a year of words

I recently realized that it’s been just over a year since I started this Substack. When Evan got sick, I wrote in detail about the events that took place, mostly out of fear. Though it was the most traumatic experience either of us had ever gone through, I didn’t want to forget any of it and I feared I would. I wanted to remember the way my teeth fit together as I clenched my jaw to keep from saying what I really wanted to say to certain doctors. I needed to be able to conjure the sterile smell of the hospital rooms and the way the fluorescent lights made everything look a little green. Then when Evan died, I wrote his eulogy and tried in vain to encapsulate over a decade of life and love into a speech no longer than ten minutes. After the funeral, I was in a home that was just mine for the first time and I had no idea what to do. Evan was gone, my mom returned home, and the only company I had were volatile emotions and occasional numbness. So I used this platform to write not so much about the events, but about those feelings. I started writing about what I thought I knew and, through the course of the year, have discovered just how little I actually do know, which is both humbling and gratifying. When I set out to write about food, I didn’t know that what I was actually trying to do was to connect with Evan. What remained of him was unimaginable grief and no amount of writing or eating food he loved could make it hurt any less. Over a year after losing him, the pain is just as sharp. I still have moments when I can’t believe what happened. I still cry and feel guilt when I don’t. I play back small happy moments and big terrifying ones on a loop when I can’t sleep. Yes, life has continued, but his absence is woven into each moment.

I write about grief as a way to understand my experience with it, but so far I haven’t reached full understanding. The “village” that rallied around me disbanded shortly after Evan’s celebration of life took place. Friends have, at times, treated me like a rabid dog, afraid that of the ways my sadness might affect them. People have seemingly forgotten that what was a tragic event for them was the event that changed me for good. I know that these experiences are not unique to me, but I’m angry nonetheless. There’s no way that I could have anticipated that an experience that no human can get around would be as isolating as it has been. So I wrote to keep myself company and try to make sense out of a situation where very little existed (my mom has always told me I’m nothing if not persistent). I wrote when I needed to and when I really didn’t want to. I wrote to people who very well may never have read a word of any of this, and I connected with people who I didn’t expect to. I wrote things I would never, and still may never, say out loud.

There’s power and vulnerability with equal measure in the experience of writing about myself and my feelings and putting them on a public platform. I often wonder if I’m just adding to the endless chatter on the internet; I’ve never been one to keep a journal, but perhaps that would have been a suitable alternative?Writing, I’ve learned, is not a way to rid myself of a feeling. “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me,” said Virginia Woolf, a woman who would eventually fill her coat pockets with rocks and walk into a river, ending her life at age 59. This woman, asserting that words have the power to heal, likely believed it at one point, as did I and most likely many writers. I don’t know what healing looks like or feels like, and throughout the course of this year, I have found that writing about a thing with no cure surely won’t make it go away. What may have started as a fool’s errand of getting uncomfortable feelings out of my body and onto a page, has ended in a realization that the discomfort is, and always will be, the story.

Thank you for coming on this journey with me, or for occasionally stopping in, or for fueling my words. You’re all a part of this.

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I don’t know her face or her name but I do think about her from time to time, creating details that may or may not be real. I was afraid, I told her. Afraid of what I might do, I said, when what I really meant was that I was afraid of the powerlessness. If my own feelings weren’t in my hands, did anything really belong to me? Did ownership mean power? What made you feel that way? How did I make long story short and explain to this woman the curse we thought my father had ended, when really his wound was deeper than any of the others? What did I tell her I did the day before without telling her that someone had hurt my feelings and this is how I reacted? I wondered if she really wanted to know or if she just needed to check boxes on a form. If I told her how this person had decided the vulnerability I contained was too heavy and too loud and getting in his way, would she understand? I looked at the ring on her finger and hoped the only people that lied to her were people like me, who said no when asked if they had a plan. Everyone has a plan.

I don’t know your daughter’s name or how old she is or if you have more than one at this point, but I know that she will never know a part of you that I know so well. I hope when you tuck her in at night she doesn’t ask you where you’re going, afraid you might not be there when she wakes up. She will never know catastrophe the way I did when the objects surrounding our time together turned out to be as synthetic as their fibers. She won’t sit in an unfamiliar room, watching fireworks mock a freedom she doesn’t feel because her perception of connection turned out to be a facade. She won’t wonder why enough is the most elusive attribute a girl can possess. She won’t know this because of you, but in spite of you. So when you tell her goodnight and you close her door or when you pry a toy she can’t share with her sibling from her hands, remember how I too was someone’s daughter.

I don’t know the date or the exact chain of events, but I know that when I came to on the bathroom floor, you showed me all the concern I was worried you didn’t contain. It only took this temporary lack of blood in my brain to bring it out of you; words weren’t enough. The heat of my anger was only kept at bay by the cold tile and my own concern that a mirror would only push you further away than you already were. I’d like to say that it was in that moment I knew that I’d given all I could to you, but that wasn’t the case. I tied my own leash around my neck and let you pull and pull and pull. How did you not see the blue in my face? How did I hide the evidence? I don’t know if you noticed me pulling away but I know that feeling like I wasn’t a secret was a sensation more alluring than you ever elicited. I wonder then, why you chose not to accept that what you told me I couldn’t have, I no longer wanted. I suddenly knew so much more than I ever thought I did.

I don’t know the exact temperature. I know it was cold but that I didn’t feel it, too bundled in the complete freedom of I love you, I love you, I love you. It was a song we both knew by heart without ever having heard the words. I remember the safety that came from your particular brand of confusion, when that confusion before threatened to bite me hard and watch me bleed. I remember too the safety in it’s been a while and knowing it didn’t mean anything other than it’s been a while. I held my own weight not because of you asked me to, but because of what we didn’t know, which was always heavier than what we did. I wish I could have held the weight of what you saw and promised you it wasn’t too heavy or too frightening or,
or,
or.

I don’t know if it’s a fire but what if it’s a flood? A rush makes what once was yours property of the water. What then, if it’s earth, a dirt that starts in one spot and quickly overtakes the body? That speck of sand that keeps showing up in that one blanket, no matter how many times you try to shake it. It only makes sense to ask this: is it the very air you breathe? Why then, does it feel refreshing and suffocating at once? It very well could be the sum of all of these parts, or none of them at all.