Apparently, I had opened a document and forgotten what I was going to say.
It’s been an interesting few days and after a brief brain cramp, I do know what I was going to write. The Giant, Mandy and the quarry trip that didn’t happen.
But I don’t want to talk about that right now.
I don’t want to talk about what I am about to talk about either.
I make jokes about the writers for this season of ‘earth’ and how they are grasping for audience retention with increasingly absurd plotlines. I think I went numb from it.
The Sirius portal opened last night and I just wanted to go home. I just wanted the plane to crash too. But I don’t think there is an easy way out of this.
Kanye just announced he is running for president. The murder hornet thing, SOS from space that no one seems to be talking about. People fighting over pancake syrup and burning masks while the body counts climb and no real progress is made. I had to step away from the internet. It isn’t safe for me right now. I am not even running my page. I gave it to a girl I met while traveling this last time. I knew her for 2 days, but she seems to be a really good fit. I don’t know if I am passing the torch for good or just taking a rest.
I used to be the girl who drank and knew things. Well, sometimes I was Jon Snow and knew nothing, but there was some balance. Not anymore. I don’t drink and I feel like a ghost passing through. I am not sure if I even exist.
Nothing has felt real in a long time to be perfectly honest.
I left Newfoundland on November 21st 2019 and got on a plane. I didn’t sleep in the same bed for more than 11 days until lockdown happened. After literally living the same night and day over and over with slightly different faces for 2 years in that bar, the sudden leap to constantly changing scenery and pure joy and excitement when my phone would bing instead of being filled with existential dread seemed amazingly surreal.
I had never had back to back adventures before, I got really good at packing and getting on planes and navigating strange cities, then all the sudden…the nothing. In Arabic, this is the haboob. I wrote about it before.
Considering we are mid apocalypse with no end in sight, I haven’t really cried much.
I haven’t felt the soul crushing anguish one would expect. I was mildly concerned about myself to be perfectly honest. I had a conversation with the new page runner the other day about crying when Trump was elected, and I do recall sobbing, heavily and often. I cried a lot in 2016 and looking back now, that year felt kinda like a cake walk, even with the gorilla and the creepy clowns everywhere, including in the white house.
I think the last soul sob I had was leaving the fucking Starbucks in March. The pandemic was just starting and the air was thick with panic. I cried the second I got into the uber and I didn’t stop until my 18-hour travel day had come to a close and I was climbing into bed in my attic. It really felt like the end of the world. And in a way, it was. I just didn’t know it yet.
I must have cried since. I hit and 8.6 on the period pain scale a few times. But I honestly cannot remember. Everything is kinda bleeding together. I know I was so messed up at one point I called my therapist from 8 years ago and we picked up where we left off. She was so instrumental in prying me loose from my terrible marriage we never got to the why I got myself into that in the first place. I was slipping and I reached for support. It worked.
My normally weepy, panicking self has been dry eyed and able to accomplish tasks.
To the point that I received a congratulatory message from someone telling me he was proud I didn’t meltdown right before shark week this month. Truth be told, I was proud too.
This too shall pass. All things must end.
I have spent the bulk of this week crying. And as much as I don’t want to talk about it, this is my therapy for now.
My baby cousin passed away. I found out a week ago today as I was antique shopping with my girlfriend. An unsaved number rang, and I thought it was my mom, but her voice sounded young somehow and very far away.
“Sarah? It’s your mother.”
We don’t talk a lot, and she usually calls me from her cell. For some reason their house phone number didn’t transfer to this phone when I got it. And honestly? She didn’t sound like herself, she sounded small. But it was her.
She made a bitter joke about only calling with bad news, and as I heard the following words coming through the phone, I was confused.
“Cousin Emily died last night.”
I have 2 cousins named Emily, one first cousin, one second cousin. Doesn’t matter, either would have been a tragedy. I haven’t seen my second cousin since we were kids. It was my first cousin. I remember her being in my aunt’s belly and feeling her kick 31 years ago. I haven’t seen her since her wedding two years ago wherein she made a huge effort to make sure I was there and felt included and welcome. Even though her birth heralded the beginning of my estrangement from my family. I was 15 and I left home shortly thereafter.
I wasn’t there as she grew up. But she insisted I be there for her wedding and I am grateful.
She was a beautiful wonderful woman. And I remember finally feeling like I got to go home, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. Holding their babies I had never met and meeting the cousins anew, as the adults they had become. I remember feeling so happy and included. Like I got let back into a house I had been locked out of for decades.
I had a long moment where I just decided this wasn’t happening, I was having a really vivid dream or hallucination. I forgot where I was and how I had gotten there. I forgot everything except for my mother’s strained voice coming through the phone. She was trying not to cry, so was I.
But as the reality that this was actually happening and I wasn’t having a weird dream, I sat down hard in a random dining room chair in the antique market I was in, clutching the pillow cases I had found tightly in my hand and I just kept saying no over and over. This isn’t real. I know the responsibility of having to be the bearer of bad news. It always fills me with angst and more sadness, having to relive your own trauma over the event and then spread it to others. I tried so hard not to make it harder on my mom, but seriously no, this can’t be happening. She just got married to her absolute soulmate, they weren’t a couple, they were two incarnations of one entity. They were in love and happy beyond happy. She turned 31 a few days ago.
I will always remember her birthday; she was born the day after our grandmother died. In the same hospital. The first time I saw her was at the funeral.
I spoke to my mom again today and we surmised that there are different kinds of grieving over different kinds of death. My maternal aunt passed away in May, other side of the family. I loved her so much. I have nothing but good memories of her. She was 88 and had a wonderful life. I think because of the numbness and lack of closure I hadn’t grieved her really either. I haven’t seen her since my sister’s wedding 3 years ago.
I’ve been so estranged from my family, both blood and otherwise for so long. I feel like an asteroid or a comet cutting through their solar systems and orbits. I’m only ever around for weddings and funerals.
I think I had left home a year before a family friend of ours passed away, almost 30 years ago and I am feeling now what I felt then. She was 9 years old, I was 16.
I don’t know how to grieve for them or with them, like I am outside of the house looking in, and I hurt but my hurt and loss are less than everyone else’s because I haven’t been around for decades now…and I have to tread lightly. But it still hurts.
I can’t explain it better than that. My Aunt passed away and I feel like I was lucky in a way because the last time I saw her she was happy and healthy, and I get to remember her like that. But then I feel like a selfish outsider and interloper. I haven’t been able to process her being gone and everything is hitting all at once.
Now my mind keeps refreshing hourly, I keep remembering they are gone. I keep thinking about my cousin’s new husband, they were soulmates, I saw it and my heart breaks fresh every time. And even that is a selfish hurt, because I am scared that I will die alone, unloved. I don’t belong anywhere to anyone. And my heart breaks for my uncle who only ever loved my aunt with his whole heart for his whole life and now he has to keep going without her. They both do these men that were happy, loving and loved. And I just think that is so fucking unfair.
I am in this orbit of my own, at the far reaches of the cosmos. Sending out distress signals that go unheard because I don’t speak the language and I have no one to send them to.
