1.

The new hallucination is a phantosmia, a scent that doesn't belong, a sensory projection. Its source an incense cone burning in the corner-shrine of my bedroom, a soon-to-be ash curling smoke in a shallow gold bowl, this next to a heavy black box resting on my bookshelf; itself also filled with ash, though more like sand I'd come to find one curious night on my knees than the pillowy density of wood-ash, bits of bone I can pearl between two fingers caked in a fine dust easily lost to a casual breeze or later found clung to the cracks of hands.

2.

The smoke smells like Marlboro Reds despite all signs to the contrary; the fine print on the label reads sea salt and eucalyptus with notes of ozone. My roommates don't smoke and I only smoke when I've had one too many Rainier-backed whiskeys, and the bar patio is a talky cloud of blue American Spirit. When the whiskey has singed a hole that can only be filled by the combinatory melodrama of oral fixation and conscious breath.

3.

A gas made of three oxygen atoms, an ozone occurs above and below characterized by its reactivity and instability. between sleep and wakefulness, an ozone is both everywhere and nowhere. It's a dream-heap of accumulated blame.

4.

Though my mother was too broke for Marlboro Reds in the final years of her life, their constant lit presence throughout my childhood became its own omniscience, a wake trailing all memory. The way some catch the scent of their mother's cooking or perfume, I caught the scent of her slow retreat from the living, embedded in the seats of our Kia Rio, the beige couch, the ash choking abalone shells on so many back porches.

5.

I inhale the incense smoke again as a test, an oxygenated pinch to check I'm not hallucinating. But even the residual scent that lingers in the room once the incense stops burning, windows closed to the late-August heat, is unmistakably hers.

6.

My mother died by suicide in her apartment in Southern Indiana on November 10th, 2020. She was 55.

7.

The internet describes the smell of ozone as "pungent," among several other vague descriptors, clean sweet metallic sharp burning—but isn't incense always pungent? I have to think the label's mention of ozone might be filler. A way to enhance the marketing with ethereal appeal. Further scrolling reveals that less than a hundred years ago, "ozone" as a noun was used to describe any sort of saturated space, or too much of a particular
energy. And I can't help but think it would be just like her to show up this way. Like too much in a way that's also completely unavailable.

8.

I once hallucinated a rooster in a hypnagogic state.

I'm also prone to sleep paralysis and night terrors, the first of which visited when I was just 8 or 9 years old. I had fallen asleep on the couch in the middle of the day at my dad's house, my childhood home in the woods. It was summer; I was damp and sun-tired, had spread my towel on the couch to lie down and take a break before returning to my siblings in the pool, when I sensed the dark form approaching from across the living room, unable to move or scream.

But the rooster came later, in my early 20s. Curious, it stepped in place on the threaded carpet, its beak raised to the gentle breeze I couldn't feel but caught the presence of in the soft ruffling of his pale feathers.

9.

In one of her favorite films, City of Angels (1998), whose soundtrack remained on heavy rotation for years, the dead are everywhere. The main character, Seth, played by Nicholas Cage, is a ghost-angel haunting Dr. Maggie Rice, played by Meg Ryan, a Los Angeles surgeon. Seth wears the angel uniform—head-to-toe black, heavy trench—and longs for both the pain and bliss of human emotion.

At sunset, Seth and the angels take a break from escorting the recently deceased to heaven and crowd an empty, sand-slick beach in their matching coats to listen; an angel-synesthesia, the sun's descent amplifies a soft melody over the sand. (Though if the angels can't feel emotions, how does Seth fall for Maggie, how do the angels experience collective awe? The film is littered with similar plot holes.)

She'd play the soundtrack in the car on the way home from school as loud as the Kia speakers could express, and I'd dream of the city, and think of so many angels perched on skyscrapers like crows. How she was so close and so far away at the same time.

10.

Lately I've been listening to spiritual podcasts because I want something to stick. Because I need a narrative that explains where/how/what she is. But all I'm left with are more possibilities, each equally lacking resonance as the one before.

In one episode, the host discusses life after death in the Christian esoteric tradition. He says that it's the dead thinking of us that produces my thoughts of her, my living memories, my sensory hallucination, and I think of a room claustrophobic with the dead, my mother just another disappointed, spectral sardine chain-smoking and wishing for oblivion. I consider the space-time travel necessary to translate her thoughts or memories (and what would it be? A dinner? A fight?) into over-priced incense cones I bought at a kimono store in San Francisco's Chinatown.

