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I tried to write around her. I really did. I wanted to go around this giant, gaping center of grief and towards the outskirts where the rest of my life waits. But that center became my circumference. Where I go, it halos. What can I say about loss that has not already been said? What can I say about this specific loss that I have not already put to language? It has swallowed all of my soft parts; it is infection and abscess. It’s sunken to the bones, through muscle and sinew, through all my ill-advised attempts to nurse this particular wound by keeping it open.
Are we tired of metaphors?
A poet on the Krista Tippett show once gave us this gem: “Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself.”
I can write about her plainly too.
I had a friend I loved wholly. She is not here. I do not know where she is. I wish I could know. I am very tired of this feeling. I am tired of enduring.
The most insufferable artist is the writer. The most unlikable is the actor, but that’s another story.
I have this theory that we—every single one of us, no exception—believe we’re the first to experience the human condition. We assign ourselves as scribes and archivists of feeling, but deep down, we think ourselves as inventors too. What place did melancholy and hunger and delusion have before we crafted a vessel for them?
I have a very kind reader who emailed me about losing a friend too. I haven’t replied because every time I think to, my mental fog intensifies and my body urges me to lay down instead. But I think about her words every single day because I didn’t really think anyone would really understand (see? insufferable) this seemingly unique, ambiguous loss.
So I’ve lost sense of who I’m writing for. I forget I have an audience. In my head, I am performing for myself, going through these motions of metaphor, trying to spin this feeling into a narrative when in actuality, it’s a body of water, not a body of work. It freezes, then melts. It’s not going anywhere but here.
I should reply to that email.
An old English teacher despised the word ‘really’—he called it lazy. I don’t disagree. He would mark us down for using phrasing like ‘really sad’ instead of ‘sorrowful’. Something about my generation and our lack of verbal breadth. Sometimes when someone asks me how I am and I want to communicate that I feel like I’m dying, or on the verge of total collapse (which is worse, because you have to rebuild after), I just tell them that I’m tired.
If I’m feeling particularly honest that day, I tell them that I’m really tired.
I’m not always trying to impress. Some days, I just want to get by.
I have an obsessive personality that only pairs well with ambition and not much else. You can’t be obsessive and angry or obsessive and lazy. The former will land you a restraining order and the latter is just miserable.
But lately, I’ve been obsessive and apathetic. I have this friend (or a few of them) that I used to talk to a lot, but we don’t really talk as much anymore. This is when I should be feeling anxious about maybe they’re mad at me or oh god, what if they don’t like me anymore? Maybe I’d go out of my way to remind them I care or send them a cheeky message to subtly show them that I’m still fun and interesting. But I don’t really care anymore. Not in any ill way, but—
You know the saying, how “meat just falls off the bone?”
It’s like that.
It’s not just with this, either. I care less about making squares fit in round holes, about whether my former client secretly hates me because I had a mental break three weeks into us working together, about why a former friend still watches every single one of my Instagram stories (and then blocked me?) because does she want to talk or, about bulking up my portfolio with work I’ve already proven to be capable of, about how I haven’t taken a flattering photo in months, about whether people—my fellow insufferable writers in particular—think this piece is trite and do they hear my voice when reading this and does it grate on them too?
I am okay with things falling apart. More than I should be, probably, but I have overextended myself with her and did not ration appropriately for everything else.
In my defense, I’m just really tired.
To get over something is by going through it, said someone, and then quoted by millions.
Vague! Hate that for us.
Here is how I interpret it and here it is in praxis: I have to burn through an emotion until it’s dead. I have to fall apart, both emotionally and physically, in order to stitch myself back up. It’ll be a hacksaw job for certain, but it will be done. I can’t do it in halves either. I can’t interrupt the flow and say, “No, that’s enough, time to turn this around.”
Fire has exhaust itself. It’ll go something like this:
I care so much it hurts.
I care so much it hurts.
I care so much it hurts.
until
I hurt more than I care.
Snip, snip. It’s off me now, this dead layer, this former part of me. On the ground and left behind. When it’s just pain and no attachment—that’s when it becomes time to let go.
Obviously, I am not there yet.
You can read this piece backwards, from end to beginning, and it would make more sense. To understand how something (like love, like friendship) can feel so bad, we have to remember it was once good. Even sour milk was fresh at some point.
I’m out of metaphors now.
The next emotion to work through is guilt. I love her so much and I feel ungrateful. I wish all the rest of the abundance in my life (to which there is plentiful) would fill this crater in my chest. No one will be her, but maybe three wonderful people can take up enough space, no? No. I burst into tears when I feel her absence most—when I notice things only she would say, details only she’d point out, love only that she knew how to give.
There’s an interesting ricocheting that happens in my mind during these moments. A gloved fight between “this is so stupid just get over it it doesn’t matter” and "oh my god no one is ever going to understand me this way again” with no clear winner. I’m embarrassed and also relieved when other people bring her up. On one hand, my misery is probably so fucking visible that I might as well get it tattooed, but on the other hand, yes, yes, someone sees it too. I don’t have to keep sucking it in like a stomach.
Taylor Swift sang Marjorie live at Eras and I thought of her. And it felt okay, just okay, because the whole stadium was thinking of someone they lost.
We’re all just bellies out, sad as hell.
The best time to publish something personal is when you’ve healed from it. Enough to endure an audience and their projections and inquisitions and all their other -ions. But writing can just be for a crowd of one, especially when you forget that you have a following and you don’t really know what you’re trying to say, other than that you’re really tired and people sometimes rely too much on metaphors to communicate a point.
The writing doesn’t have to be anything.
It can just be this.
I loved reading this, went through something similar last year when my therapist disappeared. I’m sorry your friend is not here with you, I send you the biggest of hugs and warmth from Spain 💚