Thoughts While Trying to Suck In The Part of My Stomach That Holds My Uterus

It’s a vital organ, isn’t it? Well, vital for having children.

My body is beautiful, my body is beautiful, my body is beautiful.

I think if I repeat it enough times, surely I'll start to believe it.

There are so many names for women’s bodies: pear, hourglass, athletic, slender, curvy, even rectangle.

But never a force of nature, never a miraculous work of art.

My mom woke up from childbirth with her uterus missing. My close friend needs to have both of her breasts removed. I have a couple of friends who take hormone injections that cause their ovaries to double in size, several others who have had chunks of their cervix scraped out for testing, whose periods require pain killers, whose pregnancies were accompanied by diabetes, organ damage, high blood pressure, or depression…

All of this for the sake of our extraordinary ability to reproduce. I still can't wrap my head around how the hell it's possible that one of my friends is growing two tiny human beings at once right now.

I have experienced the kind of hormonal acne that made me start and end every day in tears. Lately my uterus feels like it’s being wrung out like a wet towel for the week before, during, and after my cycle. PMS has been causing me to cry about completely fictional, fleeting ideas. I pinch at my body like it isn’t the eighth wonder of the world, like it isn’t the future home of an entirely different human being than myself.

A woman’s body is designed to carry trauma, to nurture new life, to constantly adjust and fluctuate and correct itself, to endure and overcome intense levels of pain. You'd think after all these centuries, we would've learned to love and accept it by now.

Tips for when you're not quite where (or who) you want to be

Let go of people who make you feel smaller than you are.

Forgive them for not knowing how to love you.

Don’t let sadness devolve into self-pity. Reset your sense of agency over your life.

Empathize. And keep empathizing.

Behave like the kind of friend you'd want to have.

Write yourself love letters.

Write down a list of your favorite things in no particular order: green tea, autumn, string music, puppy breath, my husband’s laugh, sunrises, dry red wine, old books, bread dipped in oil, thunderstorms, cuddling dogs, reminiscing

When you admire a stranger’s beauty and imagine their life as any better than your own, know their list of favorites is as simple as yours.

When you happen upon a pleasant view or nostalgic scent, stop and enjoy it for a little while longer.

And on those days you can’t find anything pleasant, open a book.

You’re not moving backwards, you’re just changing.

You can’t move backwards even if you tried.

Now isn’t even now anymore. That was two seconds ago.

And if you feel like you’re merely surviving, that’s fine too.
​

So you’re not where you want to be, or you’re not quite who you want to be, I’m proud of you anyway.

How are you?

It’s a simple question we answer on a daily basis.

Student Amy said, Tired. I’m so fucking tired.

Bartender Amy said, Better now that you’re here!

Interpreter Amy signed, Good, how are you?

Amy at checkout in the dead of winter said, Sick of this weather!

And then there's Anxious Amy.

I’m good, I’d say. But I can’t stop thinking about the goose I drove by earlier, dying in the middle of the road, its partner squawking from the shoulder. I regret Googling whether or not geese mate for life, because they do. And when I drove past the goose’s carcass 30 minutes later, its partner was sitting next to it.

I’m good, I’d say. But my mind keeps wandering to my friend of 12 years who's in a manic episode that I fear he won’t return from. We would speak on the phone 20 times within 24 hours and every call felt more and more like I was talking to a stranger, so eventually I stopped answering. I had to let him go. And I'm wondering if setting boundaries can be selfish.

I’m great, I’d say, but I keep picking at my anxious thoughts like scabs and can’t figure out how to stop and let them heal.

I’m great. How could I not be? I am healthy, my family is healthy, I have a husband who loves me entirely, I have a beautiful life but I worry I don't deserve it. I worry it could all change.

I’m having a bit of a hard time regulating my thoughts, I'd say. But of course I can't verbalize these things. A simple question isn't an invitation to make a casual conversation my dumping ground.

I consider speaking plainly about the ideas and images lurking in the damp corner of my brain but more often than not, I opt to leave them there to evaporate over time. Thoughts are just thoughts, I remind myself. We are good. Everything is good. We deserve a beautiful life.

