In Colouring Grief
In Colouring Grief received over 80 grievances for its duration and these were some of the responses I wrote to their grievances. A special shout out to Xpace team for their time, patience, and love, to Razan Samara for her writing and conversations, and to my family for once again being the spine I can always lean on. This work is about holding and about letters and about rituals. It’s about colouring the shades of grief with the full knowledge that there is no universality in our understanding of colour, much less our understanding of grieving. These letters and poems are things I couldn’t say to each of the grievers, the things I couldn’t express, and the things I’ve carried with me since receiving your words, your thoughts, your sadness, your anger, your bitterness, and your grief.
I've been here before, the one who is the right until I am the wrong, and this does not get easier, you do not wake up one Sunday realizing that you are singular and irreplaceable, you think back on edges that don't match and words that don't carry and love poured so late in the night no one is awake to see it, I wish, sometimes, I can stop finding my failings in the photographs of you, and maybe I'm searching for good things that didn't happen, or maybe I should stop looking at your photographs at all, planning myself around the spaces you used to take, this is how love leaves, tightening the space around you and holding it for no one, time however, is love's longest companion, it is there to mellow the sharpness, sweeten the acid, making you still tear up, but somehow, easing the roughness in the back of your throat until you’re finally able to swallow. There's a story about stars, isn't there always one, but the story is about how they sacrificed shine in order for us to live, how they whispered about us and how much they wanted to pack us up and shield us away from ourselves and each other, the stars, they understood that sometimes exhausting ourselves meant grieving ourselves, they knew that in order to die, you must become a memory seen from across an ozone layer, the stars I mean, they're beautiful, I wish they told us how to explode knowing it's needed, knowing it's required and knowing that we will still remember them light years later.
I’ve always wanted to be remembered for the way I hold on to people a little more when they’re trying to let go, which is silly to think about but I’ve always wanted to be the person who holds on to you even after you’ve convinced yourself you shouldn’t be held anymore (which is to say) I wish I could hold you, I wish we could wrap each other hard enough to absorb heat and live through a winter storm where frostbite can't fathom getting closer to us, I wish we could become so entwined we can fit under a single umbrella, I wish that when you cry on my shoulder about what happened we’d be so pressed passersby won’t notice your sobbing because of the rain or because we were always gonna be caves for one another, a secret to hold, a secret to tell, a secret to share and maybe a secret to cry out.
Grieving the death of someone is, in some ways, the same endeavor as grieving the person you used to be (in some ways) the loss feels robbing in the same way, for all that I have craved the drag of a smoke, I’ve felt myself cough my way through panic attacks, felt myself trying to breathe through the way my body does not know how to settle in these bones, the way I wrap myself into myself, even when this body does not want to hold me back, and I know you've got yourself convinced that you are a soft memory, made to be forgotten, but trust me (I know how hard it is to trust) the first time I realized that every cell in our body regenerates so often that in the span of seven years, our old selves become obsolete, I cried for days, for the person I was, but more than anything, for this person who is about to be, I hope they are tenderhearted, I hope they breathe in easier under full moons, and I hope when they become a memory again, it is fond, and loving, and radiant.
I've collected more memories from people who left than from the ones who have stayed, evidence that once upon a time we loved each other, evidence of the coffee dates, the sangria, the birthday drives and sometimes that's all you have left, it's okay I think, it's okay to gather memories like sea rocks, have them shaped by the water and kept away until it's time to take them out, a reminder of the sea salt even though they're fully dry, and when you are older, they will stay, as memorials nudges, sometimes regrets, yet more often than not, evidence, of this life, of you, of the things that happened, the ones you remember and the ones you don't.
I had a dream that someday I would wake up and my skin would be worth loving and that I will look in the mirror and know the person looking back. Sometimes I'll be unraveling mandarins and handing them over to someone and it will be like unraveling myself and most days I can live with this skin but in the middle of the night, I stay up and think of the scars it has now and the scars it will have and how one day someone will come and call them beautiful, say I love you, and I might not be able to say it back, the future, isn't sad for what it will be, it’s sad for what it won't be, a bunch of moments that lead to happiness, but I know, god I know, that if someone deserves loving, if someone deserves beauty, if someone deserves a well lived future, it's me, it's me, it's me.
The women that raised me told me to carry knives with me and cut off the hands of the men that touch me and when Athena gave Medusa snakes that turn men to stone, she cried in gratitude, the voices in my head have told me about all the things that have been taken from me without my permission, and I have lived with enough spite to be happy, lived with enough rage to burn down the things that do me harm, there is love here too, there is tenderness here too, this belief that you will not be seen as anything but a carrier of this grief but someone who will wield it, to become more god than any man who wronged you has any right to be.
