27.

Rearrangement of my own words:

I watched my mother's body become overtaken by cancer. I was helpless. And powerless. I've never felt such fear. I knew what was coming.

Grief and love and loss are layered. They inform one another. Grief is love.

It's unknowable until you have to know it. And then you wish you'd never met it.

To live with the awareness of a presence,

But not its physicality.

I long to feel your presence.

There are things we find in the dark that we'd never see in the light.

How do I move through the world with one part of me gone and this new part here?

Grief is everywhere in my body. Let it be as ugly as it needs to be.

I am fragile, be gentle with me.

I'm learning who I am, after. Learning more about who I was, before.

I am afraid of being drowned. I already feel flooded - what must it feel like to be drowned?

My world has stopped, been turned upside down, and everything is different.

I wish we could sit together and talk just one more time.

The collection of these things was declared finished before any of us felt done with it.

My heart hurts for all of the things that happened, and for all of the things that won't.