Some time back, I lost someone who I thought would forever be within reach to me, this statement loosely translates my thoughts on what I really mean. It was one of those situations where you continue loving someone from a distance and you are okay with them not being exclusively in your space because in one way or another, you will almost always see them in specific spaces. After I learned about their death, I realised that I do not know how to mourn, at least when I mirror that against how I have ever watched everyone else around me mourn.
On this day; I watched the sun go down as the waxing crescent moon came up with a heaviness that could not quite be quantified as sadness. I couldn’t cry, which was strange for a girl like me who will cry when they are watching a movie. The days that followed; I walked around with a storm in my head while everything around me felt like quicksand. I kept repeating to myself, “The Lumineers were right, ‘coz if we don’t leave this town, we might never make it out’.”
As I was reading Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, I saw myself transported as far back as that time and also thinking about the many wakes I have held for myself this past year-coincidentally, I completed this book a few days shy of my birthday. Joan creates a story around the death of her husband and how she has to later on navigate through life, for the first time since they got married, without him. The shock, the pretending that life can go on, the going through old things to find traces of him, realising that places were places because of him and that she was ‘her’ because of him.
In the book, Joan repeatedly writes words that her husband, John, kept saying, “more than one more day.” These were words talking about him loving their daughter and her even beyond their understanding. They meant a lot to me because I find myself selfishly and dearly being this lover, “more than one more day.” And so thinking about why I kept repeating those words by The Lumineers, leaving the town never has to be physical. The whole idea of allowing oneself to feel more than is wildly imaginable to themself is a shift in itself, it is a welcoming of what might never have happened.
After reading Joan Didion, I realise that I will never be a normal mourner, not even for myself, but also, there might never be right way to mourn, for anyone. But for as long as I am a selfish ‘more than one more day’ lover, I will always experience the year of magical thinking when grief calls me to.
Love_+_Light friends
Remember to breathe and stay sane
Miss Kabura 