The other day, I saw this tweet thread about Megan Thee Stallion enduring severe grief as she became more increasingly famous and recognized for her talent. Please read and come back.
As I was reading this thread and thinking about my own experience with loss and grief, I realized that I’ve been grieving for almost 11 years straight, with no beyond. In a span of five months, I lost my grandmother, best friend, partner/lover, and home. Like Megan, I was essentially alone and experiencing significant shifts in my professional life that gave me very little time to process and heal. I had to just keep going. Keep single parenting, keep working, keep everything together without the support of friends or family or anyone. I made a horrible, yet irrevocable decision to spiral into a relationship with an abuser (though I didn’t realize he was an abuser at first) and am still paying for the punishment and blessing (my second kiddo) of that decision.
Megan’s own experiences are similar to my own in some ways with some very obvious and distinct differences. The similarities are important because I think many of us understand that there isn’t a beyond grief once we live through it. There’s not a feeling of wholeness you find after someone you love is gone. It’s maybe a patch or a scar, but it’s still there with you. An emptiness where that person and your connected story is, but has ended.
I’ve been missing my best friend a little more than usual these days. It’s her birthday soon and the pictures of her I have on my altar have been catching my eye. I’ve spent some time talking to her beautiful face frozen in the past. I saw another thread about how to support a friend who is being abused by their partner. I thought about how she almost ran away with me to escape from her boyfriend. She called me when I was off work at Subway, sitting outside in the grass with my other best friend. We were smoking and shooting the shit. My phone rang and she was crying, desperate and afraid. Her house wasn’t far from my work, but even if it was, I would have rushed over there regardless. And I did.
Content warning: physical intimate partner violence
I walked into her house and saw her boyfriend holding her up against the wall of their dining room by her neck. Her feet were dangling and her face was red. Her toddler daughter was standing there watching and crying. I picked her daughter up and charged at the boyfriend. I told him to put her down or else I would kill him. He dropped my best friend who clumped on the floor. Then he faced me. His eyes were red, glassy, and bulged. He scream-growled at me that he’d hurt me too and raised his fist to my face. I stared at him blankly without flinching or backing down.
After we stood there in a stand-off for a minute, I turned to my best friend and said, “Let’s go.” We grabbed her daughter’s car seat and put it then her in my car. And, just as I was about to get into my seat to leave, my best friend said she was going to stay. I looked at her in complete shock. Then I said, “Fine, but I’m taking your daughter. She shouldn’t see this.” And I drove off.
Shortly after that, my best friend came and picked up her daughter and took her back home. A few weeks later, my best friend moved to Arizona with that human piece of shit. Nine years later, she died there, with him, due to complications from the drugs she was taking to numb his abuse. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t really be there for her beyond phone calls and the occasional visit she made back home to see us and her family.
I have to live with this grief every day. And the other losses in my life. I live in constant fear of my parents dying even though our relationships are complicated at best. Because I know that once they’re gone, so are their stories.
I think about how ever since my lover left me in 2013, I haven’t written poetry. I used to identify as a poet and write poetry like it was necessary to breathing. I will write the occasional grouping of words here and there (maybe once a year or so), but I haven’t written an actual poem or allowed myself to feel enough to translate feeling into words. I killed that part of myself.
Yesterday, I watched this incredible video by Alok V. Menon (see below) and realized that maybe it’s time to feel and write poetry again. I read everything Maroon Almanac writes and try to absorb all the beauty to keep going.
My feelings have been mostly muted since I last wrote about them in November, which has been nice. Yet, they come back sometimes, in strength, forcing me to feel them in all their intensity while still going on with everyday shit like going to a job I hate, driving in terrible weather, and accepting that my current life is empty and mostly meaningless. I’m working on changing all of these things and that’s all I’ll say on that for now.
What I will leave you with is a thing I wrote about the feelings I was feeling the other day while driving to my horrible job in the worst driving weather I have ever driven in.
god i loved you and still do like a damn fool.
maybe i’m holding onto a feeling because everything else is so horrible. maybe it’s holding onto me. maybe my last feeling and i are clinging onto each other like stars stuck in the same swirling mass of dust and mist, hoping to never and soon collide.
what have we done
i was at work thinking about how miserable i am and i started daydreaming/disassociating about mass suicides in the face of all this. then i realized that would just be an extreme measure of a mass protest or strike. but that death and suicidal ideation is increasing to the point that most americans desire death and see it as the only relief from our suffering. what have we done.
Yada yada pour la yada 
Leave a comment