Sometimes this is the only appropriate response.

Alright, so let’s take a minute to be happy about remission. Around a year ago I came clean with y’all about the whole cancerous cells mutating thing that my body was doing. It was like my lymphatic system announced to me that it would be unavailable because it was backpacking through Europe to find itself. And, of course, one simply cannot do a lot with a MIA lymphatic system.

And yet, we did it! We made it through this year, and I got to sit in that stupid office with the various diplomas and photos of German Shepherds on the wood paneling and listen to my doctor click his pen-butt a few times and announce that “everything looks good”. In that moment, I felt nothing at all. I said, “Okay,” went to the reception desk, paid them for the zillionth time, and stepped out onto the street. It was when I started walking toward my house, the sun shining on the palm trees, my pink Chucks shuffling along, that I uttered something I have never in my whole life thought would leave my lips. With a smile on my face and an “alriiiiight” shake of my head, I said “BOOM-shaka-laka!”. And I goddamn meant it.

The main reason I say that “we” did it, is that over this past year especially, I have had the great fortune of being taken care of by so many people in my life. Some of you gave me freelance work. Some of you sent me presents. Some of you helped chip in when Dan and LA Record set up that amazing fundraiser that helped me pay off 8 grand in medical bills. Some of you bought me groceries, and my son was able to eat like a prince. Some of you spent time with me, and with Trast. Some of you gave me rides to appointments, or went to the gym with me. You all did so many great things, and when people ask me if  I have a support system, I can’t even make my arms wide enough to show the “this big” of it all.

So, now I’m pretty set with not having to worry about chemo and radiation and surgery and what’s going to happen next. Sure, I have to continue to take a pretty whopping dose of prednisone for a while, but compared to the exhausting effects of the treatment, I’m doing much better.

Gluten Free: A selling point even among pharmaceuticals.

However, I’m a bit screwed at the moment. That’s as delicately as I can put it. My unemployment benefits are gone, I am waiting to see if I qualify for an extension, and the money I’ve made on freelance jobs is gone. I’m sending out resumes daily, and shamelessly asking anyone I know to keep their ears to the ground for any work that might be out there. When they ask me what I’m looking for, I say “Anything.“, and by that I mean that I’ve got a variety of skills that I’ve honed over the years that would be of use.

I really do love these snack crackers.

Ideally, I’d have a full time position working in production in some capacity, utilizing my creativity. But the immediate need for any work at all is pressing. A friend of mine suggested that I have another fund raiser, but I feel like you already did so much to help the first time around, when I wasn’t exactly able bodied enough to do very much. So, I don’t like the idea of asking you to just hand me money.

I’d feel much more comfortable asking you if you have any work that you need done that you just don’t have the time or ability to do yourself. Do you need help doing some organizing? Do you need some writing done? Do you want me to clean your house? Do you want me to cook some meals that you can freeze and reheat later? Are you trying to put together a holiday party and you need someone to help with the nitty gritty details on that? Do you want me to be your body double in a major motion picture? (Ryan Gosling, I’m looking at you on this one.) There is no job too small right now, because every little bit is going to help more than you know.

I feel a little bit weird about posting this, because I know a lot of people are struggling to get by right now. But, as I sit here in this place of panic with $1.65 in my bank account and a lot of bills that need to be paid, and time and again all the people in my life say, “You’ll figure something out. You always do.”, I need to do something, and this is at least something.

So, please, contact me if you think of something I can do to help you. And again, thank you for being a part of my life and for all of your help.

***And if you’re wondering how to pay me for services rendered, you can always use this:

I just started yet another round of radiation. And so, I’ll share some of the stuff that’s making my world more bearable.

1.) Lollllllliiiiiipops and Mouthwash.

I am not a candy girl, and haven’t been for some time. I did find my baby book a few years ago, and it seems that my favorite “foods” were “pop and candy”. Grown woman me would like to go back in time and put some vegetables in front of little baby me, and possibly have a discussion with my mother about the definition of the word food, but it didn’t lead to me turning into a sugar fiend adult, so I suppose I’m okay.

That said, my mouth is so dry and stinky that it’s like a litter box that was left in the sun for a few weeks. During my last round of radiation I even lost a tooth. Which is gross and I feel like a hillbilly when I smile.

