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“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.” —Dante Alighieri, Inferno
finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of.
That’s the part of depression people don’t consider, that at times it physically hurts.
She’s as beautiful as the day we first met. She’s changing, aging, but to me, only getting better. Like God looked at the feline flare of her cheekbones and the tempting pout of her mouth, the sultry dark eyes flecked with gold and said, You think she looks good now? I’m just getting started.
How do you breathe when the person you thought you’d cherish forever looks at you the way Yasmen looks at me right now because you’ve hurt them so much?
Grief is a grind. It is the work of breathing and waking and rising and moving through a world that feels emptier. A gaping hole has been torn into your existence, and everyone around you just walks right past it like it’s not even there.
When you lose someone that close, the enormity, the finality of it, sometimes hits you full force when you least expect it. When you are least prepared. And your heartbeat stutters and your knees nearly buckle, just like when you first heard they were gone.
I’ve learned to tame grief, though, so it doesn’t run wild and ruin my life. It’s in these unguarded moments that the pain hisses and growls, a rabid beast with its face pressed to the bars.
And I think I’m most grateful for time, which doesn’t always heal all wounds, but teaches us how to be happy again even with our scars.”
“If I waited until I don’t have feelings for Yasmen before I moved on,” I tell Vashti as gently as I can, “I never would.”
“I was no walk in the park, Merry.” “Who wants to walk in the park? I think that man would run wild with you.”
“Depression,” she goes on, “is a liar. If it will tell you no one loves you, that you’re not good enough, that you’re a burden or, in the most extreme cases, better off dead, then it can certainly convince you that you’re better off without the man you love, and that, ultimately, he’s better off without you.”
Our eyes lock as a storm of lust rolls in between us. Her expression wrenches almost like she’s in pain. Moments like these feel so good they do hurt. Hurts that it’s this perfect and that it has to end; that it’s fleeting, yet indelible. That the feel of her will be tattooed onto my skin the way I hope that mine will be on hers.
Public grief is tricky to negotiate. At a certain point, and it varies depending on the person and circumstance, there comes a time when you should be “over it.” You should have moved on by now. And you’re so aware of the fact that you have not, that you cannot. You don’t want others to see your past-due tears or sense the pain that has outstayed its welcome. You protect them from feeling awkward because you’re still in pain. When the facade fails and you lose it, the stares soaked in sympathy are as bad as the ones filled with contempt.
Our traumas, the things that injure us in this life, even over time, are not always behind us. Sometimes they linger in the smell of a newborn baby. They surprise us in the taste of a home-cooked meal. They wait in the room at the end of the hall. They are with us. They are present. And there are some days when memories feel more real than those who remain, than the joys of this world.
It begins with a tremor, a realization that love happens in the fragile context of our mortality. That love and life occur just beyond the reach of our control. There is only one letter of difference between love and lose, and somewhere along the way, for me they became synonymous.
“I was meant for you and you were meant for me, and even when we got in our own way, even when we screwed up—because we both did, baby—even then my soul knew, my heart knew, it was wrong being away from you. I don’t ever want to ache like that again. People don’t often get second chances like this, Yas.”
“Did we deserve all the shit that happened to us? The things and the people we lost? I’ve learned that life isn’t about taking what you deserve, it’s about getting all you can while you can because it’s short. Because it’s fickle. Because it takes when we least expect it. Now everything I’ve lost makes me cherish the things I have, instead of always being afraid I’ll lose them.”
There are a thousand things I could say to capture how I’m feeling, to tell him what his devotion means to me. That instead of escaping into the dark, I’ll find him in it, and we’ll guide each other to the light.
