A very raw and unfiltered one. Sorry. This is the first of a series because I initially wrote such a long novel that I had to break it up into parts. Seven parts, to be exact.
prelude
There is a pain that goes beyond words when it comes to losing a world.
A whole world.
Imagine that.
Does the deer in the headlights see its life flash before its eyes?
There are certain things the human mind cannot conceive of before collapsing in on itself. One of them is grief, in this magnitude. I cannot imagine how a world could fall apart so effortlessly, and with such a gentle violence; neither did I imagine I would one day have to survive it.
We may choose what we love, but we do not get to choose what we survive.
I have left such a large part of myself right where I have fallen apart time and time again before you, sitting on that wooden floor. I look up and I am still waiting for you to walk through the door. For you to pick me up as you always did, and hand me a glass of water which I always refused because I hate drinking water. But you don't come through that door anymore. The door is ajar, and there is no you. It is quiet, the breaking. It is also the quiet that breaks you. It is the absence of everything that used to hold my trembling like a bird. It is the emptiness of a room marked by a presence — pink stains on the floor, a note on the mirror, that same smell I used to know, the way those tiles feel beneath my feet, the way the moon shone so brightly so many nights from the kitchen window. It is an orchestra poised to play but no sound emerges from these broken strings. The audience is left in the lurch, suspended forever in the moment before the crash, before a body hits the ground. And that space is how and when grief walks through the door.
I wake up and feel like the world should be ending now. The earth ought to stop rotating, the sun should not rise, buildings should collapse, people on the streets should fall to their knees. But everyone goes about their lives and there is laughter in coffeeshops, dogs walking in parks, waves crashing upon the shores. It feels like waking up to violence. How can everything be okay? This was the world I knew and loved and every castle I used to run into for shelter from the rain has come crumbling down. How can everyone be fine? How dare they? Where is the dreaded apocalypse? If the world ended today that would take away the pain. But no. That would be too easy. It never is this easy. Funny isn't it, how these moments of unfathomable ache make even the end of the world feel like drops of mercy.
movement I
Tomorrow I will wake again, and you will not be there. There will be a dreadful silence that will follow me around. And the same thing will happen the next day, and the day after, and the next, and all the days after that. Looking back, I realise I have never felt so lonely. I have also never felt more loved. Both of these things can be true.
Despite all the philosophy I read, I start to develop a disdain for duality. I don't know how much a heart can break before it stops, but I suppose we all find out. I entertain the thought that perhaps it is not age or the wearing down of a body that eventually kills a person, but the pain one lives through while trying to walk and be a human being in this broken world. I push the thought away. It is grounded in nothing but feeling, and while feelings are valid, that doesn’t make them true.
I am 27 and I suddenly don't know who I am. At 26, I thought I did. It only takes a couple of months for the self to unravel, and for one to relinquish all certainty of everything you thought you loved, the future you wanted to build, the future you thought was yours because you finally could build it with your own two shaking hands, and the person you thought you were. Most times there is a facade I present the world, a mask of a girl who is sure of herself and who loves to laugh, who is reckless beyond thought. Most of the time that is who I am. Sometimes that is who I'm not, but who I want to be. But underneath it and more frequently these days I am tearing at the seams. There is a desperate tenderness beneath it all, and I feel fragile even on days where I am not crying anymore. On days when the tears do come, their warmth greets my cheeks in the shopping mall, by the pavement, as I cross the road, as I sit on the toilet floor at 3am. In these moments, it is the only warmth I know. Most days I do all I can to not let that show, or let the blood spill onto the floor. People don't like seeing blood. It scares them. For some reason it has never scared me.
Perhaps youth is a fault and folly of mine. I was always idealistic, and I was told the kind of love I wanted was not to be found anywhere, that it doesn't exist. But I have caught glimpses of it. I have seen it, tasted it for a second, reached for it. But it always fell out of my grasp. It is a love that is wild and passionate, one that makes you feel wanted and that feels like freedom. Absurd. Utterly delusional. Perhaps one day far into the future when it is too late and the sun heaves its last waves on this planet, I will tell you that you were right in telling me I would never find it.
Youth makes us think we have the world spread before us like a table of plenty at a feast. But in the few years I have been alive I have known love and seen it grow. I have seen and walked love’s landscape, rolled in its windy hills. Tasted its rain as it pours, endured its storms and found no shelter within. The sun shines again. There is a moment of warmth – a stillness and a silence. And still, the fear of who I am within certain kinds of love makes me run. I cannot explain it.
movement II
My mind disintegrates into a cesspool of irrational paranoia. It does this, catastrophising, whenever I have completely lost control of every situation. It comes mostly when confronted with grief. I have loved and lost so many in my life, and I have this theory that grief never really goes away. It looks different with every loss, but the enormity of it compounds every time we must contend with it. This is why any kind of loss to me feels like someone has died, and if not, my mind immediately rushes itself to the finish line of life, and meets loss there.
