner.

Kaddish: Both Aramaic and Hebrew for “holy.” Kaddish. That which Jews recite upon mourning the dead. It is part of our daily liturgy. It is part of what separates the sections of not only our prayer services, but also our mortality, and our mourning rituals. Kaddish. It has gotten me through so many deaths.

The strictest of Jewish traditions will tell you that Kaddish cannot be recited alone. That Kaddish requires a minyan—at least a group of 10 Jews, and in the most orthodox of spaces, specifically 10 men. And yet here is me, a single Reform-raised Jewish female with my heart gutted open on a weekday morning in the wake of the death of a four and a half year long partnership, and here is Kaddish, the only thing getting me to the rental car on the side of the curb downstairs.

***

When we meet in the hallway, he points to his chest and says, “This is Kim.”

I had arrived at my former subway stop on 103rd Street and Broadway certain that this was serendipity. That after three weeks of rejuvenating my soul on a solo trip in California only to arrive home on the red-eye and walk straight into my recently ex-partner at the front of Madison Square Garden for what I intended to be my first Phish concert alone and single in five years, this too—this potential 22-day sublet on 105th Street and Amsterdam, two blocks from where I lived four years prior while miserable and depressed in graduate school—was meant to be.

And now here is Kim with a long, silky black ponytail knotted into a multi-layered bun at the base of his skull, and his blue and orange argyle socks fitted into pale blue plastic slippers. And he’s walking me into his six-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen and a single bathroom as he walks me down the singular hallway and taps on each door as he tells me the place of origin of the women who live behind each door: Pennsylvania, China, Austria, upstate New York.

He takes me into his bedroom. A tiny dog yelps around a pee pad. Sparkly heart cut outs hang above the pink leopard print bed sheet. Deep pink paper mâché spirals dangle from the ceiling. He says his girlfriend is responsible for all of it—the dog, the decorations, the need to sublet.

We take a seat at the two white plastic chairs on either side of the small glass table overlooking Amsterdam Avenue. He shows me his New York State driver’s license, credit card, and offers to show me his passport. He pulls up an email with his flight information to meet his girlfriend’s family. I don’t ask for any of these offerings, this show and tell. He just shows me. And then offers to lower the 300 deposit as well—200 for me, he says, because I seem like a nice person.

The dog licks my hand. Part of me wishes the dog weren’t going with him. As I ride the 1 train back down to a New Year’s Day party in Chelsea, I think about my ex. How he wants a dog. How I want kids. How I don’t want dogs. Yet. How he doesn’t want kids. Maybe ever.

I don’t really have a gut feeling about Kim’s room. I keep digging for some sign—from the depths of my gut, from the universe or G-d—that this is correct. Nothing. Silence. Not a nudge.

Kim seems like a nice guy. Clean. Honest. His bedroom window overlooks a church, so I figure G-d is probably nestled in the sidewalk cracks across the street. I need to move, I remind myself.

More importantly, I think to myself: it’s obvious. This sublet apartment sits two blocks from my old apartment on 105th Street and West End Avenue. The apartment where I lived while getting my masters degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, 11 blocks away. The apartment where I slipped fully back into depression and nearly relapsed into an eating disorder. The apartment where so many other scrupulously seismic and significant situations in my personal life fell apart. The apartment where I sat on the closed toilet seat sobbing uncontrollably instead of slitting my wrist. The apartment where my ex and I fell in love.

My ex loved being up there. He said it was quiet, and private. He stayed there in my studio apartment with the hallway kitchen and above-the-door storage space at least 85 percent of the time during my one-year lease. He helped me find it as we trekked up and down Broadway with a realtor. I let him keep his clothes in a long Container Store box under the bed. And he kept a pile of pants and hoodies draped over the love seat couch that I’d ultimately sell to his mother’s best friend’s son. He and I would joke about this for years to come—the clothes in the Tupperware. And still, even though it was my lease and I paid the rent, we shared the apartment, we lived there together. And then after I graduated, we would do so officially for years.

I liked West 105th Street in theory. It was beautiful. There were fresh bagels nearby. And my best friend from JSchool and her now husband also lived studio apartments on the same block.

But I didn’t love being up there as much as my ex. I was living in a horror film inside my head. I wanted desperately to mutilate my skin. And purge food up from my stomach. Though, I never did. I held on to my recovery for dear life. I refused to physically relapse after all my hard work. Still, I was haunted. Haunted by old thoughts and old habits as I allowed the demands of graduate school and my family challenges to hold me hostage, suffocating underneath my skin.

