01/01/23

Were you the only person who had patience for me?

What have I lost?

Everything.

What do I have?

Everything.

Everything you loved, it’s all here.

But you’re not.

I’d like to stab this pen through my eyeball.

I don’t think anyone is equipped to help me.

You used to tell me I wasn’t broken, and maybe you were right, maybe I wasn’t, but now I definitively am.

How do I learn to love this flesh you made in your absence?

How do I go through life without you holding my hand?

There are so many lessons in the wake of your death, but I don’t want to learn them.

I don’t want to move, not even to pee, I just want to lay in my own heartache.

Selfish. Reckless. Self-hating. Relying on the friends who cannot help me, ignoring the friends who can.

It’s easier to stay on the road to suffering, harder to let in love.

Suffering is all I know now, the only language that makes sense.

Happiness is accompanied by suffering, you learn that in grief. The best day is the worst day because when I turn to share it with you, I am met with empty air.

Ashes. An entire life, and that’s what remains. Grey rubble in an urn. What comfort is there in that? What did we lose when we scattered a fraction of you into the ocean? An ankle? Your tattoo disintegrated in an incinerator – two sticks representing you and Dad, a dot for me. Or was it your arms? Your arms you used to hide because you thought they were too large, that you had only recently learned to show off.

Where did your lungs go? The lungs that killed you, what happened to them? When did the cancer start? How quickly did it spread? Do any of these questions matter?

We won’t get a second chance. It’s done. Your story is written, and I’m living in the after no writer wants to think about.

Can I just close my eyes forever? Is it possible to say no to life and to death at the same time? Why do I bother with any of it when it hurts so much?

I need your help. I need you to make it easier. I need you to mother me from the sky, or the urn, or the ocean – wherever it is you now reside.

I need you to keep holding my hand, to never let go. Even as time passes and you think I’ve moved on – hold me tighter.

Never Let Me Go. A book you read, a film we saw together. Two lives lived as one.

Keep living your life, Mom.

Do it through me instead.