In the melancholy of realizing that the body that was serving you needs more help than anticipated, I know that disappointment will sit with you like an unwelcome guest, when that happens, remember that our bodies have folded themselves and expanded in an attempt to contain everything about who you are, and for all that there is more care to be shown now, they are still reaching, forming, changing, in an attempt to become everything you were always meant to be.
I learned recently that the colour orange was one of the last colours to be named, it was in the middle of it all, too dark for yellow and too dull for red, and sometimes lived experiences feel like that, like an unnamed middle, a change in the tint that is seemingly unwanted, and often unexpected but I have painted skies and sunsets and breakdowns in more shades of orange than I can count, and none of them were conventional and all of them were the sound of heartbreak, and I am done collecting crayons that don’t speak to me, and you, you are orange, bright, and screaming and hoping to god, there's a place for you to exist, steady and slow like a warning and a celebration.
The first boy I ever loved was so beautiful you could hardly open your eyes around him, this boy, god this boy, he shone like the birth of a star, like the aftermath of a miracle, with every breath you marvel at its impossibility, or maybe at its possibility, what they don't tell you. I'm finding, is for centuries we used stars to wayfind, what they don't tell you, is how most of us don't have any other ways of taking ourselves from place to place other than following the stars, now, now that the boy I loved is gone, I'm running out of ways to find the right route for this ache, the way the road longs to smell like anything but regret, I'm trying to remember that the sky is filled, but this one has guided me for so long, and sometimes I wonder how gratitude and grief exist in the same river, how they reflect one another, the way grief exists because gratitude couldn't (that is to say,) god I miss you, I wish I said I love you, I hope wherever you are, you're shining, you're happy, and you're everything you always were.
How do you become worthy of the things that have not happened? How do you forgive yourself the future you never got? How do you fill yourself with questions that have been left unanswered for so long, breathing has become a question mark I can't seem to justify?
You are not a mark in someone's checklist, you are not a goal to be achieved, a person to be controlled or an answer to a question, most of all you are nothing but yourself, you are everything but belonging to the other, and you, you don't owe anyone anything, you don't owe them dignity, or pride, or obedience nor a name they gave you in reluctance, and you don't owe them patience and smallness and shyness and most of all, you do not owe them a middle or beginning or even an ending.
I hope you carry yourself with tenderness, with the knowledge that the choices you have made were the kindest things you could have done, to yourself, to what you knew, to the time you had, to the person you were, the person you are, these choices were the best you could do, we are always choosing while not knowing what will come off of it, we are always doing the best we could do, while we carry the leftovers of those actions, some days I am haunted by all the things that I am not, and the things I could never be, and the things I wish I was, I hope you shake that dust off, I hope you breathe easier knowing, that every time you woke up, you were choosing to do the best you could (I know that to be true) and when the bell in the empty house rings for the first time in a long time, darling, open the door, someone who loves you is here to greet you. And if you could hear me now here's what I would say: I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, you were doing so much, and there was so much to do, and so much to go through, and not enough time, and not enough time to care, and after all of that, for you to have to go anyway, fairness is a bastardized concept, an illusion of fact, there is nothing fair about this, nothing fair about a constant state of suffering with no relief, I miss you, take care, for the time being, I’m looking after them for you, finally, always be certain, I will remember you as the part of us that we couldn't keep.
It's not your fault. I need you to know that, more than anything, that it's not your fault. You couldn't have known. You couldn't have looked them in the eyes and have known, it's not your fault, I promise you, it's not. The person that you loved was someone else, but that is not a reflection on the person you are, who we love, are not reflections of who we are, sometimes we give love to those we think need it, and that is not your burden to carry, I'm sorry there is a burden to carry at all, that you had to pack your bags, to leave everything you've ever known, to find another place that gives you peace, there is bravery in leaving, there is bravery in believing that you are worth more, worth a second chance, worth another beginning (I love you) take care of yourself, I'm going to say it again, because I need you to know it, it's not your fault.
The women in my family carry themselves with pride, they carry themselves with grace, they carry themselves with enough grip that the hold on the steering wheel is never loose, grip you hard enough to never make you think they're willing to let go, these women took pieces of themselves and added them up and somehow I came to be and it breaks me (now) knowing that somehow we are not endless, that for all that I assumed I would be held by these women for eternity, life comes bracing with the bitterness of the verities, tells me that that might not be true, and it feels like a falsity, something you're told as a joke, and I don’t want to believe it, but see, these women, the women in my family, they shoulder guilt and break wrists and ask you what your favourite memory of love was and then they do it all over again (these women) they mark up the ways candle wicks do, temporary but reverent, lighting up rooms, for days making spaces smell like citrus and home (that is to say) the answer to immortality is here, eternal love is here, even if life is not eternal, these women, my women, my loves, the mosaic slices I am made of, they exist in me and in each other we’ve mapped out eternity.