The two things that help me most are Biotin mouth wash (thanks, Lori Dorn, for the tip) and Yummy Earth Organic Lollipops! Yummy Earth has a lot of different flavors, and some vitamin C pops. But I like them best because they aren’t too sweet. They even have a chili pepper flavored lolli that I love.

2.) Sugar Scrub

I know I just said I wasn’t into sugar, and twice in one post I’ve mentioned sugar. For years I have been buying salt scrubs. Recently, I tried Tree Hut Shea Sugar Body Scrub and I’ve now been buying it in bulk.

The thing is, my skin is a mess. It’s dry, itchy, and pimply. Salt scrubs are great to make the skin soft, and the salt disintegrates super easily. With sugar, it really exfoliates, and makes me feel like I’m getting my itchy skin scratched by god. And the shea butter leaves me feeling really soft.

3.) Vitamin B Shots

No sugar in this one. Just bending over and having someone poke a needle in your bum-meat.

I first heard about vitamin shots a few years ago when the guy I was dating won some at a silent auction. We went to WeHo, drank some cocunut water, and, in the back room of a health food store where they administer Botox and sell Latisse, we got vitamin shots. The men waiting in line behind us swore that this was going to “change our lives”.

I’m always wary of anyone making such a claim, especially because it’s usually about shit like fermented goats milk or alkaline water. I’ve never had anyone tell me anything that actually changed my life was going to change my life. And the first time we got those shots, I didn’t feel like a changed woman.

Now, let me offer up a big old disclaimer about these vitamin shots, which I’ve been getting once a month for about six months. They are stupidly priced ($30-40). They aren’t going to change your life. (duh) And they aren’t anything you’d find yourself really needing all that much.

Except, I do notice that my energy levels dramatically increase when I get these shots. For about five days I am a whole lot less drained than I usually am. So, this is how I treat myself.

4.) Homemade Kombucha

Janet Housden got me hooked on this stuff, which is just fermented tea, which I then flavor with ginger and blueberry juice. Now, this shit looks weird as hell when you’re fermenting it. I even had to put a note near the jar telling everyone not to be frightened. But it tastes wonderful and it seriously helps my belly be a much less hellish place.

This week I’m trying some high PH water that Trast’s friend’s mom brought over. Hopefully it’ll change my life.

Being stuck in bed, I have an awful lot of time between naps and watching entire series in one sitting to look at Groupon. Luckily, I don’t have the cash to buy anything, or this would get expensive.

What I have decided, however, is that once I am done with all of this cancery nonsense, I want to finally do something that I’ve been wanting to do my whole life. And every single day, Groupon, you temptress, you send me more emails about the sorts of things I could be doing.

Look at this beautiful promise of interracial familial bowling fun!

No, I’m not just talking about laser hair removal, which, I gotta say, if I had laser hair, why would I have it removed? That sounds cool as hell. And while 70% off memory foam pillows is a great deal, I don’t think I should have memory foam anywhere near my bed. Let’s face it. I’d give memory foam PTSD. In a few weeks it would be repressed memory foam.

What I’m talking about is the crazy shit like sky diving and parasailing in a weird car-shaped thing. Or jumping off of shit, or climbing up things, or going to Cabo San Lucas. I have never, in my whole 33 years of life, been on a vacation. It’s about time that I do that, isn’t it?

And I know these are all daydreams that seem pretty far-fetched once I realize I don’t have two nickels to rub together. I mean, who dreams of Cabo when they’re buying discount meat at Fresh & Easy? Well, I do. And I want to thank you, Groupon, for giving me things to daydream about. Keep it up. Show me all the four night stays in Montego Bay that you can muster, because when I close my eyes when the drugs kick in, I can picture myself jumping out of a plane for $125, falling through the air toward my ocean-side Jamaica beach hotel, fully relaxed from my day at the spa.

By the time this is published, I will be passed out, I will be naked and someone will be cutting me. No, I haven’t joined a new fetish club. I’ve just scheduled this to be posted during my 8 hour long surgery that may possibly remove all of the remaining cancer in my body.

I love that she's still keeping it sexy with that left arm up over the head.

