Her Hands His Eyes —Entry 11
This was one of those weeks.
I sat down to write on Tuesday. I opened the photographs. I looked at her face. I looked at his. I waited for the words to come.
They didn’t.
What came instead was grief. Pure and uncomplicated. The kind that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t care what you had planned for the afternoon. I went through half a box of tissues before I gave up trying to write anything at all. I closed the laptop. I just sat with them for a while.
I miss my dad this week. I miss my mama. Not in the abstract way that has become familiar over these months of opening the box. In the immediate way. The way where you reach for the phone before you remember.
I called Chris. We talked for a while. About nothing in particular. About life. About the way some weeks just land on you. That helped more than I can explain.
Then I called Remi.
She is in the middle of exams. She has a boyfriend now — she told me about him with that particular mix of wanting to tell everything and not wanting to tell too much. She is coming over for the weekend and we are going to cook together and I am already looking forward to it more than she knows.
By the time we hung up I was still sad. But I was lighter. Sometimes that is enough.
“Some days you open the box and the story pours out.
Some days the box opens you instead.”
This was one of those weeks. And that is part of the story too.
“The kind of grief that doesn’t ask permission
and doesn’t care what you had planned for the afternoon.”