I wonder if you know the debris the explosion of you leaving caused, the collateral damage my body took knowing you won't be coming home, how I don't sit in shadows for long anymore, how now I only have trembling silhouettes, and I wonder some nights if I can ever become a part of the before, a part of the us, a part of the explosion itself, recalling when we were lovely and small and together, because I do, I do, I do.
Pain is, most obviously perhaps, abhorrently painful, and healing for all that it does happen, believe it or not, does not erase that things were so painful in the first place. You can trace all the edges around the burn and make sure you don't let anything touch it and then you wake up to realize that you haven't seen the sun for fear of heat and I love you, I do, and so did they and I know, so did you, but sunshine gives us so much life, you deserve so much life and you will get it (I know it) you will get it.
The allowance of mourning is your due, people etch onto us even if the etching is too subtle to be seen, shape us in ways we don't always give permission to, most of us can only fall apart in silence some days, like the solemn ringing of a bell, the incessant ticking of a broken clock, some mourning is so invisible it would take years for us to notice that we were carrying it (you have every right to this) you are worthy of sadness, you are worthy of pain, of a mouth that tastes like bile and regret, regardless of our belief in our rights to tragedy, you are allowed tragedy.
And for all that we are skin, bones, and a mess of arteries, sometimes this grief seems to spill over everything leaving me murky and messy, unwanted and unfinished, it spills over everything I have, spills over everything I am, until I am covered in nothing but despair, and it could be the grief or the anger or my tears or maybe they're all the same but most importantly they are not a whole of me, they are pieces yes, important ones, companions to a long life that is difficult to live and even harder to master, but they are not a whole, they are parts but they don't make the sum of you, you are a becoming, a meeting, a collision of spaces, and the best coincidence the universe ever allowed to exist, you are not just parts, you are whole, the full thing, all of it, always trying, desperately loving, searching for joy in it all.
When the astronaut leaves for the last time, he will carry your ashes to the moon as he hums a short tune, and it'll be the song I sang you as you were falling asleep.
There’s a fire burning and I am unsure if it is me or if it is this heart or if it is this anger, I am unsure how long I can continue burning like this, the way I become both a small flame, a whisper away from getting blown, or a forest fire, so ready to take on all those who have hurt me and I want to burn and burn and burn but there is no pleasure in the fire, only heat, and you have looked at me and seen nothing but smoke, seen nothing but mirages, and sometimes when the crowds have gone home, I am so lonely my thoughts become the only friends I have, and somehow that’s lonelier, sometimes, when the ones you love look at you like they don’t know you, I worry that I don’t know myself, yet, yet, yet, mirrors don't scare me anymore, and if I had to describe myself to someone who has never seen me before, I’m describing someone beautiful, someone kind, someone who will shake this earth, heart aching, heart broken, but somehow still whole.
The last time I tasted love was at the fair in Oregon and it makes sense looking back, how the air smelt of burnt popcorn and the aftertaste of laughter, the way you snorted so hard the diet coke you were drinking went down the wrong pipe and in my memory you are still and in motion all at once and it’s so quiet, like a scene in a movie where you first see the character you know everyone wishes they were, and I don’t know if that’s what I miss the most, or if I miss the me I was when I was with you, or if I miss myself most of all, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.
The tragedy of motherhood I think, is that so much of it is about creating people that are made to leave. It is both the most excruciating and kindest act of love, I think, to make and care and then to let go, I know that some days you want to pack them and put them in your pocket and hide them away, the same way we want to hide precious things from prying cruel eyes, but I have learnt that my Pothos will trail best when she sees the sun even though I am afraid she will be burnt (this too) this too is love I think, to let go with the knowledge that they may be hurt, to somehow still, after all, be there, for them, to come back to, hurt and grieving but also so beautiful, so doting, always so loving.
Is it rude to ask for the pieces of ourselves we give away? Is it rude to question if they still need them? Is there a wrong I’m committing by telling you that when I gave a part of myself to you I hoped something else would fill the emptiness? If I get it back will it be same? When we first gave each other pieces of ourselves I somehow counted on you never leaving and instead I am the only one left here and I didn't think I’d be the one left, we never think it would just be us here, staring at all the things you left behind, wondering how I fit, wondering how to become an artifact that people can then discover as something that belonged to you, one that you left behind, this heaviness is both weightless and so cruel, I sometimes imagine myself weightless and cruel and I miss you, come back, please, I didn't have enough time to tell you that when the story ended I wanted us to be holding hands.
