loss.

exactly a month until my birthday, i look back at 23 and think about all the things i've lost: weight, friends, lovers, mentors, self-respect, time. i've lost my pride, i've lost my fire. most of it to a nothing that meant everything. i have to 'let go,' and i'm still trying. but i've never handled loss so poorly before. because i've lost plenty of people: to basements, to drugs, to the ground, to a changed phone number. i channel my energies into distractions, but even those are centered around other people, and i need to start living my life less for others and more for myself. but it's difficult when i have trouble looking in the mirror, averting my eyes from the ugly parts of my skin and bones that feel so unwanted. i keep trying to tell myself that nothing in me is undesirable just because one person rejected you. even if that person was able to tear down so many of your walls. after all, remember your father?

part of me is still in mourning after having finished "this is how you lose her." it makes me think about  the existence of love but a warped kind of love, amidst the world's grotesque imperfections, amidst patriarchy, amidst colonization, where men cannot, nor have the desire to love in any kind of good way. and so you lose them to drugs, to shootings, to illness, to other women. and what you're left with are women who carry too much loss, who are too heavy to be around, much too sad to love.  women who stand strong and spend the rest of their days taking care of grown children, of grandchildren, in hopes that maybe, just maybe their loss does not continue to be a part of a family tradition.