And now, sitting on the 1 train on New Year’s Day in 2014, that was the only reason I could come up with on why to take Kim’s sublet. That was the only impulse leading me to believe I was meant to spend 22 days living back on 105th Street, awakening each morning to pink paper mâché hearts I was told I am not allowed to move or touch. But look it. No choice but to stare.

Here I am, I think to myself. I am two months out of a four-and-a-half-year-long relationship. I am feeling more whole and complete and at peace with myself than I have in quite some time. And here is this room, two blocks from where I spent one year bombarding my spirit with self-loathing dogma, should I not go pay a condolence call to my former self? Should I not sit shiva and pay respects to the 27-year-old graduate student stuck in the bathroom working desperately—with every cell in her bones—to keep from sliding her fingers past her lips?

I must sit shiva for my former self, I think. I must bury this bag of bones.

When I get back downtown, I call Kim. I’ll take it, I tell him. And thus, shiva begins.

***

I have sat so many shivas in my life. For people. For places. For things.

I have sat shiva with a vengeance. Shiva with a rigor. I have sat shiva with a desperation, knowing it is the only era closest to a dead one’s forever gone life. Shiva. It can sooth my soul.

***

Night one in Kim’s room. Tears capture my face like a silent fog. I have been up since 5:30 a.m. I lifted several duffels and dozens of boxes dozens of times. Up stairs. Down stairs. Like Tetris pieces into a rental van. And into a storage unit 8 feet off the ground. And into this apartment.

I have also gone to Target (eleven years before we will boycott) for cleaning supplies and kitchenware because all of my kitchenware is wrapped in New Yorker and New York Magazine pages and packed in boxes that are now shoved behind my queen-sized mattress in Chelsea.

I have also made dinner and eaten while chatting with two of the five other female roommates. They are 24 and 20, so young. I am 30, newly single. I want to crawl out of my skin.

I have also washed my new kitchenware. I have cleaned the bedroom floor. I have unpacked most of my belongings, and decided to keep my clothes in my suitcase. I have showered. I have protested the house rule of keeping each person’s toilet paper in their own bedroom by leaving a roll next to the toilet for anyone to use. I have connected to the WiFi. I have brushed my teeth. I have put on a hoodie, sweatpants from sleepaway camp, and a tank top I just got in California.

And I sit down on the bed and cover myself with my brand new Target quilt and a blanket my aunt made me out of my dead brother’s old T-Shirts. I text a few friends to update them on my move. I want to tell my ex. I want to tell him about today. How I carried so many bags alone and forgot to put the rental car in park and it rolled into the back of a parked car. How my 24-year-old roommate shares a name with his friend in London. How I sat in my storage unit and cried.

And that’s when I have to put the phone down because the silent fog is now a storm. I am now evaporating noises out of my throat. I am now shaking my shoulders with every shivering belt.

And that’s when I hear myself tell myself, “I will sit this shiva.” I will sit this shiva. I will sit.

I thought I came up here to sit shiva for my former self. What denial, I think. I came up here to sit shiva for my dead relationship. I came up here to sit shiva for him. When I recited Kaddish leaving our apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that was Kaddish for the relationship. Not for me.

What grief. What sorrow that only two blocks west, a mere stone’s throw down the street, we fell in love. We spent hours watching The Simpsons. He read my essays and articles for graduate school. I got up at the crack of dawn and walked with him to the nearest Kinko’s to turn his black and white photographs into cut out boxes and having already been up all night working on them anyhow. And we woke up my neighbor Patti. And for some reason we thought it was funny. And we laughed. We made vegetarian Shepard’s Pie. And vegetarian Bolognese. We hung dead flowers upside down on the kitchen wall. And packed them in a box when we moved in together in Williamsburg. And hung them on the wall. And hung new dead and dying flowers on the wall. Like when I got home from being on tour performing poetry, and he had my favorite foods and a bouquet of flowers waiting for me. And when out of town visitors came over. And when it was our anniversary. And when it was a birthday. And we hung the dead and dying flowers upside down in our kitchen—our shared kitchen—in Williamsburg. And then we packed them in a box when we moved out two years later. And they sat in storage when he went to London for a photography fellowship and I lived with his parents in Long Island. And then we hung them back on the wall in our next apartment in Bushwick. And then we hung up more. And then we took them all down when we broke up because he insisted I take them—the dead and dying dried flowers. And he helped me place them bouquet by bouquet into a dark brown box.

