Excerpt from a letter that now almost seems like it was written in a past life.
I’ll miss your stories. I’ll miss fighting with you.
I’ll miss your deep voice. I’ll miss knowing you.
I’ll miss hearing your smile through the phone. I’ll miss you calling me on your lunch break.
I’ll miss falling asleep to your text messages. I’ll miss waking up to your text messages.
I will miss everything so fucking much.
God, it’s really over.
My heart is so heavy.
It is so so tired.
–S.
Another letter written to my dead grandmother from years ago.
Grandma,
Love is a strange thing. Love in connection with death is even stranger. It’s when you no longer inhabit the earth that the regret hits. All of the phone calls you should have made. The time you should’ve spent. The memories you should’ve made.
I have to believe that in some way this will reach you. That in some way, shape, or form – it still can.
Some days it scares me that the memory of your laugh and your voice is fading. It scares me that people immediately get caught up in the politics of it all. Where did the mourning go?
People prepare you for heartbreak. And sex. And to cook. To clean. To love. To remember to feed the dog. To take responsibility for your actions. To say sorry.
They don’t prepare you for death.
And maybe that’s why we all act so differently. For some, it’s the pain that comes with waking up every morning. For some, it’s their smile and how it will never be fully genuine again, never reach their eyes. For some, it’s burying any real emotion, six feet.
For others, it happens at random moments. The wind against their face. Blades of grass brushing against legs. The sun burning the skin. Rain hitting the window. Or it hits every few months. Or years. The darkness finds its way into your bedroom. It sleeps with you. It eats with you. It bathes with you. It breaths with you.
I won’t tell you what it is for me. Just know that life is what it always was. And then some days – I remember. And life becomes something entirely different.
I don’t understand many things. They crash into me and knock me over. And I don’t understand them.
Love is a strange thing.
Death is even stranger.
Mourning is the strangest of them all.
I’m still loving on you girl. I know that you’re still holding it down – wherever it is that you are.
–S.
The Messy Middle 🖤 