A True Story with a Little Projection

(written in 2019 on my old blog, 3 years after Sam died)

He’s following his big sister down the sidewalk, fumbling with the handful of Legos that are too big for his little hands. 'Wait for me,' he says. Or did he think it? Can she even hear him? She is only a few steps ahead of him but it feels like he is galaxies away. When she thought of her youngest brother she thought about Legos. Piles of them. Buckets of them. Landscapes of them crunching underneath her bare feet at the lake house. He’s trying to keep pace with her but he’s struggling to hold onto the plastic pieces of their childhood that she always associated with her memories of him. One of the blocks slipped through his fingers and if he stopped to pick it up, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with her. So he left it there on the sidewalk and decided he’d pick it up on their way back.

I was walking home from class with my headphones in, thinking about Sam. When I die, I wondered, which version of me will people remember the most vividly? Maybe my childhood friends will remember my blonde bangs and high pitched voice. Maybe my high school classmates will remember my thick eyeliner and that brownish-black hair color that my natural roots never quite took to… and my violin and my paints and my bedroom walls decoupaged in pages torn from encyclopedias and how I always seemed to be on crutches. I like to think my siblings would remember my laugh. I associate the word happiness with my family when we’re laughing the kind of laughter that temporarily freezes time; the kind of laughter that fills the corners of your eyes with tears. When I hear Sam’s name I think about us as kids, playing in the sand. Laughing. I used to think stepping on Legos barefoot was the most painful feeling imaginable but now when I'm missing Sam, I know I was wrong.

Despite a consistent sensation of loneliness, I haven’t felt truly alone since God began plucking people from my life. I feel them all around me, all the time now. I was walking home from class alone but I didn’t feel alone. It felt like I was being followed. This was probably five months after Sam died and my mind was wandering when it found him; he was ten years old again fumbling with those fucking Legos. And suddenly, on a walk in the middle of campus, I was thirteen again, stopped dead in my tracks looking at a real-life Lego on the sidewalk. It was a black, four-by-two block. I picked it up and looked around wondering if I was the only one seeing it. My head muted everything around me and tears started pooling in the corner of my eyes the way they did when I used to laugh. Right then, I had to laugh or else I'd cry.

And although the little boy wasn't ever able to catch up to his sister, he watched her pick up his Lego on their way back from class and they laughed again. The kind of laughter that freezes time; the kind of laughter that fills the corners of your eyes with tears.

And he knew she knew he was there.

You’re Alive Enough

No one is making a mental note of all the things you didn’t accomplish last year.

Well, except you, of course.

The first draft of the book that you hated the moment you started writing it,

the workout you were promised you’d fall in love with if you just kept at it.

If you kept at the diet,

if you kept at knitting that godforsaken scarf,

if you kept at the daily journaling,

the monthly book clubs,

you’d still feel unfinished.
​

It’s enough to simply be part of passing time,

to celebrate another birthday,

another year of loving and being loved,

another year spent nourishing your body enough to keep it alive.
​

On a particularly good day, you tried a new café,

your dog did something exceptionally cute,

the recipe turned out even better than expected,

you broke a sweat doing something hard,

you looked in the mirror and liked what you saw.
​

Perhaps on a great day, you came home to flowers,

your dad got good news from the doctor,

your friend had her baby,

you laughed so hard that you cried.
​

But on any ordinary day,

your husband looked at you with the same eyes he looked at you with on your wedding day,

blood pumped throughout your body involuntarily,

somebody thought of you, even on those days when you felt completely alone, you crossed somebody's mind.

On any ordinary day, your body rose out of bed to the same world where all your good and great days took place.
​

So another year ended with no finished manuscript,

no new hobby perfected.

There was, yet again, no great epiphany,

but you were alive enough.

Scar Tissue

I’ve got a running list of signs that I’m trying...
​

The callus on my ring finger from decades of holding my pen wrong,

the scars across my chest from incessantly picking myself bloody,

the raw flesh in the back of my mouth where my molars like to work out stress,

the incision scar from a surgery I got in an effort to love myself,

the pathways in my brain that open up distant rooms for me to slip into,

the numbness that creeps in behind my face whenever someone yells in my direction.