I'm terrified that when my ancestors call, my tongue will not know the words to answer, I'm terrified that the sounds will be all wrong, that I won't know where the emphasis needs to go, where the softness needs to be, and they will be trying to tell me the secrets of the universe and the ways you make meals that bring family together, and I will be lost, sitting and listening, crying and confused, not sure how to answer them in ways that let us communicate, no one ever talks about the grief of forgetting your mother tongue, she was your first love, how could you forget her, how do you now sit and retrace her back, how can you find her again, in ways that let you feel like you're coming back home one more time.
The goodness of someone doesn't take away the hurt and that is the oddest thing, how good people can hurt, I grew up thinking the good do good and the bad don't do anything but, only to realize that it's not so uncomplicated, that leaving out of love has left me bereft, with more than enough loneliness to collapse a sturdy house of cards, maybe I am a house of cards, maybe I am a house, being held by nothing but hurt, but love (my love) houses hold and hold and hold, and contain so much, you hold and hold and hold and you contain so much.
I loved the person I was with them is one of the hardest things I don't know how to sit with, the notion that the version of the person looking back at the mirror was someone worthy of love just by the extent of existing adjacent to someone else, and maybe that's why heartbreak sometimes feels like the floor swallowing everything you know to be true, feels like a reintroduction to a person you think you knew, and is this the tragedy of loving people I wonder, living with the terror of them leaving you in an infinite number of ways, this terror, god, it grips you so tightly it's leaving bruises and leaving you breathless, is it worth it god, all this terror, all this heartbreak to love to love to love and to love some more and still be left with nothing at all
I imagine that I’m going to keep having mornings that I want to tell you about, I imagine I’ll still have love to tell you about, and hurt to tell you about, and silliness to tell you about, and joy, god all the joy, I want to tell you about so much of it, you were the joy and you grew with joy and now I’m not sure there is joy when you’re not here to see it, or maybe there is but it’s so hard to see that, so hard to let go of all the things I know to be true, the way you hold yourself, the way you scold and the way rooms grow with you and the way I watched you be all of the right things and mapped out the person I want to be through them, missing fills you with so much air you feel like you’re about to blow up or maybe float away, either way I know I can’t stay here fully knowing you won’t be here too, and if I knew that my last words were actually my last to you, they would’ve had to rip them away from me so maybe by not saying them you would’ve stayed for a second longer, this missing, all this missing, it hurts, it’s too big, and somehow I have to live with it.
I don't think we ever expect betrayal until it happens, I think for all that we talk about our pessimism, we are notoriously hopeful, so when I saw a different sign of who you are it felt like a lingering scent I couldn't identify and suddenly someone who mattered is offering more hurt than those who didn't, and they don't tell you about the whiplash, the disbelief, the way everything that was good between us is stained forever with what happened, ink you can't wash out, and I see it in me more than I expected, the missing, the bitterness, the confusion, and I'm hoping one day I reach a middle in all of this, serene and forgetful, of you, of what happened, and everything in between.
Even if none of it was true, what makes it any less agonizing? If you make sudden sounds around children, ask them if they are in pain, they will believe they were hurt, and the pain is there in ways that they believe is real, what in the world can make this any less tangible? What is reality but a bad game of improv we're all badly playing? What is it but a bunch of choices and rumors and hurts and things we're never sure happened in the first place? Regardless, here is what I know to be true: for three years when I was 17 I was convinced my heart was going to leap out of my chest because of the sadness, I went to a doctor and told him, that my heart is trying to leave, begged him for something to make it stay, and he said that it's going nowhere, but still some nights I wake up tasting the terror, it was always there (the terror I mean) it was always real, it was always so real.
When the forest burns none of us will notice until the flames are too loud and too long and too hot and I'm sure you were told a thousand times but another time couldn't hurt, you did everything you could, and it wasn't your fault, yes it's true these are empty sentiments made of more broken glass than anything, but a forest fire is wild and uncontrollable and it eats away at all the things we hold dear, and your heart, god your heart, it must hurt, terrifying how humans can die from a metaphorical break, which is to say, after the eruption they swore that the earth was so damaged nothing good could ever grow ever again, but that spring, flowers were blooming, and no one ever knows how forests survive fires but they do, god they do.
Growing up I wasn't very close to my father, he somehow managed to be there and not at all and I couldn't tell you when that changed but the first time he told me he was proud of me I was 25 and I'd be lying if I didn't say I burst into tears, because fathers sometimes feel like hidden knowledge, like the way he’ll listen to me and hum in agreement and I never know if I said the right thing but in that same breath he tells me about how his mother used to wake up at night to make sure he wasn't cold in bed and instead all i hear is I miss her and for all that I don’t know that man, he still holds me for a while when we haven't seen other in days and he tells me your mother loves you, you fight because you're like her, and I tell him no, I’m like you, and he says no you're better and we sit in that, and that is to say fathers are like backbones, there and hurting and growing older and achey but somehow holding us together, and I can't imagine not having a back to lean on and that is to say I'm sorry, I hope there are walls around you holding you up, I hope there are backs around you holding you up.
