You can try to avoid grief, and push it back, but it remains, fixed, immutable. How you talk to it is about all the control you have, like trying to reason with a drunk.
Focus seems the first casualty when it comes to using technology these days. Whether you're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or your drug, I mean social media, of choice, I feel that we are made to feel that everything should keep coming at us, from notifications (which you can deactivate) to program updates (which you can't) to videos or audio playing on your phone (which you think you can stop ... but you can't) to ads progressively creeping into your apps (which, again, you can't stop, except for after the fact). I read somewhere recently that the most precious thing we can have is our focus and that with our phones, these supercomputers in the palms of our hands, we readily hand over our focus. Sometimes it can be a good thing. Connecting with friends, family or loved. Finding out about something you're passionate about, whether art, music, books or comics. Or maybe you want to keep track of the snowfall today (it's Canada) or the news or something you are f...
Upon returning to the city I live in, when my sister was gone, having died from lung cancer, everything was black. It often still is, but I push back the darkness and try to move through things. I remember distinctly, in late November, getting into my head that I should go for a late-night walk, past a particular red-brick house that was nowhere near my neck of the woods. There was freezing rain earlier that day, and toward midnight, snowdrifts undulated down our street. In the end, glazed-eyed and out of my mind with grief at losing my sister after a grueling autumn, I did not venture out. What would I say if I walked to this house? What would I do? I would still need to walk back in the hellaciously conspiring weather, if I did stop at that front door. I was lost and decided to stay lost at home.
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