My body has tried tirelessly to correct itself,

to erase what I’ve put it through, to erase what he put it through, to erase what it’s put itself through.

Every inch of me is a sign that I’ve tried,

but you can never fully remove scar tissue.

There are no self-care tips that can make you love yourself,

to love the version of you that life has molded you into.

But I have a huge gash on the back of my heel from attempting to jump a fence in middle school, and I remember my friend asking through tears of laughter, “Oh my god, how is there so much blood?”

We were laughing so hard that it didn’t even hurt.

I have that callus, from the lengthy handwritten notes I've been penning to loved ones since the age of six.

The pads of my fingers are thick and tough from the violin strings I plucked as a child.

I have sun spots from an exceptionally bad sunburn I got in Charleston when I was twelve.

I have a small hole above my bellybutton from a mistake I insisted on making as a teenager.

My wrists click from years of interpreting sign language.

I have the tools right inside of my brain—a sense of humor carved directly from life’s most difficult experiences—to provoke laughter from people I love. And is there any better sound in the world?

I’ve got a running list of signs that I’m trying, and an even longer list of signs that I'm still the little girl I look back on so fondly, with her sunburns and hobbies and impulsive piercings. I'm just the older version of the girl I so fiercely protect. She's in there, tracing the same scars, confronting the same demons, rubbing our sore wrists thinking, I can't believe we know sign language. She doesn't see what I see when we step in front of a mirror; she can't get past how grown up we look. She's in there, laughing along at our jokes thinking, look at how many people are happy we're here.

A Love Letter to Music & Poetry

Instagram reminded me that ten years ago today, I was in the front row at The 1975's concert. Which means a little over ten years ago, I crawled my way out of a dark relationship.

I didn’t know where love ended and abuse began, but he called all of it love. I knew which parts were wrong, I knew which parts I didn't like, but I believed every word he said afterwards. Ten years ago when I left, I was not licking my wounds. I was not even beginning to reconcile myself, much less rebuild her. I had forgotten that she was there altogether. Looking back, I think maybe she wasn't. I think maybe she went away long before the abuse ended. Ten years ago, I simply did not care where I went missing, or whether I lived or died when I returned to the distant vessel of my body. There was no anxiety, no outward depressive symptoms, just a deep, settled feeling of indifference. That’s been the hardest part about trying to relate to survivors or grievers: reaching deep enough to find something I haven't buried, something firm enough to share.

But music unearthed me. I remember this day clearly in 2014, I saw The 1975 live and I thought the experience must have redistributed my brain cells. I was numb, but I was dancing. I was a waitress when I was leaving that relationship, and I’d listen to The 1975's self-titled album on my breaks. I’d close my eyes and travel someplace else—wherever the rest of me ran off to. I wrote down their song lyrics when I still had no words, when they were all still buried. I’m not a cliche, okay? A band did not save my life. But music snapped me back into a reality that no warm body nor touch ever could. Music was mine, nobody else’s. And poetry… if poetry was amplified like music we’d all be better for it. No social movement, no support group, no therapist could have satiated me like music and poetry. I was never looking for someone who could relate to me. I was just looking for mirrors. I was looking for myself in everything, for signs that I was still alive. I did not want to be brave, or anything more than an active participant in this life. And I don't have to be. But I think if I keep writing, I can lure home whatever pieces of me are still out wandering.

I suppose this is my love letter to music, specifically my love letter to The 1975’s tour of 2014. And to lyrics and poems that reached me in my state of colossal indifference.

To the daughter I do not have:

I’ve spent my whole adult life kicking around the idea of even having you.

I tuck your name away in notes and test it out loud when I’m alone.

It’s my grandma’s mother’s name, the grandma whose words are inked into my arm.

You’d fall in line behind bold, unapologetic matriarchs who have all been stronger than me.

And if generational trauma is real, I’m sorry.

I make checklists of things I would teach you:

The many ways to say thank you

The many instances to say fuck you

How to be heard in the loudest rooms

How to be soft in the safest ones

How to build boundaries before they're needed

How to fall in love with a hundred hobbies at once

(I wouldn’t know how to teach you to stick to one)

(You’d learn diligence from your father)

We’ve never met, you’ve never existed, and you may never will,

but I constantly look for reasons you should.

