There's no particular significance to this day that I can think of. I'm just sad after waking from a dream in which my mother was alive again, and in the dream I knew she had a year left. I was so so excited to finally have a chance to show her all I've learned and set up a schedule to spend time with her--to not squander our remaining time. Dream logic.
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I'm thinking of a recent study that suggested that sleep is actually meant to give us time to forget.
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It has been over 8 years, and I'm increasingly embarrassed by the persistence of my grief.
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This is one of the last photos I can find with my mother. We both shied away from photos because we both thought we were too ugly--she was self-conscious about her dark skin & freckles, and I about my weight. I'm 16 here, I've just graduated from high school, and we're on a family trip to China. It's the first time she's been back since her father died about 8 years prior, the first time for me since I was 3. She had been diagnosed with cancer before we left, but I didn't know yet here. She kept this secret the whole trip, and then secretly had her first surgery my first week of college.
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As I dive deeper into the writing community, I find that so many people have similar stories of finding poetry in times of (early) traumatic loss & grief. How is this so common & how are we still so fundamentally alone?
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Edit: Ok now I'm trying to come up with a happy/funny memory from this trip to share instead of being consistently morose. This was one of those Chinese group tours where they take you to a bunch of factories and pretend it's educational. We went to Beijing (pearl factory), Shanghai, Suzhou (silk factory), and Hangzhou. Evan has done a similar tour with his dad, and he also went to the pearl factory. I don't remember the other two factories, but I assure you there was one for each city.
Edit2: I just remembered one of them was a tea farm. Also I'm not sure where the pearl factory was anymore, but there was one.
I wrote this poem at the very end of grad school, and everything about it has been terrifying. But I'm glad it's out in the world now, and I'm glad it found a home in @tin_house, which I've admired from afar for so long. Two years later, I'm still coming to terms with my time in grad school and with loss, but this feels like another step towards something like closure.
I spent a few moments today reflecting on all the people and moments that led to this poem and to this life in its current state, and I cried out of sheer gratitude and awe. There has been so much pain but also so much love and support and beauty, if I just remember to look.
Link to the poem (& give Tin House some love while you're there because they're amazing): https://tinhouse.com/point-at-which-parallel-waves-converge-from-which-diverge/
