New York, USA
I want to clarify: When I say I’m sorry this is happening-- When I say I’m sorry this is happening I am saying I’m sorry this is happening to us It is a catch-all for transmitting a feeling Announcing My insides are knotted, weight, sinking, dragging across the ocean floor; I wanted to know if yours are, too. I want to tell you that for me this season began in death. It waded in a pool of grief, was prefaced by a hospitalization and unraveled in nine days, under the gentle shower of joss paper and the absurdism of a mad-libbed eulogy; I was committing to memory: what it means to share in loss 2,887 CASES how a house settles into emptiness FLIGHTS CANCELLED how your aunt’s voice drops to a whisper 武汉,黄冈,鄂州 ON LOCKDOWN what it feels like to find in a cemetery the granite headstone of a child. Here is grief, derailed by a national epidemic. Here is grief, accompanied by a panicked departure, foul 13-hour-flight breath, friends who don’t know what to say, an airport TV telling me Kobe died, a red-eye that leaves me dry and sad and silent. Weeks pass. You see-- I wanted to give grief tenderness I wanted to do it justice, to be able to say the impossible, selfish thing that what I gave grief in time and energy made the death itself easy, warranted that my grandmother didn’t die in the winter for no reason But grief is elusive, hard to get ahold of, greedy and mute What do you say to grief when it does not speak to you? So I have said nothing and in that time, the great, wide ocean between us has only lengthened, deepened in silence. Silence is the thing I wish I had not inherited. No—I wish that I spoke to grief when it came to me that I laid out its heavy, misshapen souvenirs across my bedroom floor when my bedroom floor was still my bedroom floor when it was not an island, or a piece of driftwood, or a slab of seabed; I wish that I had given it my best shot, if only to prepare for what weight feels like. This season began in death, is growing exponentially in death. Every day I wake and find that I am mourning, find that I did not know grief could cling to brick walls or soak the hardwood floors or swallow our lives whole, that it could leave the thick stench of disinfectant, even if I open all the windows. I also did not know that flowers could still bloom, in grief, and that could be good but it feels bad. So, I’m sorry this is happening. I’m sorry to be crude, like a child, and I’m sorry if the poetry does not surface today; The end of mourning has not come for weeks, will not come for many more, since for grief to listen, there must be space there must be the wide green grass we are free to roam on, and a buoy. I have gone back and counted one by one, all the things I have and could not, for the life of me, find either. Denise Zhou (@dyzhou on Instagram) is a CA-raised, NYC-based filmmaker and writer. www.denisezhou.com
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STAY HOME DIARYan online archive of diary entries by Asian artists and writers, recording our lives from March to April 2020. |