''Απλά απαντά μου σε κάτι τελευταίο,
Πιστεύεις έζησες, ή συμβιβάστηκες; ''
I believe we have some choice in who we love. Be it conscious, or unconscious, your mind is a complex hive of everything that happened since the day you were born, up until 10 seconds ago.
If your mother ever breast fed you; if you could tell by the sound of the footsteps outside your door which family member it was;
if you ever lost someone you loved in a violent way; If you were spoon fed love with a fist to the mouth rather than a golden spoon; if you were taught how to tie your shoelaces at thirteen by your aunt so the school kids would stop making fun of you; if you grew up fat and ugly; if your father was always angry and your mother was always silent;
And I learned how to love through my mother.
I learned to bend at the knees when told to do so. How to lower my head in submission. How to say sorry when the hand that hits you demands it so. How to crack my spine open and offer everything my bones had and didn't have, just for a taste of kindness.
I learned how to mimic her bravery, or what I once called bravery,
by how close her hands touched the ground in penance for her existence.
How to apologise when doing nothing wrong. How to carry an imaginary shame that was never once hers to carry, nor was it mine. How to smile with broken teeth; how to sing even though you thought you didn't deserve to have a voice.
And I loved broken men because my mother adored broken men. And she loved broken men because her father was a broken man that she never got the chance to heal; so her tongue was laced with medicine and she shoved it deep into the mouths of men that reeked of poison;
only to discover that, in the process, she had poisoned herself.
You see, grief is not linear. Grief is a circle; grief is an all consuming spiral. It is a pendulum; some days it swings away from you, but what swings back, must always come forward again.
I've spent most of my life familiarizing myself with this emotion. I would be micro-dosing it since my birth, some times without even knowing, until I was old enough to understand the nature of it. Most of it was inherited, passed down from grandmother to mother to child. It grew so large and heavy it weighed on my back like a stone I had no choice but to carry. I had no choice but to migrate it into my character. I had no choice but to learn to wield it like a weapon.
A weapon I turn in, towards myself.
It was inevitable, me repeating history. Me having a tongue like medicine. Me loving the same men my mother loved. The men that looked like my father. The men that looked like her father.
And oh, did I love.
And I would find myself proud. Look how I tear myself up limb from limb in total sacrifice. Look at all this pain my shoulders can carry. How my spine is made of steel. How my bones are made of stone; how they cannot break or shatter under such weight. Look how I smile with all my grief, despite my bleeding gums. Look at the lamb, full of laughter, on its way to slaughter.
Now I am old enough to be honest with myself.
My nervous system has shut down. My racing heart, a standard mechanism in my body. I am afraid of everything, because in the past, everything was to be afraid of. I used to eat grief for breakfast and dinner, and now I've replaced it with a beta blocker.
Where is the bravery, in tearing myself open for hungry dogs that never satisfy?
When will it be my time, to eat, instead of being the meal?
I loved a broken man, and in the process, I've broken myself.
In the beginning, I was the shiny new object. I was the trophy hanged upon his wall. The object of his desires, with no desires of my own. Love measured by how wide my legs and mouth would open. But not wide enough to complain, never that. Wide enough to give but never take. Wide enough to let him consume me; spit me out in a chewed up pulp. It was up to me to re-mould myself into his object of desire by the morning.
What is love, but to consume?
I was obsessed by this ideology. I thought the more I gave, the more I forgave, the more I was,
the more he would whisper into my ear that he loved me.
The more he took, the more he ate, the more I had proof of his want and his love,
And the more the lines blurred between love and conquest,
the more I was happy.
I must have been doing something right! This is how my mother loved. This is how my grandmother loved. I was a girl learning how to manoeuvre this emotion the way I was taught. The history of my lineage. The story my bones held. The knife passed down to me through hands that looked so much like my own.
I've been learning my whole life, how to erase my own identity, to make room for his to fit.
Now I am almost 29 years old. I've yet much to learn, but I did learn this,
You cannot love someone into healing. You cannot shove your medicine tongue down their throat and hope you wont contaminate your mouth with their sickness.
You cannot make pedestals out of the version you think people are.
You cannot survive on leftovers alone.
I've spent years of my life living off of crumbs, and now when the time comes, and a plate full of food is set before me,
I am afraid I might have forgotten how to chew.
How to swallow without feeling guilty.
How to accept without feeling the overwhelming urge to give more than I received.
Late at night, when the world grows quiet and demands nothing of me, I feel the most a peace. My room is dark and my thoughts are loud with light. I think of all the women before me, all the un-seen sacrifices their hollow bones endured. I must learn something from all this grief. I must wield it into a weapon;
A weapon I don't turn into myself, but one I wear like an armour.
I would not allow myself to be a martyr. To die at the hands of greedy men. No amount of flogging myself with desperation will ever gain their love, for that is love, without respect.
'A mans heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It wont bleed. It wont stretch to make room for you.'
----
I used to be proud of all my grief. Wore it like a heart on my shoulder. It was proof that I ever existed, proof that all my sacrifices would pay off in the end. Proof that I had a soul to show. That my mangled and torn up body was proof that I loved, and that I loved deep and well.
Now it sits in between my teeth like a splintered bone I can't take out.
A constant reminder of everything I once had, and everything I once lost,
It's a funny thing to grieve a person who is still alive. And even funnier to grieve the version of that person you thought you had, but never did. And even more funnier to grieve a person who is dead, and even more funnier to grieve the past version of myself;
the one I was before them, the one I was during them, and the one I am now.
I am constantly grieving everything, all at once, the now, the then, the future; I am a deer caught in the headlights. Like looking at a car crash waiting to happen, and not being able to look away.
Grief is funny that way, there exists no time. No yesterday, no tomorrow. Just now. A slow ache.
Just a spiral. A pendulum that swings back and forth.
I feel everything so deeply because everything was once my responsibility. Or so it seemed, at the time.
If I didn't hold tight the very thing that hurt me, then what proof did I even have, that it happened at all?
What did I have to show, for the ruins at my feet?
Now I am learning to un-clench my jaw. To relax my shoulders. To unpack the weight I was holding onto for so many years. It was never mine to carry. It was mine to experience, to love and to hold, to lose and to mourn,
But never mine to carry.
It just was, passing through. the people I loved, the people I lost,
Instead of letting go, I made thrones for them to sit.
That is the root of all my suffering.
