Grief Is Power- Essays

A WITCH'S ART

"You are so fucking sweet."

I get this message as the first conversation begins with this digital-human being. It is a text over this dating app I have been on for a while. I do not trust the first time he texts me that he actually wants to text me. But I reply.

For some hazy, fogged up, erotically escalated reason, I dare up to simply use a one minute video call. When he picks, his accent is thick— Greek, he says after I ask where he is from. He tells me I am cute, when I send him photographs of my bare skin, he tells me I am sexy. I smile stupendously, an innocent way I tell myself I am beautiful. But I have never felt that way.

A strange memory flickers when I am told that— one that I have countless times mentioned to my psychotherapist— I was seven, moved to a new house with my parents and brother in a different town. It was almost midnight when I looked in the mirror by the washbasin in the kitchen corridor. My father was in the kitchen, cooking something. For some reason, with neither hate, nor respect, I looked in my own eyes— a bulbous reflection, and called my Dad. I asked him, very clearly, "Do you think I look good?"

"Yes, of course, beta." There was a state-of-fact stern, yet polite, child-like tone in those words, one that didn't settle with me, one that wasn't synonymous to a young boy's mind.

"I don't like it," I replied with a simple yet rue innocence. "I feel I look ugly."

There was a sudden slash of cold air in the kitchen upon the release of those specific words. "Why are you saying such nonsense?"

Everything else before and after that moment seems extremely hazy. But that one moment, a very frame of that image of me looking into the mirror and the slight frown on my smiling face thinking what I had seen remains imprinted, unshakably.

Perhaps the most peculiar part of that memory is that I can never really put my finger on whether it is a good or a bad memory (as if to say there is no particularity to it).

While this memory remains a trigger, and weeks roll by, it becomes clear that there is not enough matter for either of us to stay put. If there are days, (blessed, kind, Godful days, which remain extremely rare) he will ask if I am okay. He told me first he is divorced, the next day that he is still married and the divorce is being finalized, that he has a son he loves more than anything in the world, that he is a civil engineer, that he can never ever commit anything to me, that he is extremely discreet and nobody can ever know about him.

I ask and he tells, he loves Netflix, and swimming; he often hit the gymnasium (which explained his erotically thrilling shaped body) but has not been able to do it due to his last project for the past six months. There is an underlying tone in his textual words that feel uninterested, at times, distributed to many others. Even after our talks, he spends more substantial time on the application we first met on that directly speaking to me. He has often come online and been there for hours and never had it in him to text me; until I did.

When I fell ill, I told him I won't be able to make it to our Video Call session at night (which he had not asked about yet). He tells me to sleep off, that my resting is the most important thing. I ask him if I can see his face on a video call for one second. He calls me for five seconds. I melt (like I always do. What is ice to do if leapt into warmth, and not just heat, except melt like a declining candle, slowly but steadily?).

Two weeks in, when I tell him I actually like him, not just sexually, but I care about him, he tells me that I am simply attracted to him. That 'as long as I act normally' he does not care about it. That he has a son whom he wants to be proud of his father. And, for some reason, I confide that thought, as if it is mine, that emotion, because on some idiotic-subconcious level, I understand that emotion, a dreadful one perhaps, one with too much weight, too comfortable under the shadow of that weight. I cannot criticize or objectify. Don't make it drama. His thick accent screams through the text message.

Instead, I begin to sulk. As if not knowing the consequences– that it had been a package deal from the very beginning, and that I had known that. But I still grieve.

Is this some kind of loss? There is a gut-wrenching feeling. And perhaps there is such dread because of how much I have been obsessed with the fact that he told me I was beautiful. You look so good, I want to eat that *****.

How dare he told me that when nobody else has ever done? How dare does he make me feel beautiful, while all my young life I have never once loved the way I have looked?

Every moment between we have ever had some texts or videos exchanged (his gayness only ever comes alive in the night) I have been brimming with a timid cocktail of both giddiness of excitement, and the drought of anxiety. My heart beats faster and harder as evening falls— as soon as the day begins to drown itself, to the point that I feel like my chest would tear open.

Now that I am thinking and tracing it back, I keep thinking what did he like yesterday about me? I may have to do it today as well.

Like this, everyday becomes a ritualistic practice, almost as if a witch casting a rune, bringing to life her art that can either rule or annihilate the reality of her existence. Although, there is no destruction here. The ritual is far from Satanic, but rather more timid. How did I dress? He saw me in shorts yesterday. Perhaps he likes that. He liked my softness and not my rigid, straight forward tone. My smile, did he like my smile? Should I smile more? Should I try to hide what I feel, or would he like it?

The thing about a ritual like this is that it fails to form a proper routine– for all I have been thinking about is him, how will I even remember what I am doing is from yesterday or the day before?

This grief is penetrating me.

Grief is so weird. I can't make out whether it is covering me or scraping layers off of me.

What kind of loss is this— how can I be nostalgically saddened by something that never was once even mine? Loss is a gravity I guess. It simply just breaks the laws. It doesn't pull one down, it simply pushes one beneath. I guess that's the difference.

Love doesn't die with one love leaving, does it? Love is a presence in the mind. People are lovable. But It's like loving a rose flower more. There could be a garden of dozens of other radiant and more beautiful ones. Yet harmful, yet more beautiful, yet all the love resides in that one flower. What a tragedy it is, the heart pulling itself apart for one single flower. Perhaps that is where justice and injustice draw the line, doesn't it?

But all I feel at this moment is that I could simply blip from existence right now— my hopes have given me too much. It is difficult to repay them.