Grief, not my friend, but not entirely my enemy, either. I'm well-acquainted with you. I can be happy, but you're always there, waiting for me to feel tired and then wrapping around me like a comforting blanket. You've been my companion for more than a decade, but perhaps for longer, perhaps ever since my personality truly developed after the first seven years of life in which you are little more than the extension of a parent.
I've come to know you better than any of your counterparts, joyful or sad, mad or fearful. You're not even originating from a death like you are considered, for most, to spring from. It's not much that I've never mourned anyone, but I have been in a constant state of mourning something abstract since I was eleven or twelve.
I can't pinpoint what it is that I've been grieving, only the times when I truly had something to grieve: a hope, a person, a relationship, a dream. It's not my childhood that I mourn, as I disliked being a child because nobody would ever take me seriously. It's not my family unit, as I never felt truly safe within it. My best memories include other kids, never my parents. It's not innocence, as I realized in a recent therapy session that I've never really had it. It's something I cannot pinpoint. Something that always takes me back to the same thing, like a whirlpool: to death. To the death of something, or someone.
I remember that girl back in the spring break of 2009. She was from a faraway land, a couple years my senior, and she and her male bilingual friend were riding at that club where I would ride during the holidays, as opposed to the main one that would see me every Saturday. I remember how beautiful I found her, but how I never really dared get close to her. I remember her turquoise puff jacket, her long brown hair. I even remember her name. Her friend had curly hair and hazel or blue eyes, I'm not sure, but slightly tanned skin. I remember having managed to snap a photo of them but those files have long been lost to accidental deletion.
They were here for a week, I think, and I remember, every day, waiting to see her. To catch a glimpse of her. It would make me so happy.
When one day, neither her friend nor her were to be seen again, I started talking on the Internet about how she died. Some even believed me. I made her a totally different person than she really was in my life. Imagined us as closer, as best friends, not knowing I actually had a crush. Her death was caused by a heart issue which is laughable when we think of preteens, but wasn't that "heart issue" a projection of my own heartache?
I was lying and I knew it, it was routine for me to lie and make up stories on the Internet at that age, starting with posing as an older kid (going from 8 to 12), but it was never to mislead people: it was because I thought nobody would want to talk to an 8 year old, I was feeling bored with children my age, and because I was expressing what I was feeling, although awkwardly: loss, Grief. A death. I never learnt her last name and I don't even really remember her face in detail, so finding her isn't even an option. She may be truly dead today, for all I know.
Creativity, like any other skills, often is clumsy in the beginning, and I believe children who invent elaborate lies like I did have some tremendous creative potential. Especially if, like me, it's not with malicious intentions. I was an online liar up until 13 or so. In a sense I may still be, especially when I keep details about myself ambiguous, hinting at something, but maybe totally misleading you in an effort to obfuscate my traces.
There is one song I still associate with this, as I discovered it right then: "If" from the Korean movie Hong Gil Dong. I never watched it, but many years later, curious about the meaning of the song as I don't speak Korean, I found out that it fit quite well with how I was feeling at the time. Intuition? Universal language of music? Either way, it sums you up perfectly, Grief, as I was just starting to know you. I cannot say if this is the first of your apparitions in my life, but it sure is the most powerful of my earlier days.
It's strange how I never seem to feel Grief after the death of a person. Something must be off with my psyche. I have experienced a few, but none of them, except for the moment when I touched my grandmother's casket, ever seemed to trigger it. It's almost as if I am too used to it, as if I am desensitized, or... maybe another option that makes me question my supposed "goodness" as a person. But the end of a relationship? The death of a pet? An argument with a friend that irremediably tainted our bond, causing it to break forever? Moving to another place? So much of it, of you. The more sudden, the worse. I am often the last to give up her dead. Things seem to stay with me long after everyone else has moved on.
I am a creature of memories. I remember too much, too many things, often in detail, to the point I can recall the green sofa and the bunk bed at two years old, a classroom I went in at four, or a small tropical bungalow I lived in for a short time at six. So is my mother, who's been carrying the grief of my grandfather's death for more than thirty years. I must have heard her life stories a million times, but she always tells them with so many details that I can picture them clearly in my mind.
I wonder if us, "creatures of memories", are more prone to complicated or endless Grief than the average person. Always looking at the past, because the future not only has so far only been a repetition of what you've always known, good or bad, regardless of what you do or hope for, but also because you try your best not to repeat history, all the while people seem focused on the present or on some sort of vision that may or may not materialize, all at the detriment of lessons that they should learn as not to get in a future pickle. They don't seem to attach much importance to little moments that will remain lost in time, to take pictures because they would want a physical (or digital) trace of said moments, or to spend a long time happily, or unhappily, recounting what has already happened. Reflecting endlessly on what could have been, on how things could be today, turning it in your hand like a golden coin.
Blessed is the one who is that carefree, and not haunted by this ever-present Grief even in their happiest moments.