Heard on social media that somebody I liked from my parents’ church is no longer with us. I didn’t know him, but I always liked him, and this one is hitting me kind of hard. I know that he didn’t always have the easiest time, but I know that he also liked laughing.

It’s hard when you haven’t seen them in a long time, when you don’t know how they’ve been. When you’re going about your day as usual, worrying about small things that don’t matter except that they do, and then you catch a familiar name in the last sentence that anybody wants to hear.

It makes – everything – smaller. Like it matters so much less.

It doesn’t matter whether or not the bread rises. That kind of thing doesn’t matter, when a daughter lost her father or a partner just lost her other half.

It doesn’t matter if I can capture what I’m trying to say in words when somebody else is gone.

Just yesterday I was talking to a cousin and we both said that we hoped that everybody would get through this thing and come out the other side. It was a tough thing to wish for, because of how many people we’ve already lost, because of how much risk there is for the ones we love.

I’m not just talking about covid-19.

Almost a year ago, we stopped gathering together. Being together. Occupying the same space, being near to each other, breathing the same air.

Because we couldn’t.

And there’s been this hope, right, there’s been so much hope that there would be a time when things could go back to some semblance of normal. There’s been this hope that sometime eventually we could all be together again. That maybe we could dance.

But for some of us there won’t be a reunion. There are going to be empty chairs at the table, there are going to be voices missing from the conversations in the kitchen.

There are going to be friends might never speak to each other in the same laughing, companionable way again, because they drifted too far apart when they couldn’t get together, in order to keep one another’s families safe. It’s been a year, and that’s really hard.

But maybe I just don’t have enough faith. And maybe so long as two people are still alive and breathing, there is always hope for a time when they’re laughing together, again.

Still.

After this storm passes, there isn’t going to be any back to normal, and it hurts. So fucking much.

And we have to greive. We have to look that loss in the face. It’s a heavy loss, and it’s a difficult undertaking. But it’s no use pretending that this shit hasn’t gone down.

Sometimes all it takes is a big cry.

Sometimes people heal in other ways.

A short trip to the edge and back. Cat kisses and a bruised knee. New songs, sung by old familiar voices. A favorite pen. Excellent books. The cool side of a pillow. Water on your lips. A character from a video game. The sound of gravel cruching under your feet. Mud between your toes. Birds, crying.

Nobody should ever have had to be alone and greive the loss of knowing that nothing would ever really be the same again. Nobody should ever have had to realize the weight of that loss from a distance, isolated, by themselves.

Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but wait until the bread rises, and worry about small things like whether or not it’s going to or not.

I wish I could hug everyone in the universe, if they were down for that kind of thing.

I wish I could reach out and hold your hand.

But I’m stuck, here, behind a screen. I can be present and here and with you and also not, at the same time, and it’s strange and it does weird things to a human brain that’s used to connecting in person.

I know that someday the ones that are left will be able to step out into the world. And it’ll be different. And we’ll all have scars. But the ones that are left, for a little time, can be together in the sun. And it’ll seem alright.

I hope that you’re doing okay.

I love you.