3 years.

Trigger warning: hella grief

Today the energy is different. Yesterday I laid thinking I was resting and recovering from the week’s activities.

My mind may have forgotten.

My aunt texts me. It’s been 3 years since her sister. And I wonder what is it to be an orphaned sibling?

My body understands the weight and the silence. Yesterday I didn’t desire an outing but we did it anyway and everything felt so drawn out — so dysregulating. I didn’t think anything was wrong. Just one of those days were too much and too long collide. And that was my warning. My dullness.

But now the shock hits me again. What hunger can I even feel? At the fullness of loss.

It has been too familiar a feeling to be in grief that loving those present becomes a sense of despair and previously escapism. I struggle to not think of loss. To not be so quiet that I too am forgotten.

What do you do when you lose the listeners of your life?

I breathe. Wiggle my toes. Feel the hunger in my body. Let my eyes shine. Light a candle and keep writing her until I remember her face again.

3 years feels like minutes and decade simultaneously.

I fell ill after. I learned about love and grief during. I learned about gratitude and being loved. I felt fear and guilt and shame. Questioned, everything. Visceral to get haunting calls that remind me of years ago. The recognition of loss. The vicious way it freezes us. My body got riddled with covid — I couldn’t do anything else but grieve for 2 weeks. Broken and pained. on the last day of it was her service.

And in my rage of so many things I realize how little space for a lack of care I had. How much softness I needed and the nuance of it could only be in particular dose and community.

Some of those who held me I don’t hear from any longer. And maybe I don’t know how to hold their grief enough. Perhaps I am not meant to know the container in which the vastness of grief cannot be held for them. But my life is filled with grief glimmers and gratitude because of it.

Loss makes me quieter. Despite my attempts to be warm I often retract. Clumsy around softness.

All this to say here is how I honor Mami Tomasa.

https://open.substack.com/pub/lyszflo/p/grief-as-a-surprising-muse

Wela by Lysz Flo https://open.spotify.com/episode/18trSVuCXYenWJdZyArXkj?si=Fs6gU4R8SOmx09M-4qLQaQ

https://www.lyszflo.com/theobservatory/2024/1/3/proverbs-from-wela

apart from the reminder that I am the altar.

I wanted to write about writing as veneration. Maybe it’ll come later.

But I don’t speak often about the things that happen to me. Often times I am not listening to my own retelling, ask who’s even listening?

For now — an offering for myself in the shape of an overwhelming gratitude to be so uniquely loved.