This is a love letter.

It feels like I keep losing.

This month has felt like back-to-back days of failing brakes. I feel like I keep losing more from my life and each time it happens, it comes as a sudden, sharp shock to the system. It feels like the universe is shattering around me and beneath is this false reality I was secretly living in.

But this is not really about this month or this year, but the feeling of quite suddenly and unexpectedly missing something you had only a second before. Once it’s gone, it feels as though I am free-floating in this new reality, suddenly formed by what I can only say is a fault in the space-time continuum. What happened here?

As I look around, it’s like I’ve reached the end of the world; I’m staring at this big grid in the sky signaling to me, as a player of this game, that there’s nowhere left to go. I can turn around and go back, but what I used to have is gone and going back is nothing like moving forward. There’s something about it that feels very wrong; it turns something in my gut that feels like nausea that won’t ever let up. Thinking about it for even a minute makes me feel as though my faith in the universe has vanquished.

But of course, these things can happen to me just as they can happen to anyone else. I try to avoid this gut feeling that I should no longer believe in the things I used to just because something bad happened to me.

I read something once, about writing about terrible things. We have a tendency to write it for catharsis and say it’s good just because it meant something to us. And, in a way, that’s true. “Good” does not mean one thing. But when I sat down to write about the sudden losses in my life, I knew it was important to do more than say what happened. I needed to simultaneously make a statement about who I was and who I still am.

He said, “When you write about me, make me a villain,” and I could never do that. I can accept that my heart was broken, and I can also acknowledge that this does not make me any less whole than I was before. There is no villain in my story, just necessary pieces of my puzzle.

When I look back now, with more clarity, the most jarring part seems to be the shock to my system. The feeling of falling out of your own world, into that grid of nothing, into space, into the open air. I no longer question why they happened, but the sharp pains of shock and surprise as you experience loss hurts the same each time. So, I can accept that my heart was broken, and I can also acknowledge that this does not make me any less whole than I was before. x

WORDS by ALIYAH SUMAR ART by SANDY LUU

I didn’t want it to end so soon. I want to breathe in more of this vivid joy, feel the lightness of my leaping heart.

You make me happy but I’m going to see my parents now and there’s just no time left for us.

So with the moon as our tender witness,

Tear the glasses from my face while my lungs gasp and strike me with two violent swipes of the makeup cleaner and her face looking at me in the mirror melts.

Oh, that poor girl and her heavy black eyeliner up around her lashes so thick that it melts into her dark hair where it falls across her left eye and smudges of creamy white kohl on the bottom lids like a piercing gaze, like welling tears, like Chinese theater makeup

Where did she go? Where did she -

It all falls apart.

A thousand smearing shreds like gray feathers The warpaint that held us together.

We’ll meet again tomorrow. Hush. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. You love your parents, don’t you? Seeing them is good for you.

It’s just paint, a brush, the slightly shaking hand. You can remake yourself again. I can remake myself again.

But I wish that I could just see myself for you

And you wish that you could be more like me And I and you with me and us and, and -

Oh, the mother moon. x

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.

HUSH. DON’T CRY. DON’T CRY.