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Are.na
dre 🦋
On grief
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solitude as a golden era, Death grief rituals, 🏵 loving / feeling / grieving, and Metabolizing (Ancestral) Grief
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Now i have to remember you for longer than I have known you

Carrying around so many
Stories that aren’t mine
is how I honor you
all of you

I don’t think I’ve learned how to cope with the grief of once knowing someone so intimately that their life was deeply intertwined with mine, that so much of what we did was together and interrelated and shared. And now they are a stranger. Almost completely removed from my life except for the parts of me that are shaped by them. I don’t really know how to make sense of it. They only exist in memories and photos and songs and places. I don’t really know how to cope with their absence other than just accepting it. Living through it and finding ways to make peace. Releasing, shedding, letting go. I don’t know how to understand the passing of time and all the space that exists between us since our paths separated. That space used to be a bridge. That space used to be an opening and entryway and rite of passage for connection. That space used to be the space created by lovers or best friends or whatever we once were. Now it just doesn’t exist. But I find myself trying to reach across it. Sometimes I even try taking a step and I just fall. Fall into empty space. A pool where my grief lives.

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“It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

the famously 'untranslatable' Portuguese word saudade: "'Saudade is the presence of an absence.' A stabbing pain in a phantom limb; a crack that opens up suddenly in the asphalt; the rivers and lakes of Mexico City; sheets after lovemaking."

Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli

"Memory is a tough place. You were there."
Claudia Rankine

people come and go
people come and go
Headless Horseman
Headless Horseman 
Half of Me
Half of Me 
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