Grief

I have this plant I keep giving water almost every week. I never forget, each time I see it, I water it. it became a habit, automatic. today I was somewhere else entirely. I had fallen into my head, and I needed anything to pull me out of my own head. And when I saw the plant today, it was empty. dry in a way I hadn’t seen before. maybe for the first time since I got it. I had been watering it recently. I know I had. but I hadn’t looked at it, not really, in a long time. not stopped to notice it the way I used to. the plant didn’t remind me of itself. it reminded me of everyone. all the ones who are gone now, I started to trace how they left, and every line I followed led back to the same place. I had been present enough to maintain things, present enough to keep the habit, but somewhere along the way I had gone fully inside myself, into that sealed interior where nothing outside can reach me. and in that withdrawal, I let things die slowly. not from cruelty but from absence. maybe you’re still doing the motions, still watering the plants, still showing up in some technical sense. but you’re not there, and people feel that, even when you don’t. and then you come back one day and find the room already empty, the distance already permanent, and nothing you can say accounts for the time you were gone. I was the one that shot on everything I loved. over many moments of not looking, not stopping, not being willing to step outside myself long enough to appreciate what was still alive in front of me. I don’t know what to do with that yet. but I know I keep coming back to the plant. like maybe if I look at it long enough now, something counts.

I miss Abdalwahab.

He used to be the only colorful thing in my grey days. and this Eid I felt his absence, not constantly, but every time your heart tries and search / looking for something familiar and finds nothing there. I was surrounded by people and I’m, and none of it touched the specific place he occupies. that is what frightens me about this kind of missing. it isn’t general loneliness. it is targeted, I can’t search for something, the ache for a particular person that no number of other people can fill the space the left, because they are not a type, they are a person, and there is only one of them.

Oh you don’t have to carry the guilt or to blame yourself for hurting others, they say.

and I smile because I wish that landed somewhere in me. I can’t, my friend. you are looking at me but you are not seeing what I am seeing, and that is not your fault, you were not there, you did not live what I lived, you came into my life somewhere in the middle of the story and missed everything that happened before the page you opened on.

I have observed many stories. friendships. partnerships. families. I have even lived inside some of them. And I noticed something. Relationships rarely die from one dramatic moment. They die from a hidden cancer.

It grows quietly. invisibly. accumulating over years. no one sees it. no one feels it. until one day, it is strong enough to turn love into resentment, and resentment into distance. I gave this cancer a name in February 2022. I called them small black dots. One black dot is harmless. almost invisible.

I keep thinking about this. a deep, returning feeling of longing for my friend Abdalwahab. I keep imagining a scene where we are together again, in the same town where we first met, walking the same streets. I miss him more than I know how to say. he is a missing essential piece, and what I feel when I sit with his absence with this imagination of going back to the places, is something close to grief, for the years we have had to live apart, growing apart in different directions, in different places, while still carrying each other somewhere we don’t talk about enough.