today

I need to keep track of my thoughts right now, before I go to sleep. In a world where I felt anything was possible and I was capable of any act, today restored my faith in god. Not the god that sends us to heaven or hell, but the god that reminds us we are matter, but that nonetheless guides us in our interactions with other humans. Why trust a phone call to tell you anything? There are times you know, when you realize words mean something more than they should on their face, when wires hum with truth. That for me, is god: the mysterious openness to human catastrophe that lets us feel the unseen and the unknowable with the force of a gunshot.

This summer, I’ve felt at least two different kinds of disappearing time. One, brought on by the repetitions of a life that doesn’t seem to matter so much, that slips away on wheels greased by its own inadequacy. When people treat you like your time and person matters little, it’s hard to marshal the will to make it matter by your own accord, and so the days turn to weeks, waiting for something to put you back on track. Then there are days which feel fated by means of absurd tragedy. It feels like fate because you never had a chance to say goodbye, because you seem subject to something beyond yourself that never even hinted at letting you have control. Events of your life, that make it life, seem inaccessible and under the control of other powers entirely.

Greif endures: we are followed by our own ghosts. The most terrifying part of grieving is that it pursues you indefinitely. Loss doesn’t end, it appears in times and places you know not yet. There’s something about hurt that almost immediately becomes truth for me. There’s no denial, no wistful remorse, only the way forward. What seems impossible is the sense that you won’t ever take a breather. It doesn’t quite quantify, nothing adds up, because it won’t come to you except in unanswered gestures. You lose what seemed natural, part of ourselves that we never had to question before. Absence itself hurts, but absence without respite defines grief for me.

how do you do justice to someone’s memory? What justice do we owe to someone’s memory, and to unspoken desires? In fulfilling someone’s wishes, we hope to revive them. They animate again, becoming agent to our lives, acting on us as if surviving. Justice becomes the vehicle to our fears of permanence. Its as if those we have lost would have one more chance to speak, and we let them speak the words we would want to hear – of vindication if need be.

The reason words fail us is that they stand inert next to a radically changed future. They offer condolence, but have been used so many times before in so many ways, we can’t help but feel like we’re falling into cliché. They are the tracing paper onto which we sketch a pale copy of what we really feel. Words were made for a thousand other people at once, and don’t seem suited to where we stand, to what we’ve lost.

Dispel the rumors of healing and take each day to mean something intrinsically and eternally worthwhile. Seizing the day we too often take to be an endorsement of a petty recklessness which rather leaves us numb. Living to our fullest also means care for your relationships and care for the people that matter. Sometimes we forget our impermanence.

Duncan