Queen of the Tiles

by Hanna Alkaf

People talk about the stages of grief as if they’re levels to clear in a video game, and once you hit the Final Boss Level and defeat the monster therein, you’re free. The truth is that there is no linear progression to grief. If it is a game, it is one that twists and turns and darts back and forth through many layers; one day it’s easy, one day it isn’t, and one day it attacks you out of nowhere just when you think you’ve moved on.

Trina Low wears her gleaming, aggressive prettiness like armor and wields her formidable vocabulary with devastating precision.

Verily, in hardship there is relief.

skirts too short, tops too tight, tongue too sharp, gaze too knowing.

No explanations, no conclusions, only a door forever ajar, letting a million what-ifs drift in as they please.

Grief is a heavy thing; it weighs you down, turns all your limbs to lead.

The ants aren’t real ants—they’re capital A-N-T ANTs, or automatic negative thoughts, and every once in a while, they swarm all over me, nipping away at my insides. Every time I start to spiral—I know something bad will happen, or This will never work, or I could have done more—Dr. Anusya says I’m supposed to stop myself, squash the ants, clean up my mess. Some times are easier than others. Some ants are bigger than others.

“Okay. Can you center yourself? Practice mindfulness?” Every time someone says this—hell, every time I have to say it—I feel like I’m laying a wreath at the rose-scented altar of Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP empire. But it works, as it always does. I

Eventually, I start feeling my body calm down. Sure, I feel like a piece of paper that someone crumpled and then dropped into a puddle: pale, damp, used. But I’m here. I’m still here.

don’t trust people who use multiple exclamation points in such cavalier fashion.

I would literally give my right arm right now to be in my room, nestled in bed with some piping hot Maggi cup noodles—curry flavor, obviously—and a playlist of oddly soothing YouTube videos of people playing with slime on loop.

That’s just how she was; she saw something she wanted and she went for it with a laser-sharp intensity that could border on the obsessive. All or nothing, perfection or perish.

I’m not sure what punctuation ever did to my mother, but apparently they’re no longer on speaking terms.

“Mmm,” I say. It’s the equivalent of a conversational full stop, an oral Gandalf: You shall not pass.

Funeral rites, a ceremony, a procession, a funeral ode. I suppose it’s only logical that social media darlings, then, must beget social media exequies. I

The tricky thing about memories, after all, is that you don’t really know which of them is important until you need it.

My pulse steadies, my mind clears, something loosens in my chest and breathing works again. I know the relief is temporary, but grief, I’m learning, is a burden you carry your whole life, and a smart person would welcome any breaks they can get.

Our grief may have different symptoms, but deep down it’s the same disease after all.

“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” they say, as if the dead care.

I was all angles and edges, not quite fitting in or fitting out, just fitting awkwardly in this space that was meant to be mine.

I imagined that childhood friends were a lot like childhood toys: some grow with you, some you keep around for sentimental reasons, and some belong in the past.

Maybe when you’re born beautiful, people always bend over backward to tell you what they think you want to hear.

The day continues, because time is selfish and thinks nothing of the suffering of others. And I try my best to make it through.

being alone with him now is as strange as shrugging on a borrowed coat. Something just doesn’t fit right.

It’s a weird thing, to know so many more words than the average person and yet still have absolutely none of the right ones to explain myself.

“I think I remember,” I say, but the memory is like an outline that hasn’t been filled in, the merest ghost of a picture.

“I’ve told you everything I remember.” I drum my fingers on the table. “That’s just it, isn’t it? Everyone is going to remember things differently, because everyone pays attention to different things.”

“There was rarely any in-between. The highs were astronomical, the lows were abysses. And when you inspire those kinds of big, extreme reactions in people, well… you also inspire big, extreme actions sometimes.”

Easy to love, easy to hate. Maybe they’re both just different sides of the same coin.

Most people act like my grief is something I need to get over, a blip to overcome so we can all get back to regularly scheduled programming.

“You think your way of being sad is the only way? You are not the only person who lost her. I lost her too. And just because we experience that differently doesn’t mean that my way is wrong, or that it doesn’t mean anything.”

I weathered: I withstood, but almost without realizing it I also wore away, bit by bit. Maybe it was me that was the contranym all along.

After all, aren’t we all just an amalgamation of others’ perceptions?

Recalling a feeling, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean living with its ghost always.

It’s like getting too close to the sun. You can’t see anything else. It’s beautiful, until it hurts. It’s warm, until it burns.

Because of course, when there is SYZYGY—when three celestial bodies are perfectly in tune and aligned in the vastness of the cosmos—you know what happens? One must block the light of another. That’s just how it goes.

We take the racks we’re dealt, and we keep making the next move.”