Helplessness is a poison that I can't pinpoint the source of, in it I am unable to do much, for you, for them, for anyone I love, and even the ones I care for, helplessness is the one thing I never expected to become my Achilles heel, the not allowing of a solution, the ache to fix, but my love, human beings, these people, they are not appliances, we can't always fix them, we can't always fix ourselves, I wonder if we really need to, and I know that you sit on your hands to make sure you don’t reach out and hold, yourself, them, anyone who might need it, this is what we do, we want to touch, to soothe, and then we flinch from the same, helplessness is a poison, but the antidote was always love, the answer, unsurprisingly, was always going to be love.
Managing to live without you has been like arriving to a lecture and realizing that there was a test that you never knew about and you rack your brain wondering if it even was in the syllabus and you don’t give a fuck because you’re here and you have to take a test and somehow everyone seems to be doing just as badly but you just sit there waiting for the answers or maybe I’m waiting for you to come and tell me that it was a joke, that it was a lie and we’ll laugh and this will be something else we can joke about later and god sometimes I look up and wonder if I’m going to live the rest of my life finding you in grocery stores or in mornings at the breakfast table or even beside me after a long day and it feels like the heaviest burden a person could carry is the absence of someone else which is to say I miss you, which is to say I should’ve hugged you harder that last time which is to say god I hope this gets easier or maybe harder which is to say I love you and I hope to see you soon.
I dreamt once that I was in my bed and something was getting closer, I wasn’t able to get away and I imagine that says something about how sometimes I feel like I’m trying to escape my own life, how even that’s something I don’t know how to succeed in doing (this is to say) sometimes I wear responsibility like a shirt that doesn't fit but I can't afford to replace, even when I realize how much love is not the easy answer I thought it was always going to be, (maybe this too is part of the answer) how I wake up hoping to leave but I still choose to stay, loving is not easy (I’m learning) but choosing to stay, that, that there, is more bravery that I've ever given myself credit for.
For all that you think that you are not a tree trunk with rings to memorialize the life that you have lived, you have mapped out more ways to stay tender than you even have noticed, and I know how easy it is to look at yourself and see unfinished, see lacking, see trying and often failing but you are a mosaic of all the people who have loved you, all the people you have loved, there is no time wasted, only time gained in care, in serendipity, in holding so tightly, you become ineffable, you almost become a whole person again.
You're in a dream and you're on a beach and you know it's not real, and in it everyone you love is lounging on the sand and soaking up the sea salt in the air, and you are at more peace than real life ever gives us, and you wake up in the darkness with a smile on your face, the comfort of seeing them happy has taken me through more days than I can keep count of, it doesn't make it easier, the waking up, the shattering of the story, the way you felt the water at your feet and heard their laughter, and I'll never know why the people that make us leave us, but you are made of so much hurt and love and tender wounds, it has made you kind, what a privilege to see it, to hear it, to know that against all things, hard things could've made you bitter and instead it made you soft.
At 3 am, when I am alone and swimming in the realization of all the things I have to carry, my shoulders seem like they’ll forever be bruised like peaches, like Atlas carrying the world and having no one ask him if he needs a hand, it is 3 am and I am alone again, and I do not know how to fix the burden of this life, the way the full stay full and the hungry get hungrier, it is 3 am and I wonder if I’ll ever sleep again knowing that there is so much to this I don't know how to fix, these burdens are heavier than I was taught to carry, even Atlas can’t do this, but darling, I have woken up some mornings and been surprised to realize that I have lived through the pain one more night, the miracle of our bodies is that somehow they keep going, and maybe it’s also a curse, but maybe, all I’m really waiting for is, one night at 3 am, someone, anyone, tapping me on my shoulder, asking if I want a hand at carrying all of this, if i want a break, if i want to be held, as i cry (dear god I just want to cry), about all this ache.
You can acknowledge it, you can say the words, you can say, she did her best, you can admit, that this, whatever this was, was her best, as mothers are wont to do, how they tell us they wish we were beautiful, when you never thought you were anything but, what you don't have to do, however, is tell her that she did good by you, her best, was not for you, it was an attempt at making a villain out of a child, a need to control, to become something else, but you do not owe her an apology, you do not owe her assuaging, you do not owe her anything she never thought you worthy of, forgiveness is not a requirement for living, it isn't and you, you do not owe her anything like that.