11.

My catholic grandmother dreams of my mother in heaven with her son, my uncle, who died of fatty liver disease a few years before my mother passed. They're cloaked in white and want for nothing. But my dreams are a confused montage of my mother's life where I see her young, a teenager in the city—see her happy at a beach, see her sad with a bottle of chardonnay between her thighs and her ex-boyfriend under one pale arm, where, in an alternate dimension, I see her die in a highway pile-up instead of swallowing a handful of little moons and drifting off to sleep.

12.

On our last night together we watched half of the 2018 version of A Star is Born and smoked the most foul cigarettes I've ever tasted under the porch light of her section-8 apartment in Southern Indiana.

It was the weekend of my cousin's wedding and we didn't know when we'd see each other again. She wore a cotton bathrobe tied tight around her size 04 waist, brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail, long nails a fresh shade of desert pink. My bridesmaid dress laid flat over her dining table in its protective mesh sleeve. We sat on opposite ends of the couch, and I sensed a heavy reversal of my early adolescence, when we'd eat frozen pizza from paper plates as she echoed Dr. Evil's well-timed one liners and his careful plot to accelerate the inevitability of climate change by puncturing the "OZONE LAYER."

That spring she'd texted me she had something to tell me that was really important, but she couldn't tell me what it was until I came to visit for the wedding, thus necessitating a terse conversation about manipulation and what it means to unnecessarily withhold important information from someone that cares about you, an exchange that left me feeling insensitive, her offended, me no less concerned. So I crossed my fingers for lung cancer, half-prayed for a worsening heart condition.

But it was that other inevitability, a nightmare I'd played in my head for years: that after this weekend, we wouldn't see each other again. That when it was over the worse thing I could do was blame myself, feel guilty.

We stepped outside and passed me the purple Bic lighter. Could she tell I had done this before in the way I cupped my hands around the fragile flame. Could the nicotine taste any more toxic. The heat of it heavy like hot plastic burning my chest. Could I keep her here, smoke us both to an early simultaneous demise. Inhale until we're both ash. Could I keep her.

Back inside, the TV paused over the latest version of A Star is Born, Lady Gaga's grief-stricken face frozen and vibrating on the screen.

"Wuss," she said, when I said I didn't want to watch the ending.

And maybe I am. Or maybe she was, for choosing to leave. Or maybe wuss is genetic. They say once the door opens it stays open, and it only has to open once. Maybe my wuss has been her wuss all along.

13.

Imagine the ozone decided to text you moments before it knew it was going to give up its role as an ozone layer. Imagine the text said something like: hey, we've gotten to know each other real well over the years, haven't we? [angel emoji] It's such a vague and strangely obvious thing to say, and even the subtle tone of goodbye in the question, and more darkly, the choice of emoji, seems comically trivial. Isn't the ozone layer always in a state of intense crises? Always disappearing? Would you respond in a few days, if at all?

14.

Trying to write about her is not unlike trying to capture a ghost. My memories akin to recycled hallucinations, perhaps implanted from something external, conjured from photographs of when my brother and I were still small: posed in the garden wearing matching denim, or candid; our mother sun-drunk and drowsy by the pool; my brother and I swim-tubed and slathered in Coppertone. Some are recreated from mere vibes I can piece together from songs she would sing; the irony of her obsession with the 90s pop remake of John Denver's "Leaving on A Jet Plane" will never be lost.

15.

I once perceived in crystal clarity what I knew intuitively to be the base of some holy temple. Its intricately carved stone walls bedecked in red silks and melting candle wax; a heavy longing in my hands and knees. Still my dreams have taken me to places so beautiful, so holy, I wake up choking with sobs.

16.

Like first highs, we lose access to certain forms of longing. On a recent trip to Astoria, I found the same brand of incense next to the check-out counter in an antique store. I told myself it was a sign, and that I had to buy more to see if it still smelled the same. Once home I immediately burned three cones in quick succession, searching for a hint of Marlboro before I realized the clean toxic pungent sweetness simply wasn't there. Was more rooster, more temple than anything else. How longing becomes retracing, opening windows, taking notes.

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I've always liked the idea of using a title as a prompt. This title found me one unfortunately hot summer while I was journaling in the closest establishment with air-conditioning I could find. The anthology Suicide published by Cash4Gold Books and House of Vlad Press in 2023 was especially encouraging to read as I developed the draft.