Darkness, darkness, enveloping darkness - on grief & hope as dark twins, millennial nostalgia, and what comes next

An unedited stream of consciousness essay hammered out at midnight.

I do my best writing at night. I do my best writing obsessively. I do my best writing with less than 5 tabs open. As I write this, there’s at least 20.

I came of age before Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo, when LiveJournal was the stenographer of record for the internet, when OhNoTheyDidn’t had all the hot gossip on celebs crashing out before camera phones became ubiquitous. I learned to write in public when writing in public meant something different. The audience was smaller and weirder and you could feel them there. There was no GPT, the term ‘shitposting’ did not exist, and I didn’t get a call telling me my mother was in the hospital then either.

I went on a walk yesterday to get groceries and found myself staring into the San Mateo sunset. Credit where credit is due: it was doing the most it could for San Mateo. Pinks and purples dotting the sky, unexpected, really, and thought to myself, once again, everyone you know and love will someday die. I’ve wondered who goes first and how that impacts things. I don’t really want to know. But I make plans. And plans, like grief, are a devious thing to have.

You make the best laid of plans.

You make plans to go about your day.

You make plans to fix and organize what is needed, all the odds and ends.

You make plans, then grief enters the picture.

You get angry, then someone tells you anger is grief disguised and that actually, anger vehemently, triumphantly returns as grief.

You make plans and you write.

You look at your upcoming slate of writing.

You look at the pitch emails you’ve sent, plan to send, planned pitches, planned plans.

You make do with grief. You make do with grief as a process and as a situation and as something nonlinear and as something always there.

You make plans that can’t account for the fact that hope is forward facing but grief is retrospective.

All what-ifs and what could’ve and how to and should’ve and would’ve and all of the things no longer possible.

Hope sets you up. Grief doesn’t announce itself. Grief is honest even in its deviousness with its changing form.

Photo by Danila Perevoshchikov on Unsplash

Grief shows up disguised as anger, as productivity, as the compulsion to write, as the need to clarify for the record. Hope is dangerous because you can see the cliff edge when you walk toward it. Grief is devious because it’s already inside the house pretending to be something else. They are not the same, but they are dark twins of each other.

Grief is just darkness, enveloping darkness contrasted with the utter mundane continuity of life as usual. In surreal parallel they exist. In surreal parallel they juxtapose. In surreal parallel life with grief is the lightness of darkness, enveloping darkness, becoming a newer normal.

With grief, there is this going on and also that huge thing and you just navigate in directions with it weighing you down.

Your head spins. Your head is spinning. Your head will continue spinning, just like everything else, just like the Earth continues spinning. It all continues spinning without or without you.

You reach for the familiar mechanisms to distract yourself after saying you’ll take a pause. Why is that? Because pausing is the most terrifying thing of all. Grief unbounded. Grief unproductive. Grief unbecoming.

Grief spins you and grief strips you. Grief subtracts. It strips the hedging that was barely there to begin with, the audacity of subtracting away patience for other journeys or stories because sometimes, frankly, god, some people are deeply ignorant and proud of it. There is no filler anymore. What’s left is the thing itself. And that thing is honesty.

I’d like to think I do some of my absolute damn best writing when I’m grieving late at night, though that may be an ironic vanity of ignorance itself gloating.

Grief is also transitory, but you can’t build anything if you’re always in transit. Relationships, routine, a life, grief or no grief. But I like being in transit because I also get bored. The woman in the high tower thing sounds romantic but it’s also how people burn out alone. I like being alone probably far too much to give it up entirely. Writing needs input, friction, grief or no grief, there needs to be an impulse. You can’t optimize any good writing for efficiency and if you do, please let me know, as I’ll have another thing to grieve on the Grief Pile along with grief over where to go with grief next.

You make the best of plans. You make do with grief. You make the best of plans knowing the Bay isn’t your place. The Bay is a way-station while you figure it out. Grief just expands this thesis because the superficiality and vanities of the supposedly rational (read: selfish, gloating, devoid) become somehow clearer than ever before in their moral larceny.

You know that about the Bay because you came alive in Paris and some other places at times even when life was a nightmare.

Grief is a devious thing for a woman like me to have. But I have it.