There is an almost uninhabitable room between life and death, and love and hate, and there in the centre, resides grief.
Re: My Museum room
A few months ago, I wrote an article depicting myself as a museum of everyone I have ever known and loved, to lighten the weight of nostalgia that would knock my heart against my chest most nights. In all honesty, the article was written a year after I mourned the loss of a friendship, and even then, it was a gruelling process—one I escaped by the skin of my teeth. The article was a reflection upon it, and a way to help close a chapter of my life that I once thought would tear me in two, to pull me apart from. I have since experienced another loss, and since then have held some resentment towards my past writing. Seeing the person I lost, within things brings forth a gutting nostalgia, as opposed to a small wave hello from the past. “It is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all” I have told myself, not an ounce of me believing it.
I suppose this can be taken as a prequel to the original piece, a reminder that you do not have to find acceptance just yet. There will be days that the grief is so heavy, you feel it weighing down your heart. There will be days you pace your room, hyping yourself up, convincing yourself that you are okay, until you accidentally glance over at your mirror and see yourself staring back, which somehow makes you feel more alone than you already were. Some days you will feel completely fine, and some days you will be a complete wreck, and both are okay because you are human. There is a state of surrealism you enter after the loss; the idea of grieving a living being becoming an oxymoron.
You were so engraved into my being, how is it that you are now gone? How am I meant to move forward when it is I who peeled back the layers of my flesh and handed you a chisel so that you could engrave yourself into my bones, and how do I learn to not regret that? And where did our future plans go? Did they disintegrate completely? Did they meld back into the fabric of the universe? Will they re-morph one day, into something we can recognize? Did they travel through a worm hole for us in another dimension to grab hold of? Is that excess love suspended within the bubble our entangled lives once resided in? Where did they go, and will they return, and will I see you again, and will it be the last time? What then if it is the last time?
The healing is slow, and it is painful, and it is necessary. The spectrum of human emotion is so complex that it must be by-design that I feel so deeply, otherwise it would be quite tempting to avoid it. But that is the thing Isuppose, about avoiding your emotions: you are just avoiding yourself. These emotions and grief and wounds—they shadow you, until one day you look back and realize your shadow is no longer behind you but directly underneath. And as the sun (taking stage as the passage of time) keeps moving, you will look ahead to see your shadow standing in front of you, and it is then you will realize that you cannot outrun your shadow.
I would like to believe that the stars, once carrying fragments of us, hold parts of our stories that we do not, and cannot know. They carry messages between the heavens and divulge with the higher beings the plead deals we have made with them.
“They are calling out” a star will whisper.
“Then answer” a god responds.
And then dusk will break, and that star will appear, and it will be the first star that I see. And perhaps the first one that you see too, and maybe we will wish for the same thing, or maybe you won’t wish at all, but there we will be then, tethered by the response the stars have passed down to us.
A most comforting relief that that no matter our beliefs nor how we feel, we will look up; and there will be a twinkling messenger looking back down, and it is so small and so bright, juxtaposed against the dark evening sky. And I, too, am small, and I, too, am bright, and the world is so big, and it is new, and it is hopeful. And as the fabric of the universe is woven with love, so too am I, and I will not unravel those parts of myself as punishment for loving, when it is precisely the reason I am here at all.
Epilogue
I began this article a few months ago, though never quite finished it as I did not want that moment of my life memorialized, but rather, the progress of healing. While grief is a dish I’d much prefer not be served at all, I found it to be a complex appetizer (slightly umami if you will) of the full course of life I have yet to be served. And if I did not first prepare my pallet with a dosage of something so new, I’d not be able to ease into dishes I so eagerly await to sink my teeth into.
That is to say, it has helped me grow and has overall made me more human. It made me hate AI more and resent myself less. It has made the ability to live in shades of grey easier on the eyes, and it has made my eagerness to go on walks in the forest and catch up with the trees a lot stronger. I have connected with who I was when I was 15 and I have forgiven her. Her and I aren’t so different after all, but this time, she will be taken care of. I have sought out who I want to be at 25, and I will make her proud. While I don’t quite have an exact answer for how I am doing, or what I am thinking—whether I wish things were different or not, or what wishes I would offer to the stars—such is the nature of the ebb and flow of healing. And that is okay. So, I suppose, I am okay too.
Grief lives in the liminal spaces between memories, and if it can vacate a room so suffocating, I can surly then run through the vast fields of the future possibilities that lay ahead. And while it may be a little different, that does not at all mean it will be bad.