I find them in my mother and the women who came before her.

I was raised by a strong woman who was raised by a strong woman who was raised by a strong woman who was raised by a strong woman...

This world is filled with people who would try to dull you, men who wouldn’t know how to treat you, spaces that aren’t meant for you, circumstances that would hurt you. For a long time I thought it'd be best to spare you from it all — one less little girl unpeeling ugly pieces of reality inside of her family's stories, one less woman who has to be strong.

But I keep writing so that by chance someday you do exist, you'll know strength isn't all that hard, and it isn't all that bad. It's in your blood.

For Empaths

I know the pain of the world weighs heavy on you. I know you’re thinking of the young boy you happened upon last week, sleeping alone in an unlocked car. I know you can’t shake the thought of every lost puppy or child or soul, each of them looking for home. I know you wish they could all follow breadcrumbs straight to you. When your mind wanders, it finds destruction in countries that are oceans away. Worlds you've never seen and likely never will. It lingers there until you must pull yourself back to reality — well, your reality. Because it’s all reality, isn’t it? And isn’t that terrible?

Then joy comes. It startles you as you're gazing into the eyes of your friend’s baby. It finds you mid-laugh, the kind of laugh that instinctively jerks your head backwards. It spreads throughout your entire body at the touch of a loved one's hand, at the last page of a good book, at the sight of a fluffy little dog. Joy even once found you at a funeral as you scanned the room of grievers. It whispered in your ear, ‘Wow... to be loved this deeply even in death.’

Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense. How could you be happy in a world like this? How couldn’t you be happy?

Joy isn't a luxury. Let it find you. Don’t question why it’s there or where it came from even though you spent most of yesterday weeping. Open yourself up, let joy in, and leave the door open. Air out the damp and stuffy space where you store angst and anger about realities you cannot change. I know you call it empathy, but empathy always makes room for joy.

Jesus, another year

Why am I this lucky? Why am I this sad? I'm not the type to cry on my birthday. I'm the type to stare at myself in the mirror and pinch my skin and try to catch my reflection through peripheral vision to see if I can recognize myself as a teenager, as a child, as whoever I was a year ago. I'm the type to think: Ok, we've been given another year. What did I do to deserve this?

I remember turning thirteen. I was the last of my friends to become a teenager and it was a pretty big deal to me (I always wished I was older). We moved states that year and contrary to how you may think a thirteen year old girl would handle a cross-country move, I loved it. I enjoyed starting new. Touring potential homes with my family and walking the halls of my new school are fond memories. I liked making new friends and it never broke my heart to leave somewhere behind. I still don't attach much sentiment to the homes I've had throughout my life, just the people.

I remember turning sixteen; I waited an entire year to get my license. I hated driving. (I still do.) I had hair extensions and bangs and for a brief stint of that year, a black bob. I painted and decoupaged my bedroom walls with pages torn from old art encyclopedias. I hardly left my room and my parents didn't mind, as long as I was being creative in there.

I don't remember turning eighteen.

I remember turning twenty-three because it was the first year in a long time that nobody died. And every year since, I've taken a tally of who's left and thank the universe that they're still here. My stark awareness of the mortality of everyone I love tends to butt its head into every single one of my birthdays. I've heard time moves faster once you have children. And people wonder why I'm in no hurry to become a mother...

Ok, we've been given another year. What shall I do with it?

Lingering

I now understand why it took my parents 30 minutes after church to finally put on their coats and say goodbye to their friends, why they’d linger in the doorway after they’d already told me goodnight. Oh, 12-year-old Amy, linger with them. Eat at the table. Let the food get cold in the name of good conversation. What’s the hurry to say goodnight?

One day you’ll be 21 and you’ll speak to a loved one for the very last time. You’ll replay that conversation for the rest of your life, wishing you’d lingered, wishing you’d waited a few moments longer to say goodbye.

