rife with tragic beginnings

and heroic ends

my days lately feel rife with absence .

I wake up , i make my coffee , i laugh to my mom about how I cried before I got out of bed , i make my breakfast , fluff my pillows and go on about my day like my heart didn’t break somewhere along the way.

when my grandfather died i was eating brownies with my aunt for 6 hours while everybody was crying in the other room . we finished an entire box . I felt sick to my stomach but couldn’t conciously compute it wasn’t just because of what I was eating , it was the sounds of crying I could hear , and the silence of my heart breaking.

this loss arguably softened me like a bruised peach to every blow life threw at me.

the world felt darker, i felt too fragile for it , or too monstrous to live inside it , never belonging - just right , never a round hole making space for a square peg . it’s just how it is. the world doesn’t acommodate to make space for you , you have to fight with everything in you to take up space like you’re not sorry about it.

there was another kind of loss much later which hardened me simply because there was no survival of the weak. when there’s blood sprayed across the halls , you have to be strong enough to clean it up , no matter the metallic-y smell that sits at your throat. that’s just the kind of responsibility you have to shoulder because you feel the weight of the tragedy , as if it never occurred to you , you didn’t have to take the blame or the responsibility of ‘that’ occurring.

i can’t seem to think of one singular day after that event , where the deafeaning sound of my heart breaking didn’t haunt me after.

it course corrected me for others , but it betrayed my inner child.

i became smaller , meek , sacrificial , almost sorry for existing and sorry for wanting mercy.

and now I think of people who stayed for both versions of me along the way, I don’t think they loved me at all actually …

in fact they hated being around me.

they hated how i took on pain like I deserved it or at times wore a shield to a party of lovers. they hated my stupidity , my arrogance , my ignorance and most of all my loyalty to my saddest self.

because they knew they didn’t raise me with pain built in or birth me as a bandaid to pain of their own.

so how come … this destructiveness seems to be the only natural , imminent path i walk down.

no spiritual salvation , no amount of self improvement , begging and course correction could’ve changed what happened.

but what happened wasn’t the tragedy.

the tragedy was who I became after it.

a byproduct of pain. not someone who lives and experiences. but someone who has to survive because there’s constant threat.

when nothing softens the grief , may grief soften me…