grief was never really a part of my life until fairly recently.

wait that isn’t true i think. grief was much easier to ignore until fairly recently.

i have never been a stranger to loss or disappointment; after all, it is a condition of the human experience. usually any expressions of that were limited to ensure others weren’t too uncomfortable. but that was in the Before Time when there were other things to dull… and to distract.

but now… in The After… 

last last autumn i got my hair done and was looking pretty good. the stylist, hyping me up in the chair, convinced me to go out for the evening to show off her handiwork. i laughed when she whipped the salon cape off of me and asked if i had any plans. she couldn’t be the only one who saw me. i’m not a party girl but i do love live music. i could go out for a one drink. coincidentally, Andy’s was celebrating its opening weekend, so that night, i put on a miniskirt and called an uber to take me there.

the club is pure (late) 70s nostalgia, as if someone had shoved an evening with silk sonic into a blender and let it run on high with the top off. cocktail waitresses in period costume, a dancing James Brown figurine that i recognized from one of my great-auntie’s home bars and of course, a great live band. the pink pincurls were a hit, as my stylist predicted, and i spent all night accepting compliments and politely declining drink offers in between baby sips of mezcal. as the night wound down a woman sidled next to me trying to get the attention of the bartender. i could feel her gaze lingering after i half-smiled, half-glanced at her in greeting. 

“this place is great, isn’t it?” yeah, i agreed. the band was playing Bennie & The Jets and the mezcal was kicking in. oh shit, I love this song. the suede fringe on her jacket tickled my arm as she turned to face me to hear me better. “i love the retro vibe,” she was saying over the singing. “reminds me of the good ole days.”

Hey kids, plug into the faithless

i looked at her more closely, the freckles dappling her face twinkling like stars underneath the disco ball. this mezcal strong as hell. she couldn’t be that much older than me, and i was born well after the essence of the era the club was trying to recapture had dissipated like smoke wafting from an incense burner. but this was just tipsy bar talk between two ladies, and so much of life is just playing along. yeah, i agreed again, this time with a louder voice than i intended. “things were so much simpler back then!” damn lady, i’m trying to hear the music!

We’ll kill the fatted calf tonight, so stick around

“oh my God, right?!” she was giggling and nodding, and then i was nodding and giggling too, both of us agreeing about a time neither of us were even almost alive for. “things were so much different and better back then. everything seems so complicated now!” then the bartender slid her drink in front of her and giving her a white slip of paper and a pen and she was telling me how much she loved my hair again and wishing me a goodnight. 

“hang in there!” i called to her as she slinked away toward the smoking patio, the fringe swaying with her movements. i cringed at myself for saying something so trite even if said in drunken earnest. the band was taking a break now and the mezcal was suddenly souring in my belly. i closed the tab and slipped out of the club into a different uber, ready for the refuge of home.

We shall survive, let us take ourselves along

the hangover gods were merciful the next morning and despite it being an overall decent night, i could not help but be disturbed by my brief interaction with the woman at the bar. on a surface level it was a totally normal, pleasant interaction between two relatively inebriated people in a WeHo nightclub. still, over the following days and weeks, i rolled this feeling around in my head like the grit inside a clamshell.

Where we fight our parents out in the streets

To find who’s right and who’s wrong

as a younger millennial i’m not at all unfamiliar with the constant pop culture nostalgia that’s been sold to the public for the last ten years. i’ve participated in it, in fact, watching my fair share of (unnecessary) sequels and reboots. i’ve observed the arms race acquisition of classic intellectual property by the media conglomerates that could afford it. eventually, like everyone else, i began to wonder: damn, they can’t come up with any new shit?

“they” can. but “they” don’t want to. why risk losing profit over new ideas when we can exploit the “feel-good” of bygone eras (seemingly without diminishing returns), pacifying people and encouraging them to live in a past that no longer exists (or one that they never even experienced themselves!) to avoid coming to terms with a present moment that scares them, and a future that terrifies them even further?

and why do people keep buying this shit?

finally, i realized it. it’s to avoid the grief. well, it’s not all grief. but it mostly is.

as i mentioned before, i’m no stranger to grief, although i think most people associate the emotion with sadness over death. but grief can apply to other things: a broken family, unrealized dreams. and in the After there has been plenty of all of that. the shock of stillness. the discomfort. the pain of realizing what might have been might not ever be. that maybe what was supposedly important actually isn’t.

these things are hard to name. even harder to confront.

and that’s why there’s so much denial. something has changed, things are different, but it’s a mystery as to what or why or how. definitely not who, since none of us have been changed or affected by anything. oh well! let’s just get back to normal. remember the good ole days? buy more. work more. post more. aspire more. look over here! look over there! don’t be still, be busy! isn’t it all so wonderful?

still, the grief is always there, bubbling over in conversation and behavior even if folks don’t intend it to.

***

i’ve always been embarrassed by feeling so deeply. it was always a handicap, something to be mocked for, something wielded against me as a girl (because what could a child know about feelings? and why would a child’s feelings matter anyway?) and then, as a woman, passion is sexy, desirable, dangerous, fun, until it’s inconvenient. so i formed a shell, cliché as it sounds. there’s too much work to do, too many places to go, and no one deserves that part of me anyways. and it worked well, until it didn’t anymore. i will admit i was surprised by this- i had suppressed my own feelings for so long i was shocked when they finally would not be denied or ignored, and when my body just simply collapsed from the exhaustion of trying to hold it all together.

i’ve cried more in the last three years than i have in my entire life. i wept when i learned of my maternal grandfather’s cancer diagnosis, and his death that followed shortly afterward. i wept when my maternal uncle suddenly died a year later. i wept when D’Wayne Wiggins’s death was announced. i wept when news of Assata Shakur’s death spread across social media. i wept when my paternal grandmother also died suddenly. i wept when news of D’Angelo’s death spread on social media too. i wept while watching old National Geographic documentaries on Youtube to distract myself from the near-constant barrage of harrowing headlines, when someone thanked me for holding the elevator door at work. the slick saltiness finally became a nuisance, soaking pillowcases, pooling in my ears and streaming into my hair. it was the grief, of course, but then also bitterness, anger, frustration. 

God, let these tears be watering something. otherwise, what the fuck?

then, it occurred to me that the release was the reward, if i must have one for suffering. and even that was a concession made to my own ego. did i really expect my body to hold in everything while i ran around pretending, lying to myself to please a world that so obviously couldn’t give a damn either way? who was truly being the unreasonable one? was the “strength” i touted so proudly actually strength, or betrayal bound in layers of fucked up delusions?

oh.

so of course i cried some more.

but i’m all cried out now. 

the shell has been fully cracked, and the raw, sticky parts of me have oozed all out and over it. 

i’m a big feely blob, so what? 

i don’t need to be afraid anymore.