Who will you call if your father has a fall? When you wake up one day and find yourself unable to walk to a doctor? When you are too tired at night after a long day to buy cigarettes, how will you get them? Please drink enough water, please eat well. Nourish yourself. Please go out for walks. I find myself terrified that one day you will die and I will never know. We pass the anniversary of our deaths every year, silently and unknowingly. I will live 27 years passing the day you die not knowing when it is, only that it will happen one year in the future. The thought curdles my insides. I am terrified that I will be out in the world one day having the best day of my life not knowing that you were somewhere in this same world we share taking your last breath. I will never have gotten to say goodbye, or see you in the next life.
These are unfair thoughts to have. It’s absurd, overdramatic, nonsensical. That is why I write them here. As penance. In shame.
I never want to leave this world not having said my goodbyes, or thank yous, or I love yous. There is so much to say. How can language contain all of it, or any of it at all?
movement III
And so there comes a point in which language fails. The tower of Babel comes crashing down as the earth quakes under the immensity of loss. I stand in the dirt and rubble when the smoke clears and every sentence that crosses the silence is spoken in a tongue even we no longer understand.
I catch every careless word you shoot with my bare hands, letting these sharpened blades cut deep into my palms because something tells me I deserve it. The landscape of love so quickly turns into a battleground. I do not get to hold a shield up to you. Shields were always your thing, not mine. In every game we played together I would have this horrible habit of rushing forward to greet the violence, severely overestimating myself. I’ll take it. I’ll take all of it. Somehow and even when an on-screen health bar is nearing zero, I believe somehow I will survive it.
This is severely delusional behaviour. But in some way the violence I was met with was comforting. And you came in with healer builds and shields, trying to do damage control. But when the healer is the one who does the damage, who heals me then but the world? And if the world is broken and cannot mend itself, then whom? I must confess I would rather be greeted and repeatedly slapped in the face with anger than a biting silence. Or worse still, with kindness I feel completely undeserving of.
Is this Christian/Catholic guilt at play? We could pin it on that. There were years of our lives spent in churches after all, taking in homilies on atonement and sacrifice, suffering. The passion. The passion of Christ. ‘Passion’, as in the Greek ‘πάσχω’, as in, ‘to suffer, to be acted on’, and Late Latin ‘passio, passion’, as in ‘suffering’. The Christian god, emblematic of the deepest, most unconditional love of all, shows us that the most final and significant act of love is to suffer for another. Christ, he literally died to love us. Deceased. Gone.
But we are not Jesus. We do not get to die for the people we love and then rise from the dead three days later. Three days later I will still be in pieces, in mourning. Easter Sunday only comes for one person, and perhaps now I am a raving, treacherous, sacriligious, blasphemous, lunatic for wishing I was actually Jesus Christ in a mini skirt, because then at least I would have died for something, and have that celebrated every year on a Sunday in April. Have the day I died be called ‘good’ for some reason. But there is no celebration in this suffering and grief for sinners like us. It just is.
postlude
I wonder if the deer caught in the headlights sees its life flash before its eyes. I hope it does. It seems a grace that ought to be afforded to all creatures. Would you blame it for walking out onto the road? Was it just a horrible time, would we just get out of the car and lament how unfortunate it was then be on our way? So many animals die every day in accidents1. So many people across the world experience the crushing of a world at every given moment, and not one grief outlives or outdoes another. I’ve held on to this quote by James Baldwin for my whole life, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecendented in the history of the world, and then you read.”.
I realise now: Yes. I do think my pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. And no amount of reading will undo it. It may offer comfort, and I continue to seek comfort in the words and music and cinema and art of those who have loved and lost before me, but this pain is mine alone to carry. They are unprecedented in the history of the world because this world we shared that has now shattered is unprecedented in the history of the world. No one else will know as intimately how it shatters. There is a perverse kind of exclusivity in pain, and in subsequently allowing yourself to hold all of it. In some sick way, in its immediacy it makes you feel special. Succumb to it and you let yourself be swallowed whole by grief, never to emerge from the darkness held within that valley.
But I hold it anyway.
I am the deer in the headlights. I am the sinner nailed next to Jesus2, whose body does not miraculously rise out of the tomb in three days. The blood spilt on the road to Golgothia is my own. I will not, must not, fear it.
Dear reader, I don’t think I wrote this one very well. You must forgive me. I am beginning to test the limits of language, how it is a container that simply cannot contain the overflow of the heart. And so there is so much that remains unsaid here — as Wittgenstein once wrote, “what cannot be said must be passed over in silence”. I am still learning to be content with that.
Extreme sidenote: I have searched “deer in headlights” up on google and seen people dress up as them for halloween costumes. As someone who loves animals and who loves halloween, I have to say this is disgusting. Do you know the fear it must feel? Is that something to be glorified? There is so much of this world we can and should romanticise, but an animal’s fear and suffering is not one of them.
Okay if all of this sounds hella extreme, that is because grief is hella extreme. You must excuse me for this one. Give me permission to feel.