Then you’ll start loving people in a way that never occurred to you as a child. You’ll watch your best friend walk down the aisle and you'll be so happy you can feel the memory burning into your brain in real time. You'll want to pause the wedding so you can collect more details. You’ll get lunch with a friend who’s going through a hard time, and as you warm up in your car after saying goodbye, you watch her hustle across the parking lot in the cold. Her hair blowing in her face, her eyes tired, her hands fumbling through her purse, and she's so beautiful and strong. You’ll want to get out of the car to hug her and tell her again: I’m here for you, I love you.

Then your dad will be on a roadtrip, or your husband will be on an airplane, or your sister will be out drinking with friends and your brain can’t stop swirling with the thought of something terrible happening. Like a scab you’re not supposed to pick but you can’t help it and suddenly the worst case scenario is playing out in your head and you can’t stop the hemorrhaging. They'll get home safely and during your next conversation you'll take in every syllable of every word they say.

12-year-old Amy, you will often think about all the moments you missed because you were in such a hurry to get home, to get to your room, to get out of the house, to get older… you’ll wish you let people hold your hand. You’ll realize the days are actually so short, but people are so lovely. One more round, ten more minutes, I don’t have to leave quite yet, I love you, you know that? And then you’ll linger when it’s time to say goodbye.

Existentialism

A few weeks ago, I sat up all night petrified that I was going to die by morning. My frantic thoughts and baseless fears compounded on top of each other and by the time I peeled back all the layers of adrenaline, morning had come and I hadn’t died. I didn’t even know panic attacks could manifest that way.

This isn’t my first existential crisis. That wasn’t the first time I’ve grieved versions of myself that slipped out of me without permission. But it was the first time in a long time that my emotional experience metastasized into a physical one, and I spent the last couple of weeks trying to unravel what the hell was happening to me.

I used to be better at pretending. I could fit in anywhere with just about anyone. I could pour myself into somebody until I was empty and find a way to refill for them overnight. I used to have a recurring dream about a burning house, and even though I knew it was empty and about to collapse, I kept running back inside.

I blinked and years have elapsed. I have dreams in which I can sense someone stalking me from miles away. I can hear them enter my home, I can see my bedroom door creak open, and for the life of me, I cannot move. It takes weeks to recover from pouring myself into somebody, and not only can I no longer pretend to be anyone, I don’t even know how to be me sometimes.

There’s a loneliness to moving through life's phases that hardly anyone openly admits. Time moves so fast but the days are so long. How is everyone making such big decisions? What happened to the girl who could do anything? I find comfort in knowing I’ve changed, but my brain tricks me into believing it’s for the worse.

I’ve read that finding joy in the little things is key in overcoming a stint of existentialism. I enjoy the ambient sound of the morning news, the way my dog’s paws smell after a bath, a chilly morning draped in fog, and a red wine so dry it sucks the moisture out of my mouth. I stopped pretending to care about sports and I’ve started saying “no, thanks” to food, plans, or opportunities I know I wouldn’t enjoy. I’ve let go of my crippling, irrational fear of things that I now find beautiful: whales, heights, sharing my bed. When I lie wide awake, untangling anxiety while my husband sleeps next to me, I count his breaths instead of sheep.

None of these little things meant anything to me five or six years ago. So many idiosyncratic parts of who I am have only just developed. How wonderful is that?

You asked what life will look like in ten years...

We’ve had more careers than sexual partners (alright, that’s a bit of an exaggeration) but I’m still not sure we’re in the right place. Your body shuts down at the taste of shellfish, but it’s forgotten all the places he hurt us. We left, by the way. You’ll get to that part soon.

You’ll visit seven countries within four years but won’t come close to learning the languages we swore we'd know by now. You’ll cry sometimes over nothing, but there’s a little angel with four legs who’s been around for a while and she helps. You will move every single year until “home” is an abstract term you’ll assign to whoever you feel most yourself with.

Sometimes your hands won’t feel like they’re yours — they’ve lived too many lives. They’ll communicate with the Deaf, they’ll write a thousand pieces of work, they’ll knead homemade dough and feed people we love, they'll develop early onset carpel tunnel. They’ll grow more vascular, with knuckles like mom’s. They’ll hold rejection letters, books, babies, bouquets, wedding rings, warm hands, cold hands, and a couple sets of dead hands. You’ll look at your palms and try to remember all the interpretations about our deep-set broken lines. It’s probably best we forgot.

