Don’t Run Away From Your Hard Day, Let It Remind You What You’re Capable Of
A Death Anniversary: Part II
There are certain days a year when I live in two realities. I feel the strong beat of the present and the faint pulse of 2003 or 2014. On these days, I open my eyes in slow, determined movements. I let the air fill my lungs and remind me that I’m still alive.
I say hello to the elephant that sits on my chest and I ask it what it wants to wear today. As my legs hang over the right side of my bed and my hands go to my knees, I count breaths.
One. Two. Three.
Okay, let’s do that again. Just because I can.
One. Two. Three.
As long as I can breathe, the elephant can stay. I made this decision this morning, when the world started coming in blurry through my tears. I was choosing my battles — there was just not enough energy in me to fight the elephant off because whether I shooed it or didn’t, I would still feel uncomfortable.
So the elephant stayed.
Quiet serpentines through your life in unsuspecting ways. Its call-to-action mumbles in your ear and distracts you from what you’d intend to say out loud. It speaks in between the pauses of actual words and reminds you that it’s okay to exist in it. Not everything needs to be defined, or said out loud.
There are moments that retain purity when words are minimal.
It’s the way you look up to find his eyes on you from across the table. It’s in the way that the frigid wind tickles your nose and reminds you to exhale. When you’re on the train and you see the baby girl slide onto her mother’s lap, your elephant —the world that may be crumbling around you— disappears and the only sound you hear is the soft hum of a good moment.
The Quiet, it tells stories and it reminds you you have stories to tell.
I gravitate towards it on harder days. I piece together sentence after sentence in a feeble attempt to match the novel that each moment of silence brings me. You may find Jesus or a good song sandwiched in between the seconds that felt uncomfortably like minutes. I find peace.
I find a reason-to-be in the people who surround me. I sink into songs that know the lyrics to my life in ways I haven’t been able to put to music yet. I write my way out of my own mind and into the Silence because it’s the one place that the elephant and I can coexist.
I give Silence space and It gives me time.
Time to feel just how powerfully the world is coming down on me, reminding me I can still feel. Time to remember that I’ve dug myself out before and the pieces of the world are as light as a kid’s ball pit, if I center myself just enough.
Time to remember that sometimes the best thing for me isn’t to turn the elephant away, it’s to sit with it long enough to understand why it’s there in the first place.
Mine is there because not having a mom is hard and some mornings it’s harder to wake up to that reality than on others. I struggle with the heaviness it adds to career highlights, to big moments with my boyfriend, to small moments with my nephews.
I struggle with admitting how much it sucks because for so long survival was finding silver linings and it’s a habit that’s hard to unlearn.
I let the elephant stay because I know it won’t stay forever. It’s visiting to remind me that I’m human, that I hurt, that leaning on someone is allowed.
Grief has a multitude of definitions and is experienced, daily, in a magnitude of ways. None less or more real than the way I experienced it today, yesterday or tomorrow. For all the ways it’s different, it’s the same in one way — it’s felt. Whether you let the elephant stay or not.
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I’m the founder of toodamnyoung.com. You can find me talking about mental health, grief and work-life on Living Vulnerably: https://medium.com/living-vulnerably
I also host Creating Espacios, podcast for the next generation of Latina trailblazers.
Follow along as I condense essays into 140 characters: https://twitter.com/vivnunez
