the desire to be dissolved

I am still here — still writing. Well, still attempting to sort through the process of writing (or writing process?) and how I can find the inclination (and desire) to continue moving forward. It hasn’t been as successful or fruitful as it could be; however, I find that my grief over this last month continues to waver and seems to be a veil that looms over me.

Lately I have been reflecting on grief and adjacent sensations that accompany it — longing, pain, trauma, loss, melancholy, mourning. As I mentioned before, I have a habit of rationalizing everything through my academic glasses: how can I propose a language or means of ‘being in’ the world that attempts to resolve or deal with the complications of death and the immense emotions that seem to cling to it? I am still trying researching scholars who grapple with melancholy, mainly critical theory-adjacent literature that writes in a formulaic system that I understand (or that I believe speaks to me best, because it’s what I have spent the last 10+ years writing to).

Scholars like Lowe, Alvarado, Cvetkovich, Muñoz, Hartman, Sharpe, Butler, Eng & Kazanjian, Halberstam, Doyle, Snorton… all whose work reverberate in my own writing, but I still feel inconsolable by the rhythm and reason that undergirds their labor. Scholars that would have had a profound impact on my process previously (and still will, I am sure), and right now they ring hollow.

Lately my journal has been filled with questions like, “Do we ‘move on’? What does ‘moving on’ look like?” and “Is affect theory enough? How/could we create a framework that could generalize those feelings of grief, mourning, loss?” I’m still at this point where I think that our sense of identity is forever altered when we encounter loss — depending on the proximity of that loss to us, it can sharpen those effects to be felt deeper, stronger, and more immediately. I don’t anticipate that many will understand how deep this wound is, how horrendous it feels to live in this “post-” world; ultimately, I have theorized the dilemma of this linguistic modifier (what does it represent and for who is it a productive condition), and I think there’s plenty left that I need to untangle here.

Currently, I am in this space of trying to contextualize my grief, and it feels like we remain permanent fragments amidst these transformative experiences of loss and death. The suggestion here is that our identities are simultaneously broken and complete: not waiting to be restored to a pre-loss wholeness, but existing in a new form that incorporates the rupture itself. A common theoretical paradigm in my disciplinary fields is ‘liminality,’ that transitional in-betweenness state of being. However, I feel that we permanently reside in these borderlands — a permanent dwelling where we repeatedly go back and forth between this unsettled, unstable, but varying state of existence. We can get close to one or the other, but we are forever locked in step with this fluctuating space.

I have found it difficult to identify reasons that will keep me moving forward. I still feel horribly empty, like a part of me has floated away and I am grabbing at the ether for something that will never come back. But I have been trying to practice care in my world so that I can honor the beautiful life we have lost in our world. I read something beautiful from another grieving pet parent who said that it would be unjust to stop living in the world, because then we couldn’t infuse their life back into remembrance somehow. How unfair would it be for me to give up when I still have so much left of Ozilla’s life to bring back into this world? How could I yield such opportunities that would allow her to go unremembered? Remembering that I can keep her alive by talking about her, thinking of her, mourning her, sitting and dwelling with those feelings that are associated with her memories all these years… it’s one thing I have tried to cling to the last month.

I am not moving on; rather, I am moving with my grief. I am moving with this loss as a part of me to keep her alive, to keep her here, to reminisce and remind myself that I was so fortunate to have her in my world and life. I carry this sadness and loss as a part of a reconstructed sense of self and identity; in me, I carry this longing that, someday, I will be reunited with her and the other fur babies in our family that we have lost.

I have plenty that I would like to theorize in conjunction with my personal experiences of grief and loss. I want to examine cultural frameworks surrounding death, as I am critical of this revelation that we might not have the relationship with death and loss that we believe we do. I think the expectation of a ‘healthy’ grieving process or traditions don’t fully acknowledge or articulate the ongoing trauma when dealing with profound loss. ‘Celebrating life’ takes on a different meaning when a life is so brief, premature and shattering.

I’m not quite there yet. I haven’t found the language for it. I just know that today marks the one-month anniversary of our loss and I am still incredibly not okay. I am struggling with this loss and pain and wondering how long I will be wading in this melancholy before it feels like I am no longer drowning. It hurts to know that there was still so much life left for you, and you left us. I wasn’t ready — but I don’t think I would have ever been ready, whether it happened prematurely or ‘right on time.’

We miss you so much, baby love. Our world feels so much smaller, our hearts forever broken. All my future work is my way of keeping you alive and here with me a little bit longer.

I still have posts unpublished but… this feels more important right now. I’m not sure where else I could put it without feeling guilty. I’ll be back to my regular programming as soon as I can stomach it. I didn’t bother to proof this post, either. Apologies.