“On distance swims between two islands, I would sometimes stop mid-course to look around. To find myself equidistant between two points gave me the funniest feeling. To think that back on dry land people were going about business as usual was pretty peculiar too. Unsettling, that society could go on perfectly well without me.” – Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

This is 0237hrs wishcrys speaking.

I don’t have all the right words to express my insides, but I am going to try.

I am trying to work out why it is important to write about grief, in grief, with grief as a way of making sense of my world.

I am a writer, and words are very important to me.

This is not about my thesis. It is due in 36 days, so I understand how the slightest semblance of negative emotion I exhibit tends to be attributed to the routine stresses and pressures associated with this rite of passage. I also realize that I myself have been steering all recent conversations towards this big finish.

But there are other words that are more difficult to get out of my system.

I don’t know how to grasp the concept of finality, and I don’t know how to think about loss without breaking down and losing all my words. My auto-pilot grief mechanism has been falling apart in recent days and I no longer find myself able to compartmentalize sorrow in order to be productive, to function, to do life.

I don’t understand why I am allocating time to stand in line to pay for lunch, or obsess over commas and colons and quotation marks in my thesis, or lay in bed and try to sleep, when someone I love very much is grappling with life and death.

I feel stupid and guilty when I some times allow myself to accidentally lapse into a space where I imagine a life after. I think about how I wouldn’t know how to wake up in the morning, how to get out of bed, how to be a person, how to fall asleep.

I want to reject all this pessimism, and have faith and hope and belief. So I try to write about writing about grief to figure out how to get to there.

On the one hand, the process helps me think through a difficult situation with concepts and vehicles that are familiar and comforting to me.

On the other hand, I feel like my fears only become real the moment I give them a name. And words are so important, finite, and enduring.

As always, I know futureme will look back on present/pastme and feel encouraged for having overcome these documented struggles. And with words, I romanticise the present in the now, I archive a snippet of time, as opposed to recounting through hyper-nostalgic lenses.

But using words to describe my insides, to visibilise these insides in ink on paper, in pixels on a screen is so intimate and vulnerable.

Some times I pretend to be brave and try to tell myself that visibilising vulnerability mobilises a community who will have your back.

But I also value the self-reflexivity and intimacy in grieving alone and calibrating my insides before I go back into the world.

I need to think more about thinking about grief to figure out how to get to there.

My name is wishcrys. I am a writer, and words are very important to me. But I seem to be running out of words of late.