new world disorder
permission to grieve
atmospheric river
The first thing I notice about my new passport is my strong jawline, an observation that I likely would have never made without the last two years - events that have chiseled me into a new shape altogether. This crossing has been lined and defined with white knuckling and jaw clenching. I think whatever 47 looks like, I look like that. This new image of me is hard to take my eyes off exclusively because a little earlier today, I finally opened a mystery box of random artifacts like letters and photos and cards and journals and newspaper clippings from 1989-1996. I’m sure that during some moves over the years, either from one parent dwelling to another or on my own, I dumped these disparate items into it like a time capsule and buried it all into the earth of my subconscious. And for the last several weeks, the box has been sitting outside my backyard door, taunting me with its contents.
When I was about Luna’s age I began to leave my imaginary worlds. At the time, it felt like being locked out of a part of myself, and that saddened me because it was a part of myself where I sought refuge. Where I played with abandon, and the veil between worlds didn’t exist. I suppose it was a loss of innocence. A painful one. I remember sitting on the floor of my room looking at my doll that I loved to play with and not wanting to dress her or sit her up and feed her imaginary snacks. I remember sitting there wondering what to do instead, between selves, but not belonging to either.
Today, I thumb through journals from 1987 to 1991, which is the crest of my middle school years into early high school. Dust from another lifetime lifts into the air behind the light like its own weather pattern. Who am I not to consider the disasters of displaced dust? Who am I to shove this all back into a box? Maybe because I have visited four middle schools in the past week in search of some refuge for Rafi in the coming years, I loosely stitch us together, a patchwork of paths so similar and also so different.
Time traveling like this has me reaching out to fellow time travelers. We exchange one-line texts or emails that acknowledge memory as an afterlife. Confirming that death is for the living. I go into spaces and find the loss that gathers there can’t be moved or erased - it’s made its way into the fine lines of my skin. I forgive myself for my enduring sadness, although I wish the magic I practiced could conjure a tonic to lessen the weight of the unknown. I follow gratitude like a flame to where it intersects with this forgiveness because it is the grief I carry with me that has tucked vibrant color into the grays. Made everything I dare to explore more true and certainly more fierce.
To someone who keeps up with the pace of life by setting down the unthinkable to proceed, I might not appear to be different at all. But I am. Try as I might to pick up the pieces and stiffen my upper lip or be whatever I am supposed to be by now, I am an alien in my own life. Like a mosaic of tiny pieces of broken glass reflecting light from all directions while casting shadows all the same. I feel like this is what I must admit to my life to be fluent in honesty.
I’m not sure if grief erodes us or forms us or if both are true, but it has changed me like weather changes land on the ground and from the sky. This is to say, I am changed both up close in my everydayness and from a distance - sometimes I feel as though I should reintroduce myself to everyone I’ve ever known; it’s that profound. But still, I wake up each day, albeit in new ways and ungodly hours, and I go to familiar places and practice the language and mannerisms of my former self - like slipping into old habits in an almost fugue state. How I can get up and take myself through the entire act of making tea without even realizing it, all the while wondering where we go when we don’t leave our bodies, but we are also not here.