that's a long title for a post, i know, but it's also the things i've been meaning all day to say. i'm not 100% convinced things happened in that order, though. it's just been a great big old day of grief, perforated at all the strangest moments by points of normality, of want, of being my now self again. and in a way, that made the grieving even stranger.
sometimes things throw me more than i know to make sense of. you read something that folds and opens like a book, then you skyrocket somehow a decade or two into the past, and there you were. again and all along.
i know i'm a past version of self by the way old music affects me. take the train today, and don't look back again? doesn't work that good, 'cause eventually train's done moving, and there you still are.
anyway, i discovered myself there a little too keenly. had a good time of it right up until i didn't, went through an overwhelming sort of anger that turned afterward into grief, in spite of all the tremendous bouts of sunlight and warmth i consumed today. somewhere deep down, there's still a seventeen-year-old who's really cold. it got me into a funk, getting rocked back to that, in a way.
but i guess the past wasn't done with me just yet. we're still somehow at an age where we think we're invincible and immortal, yet there they keep going, people around us. dying. to be perfectly honest, it frightened me more, the numbness with which i greeted the news, the way my friend seemed so distraught and upset about it, in a way i never could be. me, this uncomfortable boulder of numb. there's been far too much death in the past year, and i keep reaching for examples and stories. slowly, i'm learning more funeral jokes than i would like to tell.
but i suppose there'll always be another easter to organize somewhere. until one day, there's not. imagine he still had easter chocolates left wrapped on some kitchen shelf somewhere that he'll never eat now.
"suppose you never really get used to death," a friend says. yet all i feel is used to it. i don't mind it. be pretty pointless to, but i do mind the version of me that had no familiarity with death, and realize i'll never be that person again.
today, i suppose there's grief for all the things i wish i'd known i could tell myself ten years back. would've saved me a lot of trouble. and for not knowing death (but then again, also not knowing all sorts of happiness and loves). and for lost, loved boys, and all the lives they didn't get to live. i keep walking around today, thinking how we didn't know, how none of us could've guessed. how silly it would've seemed to any of us when we were small to say we'd die by '26. silly, strange, lost things. keep thinking how there's sun out, but death, and people whose lives will never come back from this, also.
not me. not mine. but somewhere. and it still seems strange. besides, i've my own coat of deaths to gather around myself. it just gets heavy sometimes, remembering the coat of life and love and miraculous things i've got hanging in the corner, also. how tight you gotta hold that around yourself whenever death brushes past you.
i think of all the stupidity, in many ways. all the ways in which it seems to me i'm only recently starting to live properly, being honest with myself. what a pity to not get to enjoy this bit that's just around the corner.
what a pity to never eat lentils again. or forget, and have the cashier greet you with a silly, embarrassed smile when you come back for them. for stupid, two dollar lentils that will hopefully keep you warm and fed some not-too-distant day. little, ordinary miracles. a bowl of legumes. a good, sad, strange, infuriating book that's a tad too close to home.
what wonder and luck, to get to begin again, pick up another book, know better even when there was no one to tell you, find a different way to breathe from the inside out.