I will always love you II

<h4 style="text-align: center;">I will always love you but I cannot look at you</h4><img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/8961.jpg"/>Photo by Negar Nikkhah on Unsplash And then there is the other grief. The one that is harder to name because the person is still alive.Sufjan sings it plainly: I will always love you, but I cannot look at you... I will always love you, but I cannot live with youThere is a particular cruelty in loving someone you can no longer be with. In carrying the full weight of love for a person while simultaneously understanding that their presence in your life is destroying you or them or the space between both of you. This is not the clean grief of death, which at least has the cold mercy of finitude. This is the grief of presence. Passing someone on a street and feeling the full catastrophe of what you were to each other reactivate in your chest for the thirty seconds it takes to walk past them.This love does not go anywhere. <blockquote>That is the thing people miss when they offer the well-meaning but useless consolation that time heals. </blockquote>Sometimes love does not diminish, it just changes address; moves from your shared life into the locked room of your memory, where it lives quietly and permanently. Occasionally, without warning, it opens its door and floods the hallway.I will always love you.Always. It is such an arrogant word and such a true one. Once love has taken root in the specific soil of one specific person, it does not fully uproot. You cannot love someone with your whole self and then simply cease. You can walk away, choose distance or survival. You can do all the necessary, self-protective, sensible things. But always, in the small hours, the songs that catch you off guard, the quiet that falls after a laugh that sounds like theirs, you find that the love is still there. Patient and un-requiring. Like a candle in an empty room. I will always love you Here is what we do not say enough about grief:We are terrible at giving it an exit.We swallow it. We compress it into the daily work of being alive. Showing up to obligations, performing okayness, of answering "I'm fine" with a fluency that deserves an award. We bottle the love that has become grief due to the absence of social permission to pour it out. Grief makes people uncomfortable. Crying in public is still, somehow, considered a disruption. The world offers approximately three weeks of tolerance for visible mourning before it begins to suggest, gently or not, that perhaps you should be further along by now.Sadly, grief does not operate on a schedule. It is not a fever that breaks. It is a reconfiguration; a slow, painful rearrangement of all the internal furniture of a self that organized itself around a person who is no longer here to sit in any of the chairs. The jigsaw puzzle that recalibrates itself at will.And the bottling up. God! the bottling up.The grief that lodges in your sternum at 2am. The tears that come not when you're standing at the graveside, surrounded by the structured permission of a funeral but, three months later when you smell their perfume on a stranger in a store and have to leave the aisle. The way sorrow ambushes you on ordinary Tuesdays. The way a song comes on (a song like Shit Talk), honest and unbearably tender. Boom! Something cracks open and you are curled up on the floor, face in your palms weeping for something that has no clean edges.The tears of grief are not like any other tears. They come from a different place that defies language, thought and the part of you that knows how to perform being human. These tears flow from the source which is the body's memory of the person. The hands that remember holding theirs. The ears that still strain, absurdly, for a voice they know will not come. Eyes blinded by tears, constantly wiped to get a glimpse of one who would never come in their sight no more.The terrible, beautiful truth is that those tears are not weakness, they are testimony.They are the evidence of a love that was real. A testament to the fact that someone mattered enough to unmake you. There is no grief without love and love is the only thing worth grieving for. Every tear, every breathless, ugly, public breakdown, every 2am conversation with a ceiling that doesn't answer back is an act of tribute. An acknowledgment that someone was here. A proof that they sat in your life like a sun in a particular sky and that you were warmer for it and that the world is genuinely colder now that they have gone. Before it becomes grief<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/8962.jpg"/>Photo by Oriol Hausmann on Unsplash I want to say this last thing and I want you to hear it:Tell them.Tell them now. Tell them tonight. Tell them in the middle of an ordinary Wednesday when nothing is happening and there is no occasion. That is exactly what makes it true. Tell them they are irreplaceable. Tell them the specific things. The exact, small, unremarkable things that you love about them. The way they laugh first at their own jokes, a signature way they make coffee, the thing they do with their hands when they're thinking. The way they say your name.We do not know the order of things. Who leaves first? Which conversation will be the last one? Which embrace is the one that has to carry all the weight of all the ones that will never come after it?We move through our loving lives with a kind of reckless confidence that tomorrow exists, that there will be time later to say the difficult, necessary, gorgeous things. We let I love you calcify into habit, into assumption, into the thing we mean but no longer say because we think they already know. Knowing is not enough, what we needed was the saying, the hearing, the moment of two people looking at each other and choosing, explicitly, deliberately, to name what is between them.Love unexpressed has a terrible half-life. It does not disappear but goes underground and transforms into grief before its time, turning into a longing that has no object while the object is still right there. It morphs into the strange ache of loving someone you've been living beside but have stopped really seeing.And then, if we are among the unlucky ones, which is to say, among the loving ones and we lose them. Sadly, the love that had no exit becomes grief that has no floor. It falls and falls through the hollow center of us. We cry in secret, listen to Sufjan Stevens at midnight, talk to photographs and understand, finally, too late, what we should have said.So say it now. Before the love has to become grief to teach you its own value. Before the only way left to love them is to miss them. Don't wait till the love fossilizes inside you and becomes the heaviest thing you carry. The thing you press against your chest in the long years afterSay it! Clumsily, imperfectly, insufficiently, humanly. Say it in all its inadequacy. Say it in the middle of an argument, stop yourself snd say: No. I don't wanna fight at all. I love you. I just love you.Say it while there is still time for them to hear it.That is the only antidote grief ever offers. Not its cure but its prevention. Say it. Shit Talk by Sufjan Stevens is from the album Javelin (2023). Dedicated to Evans Richardson, his partner, who passed away in 2023; the person the album was written for. A love that became grief. A grief that became art. Art that became this.

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