Total

This is a draft piece born out of a workshop about grief, run by Nōn Wells of The Feely Human Collective.

It was the first time I let myself be in a space designed specifically for processing grief alongside other folks.

I turned my camera off two minutes into the writing time because the simple act of finally writing about how I was feeling and what I was afraid of allowed me to sob with my whole body in a way that I hadn’t before.

I let myself feel and write at the same time. I stopped prettying up my devastation to accommodate other folks’ comfort with the breadth & width of my emotions. I let myself feel the full weight of loss and I wrote a piece just for me, a piece that turned into a room I could hide in when the logistics of daily life kept highlighting my grief and just how fucking wrong it feels to do anything but stare at my empty hands and cry.

Here is where my grief lives:

Listen.
Grief is total.
Complete.
The ocean plus
the ocean plus
the ocean plus
every earnest little puddle turning
stream turning river turning
ocean that might
have been.

Total like that time I drove through the desert in the middle of the night and turned off my headlights because the dark asked me to and I knew I was still there, could feel the toes of my right foot on the gas and my hands at 8 and 5 on the wheel but sometimes when I close my eyes now I think for a second I was nowhere and never had been a day in my life.

Total like the way it felt when my dad would push me on the rope swing he hung from the black walnut tree in our backyard and he took me on a special trip to the feed store and let me pick out the purple and white rope myself and he’d push me away and let me fall back to him, push me away and watch me fall back, and the twin tumbleweeds of my ponytails would whoosh past my shoulders and there was always a moment when I thought that the weightlessness was a forever thing. That I would live there now with pinky white clouds at my toes.

Total like the times you hugged me and swallowed me whole.

Total like the way your laugh split my ribcage and planted a lemon tree in the fault line.

Total like the way your heart picked my heart,

chose us both, said

they were good and I

was good all along.

Total, the way you loved me first.

Total, the way I

carry on believing I can

have the things I thought

were for everyone else

before you gave them to me.

Total, how I keep my eyes closed tight when I say your name.

Total, how I surrender.