Losing in Love

on the privilege of loss and the inability to grieve.

I am always losing… I feel like such a loser. Not in the way the word loser means but during an attempt at vulnerability with my past lover over the phone this are the words i employed to articulate my feelings of loss and grief

On my mind at the time were the three people I know that have passed away this year, first a forty something year old man that hoisted me on his shoulders when I was five and flew an imaginary airplanes, while I laughed from my belly and got dizzy. He died in a hospital bed on New Year’s Eve. The second a stranger to myself but was a woman that knew my mother before she was my mother. When she was a girl and the sun rose and set to her whims, stage four pancreatic cancer that she found out she had in January this year, I didn’t see her see, I never saw her outside of photographs but this loss has plunged my heart and I refuse to stop weeping for this woman that I have not known, the third is a distant cousin, five months old who died in the arms of her mother on a Wednesday evening, they weren’t sure of the name yet.

I haven’t told anyone about my loss (es) or the feelings that come with it, not even my closest friends before this conversation. I have contemplated it but all I would get are the same I’m sorry’s and you’ll be fine everyone at the funeral says: accompanied by the ‘look’ and that just makes me angry. I don’t think it would ease any of my pain and give me any sense of hope; I don’t know that it will make me feel less alone. If I was being completely honest about why I held this information hostage I would say that I do not want to cry after I say that they’re dead; I don’t want to acknowledge what it means to lose. That I am incapable of being vulnerable.

Vulnerability is described as the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed either physically or emotionally.

I did not know it then but my invulnerability imbued every aspect of my life, subconsciously I put all my love in a vault and decided that if I had none to give no one would ever hurt me and I would never feel at a loss. I resorted to give my love, care and attention in doses. A modicum of crumbs every once in a while, leveraged it, a foot and an arm out the door of every relationship and interaction, investing close to nothing so I remained a stranger to everyone, even myself. I thought I could escape loneliness and grief in this way that I would be indestructible. Running on the assumption that my grief stopped when I withheld it, set it apart from myself, convincing myself that if I didn’t care to feel it then it should dissipate.

I had cajoled myself into believing the more I shared the more I’d risk losing so all I did for nearly two decades is lie about who I was, who and what I loved: measured out my love and attention: what I would willingly give out and all that I would withhold. The result of this was an overwhelming solitariness that caused me to disregard human affection while longing for the same.

All my grief like tides after moon rise crash on shore with all the dead people I can’t give my love and I don’t feel justified to grieve: that I can attend funerals and remain impassive. That I remain trapped in a confinement of my own orchestration. Loss must be felt , delayed or otherwise and you can turn ugly inside and out if all you do is sit on it and let it turn around in your heart, your soul. In my case it tends to linger once it’s arrived, demanding attention slowly, clawing at the red about me then finally an eruption that comes out as a high-pitched sound and sharp breaths with a river that doesn’t seem to run dry on the other end of the satellite. I am always losing; you are still everywhere and nowhere at all.

You don’t ever get over loss especially when you are eschewing from it. It creeps up on you still in the beginning of chore, the middle of a dream that has nothing to do with you. The scent of a stranger, the responsibility of care I owe to myself. The end of a book about ghosts and love. It must find a way out and if not, it will make a home of you, belong to you, and convince you that it is all you have, all you will ever have. I have been ignoring my loss and this ( writing) is one of many attempts to navigate this. allow myself to feel. I don’t want to be an ugly person, I want to be vulnerable, weep in the arms of a friend and trust that their arms are tender enough to hold me gently, lull me to sleep, I will not fall apart and die if I talk about it, if I am honest, contrary to my belief

Yes, you are alive….your heart is beating, it is beating because of love, your heart is breaking so you are alive.