By Emily Costa
One thing about my dad dying a few days into the new year is that the Counting Crows song “A Long December” has taken on some sort of deep significance, which surprises me because I’ve heard it a million times and always felt mostly ambivalent about the song and the band, and I don’t want to be cosmically moved by the nanananas but here I am crying at Adam Duritz and his little dreads swinging and he’s singing the smell of hospitals in winter and I’m like yeahhhhh because I’m thinking of the foam Purell and the wilting hospice flowers and the cafeteria food stink drifting into the hallway while I suited up in PPE during that last week, and Duritz is singing how it’s all oysters, no pearls, and I’m wondering about the part where light attaches to a girl—when does that part come in, that part seems nice, that part seems like all the bad stuff is worth it to see some holy thing like that, some transmutation, and I'm thinking: maybe I could be that girl.
Emily Costa's work can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Atticus Review, and elsewhere, and you can find her on twitter @emilylauracosta.
Art by Molly Capobianco.