small cow

Dear Grace,

This has not been an easy year and a half for you. I’m sorry. Please take this apology and wrap it as a gift, with dignity. I’m glad I’m writing this letter for you. And I don’t know what to say. Tell me, what is it you want me to say?

I can understand, how nothing in life makes sense anymore. We don’t make sense together. Here is the past, here is the present. They are not continuous anymore—they are forgetful and ephemeral. Here is the future, and you won’t even look. And here is joy, followed by an inevitable, rapid crash. I know you try to be good when you feel good. I know how hard it is to feel like you’re doing good, when you feel bad. I know how often you feel bad. […]

You tell me you want to be surrounded by people. You want to receive physical touch, you want people to ask you how you are.

You always think one step too ahead. Or, I don’t know if it’s a step ahead or a step skewed.

[…]

Hopefully the therapists will answer you soon. I’m sorry I spent so long in messaging them. It was so easy to do.

Grace, isn’t it time to go to bed now?

[…]

There’s still a lot to talk about. We’ll get there.

Joy, I can do, joy I have been practicing, joy I can practice, joy, three little letters.

Move, movement, moving.

One year already?

From the corner of my eye, three milk crates stacked: yellow, turquoise, blue.

From hopeful to mortifying, two words.

“You deserve someone who wants to spend time with you, unwaveringly, eagerly, and without question.”

Grandparents unwell, please let me one conversation with my grandmother.

Bucha.

Oranges eaten and orange peels resting.

Summer? Remote? Mistake?

Disassembling one bike to assemble another.

Disassembling analysis.

Just allow me one person in their entirety.

“Vous avez un coeur d’or.”

Cry and we will cry with you. Touch your heart and believe how tender it is. Lean on us to lean into your pain. In your love is our own.

My weakness is lodged as the lump in my throat, the silence that I deplore, the person I do not want to be.

And the lump in my throat, the stomach all tight, the eyes in one binding tear, I fight it and I let it fight me.

Thinking of my grandmother. Thinking of my mother.

Thinking of deep love, deep pain.

Thinking of hope,

tears.

You are so utterly loveable.
My God, does this world gravitate towards your heart.
Tender, brimming, colour of your life,
touching my own.
How these years have wounded us,
but favoured our togetherness.
How these years have grown through us.

Lately there has been life and collapse and incomprehension. Waking up to the white window cat, frying two eggs for lunch, walking in snow hail slush, laughing too loudly and reading the news with bewilderment. Things are happening and are moving, things are changing, the Earth is changing, people passing and people crying, test taking, metaverse expanding.

[…]

Sleep, now. If anything, sleep, for the sake of tomorrow.

If I could say, how I feel bewildered, silently unsettled, heaviness under my eyes. Do the days simply pass like this, without slow acknowledgment, without a self anchor?

I did not expect to cry so badly along the streets of Toronto. I am glad I bit the inside of my cheek for as long as I could, and that I came home to a warm bed and two living souls. And that my friend called me, stilling my heart.

What did I leave in the city, what did I bring back here?

I am not fully weak, but I do not know what I am beyond knowing I am better than last year. Tonight, I feel disappointed, confused, steady, a bit emptier than usual. I crave the end of the semester but I feel ashamed and ungrateful in this desire.

It hurts me to negate someone I care about. It makes me feel more alone than the previous moment.

It will take time for me to regain the energy I had fed with my fluttery hope.

Light is not always bright, and not always light, but always by and by.

There is a luminosity that has been following me lately, that I have found myself treading through, which gives me a quiet strength that resurfaces should it disappear.

What is it? Who is it? The truth is, I think I could say, and write, and know. How I quietly take the elevator to the third floor of the library, fold my jacket over a chair, and sit to the glow of the gingko under the morning sun. How when I step outside I hear a friend calling my name and we talk briefly, smiling. How the water begins to boil, lunch is hot from the microwave, face red from the wind. How the day brings new words to light.

And at night, besides my lamp I write in my orange notebook, and occasionally in my green, then read poetry or theory or fiction or all. Here I am, this time on my laptop, now with my music paused. Who will I be, next sunrise, behind the blinds, in the dim, by the sky?