MMXXII
Last year opened and closed, it seemed, without ceremony. I suppose for most, it was like a door swinging shut behind them, the invitation to stay irrevocably withdrawn. But we didn’t really stay anywhere, did we?
2021 felt like a crowded room that contained us yet held no real space for us.
But it also felt like a race where the track looped in over itself, no finish line in sight. And still it felt like we were in an endless queue deep underwater—a billion bodies holding their breath, each one waiting for their turn to come up for air.
We’re all still waiting our turn.
•
My dad called me out of the blue the other day. He and I are so similar—we never inflict this suffering on others without warning them first. It must be serious then, for him to be on the other end of the line. I answered on the first ring, wondering whose darkness was to be delivered to me this morning.
“Hey,” he said gently. “Remember F_____?”
And that was that. Another day, another death.
My mum told me it was the fourth death she was informed of this week. People she knew. People she was friends with. Death was a number now, a phone call. But death was also things beyond imaginable scale: illness and hate and war and unchanged (unhinged) systems that demanded a price in blood. How can death be so small yet so big at the same time?
If I’m honest, I had been expecting death to hit closer to home for a long time now, and my body has been grieving in anticipation of it.
Rainier Maria Rilke wrote: “Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.”
Oh, Rilke. The sky outside is yellow, cheery, warm, the color of the tropics, of afternoon tea being poured slowly into a waiting cup, of hope.
•
The body in grief isn’t so much sad as it is exhausted. That’s how it is for me, anyway. It’s hard to explain this without being fussed over, without the questions that only give solace to the one asking them. Some well-meaning individual offers me their own story of personal sorrow, hoping it aligns with mine, hoping it gives my pain purpose.
My body needs no comrades in grief for now. It needs sleep. Covets it. Craves it. My body is an object of hunger.
I was talking to a colleague of many years, a chronic insomniac, and she told me that sleep for her felt like drowning—that she struggled against it before finally giving in. She would find peace for several hours, and then jolt awake, gasping for breath. In my mind, I could see how it was for her, a light switch being turned off and on repeatedly, off and on, every day, off, on, offon, offonoffonoffon. I visualize a house on a dark street with flickering lights, and me stopping in front of it, shielding my eyes, enraptured.
To me, sleep is a kindness. At least I have this still, I tell myself, as I’m overwhelmed with sudden gratitude. In sleep, I’m small, unseen. I’m safe. I survive.
•
I struggle with the idea of personal loss. I haven’t lost anything, not really, not yet, but my body is telling me otherwise. Something’s missing, it says, and what was here isn’t here anymore, and you have to find it and bring it back.
Or maybe it’s me that’s missing.
No, there aren’t any pamphlets that have been put up, no pleas to the public, no phone trees activated.
Have you seen this person?
What do you mean? You’re right here.
I wish this kind of loss was more tangible, the process of losing more easily expressed. Language doesn’t usually fail me, but in this, it fails tremendously, spectacularly, evisceratingly.
(I lost an earring once, and I looked everywhere for it, a tiny gold hoop that embraced my lobe just right. It usually sat on a velvet cloth above my glass jewelry box, but I dropped it on the carpet when I was rushing for work. It made a distinct sound, soft but with heft. It was the sound of gravity. For months, I dusted and swept and hoovered, but it didn’t surface for air.)
Please describe your loss.
My middle feels heavy but hollow. It’s a pit of nothing, a void that doesn’t grow larger, only deeper. Every so often, I’ll throw things into it, but I don’t hear them hit the bottom anymore.
That emptiness is where I go sometimes to meet myself in the middle, to shake hands with the days that will never come.
•
I caught myself in a particularly lighthearted mood today, the limbo that’s also the inhale before I go under again.
In Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” there are a few lines that feel particularly redemptive.
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
I had no idea my lungs could hold this much ocean.