We Will Perish

Nothing else has prepared me for this grief the way heartbreak has.

I need you to know that every time I touch pen to paper, light up the screen of my computer with a blank document page, you come to mind. It is always you, and it is never you. I go to sleep alone, because deep within me, I know it is actually me.

I broke my heart a million different ways when I was 15 and came to understand the irreversible nature of pregnancy. My heart broke the day I watched the towers burn, the day my father walked out the door, the day I found this picture of my brother looking like a scared kid- staring at it for hours in my room alone, I cried. I carry the heartbreak of my mother’s fear, the death of her first child, what it means to not understand English in this country. My heart is broken because Lewis died of an overdose, because I got to hold Amaia moments after her birth, because I was holding my father’s hand the moment he died.

What I know is that this moment is unprecedented and also its completely common place. What I know is that all of this has always been true, we just see it more clearly now. Like that scene in that terrible movie that I used to love so much. You can’t un-see the Matrix once you’ve become aware of it. You eventually take the red pill, whether you like it or not.

But it doesn’t even matter, because if we always knew we could lose everything in an instant, we would never land on earth. The mystery that is, has always been and will always be. It is so poignant to be falling for myself again as the world falls apart around us. The word you might use is prescient.

I find that I am trying so hard to hold onto anything familiar, anything solid. And then I laugh, because what a joke, the idea of solid ground. May we never forget that nothing is solid. May we always remember that everything is real, that love comes, and love goes and that we are lucky enough to feel it at the same time in the same place for a fleeting instant.

I need you to hear that my heart is broken because of love. Yes, love broke my heart. You broke my heart, I broke my heart. And here we are, at the end of the world, right at the beginning. Time will pass, rotations around the sun. Our bodies will break. The dogs will perish, the house will rot around us. We will become bones, then dust, then nothing.

We have no choice in the matter, but I need you to hear that I choose you to witness this undoing with.