Most nights in my studio apartment on 105th Street we held each other in the corner of the apartment where the windows looked out onto a courtyard with a few trees. It was so quiet, just like he liked it, until the mother and daughter moved in next-door, and we overheard yelling.

Otherwise, it was our noise. And we fought at the end before we moved Williamsburg when he stayed up late watching TV. I loved him so much then. I loved him more than the arguments. I loved him more than the loss of sleep and my earplugs and my eye mask. I loved him the way I had spent my whole life dreaming I might one day love someone. A rich fierceness and passion like I have for my art. The way I love my work. That’s how we loved each other, both of us artists. At least that feels like the right thing to think to myself in this sublet apartment on 105th Street as I shutter wales out of my lips and my nose drips onto my sweatpants from camp.

That must be right, I tell myself. Because I am silent now. My well has run dry. That’s what it was we were doing there down the street. We were falling in love. We were making art.

***

Two months later, I wake up to a cacophony, both the ticking of the dormant heater in the corner of my sublet bedroom, and my own head. I no longer sublet Kim’s room. He came back from traveling and another bedroom in the apartment opened up. So I’ve been here for February, and now March, and now I will have to move again. I am trying desperately to live alone in Queens.

I slowly make my way out of bed. I snooze. And snooze. And snooze. I function through my quotidian routine: scrape my tongue, brush my teeth, irrigate my sinuses with the neti pot, and shower. The shower is louder than the bedroom. Two more weeks of shiva, I tell myself. That’s what I wrote in my paper calendar. Six months from the day the breakup began. That’s all I get.

I write a letter to a building owner in Queens. It’s been exactly a week since I viewed the massive studio apartment with two closed closets and a massive walk-in bathroom-closet-hybrid with a massive separate kitchen. And tearing walls. And tearing windowsills. And evidence of a woman who’s lived in one place for a decade. But I want to live there. I want to set up a new life in a new home in a new borough and call myself whole.

My father begged my mother to convince me not to move to Queens. Said I’ll never meet anyone while living alone in Forest Hills. Said the trains are too far. Said it’s a horrible idea.

But he doesn’t know what legato ballads and symphonic incantations waft through my brain as I picture myself living amongst space, cultivating a self I never dreamed I’d have the time or space to build.

I am tired of sharing a bathroom with six people. When I finish typing, printing, and typing my letter to the landlord, I place it in a folder alongside my latest pay stub and updated bank statement, I put on my socks and boots and opened my bedroom door, desperate to go to the bathroom. I have an hour-long train commute to Forest Hills and of course, the bathroom is occupied. And one of my roommates is standing outside her own bedroom door in her nightgown with a roll of toilet paper. Of course, I tell myself. Isn’t this how signs work?

I leave and use a bathroom at Starbucks on 103rd Street.

***

That’s what my mom says to everyone. A family friend told her that when my brother died: the only way out is through. That’s the only way out of death. That’s the only way out of grief. And she said that so many times to so many people amidst my friend from camp’s death last week.

My mother tells a story from business school. Her professor asked the class: how do you get what you want in life? Students raised their hands: you work hard; you become successful; you make money. My mother raised her hand and said: you ask for it. That’s the answer. Every time.

***

I am here on this E train to the outer edges of Queens with a manila folder and a two-page letter of interest and a copy of my most recent pay stub and a copy of my current bank statement and a water bottle and a mug of Zen green tea. The stranger across the train is passed out with their head against the railing and mouth wide open in a “I <3 NY” hoodie. Another stranger further down is passed out with their head cocked back against the window and their green purse nesting in their lap. There are not too many other people here on this E train car on this Sunday afternoon but wherever they are going, home or otherwise, I am grateful to be riding this train with them.

When I moved out of Bushwick in November, I said I was going to move to Queens. I didn’t know why. I’d had an itching for Queens for some time. Not really sure why. I just did.

It was interesting that while sitting shiva on 105th Street, more people actually died. A 21-year-old camper and friend from sleepaway camp; my beloved poetry heroine Maggie Estep. My great uncle, albeit he died just as I was moving out of my old apartment in Brooklyn.

On my way to Queens, I count: wherever I live next will be the thirteenth place I’ve lived in New York City during my seven years here. This next chapter begins with fresh cells. All of my cells will be new. I will have passed the 12 hours around a clock. I will have passed every sign in the Zodiac. I will have added a new apostle. I will have passed every month and started a new year.

It is 1:19 p.m. By now I’ve handed my papers off to Ricky, the super at my “dream” studio. He tells me there are tons of applications. Tells me there’s no way the apartment will be ready by April 1. Tells me it may be until April 15 or May 1.

