๐๐๐๐ฝ๐๐, ๐ฏ๐ฝ๐๐๐ ๐ผ๐ ๐ถ ๐ข๐๐ถ๐๐ ๐ผ๐๐๐พ๐น๐ ๐๐ป ๐๐.
Mother, there is a grave inside of me.
I wish I could tell you that you put it there.
That would make this easier, I think. A clean origin story. A shovel in one personโs hands. A body lowered into the earth. Something I could point to and say, there. That is where it started. But you did not make the whole graveyard. You are only one grave inside it and perhaps not even the first. But - You taught me how to tend to one.
You taught me very young that people could love you and still make themselves unreachable. That someone could be close enough to touch and somehow impossibly far away. That you could spend an entire childhood studying the weather of another personโs face, learning when to speak and when to disappear, learning that silence could be punishment and absence could happen without anyone ever actually leaving the room. You are the root of so many things for me. You are why I am somehow both an external embodiment of silence that cannot shut the fuck up on the inside.
You are also why I have always been so bad at letting people go. I learned too early that love sometimes meant waiting. Waiting for the door to open. Waiting for someone to speak again. Waiting for the temperature in the room to change. Waiting to become whatever version of myself might finally be easy enough to love without consequence.
So I became very good at keeping graves.
There are people and relationships buried inside of me who are still alive.
Versions of relationships that no longer exist. Versions of myself that only existed beside certain people. Other people who I just know I will never speak to again. Some I pray I do. Conversations Iโve had that I still know by heart. Rooms I can walk through perfectly if I close my eyes. There are names I do not say anymore because saying them feels too much like knocking on the door of a house I am no longer welcome inside.
I have been trying not to say that lately. Trying not to turn them into another altar just because they are gone. Trying not to confuse missing someone with evidence that they never belonged in my life forever. Trying to remember that grief is not always an instruction to return.
I know all of that, logically. I know.
But Mom, they came so close to my heart.
Closer than almost anyone ever has.
I do not know how else to explain it.
There are people who know facts about me, and then there are people who somehow learn the architecture. They know which floorboards creak. Which doors stick in winter. Which rooms I keep locked even from myself. They knew it all.
Maybe that distinction is part of what hurts so badly.
Because I am not only grieving a person I loved. I am grieving the friendship I thought we had been living inside of together.
Two years is a long time to discover that two people may have been standing in the same house and seeing completely different rooms.
I thought we were friends.
Not just friends, not in the dismissive way people say it when they are trying to make a relationship smaller. I mean friends in the sacred sense. Friends in the way that becomes infrastructure. A person you send the thought to before it has even finished forming. A person whose existence quietly rearranges the furniture of your life until you stop remembering what the room looked like before them.
I believed in that friendship. Maybe more than I understood. Maybe in a delusional. Maybe I was suppressing too much or not seeing enough.
Whatever it is, I keep walking through the wreckage trying to understand which parts were real. And which parts were real to whom. Which parts were love. What kind of love. Isnโt that a fascinating question? That love is in categories and the way you might love someone can hurt them even if it is all the love you can safely give. It makes me question my worth. Was I worth loving? Staying for? Did I ask too much the way I did of you, Mom? Or did I not ask for literally anything at all?
I think them and I were important to each other in ways that were real and enormous and, eventually, incompatible. And somehow that is worse. Because there is nothing clean to bury. No villain large enough to hold all the blame. No single betrayal that explains every wound. Just two people who became so entangled in each otherโs hearts that by the time we tried to separate, neither of us could tell what belonged to whom without tearing something.
I need that written here too because itโs one of the things that is too heavy to carry quietly.
I am angry at both of us. At myself for not realizing sooner. For not really examining emotions that might have existed authentically and burying them in the graveyard I have learned to tend so well. But I am also angry at them. For what they did not tell me.
I am angry about the years I now look backward at differently.
I am angry that there were feelings growing underground while I was walking across the surface believing the ground beneath us was solid.
I am angry about the way they left and the narrative of who I am being so distorted.
About having to watch myself become something ugly in the story of someone I once trusted to know me better than that. I am angry that I can understand why they hurt and still believe they hurt me too.
And maybe most of all, I am angry because I miss them.
There are so many fucking things people donโt say about grief. Let me name another: there is a level of indignity of grief nobody warns you about.
You can become furious with someone and your heart will still reach for them. With others in my graveyard, my body still reaches for them. My heart and mind and soul and hands reach for you, Mom. Still, even now, almost a year since weโve meaningfully spoke.
I can know exactly why the door should remain closed and still I will turn my head every time I hear footsteps outside. I can stop speaking to someone long before my nervous system understands that the conversation is over.
Sometimes I still think of something and instinctively think, they would โ
And then the sentence dies before I can finish it. Another tiny burial. Another handful of dirt.
Mom, I do not fucking know what to do with all these dead things that still feel warm. And my life is so full of dead things that feel warm. It is not just this. Or you. Or Nana. Or them.
I do not truly know how to grieve someone who is somewhere in the world still laughing, still eating dinner, still scrolling through their phone, still waking up in the morning beneath the same sky as me.
There is something obscene about it, mourning a living person. To carry someone like a ghost while knowing perfectly well they still have a pulse.
And some shameful part of me still waits.
Not necessarily for anyone to come back.
I do not even know what โbackโ would mean anymore for half the relationships in my graveyard.
And moreover, back to what?
We cannot unknow what we know now.
We cannot climb backward through the years and become the people who once believed this friendship was indestructible - and perhaps I am the only one who ever believed that in the first place. Sometimes I donโt know what real anymore.
I think I am waiting for something smaller and perhaps more impossible. For proof that I was not a careless villain who lied
For them to turn around someday and say, I know what happened between us was terrible, but you were not nothing to me. As though I do not already know that.
As though my own memory is not evidence. As though love becomes counterfeit simply because it did not survive.
There are parts of me I recognize from you, Mom. Like the child I was that keeps dusting graves with hopes that are more fantasy that now I know even if I try to make real, keep alive, it leaves anyway.
In some ways, not with any pride at all, I am still the little girl who thinks maybe if she keeps everything beautiful enough, someone will come back carrying flowers. Maybe even the person who dug the grave.
I say it without pride but the truth isโฆI hate that about myself. How faithfully I can love an absence. How long I can sit beside something dead and call it devotion.
But I am beginning to understand that remembering is not the same thing as waiting.
I can miss them terribly.
I can miss their mind. Their humor. The way certain conversations felt like discovering rooms inside myself I had never entered before. I can miss being known by them. I can miss the friendship before it became something neither of us knew how to survive.
I can even love what they were to me.
None of that requires me to stand at the grave forever.
Maybe that is what I was never taught. May itโs what Iโm learning. I can leave flowers and still go home.
I can say, โThis mattered.โ
I can say, โThis changed me.โ
I can kneel in the dirt and grieve until my knees ache.
And then, though I must learn how to, I can stand. I can leave.
Mom. There is a grave inside me. Several.
There probably always will be.
But I am trying to stop mistaking my graveyard for my heart. They are buried there now โ not dead, never erased, not hated, but gone from the life I thought we were going to have.
And some nights I still sit beside the place where I keep them.
I remember. I get angry. Most of all I get sad. I miss them so badly I could split myself open trying to find where exactly I stored all that love.
But I am not asking the grave to give them back.
Tonight, I am only admitting that they were here. That I loved them. That they came very, very close to my heart. And that losing someone does not make a liar out of the person I was when I believed they would stay.
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
