I have been spending more time than I would like indulging my mind’s recent inclination towards alternative realities. When I do this, I attempt to construct a world and self that is more intact. Last year, when my tears came back I couldn’t understand why now and why this. I was obviously devastated and so the people who love me couldn’t understand my confusion. I find myself in this position a lot, where I am unable to see the thing that’s right in front me. Sometimes its about how people describe me, other times its about my ability to do a thing and in this case, it was my heart refusing to become aware of every part of me that was newly broken. Looking back, this was about how sudden it felt like I had moved into a state of brokenness. Up until then, my pain had always allowed me a transition period between the me before and the me after I was impacted by an experience. Last year, there was no process, no breaking, everything just broke all at once. Because of this, I felt like I was suffocating. I was. So my version of this story, is that my tear ducts opened so that the flood would force me to breathe, to remind me I could breathe. To release the burning on the inside of my cheeks. I walked so much during that time and I remember all the places I stood still in an effort to ground myself. How futile those attempts were because each time I immersed myself in how loud and big the city was, I became overwhelmed by how impossible it seemed that my grief sprawled across it with such ease. My grief was bigger than everything and I am so angry at how violent it is to be hurting that much.
My anger is quiet and resigned. Violence can do this to you and everything I was losing last year was a shocking confirmation of how unimaginable your worst can be. I was shocked because the things I know about my body and my love should have counted for something. My experiences and rituals should have given me a landing, I’d have taken any kind. Inside there was just boundless space and I couldn’t find my words, I didn’t even want to. The only thing I could muster the strength to want was to catch up with myself. I still can’t reconcile the gap between what I know and how I feel. I hope I learn to and that I am gentle with myself in the process.
“It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition. That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.” She eventually learned, “how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change…Perhaps the most change can happen when the contempt changes to respect, a respect for the very ordinariness of the opacities between knowing and realizing.”
– Eve Sedgwick
So when I am trying to construct an alternative reality, I am trying to reconcile standing in a life I would have never chosen and sorting through what I would have wanted to remain when so much has already been taken. After all this time, I can’t piece together this self that was more intact because this isn’t about wanting to return to a previous version of myself. Fundamentally, I need things to be different to imagine me in any other way. I have not yet begun to grieve the parts of me that feel like they ceased to existed at the same time as the people I’ve lost. Thinking about it even briefly consumes me. It feels true that I’m losing my institutional memory, like my core is gradually being disintegrated and there’ll be nothing and no one left to remind me of myself, of what is possible when I can’t reach it. I’ve never felt l know how to exist but now, my grief has amplified this. And in these moments where I am adrift, I ruminate on these words from a poem my friend shared right at the start of my grief: So how does the road continue round the bend if you are not here to see where it all ends?
“I carry a kind of homesick that won’t disappear.”
– Katie, thegriefcase
My strong emotions are always a negotiation about where I am, where I could be, where I can be again and where I want to be. For a while now, I have denied that this negotiation is a practice of hope because I thought hope was more magical, that it needed to be more instinctive, not a muscle or a protocol. But I have come to accept that hope is mine to define so for me its the creation of space between me and my thoughts. That space allows for some tenderness to seep in, for other truths to rise to the surface and for all the loves around me to remind me who I am and all that I still have.
“Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”
– Eve Sedgwick
Blooming Butterfly 