No matter what, come April 1, I don’t have anywhere to live.

Shiva will end the next day on April 2.

I do not know where I will be.

I look at my watch. I’m going to be late for brunch with my sister’s best friend.

A broker shows me another apartment above my price range. It’s farther from the heart of Forest Hills than I anticipated. The broker says there are board approval fees. And meetings. And all these gateways to find a home. The studio is lovely. A little step down into the main space. Quiet. Windows overlooking trees. A bathroom with a little window, and a sideways shower head I swore to myself I would never want. Three large closets with a door. A walk-in kitchen with another window. Cabinets. A small stove and oven. Newly repainted. I could fit my bed and a couch and a dresser and a desk and my books and my records and probably a kitchen table too.

We get back to the realtor’s office downstairs. He says they may be able to lower the rent even more. And he tells me how much all the fees will be. All the gateways.

I rush onto the train. I wait 15 minutes. No train comes. No train is going to come. I walk outside and walk eight blocks to the next subway stop. I wait 15 minutes. The F train arrives. It’s the E I want. The E train I need to get to my sister’s best friend. I text her: it’s a struggle this morning. When 1:31 p.m. rolls around, I’m still on a train. The F train. Not the E train like I assured her.

Maybe this is just another lesson that it’s never going to always exactly work out as planned. I will not be moving into a new home on April 1 that I will call my own. I have no idea where I’ll be sleeping in two weeks. I have no idea where I’ll be when shiva ends.

***

In theory, one could argue that there’s a right way to translate Kaddish. It’s ancient Aramaic. In its innate tongue, the words—in theory—are what the words are. But the thing that we all may from the thing that is art of translation, it is just that: translation is and can very much be an art.

Translation is up for interpretation. The way we move words across time and space is analogous to how to we move grief. Kaddish and shiva and all of the other ways Jewish or any tradition honors death or loss of any kind is really about a ritual container to help us translate our grief.

If grief can perhaps be a language in and of itself, then perhaps mourning can be a continued attempt to try to translate grief into something with feeling or rigor or language and words.

I know Kaddish in ancient Aramaic by heart. I have recited it so many times throughout my life for different people, different places, different things. I can never quite settle myself into any particular English translation. I like the one that the community where I worship in New York City uses. A little bit more poetic. A little less stuck in a “he/him” notion of G-d or the divine.

***

Looking back, I left that apartment in Bushwick by reciting Kaddish because in many ways, I felt like I was carrying a bag of bones. A bag of bones from Bushwick to New Jersey to storage in Manhattan to the sublet on 105th Street to where I ultimately ended up in Harlem. In a five-bedroom apartment. With four roommates. In a small room in which I’d live for three and a half years until finally moving to my own studio apartment in Brooklyn. I didn’t make it to Queens.

But what I always told myself was a bag of bones was really a dark brown box of flowers. Maybe if I translate the grief a little bit, I can turn those bones into petals and stems.

The dried flowers that my ex had helped me remove from our kitchen wall in Bushwick and place into a dark brown box would sit in storage in Chelsea, Manhattan, for 11 months.

In late September of that year—2014—I removed everything out of storage and officially settled in to the five-bedroom in Harlem (just in time for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year) after already living there for six months (I moved in on Passover, I can’t make this shit up).

That Friday, just before sundown, just before Shabbat, I took the box of dried flowers to the edge of the Hudson River. I sat down on a rock. Petal by petal, stem by stem, I released the flowers into the water, and let them float away. And when I was finished, I recited Kaddish.

I let the grief itself begin to die.

I wonder if grief is a language that allows us to translate more than just our loss. That perhaps grief itself is a conduit for recitation, a conduit for repetition, a conduit for the fact that every single breath that ends in an exhale is also itself a loss too.

And yet on the other hand, one could argue that the inhale is the end.

Who is to say the exhale of a breath is not in fact is birth?

What I can tell you now in retrospect now 12 and a half years later after I had to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish to literally and figuratively move myself out of that apartment in Bushwick when I couldn’t get my feet to do anything but freeze, is that that Kaddish—along with the Kaddish at the river on the rocks—was unquestionably a birthing. It was the beginning of a time in which I would fall back in love with myself. And I wonder, as I continue to speak the many languages of grief, as I continue to allow the many rituals of mourning that helped me translate my pain amidst so much death, how to anchor that wisdom to be a birthing. Breath: anew.

***

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