We have lost so many things along the way.
And god, how wonderful it was to have had anything worth losing at all.
It was a subtle change, but I could always tell how the syllables tasted fresh on your tongue.
lil artsy
What parts were me and what parts were just what you wanted me to be?
How much of myself did I curate just so you would love me?
And maybe this is all for the best.
Maybe thats how it always shouldve been.
The next day, another loved one of mine attempted suicide too.
Before then, my life hadnt been untouched by tragedy, but after it seemed ravaged by it.
To find the traces of love toward him that etched into others grief.
I still do that, Ive noticed.
Even without the mirrored windows, I find myself unable to look away from tragedy.
I want to know the depths of it, the truths, the realities.
My friends say Ive grown morbid; they say theres a darkness that hides behind my usual glittery sheen.
Because I know now for a fact that it did matterhis life, his love, his loss.
That it still does.
That those emotions still live here, even if he does not.
And it is all so precious, if to no one else, then at least to me.
No one talked about it when my aunt got sick.
Theres something particularly awkward, even embarrassing, about contracting covid when youre in a pandemic-denying family.
Everyone thought it was better to pretend it wasnt happening.
When she was rushed to the hospital weeks later, no one said a word.
After she died, I rarely heard anyone speak her name at all.
Its strange how sometimes you lose people in pieces.
But if Im being honest, I started losing my aunt before she ever got sick.
By the time we lost her for good, she had already become unrecognizable to me.
Im not sure anyone wants to hear them, anyway.
Somehow I agree with both and neither of them at the same time.
And I hate that love and hope and optimism can turn into something so ugly in the end.
I hate the thing inside of me thats filled up all that empty space.
Im still hoping that somehow, someday, Ill leave all of that behind too.
I lost my mother briefly to cancer when I was 11.
This story has a happy ending, but does that make it a happy story?
For years, I missed my mothers laugh.
I missed her smile.
I missed the way she made the world feel like it would be okay.
I was too young to understand the weight of what I had before it was gone.
But I am grateful.
But Ill never forget the things life took from her, the things they took from me.
And Ill never stop wishing, in some small, futile way, that we could get them back.
I liked believing that it was some cure to this lifelong, persistent grief.
But whats the difference between leaving and being left behind when the result is always the same?
Because it never made them matter to me any less, did it?
It never changed the way they made me laugh or cry or feel so loved, so understood.
And it doesnt change the way my heart aches still when I remember them.
It doesnt change the way it has all changed me.
Because its all a little bit of both, isnt it?
I have gained too much in the past three decades to ever pretend it wasnt worth it.
And I have lost too much to pretend I wouldve been better off without it in the first place.
Im trying to do this thing where I look at time differently.
Ive always seen my life as a series of befores and aftersbefore something started, after it ended.
Before I knew someone, after I lost them.
Before I became who I am now and who I will be afterwards.
All these lines Ive spent decades drawing have begun to feel arbitrary.