Here's a smiling emoji, I hope you don't think I'm being dry, here's a tongue out emoji, I hope you don't think I'm being serious, here's an emoji wearing a cowboy hat, I hope you know I'm dead inside, here's a heart emoji, I'm just afraid you can't read my energy, we've met before haven't we, you've seen me speak and riff and laugh but somehow you can't read my text, they sound so serious, they sound so abrupt, they sound so off putting, what is it about me that sounds off putting, can Blackness and Brownness translate on text, can you label me aggressive and scolding when I've said nothing, the emojis, they're for you to pardon my tone isn't it, how does it feel to read something that doesn't tell you what to feel, how does it feel, to leave you wondering, if I was polite enough to send you this message in the first place.
A terrible thing you can do is give someone a recipe with no clear instructions then leave and sometimes I remember our last phone call and i try to recall what you said and how I answered and looking back it feels like you knew or like I knew like you were hinting at ingredients that I should’ve written down instructions that don’t make sense now and suddenly you were gone and there is no one left to call (which is to say) I’m scared of kitchens and measuring cups and addresses that I've never visited and I thought you would live forever to tell me the right oven times and tricks to boiling the perfect soft egg but you’re gone, can you believe it, god you’re gone, and I have no one to figure this recipe out at all, I just hope that the bits I have left of you linger with me, for longer than I can remember to grieve them (which is to say) I have your eyes, the arch of your nose and the way you hold yourself (which is to say) I'm cooking dinner tonight, I hope it tastes good.
Getting drunk on misery is both the best and worst thing I’ve ever let myself do, the hangover sucks and the headache lasts for days but somehow I’ve cried myself to sleep so many times my eyes have learned to read through blurriness and it was your fault every time, and I am refusing to be a consequence of my own happiness, I will shake you off the way I've shaken off the anguish this life has placed on me, this hurt you've given I will receive no more, and one day you will wake up and regret every moment you didn't love us in, we will be away, and happy, and bright, and you will see us, and regret the people that could've cared for you, but we will be living and living and living instead.
He loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, it doesn't matter that he's not here, it doesn't matter how they talk about him, it doesn't matter how they bring him up, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, and you are the best parts of him, you know how I know? you want to keep him alive in all the ways you know how (the best ways) and grief has always been love that chose to stay, and he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loved you, he loves you, he does, I just know it.
My body has known more about me than I've ever bothered to learn, has protected me from hurts and made them feel like paper cuts, has drawn out parts of it to keep alive, living, and breathing and in the midst I have been drifting to you, drifting in the holy grail of the things I think I'm supposed to be, only to find myself wanting, only to find myself unsatisfied, will I even, I wonder, will I ever be satisfied, loving you, in the back of my mind, gets me so close to satisfaction I can almost taste the summer heat, and if or when I lose you, I'm so afraid of losing that to, which is not a question or an answer, just a hope, of me living, this body loving, me standing in empty road, feeling my skin being kissed by the sun.
When death calls don't pick up the phone, you'll recognize the ring, make sure your mother doesn't pick up, make sure no one you love picks up, if you don't answer, will death have called at all? if no one answers will death have been there at all? if someone happens on it however, if someone picks up, by mistake, on purpose, just to shut the ringing, I hope you get some time to break down, I hope you're held through it, I hope they remember to make your favorite soup, and run their hands through your hair, and maintain the fact that there will never be a right or a good time for death to call at all.
I've had my name mispronounced so often I am starting to forget how to say it, how does it go again, I'm not always sure, the tragedy, I'm finding, in living, in brownness living in whiteness, is that you are looked at as murky water that does not belong, and that is grief that has sat with me for so long I've made space for it at tables and meetings, imagine being seen as a change in the colour, a glitch in the code, what a joke it is, to be told that this life is meant for thriving when it was not made for me, but look (no really) look, I've coloured in every page here in this skin, this trauma, this suffering and then I dared call to call captivating, called it a revolution and it was, it was, it was, and for all that I have stopped looking at half empty glasses, I've started drinking any water in front me, I will not be asking for water anymore, not when it is life given right, do not ask anymore, why would you ask at all, when you have lived so far, unapologetic, shining and more than anything so incredibly present.
Lagom is one of my favorite words to never exist in the English language, it's Swedish, it means the right amount of something, an unseen balance, how we can exist believing we are too much or too little when in fact we are lagom, I don't know if I'm using that right, but it takes us so long to come up with names for things, how orange was the last colour to ever have a name and yet it reminds me of beginnings and endings, which is to say, for all that you have not found a seat at tables, have had more neighbors close doors in your face, know that that is not a reflection on the pieces of who you are, you are yet unnamed, a lagom, the colour orange, something we've yet to find a perfect name for, even though in our hearts we know, that you, are so beautiful, so worthy of love, worthy of tenderness, and most of all worthy of being held so tightly, all your lagom pieces start knitting back together.