There are five tumors. When I think of it, I’m a bit bothered. They’re not massive tumors. They’re pretty damn small, really. I can feel some of them, but the others are so tiny that it’s more like someone dropped a skittle in my lymphatic system. All of them are in my lymphatic system. I’ve come to learn an awful lot about lymph nodes in these past few years. Once upon a time I thought you only had, I dunno, three or four. So, when they told me that they needed to remove five of them, holy beans, that would have put me down a few. Turns out, you’ve got a shitload of lymph nodes. Having cancer all over them isn’t a great idea, but they don’t need to create robotic lymph nodes to replace the ones they’re taking out.

Speaking of fetish clubs, one of the questions you have to answer on OkCupid is something like “If you died suddenly, would your friends and family be surprised when they went through your things?” And, I answered, “No.” But, it’s not because I don’t have anything that would normally be considered shocking. I just happen to be so goddam outward in the many parts that make up my life that there’s nothing to get shocked over. It’s pretty freeing, too. Once I was able to stop being so worried about how people would feel about me if they knew the boring parts, the mean parts, the happy parts, the unstable parts, the parts that get things wrong or right or hadn’t gotten it figured out yet, I was able to find a new kind of happiness. Contentment, really. And it’s made me so much more accepting of other people, because it led to an understanding that nobody has all their shit figured out.

It’s funny that I’m writing this right now, needing for it to hit the internet while I am away, as if me keeping up the conversation with the handful of people who read this is going to make a huge difference in the outcome. I feel such a need for everything to just be totally normal. I don’t want there to be a gap in time indicating a non-presence. Fear leads to funny logic.

I was babbling nervously to my friend Nima about all the things that run through my brain as I prepare to go under the knife. There’s so much extra noise right now, and altogether none of it makes much sense. When I try to tumble it out of me, it’s just disjointed. Luckily, nobody tells you to shut up when you’re all cancery.

One of the things that I was rambling to him about- I think along the lines of regrets- was that I honestly don’t think anyone has ever fallen in love with me. It’s a terrible realization, like a thud in my gut. I feel like I’m a really easy person to care about, and at times I am temporarily intensely interesting. But when it comes to falling in love, I feel as though I’m just not cut out for it on the receiving end. It bothers me, and I suppose that’ll lead me toward some sort of doing-something-about-it, you know, with therapy and all that stuff.

I’ve been having trouble knowing what to say to people lately, and they’ve all been really supportive. My responses to people have been cold, measured. I don’t know what to say when people say they’ll be rooting for me, thinking of me, sending me positive vibes. I don’t feel much right now beyond kind of lost. Over the years I’ve had periods of time in which I’ve suffered from a psychotic fear that I don’t really exist. At times it’s been crippling. Imagine the feeling, if you can. And at times that feeling has been so real. I haven’t gone through it for years, but lately what I’ve been feeling is similar, only opposite.

I’ve been feeling as though I know with a clear certainty that I exist. But just as clearly as that, I understand that it doesn’t really matter. The space I take would easily and otherwise be occupied by air. This isn’t to say I don’t think that I have the ability to have an impact on others. There are many positive things that I have accomplished, and many more than I plan to accomplish. It’s more that, even if I didn’t or hadn’t, I feel like nothing really matters as much as I believed it did when I was young.

I wish there were something in this that were positive- some Wonder Years moment where I talk about how far I’ve come or what I’ve learned. Nothing I am writing right now will neatly tie together in an ending paragraph. I don’t even know what the point of writing this is. What I do know is that this is yet another part of me that I feel okay sharing. This is the free thought space, and it’s not entirely sunshiney.

I guess I’m hopeful that once my head clears up a little bit; gets uncluttered by fear and anxiety, it’ll be like landing in Oz, with some form of vibrancy and color returning to my dealings with my life. For now, I need to be okay with the way things are in my head. And you need to be, too.

Happy Summer, everyone. See you tomorrow.

Hey everyone. Take a look! A piece of mine has been published on BoingBoing.

Don’t forget to comment. The internet loves comments.

Some days are easier than others when it comes to radiation and my response to it. On the easy days I feel a little bit queasy, and my bladder feels like it’s always seconds away from exploding. On the hard days I feel like my mouth is filled with glue made of acid, like Skrillex is playing in my head every time I stand up, like I’ve got mono, and like I want to rip my skin off of my body because it’s burning and itchy at the same time.

Today is a hard day. And here is what high doses of radiation do to my skin.

Lovely blotchiness.

