Grief and Other Extreme Sports

I haven’t written in what feels like quite some time. In the time between the continents of then and now, entire hells have frozen over and melted again. Global warming has melted the glaciers and micro plastics have polluted the groundwater. Disaster mode has come and went.

I simply cannot, for the life of me, see the world through the same lens.

I’m tired of pretending to be writing to some blogger narrative, as if this isn’t some passion project specifically designed by the elves of my psyche to be anything other than an online diary of sorts.

Somewhere for the hive mind, from a single mind, to convene. Somewhere not bound to physical form. Something that can never, truly be lost. It cannot be destroyed by a puddle or lost from a purse. It is something stronger than that, able to fortify itself against time and element.

Something reachable only if you have the specific URL (because, believe me, I’ve tried googling my own web site and have come up with a delicious nothing). It is only found if it wants to be found, and goddammit that’s why I adore it.

So, let me be real.

Let me be earth-shatteringly real.

My other passion project is reading and curating a library. Something that stands against gravity and contains many different worlds within her shelves.

I read, quite a bit.

In almost every single book I’ve read lately, a parent has died.

One of my parents has also recently died, to make a painfully long story conveniently short.

The grief has consumed me, taken memories from me, and given me bloody spiked gifts like anger and extreme apathy. I want to scream out, all of the time, “MY MOM JUST DIED, I AM FUCKING STRUGGLING!” And have it not be a plot device for an isolated, novel-sized part of my life.

I am not Carrie Soto attempting to win the US Open because it is what her father always wanted. I am not Nora from Book Lovers trying to make it in a cuttthoat literary world, raising herself because her mother never did. I am not Nina Riva, finding my voice for the very first time because her parents robbed her of the ability to do such a thing.

Only,

I kind of am.

Each of these novels, and so many more, hold shards of my heart in them. They hold unexpected wisdoms on grief and death and self-discovery. They contain the pockets of sunshine after the storm, the hope for the dawn at the end of the long night.

I have become a sappy believer in fate. Me, a cynic turned a little less skeptical. I have found my home in personal stories, respecting and loving authors who have spent hours shoveling away at the dirt to reveal the gritty parts of humanity. The profound things we can all relate to, and more often than not, so many moving parts of the human condition for one to choose from.

It has saved me, offering me salvation and sanctuary in my own mind. Helping me digest, in small bits at a time, the impossible buffet of grief I am contended with.

I am so sick of the pleasantries and the small talk surrounding a hard experience, and by extension death. I’m fucking sick of the sorry for your loss’s and the thinking of you’s. I’m tired of making other people feel better about the fact that my mom died, about the fact that it makes them uncomfortable.

I am eternally grateful for authors that are able to offer me solace in the hard, ugly truths of this thing. This impossible thing that hides under my bed and waits around every corner, that consumes me in baptismal fire and numbing ice.

I am so eternally grateful to feel like someone understands in such a visceral and acute way.

I am grateful for the versatility of the English language, and for someone much more well-versed than I putting pieces of my heart onto a page.

I am grateful to feel such comradely in this mess, and a strange (yet wonderful) inspiration from it.

So, yeah, if you see me reading a book on my lunch break, mind your business.