I slip into dissociative moments when I can’t believe I’m you and that we made it here. I think you'll like what I've done with us.

Thoughts-dump about death

It’s Sunday, I’m sitting in bed and I’m thinking about death. Every so often I get hit, and I mean hit, with grief so deep that it feels like I can’t inhale enough oxygen with every breath. How is it that my life has just moved on? Time has relentlessly tossed me through love and pain and grief and laughter and guttural sobs and just when I think I’ve come up for air long enough to breathe properly, I’m drug underwater again.

A lot of the time, everything feels mundane. Like I’m stuck between two distinct phases of life. Today it feels like life is running at one hundred miles per hour and I’ve just realized that I’ve been running for awhile and I’m exhausted. How long have I been running like this? I don’t even remember what I was like before loss. Did I worry this much? Were my intrusive thoughts this dark? Did I smile differently? Were my emotions this intense?

I love a lot of dead people. That’s the thought that knocked the wind out of me this morning. I love them deeply and they’re dead and they don’t feel it anymore. I think about them all the time. I miss them all the time and they probably have no idea. Why’d my life get to unfold further without them in it? Fuck, Sam was seventeen years old. My grandma died from a surgery she didn’t even need. Her heart gave up before it had to. Sometimes it feels like my heart is giving up, too. I don’t want to die, but I wish I could be wherever she is. I can still feel her warmth. I can still smell her hair. She was a foot and a half shorter than me, and when we hugged, I would bury my nose in her hair and inhale. Perhaps that was the last time I really breathed.

Grief has a funny way of making me talk to myself. I used to have Sam’s obituary hung on my kitchen wall. I would glance over at him while I cooked. I would ask him where he is and if he’s happy and if it hurts to die and if he knows we still talk about him. I have my grandma’s handwriting tattooed on my arm. I think back to the first time I read her “I love you now and always” signature and how trivial it seemed at the time, but now it’s part of my body. How many “I love you’s” did I hear and forget to engrave into my memories? Why didn’t I love them this hard when they were here? I guess I did. But I obsess over the hours I spent not calling them just to say it. I obsess over the minutes I could’ve spent lingering in their doorways, having one more conversation before I go, taking in the presence of their beating hearts.

I was laying on my grandma’s chest when hers stopped beating. She was scared and I was sobbing and it wasn’t a beautiful ending. She was in the room the day I was brought into this world, and I wonder if she felt the same intensity as I felt in the room the day she left it. Sam died alone in a car. I wonder if he was scared. I wish I could’ve held him, too. I wish I could tell him it was so cold and dark one night that you could almost see the northern lights from the end of the dock and he would have loved to have seen it. Maybe he did. I want to tell my grandma that I’m writing again. She tried convincing me for years to tell my stories, but I didn’t feel inspired until loss opened up a hole where my feelings now pour from. I don’t remember feeling much growing up, but now it’s all I ever do. 

Grief has changed me in many ways. It has made me more cynical. It’s made me funnier, actually. It’s made me love differently … it’s made me love better. I don’t know if heaven is real, but I think wherever my dead relatives are, they’re loving me back through the intense emotions that now constantly explode inside my body.

Grief, that little masochist

Grief doesn’t care what’s on your to-do list. She doesn’t care if you’ve got a busy morning ahead of you. She doesn’t care if it’s your birthday or Christmas morning. In fact, she prefers to visit during the holidays, that little masochist.

She’s come to obliterate your workday, spoil your dinner, run your shower till the hot water’s gone, curl up next to you in bed, and whisper into your ear as many things as she can remember about people you loved.

She's not as pretty as people said she'd be. They said she'd look like love but she looks more like irreverence. She strokes your head while you cry and then shames you for it. Oh come on, don’t be a baby. This isn't our first time.

She watches you distract yourself with books and shows and shallow conversations, and once you think you’ve gotten rid of her, she’s waiting at the foot of your bed. I’m back from the dead again, she says, and I’ve brought along more memories.

And you have to hear her out. And you have to say thank you afterwards. It’s all you’ve got left.