Like I fell asleep in the sun

First things first. I am temporarily not answering OkCupid messages, because

• I have my pan in enough fires. Or my finger in enough pots. Or my- I think I should stop with this line, or- nope. When have I ever stopped? I have my boobs in enough hands at the moment. Not that I’m settling down. Don’t you worry about that. I’ve tasted married life, and it’s like a cup of blue cheese soaked in bleach. No, I’m just happy with the people I am currently dating. But, I love OkCupid, and I love updating my profile. Still, some things annoy me. Like this guy:
  Listen, pal. If you already know you’re unattractive enough to hide the bottom of your face from the world, and you already sent me three messages, and I still haven’t replied to you, please. Move on. But before you do, include your whole damn face in that profile picture of yours because what is the point? Are you trying to trick people into looking at your profile, in hopes that they can get past your neanderthal jaw and be bowled over by your vague, trite self description and overtly sexual blathering? Because as you know by now, I already did look at your profile, and I was pretty pissed off, Mr. 51% match. I personally have been into some pretty ugly dudes (sorry, dudes I’ve been into, if you’re reading this and think it’s you. it’s probably you), but hiding half of your face only makes me want to reject you harder once I see that massive overbite and spend two minutes reading your tremendously boring representation of yourself.
   

  Moving on.

  • There is a person in my life who is making me absolutely batshit bonkers with his level of stupidity. In case he exceeds my expectations and can read, I will omit certain details. Just know that this isn’t someone I can easily just cut out of my daily life. This person recently told me that I “seemed just fine” and should “shake it off”. If there is anything more annoying than being told that I should rely 100% on holistic medicine, it’s someone telling me, directly post high doses of radiation (WHICH, by the way, doesn’t turn you into a superhero, unless vomiting jello is a superpower, in which case, get the Justice League on the phone and sew me a uniform) that they should “shake it off”. I wish he were a baby, so I could shake him. And Trast says to add that this guy is so annoying that even JarJar Binks would be like “Great. Who invited that guy?”,
    

    I'm supposed to be the annoying one!

     

  Moving on.

  • We have flies. Little, irritating fruit flies. One of my housemates left plastic bags with fish juices from thawed fish in them in the recycling bin and now? The house is about to be lifted off the ground by these filthy little jerks. We’ve created traps for them using cups, plastic, cider vinegar, and rubber bands. And voodoo. I hate these disgusting little creatures with all of my being, because once you’ve had MRSA, you begin to see everything as a potential for having your flesh eaten.

  And finally.

  • I’m on an increased dose of prednisone. Again. And while I am pleased as punch that my hair is growing back, I am very displeased that I have the desire to smash the fuck out of everything. Seriously, I want to bust shit. And bust faces. And bust a move. So, pardon me for a few posts, which may not be filled with sunshine and moments of deep reflection, because there’s a rage happening. Huh. Mayyyyybe the radiation did turn me into a superhero?

   

She wore a garbage bag to my classroom the day of the Halloween party. It was the big, heavy, black sort that shone and crinkled when she walked. None of the other parents wore costumes. Her hair was like twigs, dirty blonde with twinges of green where she’d tried to bleach it. She’d said once that when she was giving birth to Anthony, my cousin, her water broke and it was green. I pictured it the same green as those parts of her hair, the same way I could envelope my whole brain in the same kind of black shiny water as the color of that garbage bag.

There was a constant anxiety hanging heavy over my time in that house. I remember so much of it; have talked so much of it through in therapy sessions. What I missed talking through in therapy usually finds it’s way out of my mouth late night, laying in arms, a spark of a thought about a dog giving birth and eating it’s babies, or something will make me think of spending a summer in bed, writing sentences every time I broke a rule I didn’t know existed.

A few years after I lived with Dan & Gina, my aunt and uncle on my mother’s maladjusted side of the family, I was in a foster home that similarly enjoyed the Public Square style of chastising a person. They’d have the offender stand before the entire family and they would berate, list your crimes, demand that you explain yourself. I would stand there and I would stare past all of it, and I would think “I’m not here. I’m not here. These are not my toes. This carpet doesn’t exist. I am nowhere. I am nothing. These are not even my thoughts, because I have none.”

