Sometimes words fail me.
Nothing frightens me more.
Words, after all, are the only thing that I had to cling to for such a while.
But recently I have had a season of silence.
A season of starting to write and having the words come out all slanted and wrong. A season of struggling to find the tone, the shift, the texture of what this space is holding just now.
Life has changed this year, this year that I dubbed the year of trust, this year in which nothing of consequence has happened at all. My life is still divided into all of its corners, I’m still that girl who believes so much in what must be magic-nothing at all is different, and yet I feel so very changed.
Grief, they tell us, is not linear. Grief does not end. Grief simply morphs and changes until we don’t recognize the weight of it anymore. (If we are lucky, of course.)
Every night that I am able, I walk. Outside. Around corners that I could navigate blindfolded. When you live in the same place for 40 years, you carry the bends in the road in your step, in your soul. And so, every night I reach the top of the same hill, the hill that is what I will always consider “my hill,” the hill that I climbed at the age of 10 and declared to God that I would never, ever leave. And every night I think about that little girl, and about all of those dreams that she held tight.
All of the important dreams came true, I tell her.
There has been too much sadness lately. Too many people that I care about have lost loved ones, have realized a bend in the road that they weren’t expecting. It’s tripped them up. I want so much to tell everyone-this is how I did it. This is how you survive grief. But, of course, I cannot.
Grief is not survived. It is lived. I am still-
still-four years later living the grief of a broken heart, of what it means for someone’s words to be a lie. It’s crazy and maddening.
I made a lot of room for grief. I wrapped myself up in it like a blanket and held tight to it.
This year of trust has felt truly like I’m not doing much of anything-just living and holding onto my girls as tight as I can and reading and writing and all the things. After four years of trying to become a stronger person, a person more sure of herself and her worth, right now I’m just holding steady. Enjoying this moment in time, where I am the mother of two girls who still enjoy spending their free time with me, where I am the daughter of parents that I get to see every single day, where I’m defined just as Joy.
Trust seems to have been about figuring out that all of that is just enough.