Most days I feel torn, putting on a grand performance of holding still and stoic but drunk men believe they are steady too, even when we all can tell they’re falling apart, and I have lived a life of becoming everything you told me to become, only to find that it was not a person I knew how to love, and leaving meant losing you and gaining myself but I have seen the future and in it I am lonely and in it I am grieving and in it I get up and in it I made family out of seasons and I fill rooms with laughter and food and more ache that rib cages learn how to carry and in it I am happy and without you and there is hurt that no time can fix, but here I am both hurting and happy and I am learning to be both, dear god, one day I will be both.
You're trying so hard, you're doing your best, you're trying so hard, you're doing your best, I don't think anyone has told you, you're trying so hard, you're doing your best, you're trying so hard, you're doing your best, you're trying so hard, you're doing your best, someone should tell you, you should know, you should know this, you're trying so hard, you're doing your best.
The way I remember it, we were dandelions and young and freedom swathed our bodies and for all that I remember us happy, I know you don't remember us at all, and sometimes I wonder if all memories are a set of myths that feel true to me and false to others, and maybe they are, but if I close my eyes for long enough I can still hear our conversations and they sound like a well read book, does it matter if the memories weren't shared, if they were real, does it just matter that for a time I was so happy, and for a time I can believe I can be happy again?
I find that we don't always know how to show sadness and misery through anything other than a visible manifestation, but tears will never be the only way to grieve, and darling, we have smiled through more rain than the earth will ever know, and we have not had to defend that despair as much as you've had to defend this sorrow, so smile and break and then smile and break again, if that's what you need to be whole.
Helplessness is a poison that I can't pinpoint the source of, in it I am unable to do much, for you, for them, for anyone I love, and even the ones I care for, helplessness is the one thing I never expected to become my Achilles heel, the not allowing of a solution, the ache to fix, but my love, human beings, these people, they are not appliances, we can't always fix them, we can't always fix ourselves, I wonder if we really need to, and I know that you sit on your hands to make sure you don’t reach out and hold, yourself, them, anyone who might need it, this is what we do, we want to touch, to soothe, and then we flinch from the same, helplessness is a poison, but the antidote was always love, my love, the solution was always going to be love.
I wonder sometimes if anyone will ever know me like the piano I played in your room, will I ever be known for that fragility of sound, how meeting you meant looking at someone that chose me for the first in forever, what a rush it is to be defended, to be loved, I still have your number saved on my phone, used to keep it to hear your voice even though you've never picked up and now a stranger has that same number but it's still under your name, I thought that for as long as you were alive, you would've been in my life, and some nights I still wake up with a prayer and a wish on my tongue, that wherever you are now, you are happy, and safe, and content, and maybe, even a little, thinking of me.
I've lived a life collecting more guilt than I have pockets to hold, more guilt than I know what to do with, there's a room in my head called the guilt room, I hoard it, keep it away because if it comes to the surface everyone will know that I carry the way I can't help like a weight that I don't know how to put down, the hole on the street beside my apartment has been here since I moved and I imagine it’s been there for as long as I’ve felt a hole in this body, two things that no one has the time or money to repair, the guilt I carry for all the lives I can't soothe sits like this, unchanging, unwavering, sometimes I noticed, and then I fall in because I forgot it was there, those days I can't get out of bed for hours, this is what we do, we carry, when there is no where to put down, I joke so much about how one day I will die because of my heart, I'll break it so hard that it can't help but give out, and my mother, she doesn't know, she tells me no one will dare break your heart, my mother, she doesn't know, that all this pain breaks it, and I know you sit in your kitchen wondering how you can think of anything else other than the sadness each of us has to live through, and I wish I can give you some answer, but the only one I have is this: travelers rarely have homes, how can you leave and root, you just can't, so root yourself in this earth, root it in its soil, in its tragedy and most of all in its people, they are always hurting and yet, god can you believe it, yet they can be so light, so caring, so shockingly kind.
If I think about all the things I inherited from my mother I might start crying, that's another thing I inherited from my mother, the tears, the belief that swallowed by the earth, the living room chair and these conversations where the only places I belonged, that is to say, we don't always choose what we get from our loved ones, even though so much of it is coated in love, some sweet things have a bitter after taste, one more thing, about inheriting, but also about loved ones, remember this: you don't need to suffer and lose in order to know, in order to be wise, loss is a destroyer, a wrecker, a criminal in a war, it was not what taught you to be kind, you, you taught you to be kind, you took the wreckage and built a home for yourself to cry in, that's one of the things we inherit, sometimes, from our mothers, the tears I mean.