That foster family came to believe that I was possessed. They were Catholic freaks who seemed to keep finding themselves guardians of all sorts of possessed children. To hear their stories, you would think Satan was the case manager, because there is no explanation for the number of kids who came through their home who somehow became inhabited with an evil spirit.

The only spirit in me, causing me to go cool, grow still, stand for as long as I needed to in order to bypass their bullshit- outlast the madness and not be broken, was the same spirit that had learned how to endure anything.

I was seven.

My aunt used to lay me on the hardwood floors. I was seven when she started to do this. I mention that because when I think of seven year old children, I often consider the amount of misery a person would have to have within themselves in order to cause this level of sadism to be directed at a child. Once on the floor, my freckled nose pointed toward a plaster crack, she would put a shirt into my mouth. Then she would take the buckets used to fill up the fish tanks, dirty plastic, heavy buckets, and she would pour the water slowly over my face, and it was like I was drowning.

You don’t die from most things, and some things you wish you would. I can recall panic attacks as an adult where the loudest though in my head was “Enough! Just stop living already so that this can be done.” And a panic attack, that’s within yourself. You have to grab yourself by the arm, make yourself breath, relax, be okay. Or, you could just take a xanax. But another person isn’t within you, and you can’t grab them by the arm when you’re seven and their arms are that far above you.

When I was 21 my aunt and uncle found me. They called me and we small talked about my cousins, about the house, about my kids. And then my uncle got me on the phone alone and told me about Vietnam and being a prisoner of war. He talked about the tortures he endured, and how those things stay with a person, making it impossible to ever really come back from that.

For over a year the punishments continued, increased, got more intense. There were beatings with a leather razor strop, there were mental games, making me dress in a diaper and goo-goo gaga and drink from a baby bottle in front of the neighbor boy I had a crush on, there were more instances of water boarding, there were three days of making me stand in a corner, kicking me when I’d fall over from exhaustion.

And I remember that time in shades of green and in black, and I remember hiding in the bathroom, overdosing on tylenol because I had read about a kid dying from it. It did nothing. But laying there on that floor, knowing I wasn’t going to die from a thing, not knowing the word torture as it applied to my uncle and his war, only knowing that this would not kill me,I knew that in order to not break completely, I had to do something. I found a way to stare until I didn’t exist, and I would think “I’m not here. There is no me. I don’t exist. I have no thoughts. None of this is real.” until I stopped thinking all together and I really didn’t exist.

The last time I talked to my aunt and uncle on the phone, my aunt said “Every time we see a news story about an abused kid, we think about what we did to you, and we’re sorry.” And I didn’t know what to do with that. I said “That’s okay.”, because what else could I say? “Well, I don’t have to see news stories to remind me. It’s always there.”?

As an adult, after years of therapy, I learned to stop disappearing myself any time I felt like things were about to get hard. I learned to be present in those moments, to accept that stressful things aren’t all going to be as terrible as the tortures endured in abuse. It’s difficult, though, because I react so strongly to every single thing that happens. I liken it to needing to cut a grapefruit when the only tool I have is a chainsaw. Every time there is any situation, no matter the size, my usual tool is so powerful that it can destroy what could be a good result.

It was an act of extreme strength that lead me to invoke the ability to meditate myself away from a thing that would have driven me mad otherwise. And lately, I have felt life testing me, have wanted to replace the sound of the doctor talking about the courses of treatment, the nurses in hasmat suits putting poison into my arms, the nights of aching, the arguments over the phone with billing departments, the fucking loneliness, with that same dark space of not existing. But I haven’t, and I won’t, because it actually takes more strength these days to be present. And I have never taken the wimpy way out before.

See, my uncle was right when he said that those things that happen stay with a person, and he was right when he said you don’t come back from that. You don’t come back; not ever. Instead, you go someplace else. It’s just that the place I chose to go has a a much better view.

I used to fear water, or rather, I used to say I feared water. I didn’t really fear it, though there was something about murky lake bottoms and fish bold enough to graze my goosefleshed legs that grossed me right out. Still, I overplayed my fear of water for years, claiming I was psychic and knew how I’d die; claiming that because my father had drowned at 21, I was afraid I’d drown as well; claiming that in a former life I had drowned myself; claiming whatever seemed most interesting while hugging my own arms and making a show of my fear.