Pulling Strings

I'm always impressed when people say they can recall conversations and events as far back to when they were toddlers. I can remember all the birthdays of people who made even the slightest appearance in my life. I can recall my old girl scout troop number as well as the names of everyone in it. I can even recite the lyrics of the cheers I used to chant from the sidelines of football games in middle school. But I still feel as though there are years missing. So much of my life feels like vague events tied together by vivid flashbacks. Some of these images are burned into my skull like a thick, wax seal, holding in feelings that are too heavy to roam freely throughout my body. The rest pop up like strings: Pull here to remember.

I am young, no idea how young or what time of the year it is, and I am in my aunt’s basement in Ohio. My whole family is downstairs waiting out a tornado. The adults seem calm. It’s obvious that they knew everything was going to be okay. I’m playing it cool on the outside but on the inside I am petrified that we are all about to die.

I am fifteen and I’m working as a barista — my first real job. I’ve just made a cappuccino for an intimidating older man. He takes one sip, looks at me, tosses the full cup in the trash, splashing foamy milk all over the wall, and wordlessly walks out the door. He may as well have punched me.

I am still fifteen and I am at my dad’s office just outside of town. We are watching a set of four tornados touch down in the distance, miles away from us and what appears to be right above where our house sits in town. My mom is at home with Sam and my grandma. Scott is trying to call her but the phone lines have already been sucked up into the storm.

I am sixteen now, on the phone with my parents who are a little over an hour out of town. They need to come home right now. There's an ambulance coming. Scott is laying on the floor, convulsing, drenched in sweat. They get back just in time for his final Grand Mal seizure of the evening. I have my brother’s eyes and my dad’s eyes at the forefront of this memory: one set rolling back into his head, the other welling with tears.

I am eighteen and I’ve just woken up in a stranger’s bed, naked with a rolling headache. A toilet flushes from the other side of the bathroom door and I don’t wait to see who emerges. I’ve already gotten clothed enough to flee the house I didn't recognize, running barefoot down a street I’ve never seen.

I am nineteen and sitting on a paper sheet under buzzing, flourescent lights, worried my parents will be able to see my medical records. I'm not ready to explain that the "nice boy" I brought home for the holidays isn't very nice at all.

I am twenty, then twenty one, then twenty two, then twenty three answering a familiar phone call that is going to obliterate another little chunk of my heart. My recollections of each time I learned someone I love has died are so clear that I could write an entire book series on those sets of 60-second phone calls.

I get these clear, fleeting flashbacks that I replay in my head like a catchy song before they disappear again. Of course I have memories of the fresh air that was breathed into my body when I finally, truly fell in love or the sound of my grandma saying “Amy, look-ey here” whenever she’d place a tricky puzzle piece. Of course my temporal lobe isn’t this damp, musty room where I go to brood, but it seems like my ability to hold onto my most disturbing sensations is the strongest of all. I can’t stop pushing the buttons that force me to re-feel these things over and over again.

Bad memories sprout up like strings that are too tempting not to pull… and pull and pull and pull and pull until my brain is scattered into pieces. I braid the strings together and lay them out in the form of writing so that I can bare to look at them. There are so many now, but I like the way they weave together. Every year they're less tempting to pull.

The Many Faces of Empathy

I used to laugh louder. I would throw my head back and cackle at a joke I’d heard twenty times with not a thought about the sound of my laugh, my double chin or if I was being annoying.

Everything used to move me; the same hummingbirds gathering in my grandma’s garden every morning, an old man sitting in a park with no book, no phone and no companion, just his thoughts and the view in front of him… the news of somebody I’d never even met passing away, the sight of two people reuniting after a long time apart, the sound of a string quartet, the touch of an old, wrinkled hand or the taste of angel food cake covered in strawberries. These could all at one point in my life cover my body in goosebumps. I read once, “you cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness” and it reminded me that around the time all of my difficult experiences stopped feeling nearly as painful, nothing moved me anymore either.

Now every once in a while, I read a line in a book that stops me in my tracks and I reread it until the words stop looking like real words. When I listen to someone as they tell me something tragic, I search their eyes for whether or not their own story still moves them, if their words still feel like real words.

