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I understood then that darkness is falling without an end. That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.
She switched places with her shadow because suffering changes shape and happens secretly.
We read to inherit the words, but something is always between us and the words.
language lived a full life of questioning. His favorite was twisting what others said. His favorite was to write the world in black and white and then watch people try and read the words in color.
My mother couldn’t speak but her eyes were the only ones that were wide open.
But for every letter I picked up, another fell down, as if protesting the oversimplification of my mother’s dying.
But maybe I am wrong, how death is simply death, each slightly different from the next but the final strike all the same.
The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices
when a mother dies. What’s left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.
When language leaves, all you have left is tone, all you have left are
smoke signals. I didn’t know she was using her own body as wood.
I used to think that a dead person’s words die with them. Now I know that they scatter, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent.
The mirror won the battle. I am now imprisoned in the mirror. All my selves spread out like a deck of cards. It’s true, the grieving speak a different language.
An image is a kind of distance. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart.
Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.
I put a fish ball in my mouth. My optimism covered the whole ball as if the fish had never died, had never been gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape. To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.
The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.
This year they sent a spacecraft on a suicide mission between Saturn and its rings. If I could get between my father and his brain, would I too be committing suicide? If someone is directing the spacecraft, isn’t it murder?
picture represents a moment that has died. Then every photo is a crime scene. When we remember the dead, at some point, we are remembering the picture, not the moment.
I dislike visiting my father. The way his fists stay shut, the way his mind is always out of earshot. The way his words abandon his mouth and each day I pick them up, put them back in, screw the lid on tighter. Sometimes when he complains and no one can understand, I think of all the places I hid as a child. All the times I have silenced someone by covering their mouth with mine.
the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.
I can’t say with faith that I would run toward a bus to save you from death. If a girl is only as good as her mother, then what? * To love anyone means to admit extinction. I tell myself this so I never fall in love, so that the fire lights just me.
They were being pursued by their own deaths. I wonder about the leaves and their relationship with fruit. Do the leaves care about the swelling of the fruit? Does the fruit consider the leaves while it expands? Maybe the leaves shade the fruit as it grows and the fruit emits fragrance for the leaves. But eventually, each must face its own falling alone.
Death isn’t the enemy. Knowledge of death is the enemy.
I know now that to be loved as a child means to be watched. In high school, I loved when the teacher turned the lights off. A moment to feel loved and unseen at once. I understand now. We can’t be loved when the lights are off.
When the brush hits a knot, the child cries out loud, makes a noise that is an expression of pain but not the pain itself. I can’t feel the child’s pain but some echo of her pain, based on my imagination. Blame is just an echo of pain, a veil across the face of the one you blame.
I want to complain to the boss of God about God. What if the boss of God is rain and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?
Even as she was dying, she thought the path to God was money. I wonder if she heard coins in her dreams, if when God touched her forehead, His fingertips felt like gold.
Her head gone. Her face gone. Rilke was wrong. The body is nothing without the head. My mother, now covered, was no longer my mother. A covered apple is no longer an apple. A sketch of a person isn’t the person. Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in.
The Blue Dress—died on August 6, 2015, along with the little blue flowers, all silent. Once the petals looked up. Now small pieces of dust. I wonder whether they burned the dress or just the body? I wonder who lifted her up into the fire? I wonder if her hair brushed his cheek before it grew into a bonfire? I wonder what sound the body made as it burned? They dyed her hair for the funeral, too black. She looked like a comic character. I waited for the next comic panel, to see the speech bubble and what she might say. But her words never came and we were left with the stillness of blown glass.
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that it’s over, I know the heart doesn’t really shatter, but I also can no longer feel it.
I had too many selves for God to save. None of my selves knew how to say sorry. None of my selves knew each other.
In hangman, the body forms while it is being hung. As in, we grow as we are dying.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I had become estranged from a part of myself that wanted to stay alive. That wanted them to remain alive. In the same way I had become estranged from my mother forever, but not from her death.
