The last piece I wrote was a grief letter six months ago. Grief and writing are weighty things that I do everything I can to hold. It’s the eve of new years eve. Time burns through these dying days of 2023 and I breathe in the smoke. My fingertips can almost touch 2024 on the horizon as it calls me on with something like hope. But complicated grief is shaking itself loose beneath my skin again. Can somebody tell me — how do you write about endless grief without falling to pieces?
The human condition is such a bittersweet thing; we survive so much and try to thrive in between. This year, I re-read My Love Story by Tina Turner and Ms Turner breathed her last breaths while I was still trying to learn her. When you read one of those stories about life after heartache, you’re reminded that real heroes don’t ever wear capes. I wonder, I wonder what you have been reminded of this year?
This year, I was reminded that when I was a little girl, my favourite book was Where the Wild Things Are, and now that I’m grown — it’s still my favourite by far. This year, I learned that resilience and imagination are my superpowers; they have kept me afloat minute after minute and hour after hour. This year, I remembered how to be brave by taking a leap of faith over a ravine whilst being deathly afraid.
Breakthrough was indeed the verb of the year — but let me be sincere; my breakthroughs came with unexpected challenges, blood, sweat and rivers of tears. Sometimes you touch the sky and then the sky falls down, then shame clings to you and you don’t know what to do with yourself now. This is my testimony of life as I have found it — at its worst and at its best. And I’m not ashamed to say that I begged for grace when loneliness began feasting on my flesh.
I am looking forward to a good beginning in 2024 but I know life is no fairy-tale. When I woke up this morning and looked out of my balcony window, I saw a dead fox sprawled out on the pavement across the street. I watched life continue to happen all around its lifeless body; the bin men arrived and collected the overflowing rubbish bins lined up neatly against the wall behind it, a traffic warden on a white moped, cruised by studying all the windscreens of the parked cars, a woman and child walked by and gave the fox a wide berth, the postman arrived and posted mail through the letterbox of the house with the grey door about ten metres to the left of the fox and I can’t tell if he noticed the fox at all. It began to rain a little and then a lot. How sad — how strange.
I wonder how the year ahead will unfold itself and unfold me. Will it be harder or easier than the one we’re leaving behind? It’s the eve of new years eve and I’m thinking about the habits I need to break and make. The world is changing and so am I, but I’m wise enough to know it won’t happen over night.
