There is a point where reality ends and abstraction begins. 

My writing has always been based in reality, in the events of my own life and my own thoughts and feelings about those events. That is what I know, that is what I write. 

Yet the limits of this occurred to me last night.

FICTION AS REALITY

While watching a film, I found myself repeatedly wanting to press pause on certain scenes and write them. I wanted to step inside of the characters and tell you their stories, their realities. They were not my stories, but they might as well have been. And that, I have learned, is how fiction works. That is not you, that is not your life, but it might as well be.

Fiction is not a fakery as I used to believe, but rather an abstract expression of reality. Our reality. When you read or write stories, you get to move beyond the limits of your own experience and imagine someone else’s. It unlocks whole new worlds.

For example, when I saw the scene of two men standing next to each other in an empty museum in Paris, admiring art, admiring each other, I imagined one of them would tell you this about it:

It was silent, empty, serene. It was art. It was everything you would ever need to feel real. To feel alive. To feel like something, anything, more than a worker, a tenant, a chaotic bundle of cells just trying to survive according to the laws of a society. To stand in front of great art is to witness the real, aching, bleeding truth of it all. The humanity. The pain. The love and the loss of that love. Life, and the loss of it. We are all losing life every day. But it’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Half empty, or half full? With each passing day, do you gain life, gain experience, or watch it slip away?

These are the real things, the things that matter, the things that we don’t have time to think about until it is too late. Art is not indulgent, it’s air. It’s food. It’s nourishment in a world that makes it far too easy to starve.

Standing there with him was like being fed. I could feel my cells dance as they remembered what it felt like to function.

GOOD GRIEF

The movie, if you were wondering, was Good Grief, directed by Dan Levy. In short, it tells the story of a man navigating his grief in the wake of his husband’s tragic death. But really, it is an ode to subtle moments of beauty that we find in the lonely abyss that is any loss, and how eventually, slowly, those moments add up to something beautiful. Something we can hold in our hands and know that we walked through fire to possess.

And then it struck me, why I am so consistently drawn to books, films, and photographs that catalog loss.

Everything I write, I owe to grief.

Didion said it best when she explained that children who are drawn to journals are children who possess an unnatural presentiment of loss. I felt that presentiment very early in life for reasons that were not clear. People were not dying, but moments were, and I remember feeling the weight of that even as a child.

If you flip through my old journals from elementary and middle school, they are saturated with grief. It drips off the pages and pools at your feet.

I distinctly remember the transition from childhood to early adolescence as a tumultuous wave of loss that I used to sit outside for hours writing about. I wrote about the sadness I felt over not being interested in dolls anymore and the utter heartbreak that accompanied losing the ability to play pretend.

Something was slipping away and while I knew almost nothing yet, I did know that it was something that was never coming back. Not like that. Not like it was. The colorful world of my childhood was turning cold and gray like a gravestone to which I brought flowers.

LOSS AT A MUSE

As the years unfolded and the journals stacked up, loss remained the constant to them all.

I mourned friends, schools, activities that no longer interested me. At some point it became more abstract and I began to mourn selves, opinions, and old beliefs. Then high school, adolescence, college. The life I thought I would live, and the process of falling in love with the one I actually did. Boys. Cups of coffee. Terrible jobs. The ability to not know how many calories are in one tablespoon of butter. Really gorgeous men in super markets and cute babies who are going to grow up to lose their own things, but the same things.

So I wrote, and I write, about loss. No matter how small, no matter how big, it is the edge in which I sharpen my words against, the one we all have scars from. Open, bleeding wounds from.

It all, to my understanding, comes from loss and the unshakable desire to combat erasure, evaporation, with ink stained pages of babbling prose that maybe, just maybe, might give the world something to show for the thing that was you. It is, at best, a futile attempt at concocting permanence. But also, a beautiful, if not vital, exercise in honoring grief, not running from it.

Because grief is not such a rare thing. It is not reserved for funerals and hospital corridors. It’s everywhere, all the time. Everywhere that there is love and life, there too is grief. The existence of one is only ever holding the hand of the other, pulling it right along.

OBJECTS NOT SO PERMANENT

Which is also why I love the title of that film. Good Grief, or grief as good. Grief as the passageway to understanding and appreciating anything at all.

When we are young, lacking object permanence, our brains panic when something vanishes from our sight. Our mother leaves the room and we think she has died. You hide the bunny behind your back and we think it is lost forever.

Then, at some point, we learn to believe in things we cannot see. We learn to trust. We learn to dream. And so too, we learn loss. We learn grief. We unlearn the idea of anything being permanent at all and spend the rest of our lives navigating the lethal labyrinth of that. If we’re lucky, and I believe this is what Levy was getting at with the film, we meet everything that matters within the disorientation of all of that loss.

We meet who we really are.

Happy Sunday.

Love, m.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)