I’m currently working on National Novel Writing Month, or nanowrimo for short. The premise is that if you are able to write an entire novel in a month, 50,000 words in 30 days, the nonprofit takes you through the steps to get it published. I’ve been trying to write something since I was around 12 or 13, but I never stuck through it to the end.
Since I was around 15, and since I had encountered so much at once, my mother had joked that I should begin writing memoirs. Little snapshots of the memories I was currently making, and if I were to be ambitious enough, I should try to get them published. We always joked about that- even going so far as to have a title planned out for it, probably the best title ever, really; Teen Angst and Tom Hanks: Fueled by Spite.
It captured everything about me. I was angsty and sad, I loved 80s films, and I was, and am, in fact, fueled by spite. If someone tells me no, I have to go out of my way to do it. I have to record the action, and toss glitter and confetti in the air, because no one tells me what to do.
Except my mom and dad because I live with them, and my cool bosses because they’re cool.
So, for this week’s blog, I wanted to put in an excerpt on what I’m writing. This memoir deals with the loss I experienced over a 9 month period, and how, even 3 years later, I can’t fully come to terms with it.
“There was a dark period. Many people talk about Pollock and his blue period- where the most invigorating part of the paint splots was the sad, somber blue. People talk about the periods when Monet focused on some flowers more than others, favoring how the beauty of certain petals rested as opposed to the entire garden. The world is divided into periods of peace, war, famine, wealth, love, and disease. The Golden Age of Islam happened at the same moment as the Dark Ages of Europe; the only luck involved was where you happened to live at the time.
My dark period was a longer one than most. It wasn’t a phase where I religiously prayed to the gods of Hot Topic at the shrine of Spencer’s. It wasn’t a phase of American Eagle and elitism drunk through the veins of Aeropostale. This phase wasn’t as easy as taking of the layers I could no longer carry and waiting for the dust to settle on the threads.
My dark period was 9 months where it seemed as if my life would forever be notated by grief. In 9 months, I lost 3 people, who were all 18 or younger. The precise of a new life that was dropped from the mantel of the future. When I was 15, I didn’t think that I could live through that. I was the one to sweep the broken ceramic from the edges of my memories. I thought I could grieve by forgetting that I knew what loving those people was. What it felt like could be something I never knew. I could unlearn the tongues of sympathy by refusing to speak.
I wrote about John. Now it is time for Maddie. Maddie was beautiful. Beautiful in the type of way that made me scared to say it. She looked like she was what everyone thought of when they talked about a girl who would run the world. A style so signature to her and her alone that anyone who came close gave of the same illusion as a knock off handbag; close but no cigar. And of course, because she had to be even better than just that, she was genuinely kind. She was a lovely, dark, rich purple. I remember, on her best days, it felt like she was outlined with gold. Gold like John.
Sometimes, I crunch the numbers again. 3, 9, 18. Divisible. 18 can be divided by 9 and if you take the answer from that (2) and multiply 2 and 3, you get 6 and 6 times 3 is 18, and everything is whole again if you only focus on those numbers. Looking for conspiracies in the fact that I can’t fix everything, I try to do the math again. And again. And again. I look at those numbers and wonder if I counted each individual day, if I’d get another piece of a puzzle to look at that answers a question other than why.
I don’t want to know why Maddie or John or Nick died. I know they were sad in such a way that engulfed them. I know they don’t know how much I or anyone would miss them. I want to know who they last thought about. I want to know if they looked around their rooms one last time and knew that they couldn’t spend another day there. I need to know if they mourned their friends in advance. If they cried because, if they did this, they couldn’t see us in the way we can’t get to them. I need to know if they thought about each song they loved and listened to it just to savor it. One time. I wonder if every message sent and the last hugs were all because they knew they’d be leaving.
I can’t ask her. Anything. I can’t ask her favorite color. Or band. Or food. I wanted to. But, Maddie was way too cool and way too perfect to be touched. So close, yet so far away.”
I miss all three of them so dearly. I don’t even know if they thought I would miss them, and that in and of itself breaks my heart. Grief, I’ve found, isn’t something you heal from. I’ve read about it time and time again, and people say grief is a wound. A wound that closes. But I don’t think so. I was given the best tools to get through grieving, and yes, I was 15, so it’s not necessarily fair to think I’d get out without some lingering trauma. But grief isn’t something to heal from. It will always kind of ache. Like, yes, life is good, but there was still space for someone to be with me. It’s not a wound, it’s a lost limb. You learn to live with it, and work around it. In a lot of ways, living through that grief was similar to being paralysed. I knew I could make life go on, but I also knew that I would have to change the way I thought about living.
I would have to make accommodations for myself, and I would have to ask others to do the same. There would be places I couldn’t visit, and memories I wouldn’t want to touch. There would be people who came into my life to cry with me, just to move on again. I don’t think grief is like a wound because people heal from scratches and bleeding all the time. Hell, just a couple months ago, I cut open my hand on a food processor blade, and now I don’t even have the scar to prove it.
Grief is life altering. And it wasn’t till I wrote about them that I realized how much I missed them. These last few weeks have been hard, mainly because I am reliving trauma each night for the sake of making good art. Personally, I’ll take the trade off, but I also know that I’m sacrificing a little bit of my own safety and peace of mind for it. However, I do like to think I’m healing. By putting it out to the Universe, it means that my pain isn’t just inside myself, but it has the ability to change others. Maybe it will teach them something about how to love after pain, how to laugh after crying, or how to live after death.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. What sort of mark I want to have before it’s ultimately my time to go on. I want to think that, as I keep writing and talking to my empty bedroom, I’ll figure it all out. I’ve got a little bit of faith in myself, so I think that even if I can’t figure out all my questions, I can at least get a good start on them.
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