Today is day Seventy Eight.
I thought the last few weeks I got better, but grief keeps leaking, somewhere between the songs on the radio and when I revisit the picture and video from August 19th.
I notice how grief manifests differently in people. Some of my friends who've lost a parent or both, it almost becomes their entire personality, a quiet badge they wear everywhere. Others, who loved their parents just as deeply, barely speak about it at all.
And then there's me—the one who capitalized on the momentum of loss. I write, I reflect, I publish. As if every word could justify the ache, or at least make it productive.
I don't know if it's coping or exploiting, honestly. But I read somewhere that "loss is simply what happens to you in life. meaning is what you make happen." Maybe that's what this is, not coping, not exploiting, but the clumsy attempt at making meaning. Writing gives me a sense of control over something that was never in my hands to begin with.
My mother's death rearranged the furniture of my mind, suddenly everything had to find a new place to exist. Some people build silence around their loss; I built sentences. Maybe because silence felt too heavy, too close to nothingness. So i wrote. I still write. Not always about her directly, but she's in the undertone of everything—in the way I reach for meaning, in the pauses between words, in the strange calm that comes when I finish a piece and realize I've managed to turn pain into language, again.
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