Mazzy was the kind of person who, when met along any point of her life, struck new people as someone who was meant to be, solidly, age 35.

At earlier points in her childhood, growing up in the proximity of corn fields and strip malls in Western Pennsylvania, the adults that ringed and bound her life (aunts, neighbors, friends of mom) noted to each other that she was one of those folks who were "born old". She had a slow, methodical manner that would have been considered plodding in a fat girl or airy and spiritual in a thin girl, but in a child of healthy appetite and robust energies was assigned as "mature". And it was true that, unlike the three siblings that came later, who seemed to have a torrent of hurry constantly spilling forth and over and around them (answers flushed out of mouths before questions were completely asked, feet tripping over eager legs, etc), Mazzy preferred to stop and consider things, and could be seen standing, a pillar of gentle certainty, in the middle of a squiggling pile of cousins and brothers and sisters and neighbors, who from an early age onward adored Mazzy and fought for her attention and cried when she didn't give it and got so excited when she did that they tripped over themselves and fought with each other some more and cried over this and, in at least one memorable occasion, peed themselves. Mazzy didn't care. Mazzy, from the earliest recollection of the collective Petra family memory, wasn't bothered by things like tantrums or toddler urine, and took the lack of control that so humiliated her young worshippers as a thing in stride, not particularly fantastic but to be expected in the normal course of a day's events. Her aunts remarked on more than one occasion that Mazzy was born to be a mom. These were the only times Mazzy ever showed signs of emotional disturbance- overhearing this, her head would shoot up and she'd seek out the eyes of her mother, and they'd share a long, uninterupted look. No words, not even a chance in her face from the calm, attentive smoothness, but the aunts would get a sense then of something exchanged, some subterranian thing that was maybe tension? Maybe secret? Maybe pact? Maybe disagreement? It was hard to tell, and it would only last a moment, and then the world snapped back into place, Mazzy's calm soft voice rising over the frenzy, calling out suggestions for a game or starting a group song, and Mazzy's mother, Gena, shrugging her shoulders and saying "the kid's only a kid, guys" and moving the discussion into deeper adult waters of gossip and marital problems and money problems, topics more universally satisfying, more suited for an afternoon when the kids were sure to be away from underfoot, sure to be safe under Mazzy's watchful eyes.

Mazzy celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday on her best friend's back porch, surrounded by a group of people who loved her, intimate and cozy on the slightly too crowded veranda, where folding tables covered in mismatched cloth with unravelling edges offered up casseroles and mason jars of flowers and wine. The back porch opened into a back yard that was Mazzy's favorite kind of backyard; loved but haphazardly tended, the corners crowded with lilacs just beginning to loosen from the buds, and the dark brooding branches of pines, while the center was dotted with half started gardens from last summer, signs of an abandoned croquet set, a bicycle or two. Someone had raided the recycling and set up dozens and dozens of candles in tin cups around the yard, cleverly among the ragged mop of daffodils and the floundering joquils- Mazzy watched the little lights flicker and dance, and looked to the sky, where in the very center, faint lights also shone, elusive and seeming brave, determined to be visible even against the early spring smog and the light pollution of the city and the crowding branches of trees. To Mazzy, it seemed the ridculous little candles were waving and flickering in frenetic encouragement, and that touched her, the way broken, impossible whimsies always did. She leaned backwards into the broad arms of her husband, Greg, who was smoking a cigarette and discoursing with his best friend Patrick the finer details of some latest album of a mutually liked band. His words seemed to drift along, like the thread of his cigarette smoke, threading into the evening's banter and discussions, and Mazzy had a sudden moment, the kind you have occasionally, as if for one precious, fleeting second the world opened up to her, and all of it, the recycling tins and light smog and absurd conversation and her friends whispering and laughing, filled with rich food and red wine and home brewed beer (that was the big thing in her group of friends this year, home brewed beer. She personally didn't get too excited about it on it's own sake, but appreciated that it did something for them, and so, when seeing a bottle of homebrew, felt a gentle pinch of refracted pleasure)-all of it seemed to exist, perfect and saturated throughout with-something. Later she'd try to grab at words for it, jotting down "love" and "meaning" and "truth" and even, to her deep flinching squeamishness "God" (Mazzy was a believer, but tried to keep that on the down low, for reasons which seemed vaguely pious and sincere but never ideal to examine closely), but at the time verbal thought wasn't an option: it had come on so unexpected, and hit her so fiercely, she merely sat, stone still and mute, slammed and thoughtless with the enormity of the experience. Around her, her friends were talking and laughing, Janelle was clearing off a table, Patrick was flipping through their ipod to find a particular song, and someone (it must have been Bradley, she thinks long afterwards, when trying to reconstruct this scene, to mine it for some undiscovered answer or meaning) had taken out a guitar and was strumming it tenatively, slowly, the sound vibrating low beneath them all, a thing tugging them all into some previous way of being, only recently (so recently) left behind. Mazzy saw them all, and felt such a tremendous outpouring of love for them, each one of them and then the whole thing, the whole holistic world of it, and everything in it, and, strangely enough, a feeling she would later write down was "a lot like pity" only without the sad, seperate feeling of acknowleding that something is pitiful- she felt it all, filling her with such intensity she wondered if she was physically going to burst.

She wanted the kalidescope parts of life; she wanted to take all the
pieces of her life and toss them together and spin them around and then pour them, and she wanted to find a vantage spot that was far enough away that she could see it all, spread out like that, in the random, beautiful image she knew it would make.