Loneliness has chased me for so long I make sure it’s keeping up pace now, but I'm forgetting aren't I, I'm forgetting that I was not made for this, no one is, I was made for tender hugs and coffee mornings, and the cicadas of summer and it will come, this will come, but for now the wait is so ghastly, so forsaken, but (my love) hold yourself tighter tonight, call someone that loves you even if you can't admit it, then tell me that this, all of this is an indescribable wound, and you're not sure you'll heal, but if they are there, they can heal with you, for you (my love) the mundane is beautiful because you've survived it, I hope you sleep well tonight.
I've spent so much time speaking to my shadows, telling them about my days and the way storms take over skies and feel like grief and my shadows, these shadows, have not answered back, they have left me speaking and grieving during pitch black nights, and sunrises, and days, and weeks, and shadows are meant to follow you around and be your oldest friends, but mine, my shadows have chosen to leave every chance they got, (which is to say) we are not responsible for the things our shadows choose to do, we are not shadows meant to be following them back, begging for attention, shadows, I've been learning, don't talk back, they don't listen, they come and leave and they're never there when loneliness has found a home in your sweaters (which is to say) I'm sorry, for shadows, and for fathers, and for the ones who were supposed to love us in the way we are worthy, but were never able to do so.
Grandfathers, I've learned, have this magic about them that I don't think anyone else has, the way they carry themselves in rooms like they are history written in the walls, as if they write history as they walk by these walls, grandfathers have this magic about them, and more than anything, they exist as if they are timeless, that’s the thing about not watching someone age, you think time will not touch them, and then time, I realize, suddenly and all at once, is an unforgiving mistress, she cheats us of everything without asking for permission, somehow, my grandfather became the alarm bell in a locked room, someone I thought had the key to leave the fire behind, I miss him, god, my grandfather laughed so loud you couldn't help but equate it to the sound waves of your favorite wave of happiness, everyone is trying to pick up the pieces of his tone, somehow, none of us can find the tune, like the lyric no one can pin point, he's the only one who knew how, and we're walking around confused and lost, with tunes and lyrics stuck in our head where no one can pinpoint the song, my grandfather was the song, he was, he was the words, the humming, the way it made us sway, my grandfather loves me so much, so truly, so slowly, I felt safe enough in it, and this is the hardest and easiest part, the way he loves me, how for all this change, for all this heart ache, somehow, he’s still, after all of this, loves me, this right here, is a constant, the only one, the best one.
The heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't, the heartbreak will end and it won't but it'll end even when it won't.
When the pain sets camp in your backyard, builds a fire and hammers in the tent, feels like it’s decided to live with you for an undecided period of time, it’s never-ending, the way it haunts your house, the way it screams in the middle of the night and wakes you up with eyes stinging and your bed smelling like despair, the never ending pain refuses to move out, sticks to you the way the skin heats after you slam it to a table, a delayed sensation that talks at you for hours later, it knocks and knocks, hammers and hammers, the way it keeps going, the way it doesn't stop, the way it feels like you are gasping for air when there is still water filling your lungs, it burns, and for all that I spent my whole life trying to piece out the person I am who lives without the pain, it seems that I am searching for an apparition that does not exist, it feels sometimes that those two people are one in the same, and my mother used to cry herself to sleep some nights because of how much it hurts and the next day she’d wake up and tell me to make bread out of bruised bananas, kisses my forehead and tells me bruised things come in shapes we don’t understand but the sweetness is there too (I just know it) there is no lightness to be found here, but when the sun sets tomorrow it will feel like a calling, or an answer, someone reaching out, only to realize that it’s the you, from the future, they look like they’ve carried so much to get there, but their shoulders are looser now, edges are rounder, there are laughter lines and they just happen to be yours, they’re yours (believe me) they’re yours.
Erosion, I’ve been learning, is not something that only happens to rocks, sometimes it happens to us, sometimes the river, who to some is life-giving, does nothing but take away from me, and the answer at the time (maybe even now) is to become a mountain, to take shape, become pointed, reach out for more, leave the river behind, and you are allowed to miss them (the river I mean), even if it eroded you, even if it made you hesitant, made you shake, made you less and so rarely made you more, sometimes loving does not make sense, but neither does grieving, which is to say, not all rivers are filled with water made for drinking, you have become so much, and I am so grateful we’re alive to see you become it, but darling, I wish you could have been loved and touched and healed with rivers that deserved a mountain like you.
Thank you so much for reading and giving and being and carrying all of this. Always with love—Yasmeen Nematt Alla