Jokes eventually get less funny. Alone time in the park eventually gets boring. Hummingbirds (and the old woman who put sugar in their feeders) eventually die. And words eventually stop looking like real words when you reread them too many times. I didn’t notice that cynicism had moved into my body until its bags were unpacked and suddenly I was pretending to cry at funerals so I looked as sad as everybody else. We’re all going to die, I’d think to myself, Why do we keep crying over and over again about death? I grieved loved ones by curling inside of myself, wilting into journals and outwardly not feeling anything at all. I didn’t notice I was protecting myself from happiness until my friends started asking permission to hug me and people looked at me with an expression that screamed, Are you even sad?

Something I’ve grown to appreciate now is that people know I won’t cry with them, yet they still come to me for comforting words. Despite the fact that the act of hugging sometimes makes my skin crawl, people love me enough to want to embrace me. I laugh with my husband like I’ve never laughed before because my dark sense of humor amuses him. I’m not actually that cynical at all. I’m just vulnerable differently.  

We don’t have to show empathy or be moved in the same way as anybody else. 

You’re Never the Same after Someone You Love Dies

You’re never the same after somebody you love dies. Almost like how you’re not the same person as you were before your first big love. Something deep within you changes. And when that love wandered off, it might’ve taken a bit of your innocence with it. But death… well death takes a lot more than your innocence. 

You’re never fully happy again after somebody you love dies, which is really sad for kids who experience loss when they’re young. It sounds extreme but it’s true. Of course you’ll experience happiness, belly laughs and those moments when you’re like, ‘Yes! This feeling, this is what being alive should feel like!’ And perhaps for a second you don’t remember that anything ever hurt you. That first big love never wandered off. That person is still alive.

Eventually you snap out of it. You’ll reflect on that moment of ecstasy and think, ‘God, the only thing that could have made that moment better is them. They should have been there for it.’ 

Memories of your first love fade with time, but grief comes back around for every holiday, every birthday, every milestone. You’re in a room full of laughter but you’ve not laughed as openly as you did before they died. You’re cracking jokes but you’re not as effortlessly funny as they were. You’re reading a book that someone recommended and it fucking sucks. It’s so poorly written that it’s comical and the person you lost would have never recommended such a shitty book. You’re saying “I do,” and of course you’re present for that moment but later on you’re in the bathroom, holding your wedding dress while you pee, alone with your thoughts and you get whacked again by grief. The only thing that could have made that moment better is them.

Nothing is the same after somebody you love dies, in fact everything is just a little bit worse. But you have to keep going. You have to tell jokes even if you’re not as funny. You have to laugh even if their impeccably-timed wit is nowhere in the room. You have to keep reading, even if it’s the same book over and over again because at least you know it’s not shitty. You get married and you cry tears of joy because you found a love that won’t wander off with any more pieces of you and even though the person you lost wasn’t there, it is still the best day of your life.

Maybe you have a baby someday. You grow a healthy human with your favorite person but even then, you’ll look into her big, beautiful blue eyes that have hardly seen anything and in your happy moment, the light still flickers. Because fuck, that person really should have been here to see this.

Years down the road you do the mental math and realize you’ve grieved them longer than you knew them. How is it possible that you’ve been half sad, half happy for so much of your life? 

On my especially sad days, I look around for other sad people. They’re everywhere if you look for them. There’s so much loss. So many of us are half sad, half happy at all times. It’s important to try and lead with the happy half and to show compassion to the people who can’t. 

That spark from your youth, ignited by blissful ignorance and the belief that you’re immortal, that spark is never coming back. There’s a shadow lurking behind joy and it’s waiting for its cue to interrupt. You can try to teach it manners, explain to it when and where it’s welcome, if it’s welcome at all. But grief doesn’t fade away the same as memories do.

You’re never the same after somebody you love dies. You’re softer. Or sometimes harder. You’re sadder. Sadder all the time compared to before. But that half sad thing, that whack of grief on your wedding night, the lurking shadow that has a habit of letting itself in without permission, that’s love too. It’s a pretty bleak form of love, but it’s the only kind you have left between you and that person who really should still be here.