What to do when you don't understand reality:

A guide for the grievers

There are many, many days where I wake up - with the sudden remembering that I exist in a world where I have lost loved ones. It is a jarring realization, it often makes me feel like I don’t even belong in this reality. That this can’t possibly be the reality that belongs to me.

It makes me feel like a foreign body in my own skin. Like nothing in this world is the way that it should be and somehow, I’ve ended up in a place I don’t belong. Because how can I belong to a world that doesn’t have her in it?

Grief is like that. Unsettling and disconcerting. Setting you upside down in new ways, all the time.

So what do you do when you don’t understand the reality live in? What do you do when grief settles in the bottom of your shoes and won’t let you go?

Well, you sing. You sing in the kitchen while you wash the dishes.

And maybe you dance in the hallway, just because you can.

Then you look up at the stars and examine the sweet pinpricks of light with tear-filled eyes.

Listen to the wind whistling over the house and fling open the windows to let it in.

Put your feet in water, any water, and watch the ripples spread away from your body.

Let the earth hold you, let the stars hear you, learn how to belong in this body again and again and again.

This is me, reading my poem Molecular Expansion. I hope it brings a little hope (the thing with feathers) into your heart.

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