Some losses that do not merely bereave—they denude. They strip from you the very faculties through which the anguish transmuted once into something luminous, leaving in their stead an inner quietude so profound it borders on erasure.
I have dwelt within that quietude. I have tried learning its contours, its particular hollowness, and even how it mimics peace until you are no longer certain of the distinction. It is so exacting in its excavations for it does not pillage indiscriminately: it locates and takes up a long and unhurried residence.
The writing was among the first to be subsumed.
I did not mourn it then because I had greater absences to reckon with.
I do not know yet what reconstitutes in the aftermath of such a heavy season. But I find myself here, among these familiar corridors, with the tenderness one reserves for places that once held them at their most alive.
And I find that the finding is, for now, sufficient.
I hope you are all well. I hope the words I put out into the world a long time ago have been more merciful to you than they were to me, for a time.
