Cycles. Grieving. Not Forgetting.
2020. What can’t be said about it? Well, for one, a sense of happiness. The losses of habits, community, and what we thought we needed are one thing. The loss of those we love is another. The first death happened, and I gasped. I kept it to myself and pressed on. When I told people, a few weeks later, the shock hit them . . . a shock for me per se. Mostly, though, there was no acknowledgment. I lost someone, one I had been seeing. On the westside, I moved uptown, and the space and beauty of an apartment were lost as the world froze. As I unpacked my kitchen and posted jokes in a thread about the ice cream truck outside my new place, one of my oldest and closest friends died. Died while we were jesting about the damned ice cream truck. Things that happened with that have stuck with me and soured me. I’ll never mail the letter I had written his wife when it happened, wishing her love and peace. More so, as she is still friends with my mother—of sorts, I guess—and when thin...