Having moved a lot, I could reinvent fears based on convenience. Moving in the summer usually kept my fear of water at bay, with the opportunity to do hand stands in pools during the stickiest midwestern days guiding me to not only not fear water, but to be a mermaid; to lay in the bottom of pools with all of the air pushed out of my body until I was still as a stone, looking up, watching the way the sun turned into three suns through the chlorine kaleidoscope. In those cases, I always picked other things to fear- the dark, the basement, thunder, loud noises.

What was I, after all, if I had nothing to fear? Everyone seemed to fear something, and I had noticed that when they did, they were loved for it. They were loved through it. They were hugged and teased, then protected from it. If they faced their fears, they were hugged harder, even if they came out shaking.

My son, Trast, has real fears. He fears roller coasters, heights, and anything medical. He fears pain, discomfort, and seeing his own blood. And I have a hard time understanding him, because I have had very few honest fears in my life other than spiders, and not being loved, for which I would do anything.

Yesterday Tim and I went to the ocean. We drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, gathering pools of disgusting as we waited in lines of traffic so slow that I daydreamed of rollerskating past all the cars, shaking my short shorts and holding a flower. He just kept telling me to be happy, it was going to be a good day, but I couldn’t feel it yet. I’ve been so angry lately, anyway, and I wasn’t feeling down with his whole “Look at us! Tim and Nikol! Off to do whatever and be spontaneous!” idea.

And then we got to the ocean, and I can’t imagine anyone has ever not felt the way I feel when I’m next to the Pacific. I never get used to the moment of realization that I am so very small; that everything else is so very large; that I have nothing worth worrying about, as the moment I first look up at the perfect spot toward the back of the sky where you realize it seems to have no end. I imagine, had I lived in a time when people thought you could fall off the edge of the earth if you swam far enough, I would have thought, “Sure, stupids, but that’d take you only forever.”

Photo by Joshua MacLeod

When you first feel the water, standing at the edge, as the waves barely touch your toes, the first reaction is to make your way back to the towel and forget the ice water. “It’s cold because it comes all the way from Alaska.” Tim tells me this every single time we’re at the water. “Yeah, but come on! Didn’t it have time to warm up a little?” That’s how I always respond. Things with him are like that. I always know what to expect with him, and I have needed something like that in my life forever.

The waves knocked me over this time. The moon was full and the tide was especially strong. Even if you “stayed low” the water seemed intent on pulling you into it and pushing you down. I started to laugh underwater, imagining what it must have looked like to see my bald head, growing back blonde baby fuzz, one moment above water, and the next gone. I don’t suggest laughing underwater to anyone.

I sat in a shallower area, but the waves kept pushing my head back, filling my nose with salt. I thought about my teen years and my fabricated fear of water, and I thought of how, so long as I kept telling myself it was the truth, I could almost convince myself of anything. Just yesterday morning I decided that I loved doing dishes. I know that by the end of the week, I will be downright cheerful about washing them. The brain is like that. You can tell yourself anything and make you believe it.

If I think about the things I fear right now, I haven’t changed all that much. I still fear that nobody loves me. I still genuinely won’t go near a bug. And I fear being blind folded. That seriously freaks me out. But more noteable is what I don’t fear, and what I have never feared; a thing whose lack of fear has lead me to another kind of fear altogether. I don’t fear death.

Since the moment I knew I was alive I have never feared death. Through any spiritual incarnation of my beliefs, even when I believed there was a hell, I didn’t fear death. I have been near it, I have sought it, I have wondered about it, and I have never felt a moment’s fear about it.

I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

However, like any proper egomaniac, I have feared life without me. I have feared Trast, already one of the most amazing men I know, continuing to be amazing but without our banter. I have feared Ayden and I never getting to the point where we can say “All those years of butting heads were pretty funny now that we look back on it.” I fear Pelham, who is only five, not having the goofy stories of times we spend together; not being around the very spirit of all that I am that makes others shake their heads.

And I clearly see the parties I’m not at. I clearly see the dinners I don’t cook. People are there. They are eating, happy, smiling. These are people I love, and I am not there anymore. There’s Tim, at the beach, and the water is cold. “This water is cold because it comes all the way down from Alaska.” he says. And whoever he is there with says “Oh.” And I am nowhere. But everything else, like the ocean, keeps going so far that you can’t even imagine where it ends.