Your absence reminds me of the warmth. The pain crashes away and I am the sun. When nighttime comes, I am the darkest side of the moon, raging for the Sun again.
II. The Night Rumi Broke Me Open
Since Mom-mom died, something has been turning in me. Not away from her. Toward something underneath the grief.
It actually started before she died. I was doing somatic work, trying to move the trauma my body had been carrying. What I did not understand then is that the body does not only hold what happened to you. It holds what came before you. The line runs through the tissue. As I cleared space, something older became audible underneath.
She was the crack that let some light in.
Tonight I was reading Rumi. I learned that his greatest work came out of grief. The reed flute in his most famous passage cries because it was cut from the reed bed. The crying is the music. The longing is the love, still connected, just in a different form.
Grief is the longing. The connection is love. That is what I have right now.
I am not claiming to be a Sufi. I have not earned that word and I am not going to wear it.
I am just a man. An ordinary man, filled with love, some of it with nowhere to go.
How awfully beautiful. How beautifully awful. That is the Real.
III. On the Love That Reorganized Me
This love has reorganized who I am. What I believe. What I feel. How my eyes hold vision. The way my lungs can hold air. This love has come inside the darkest parts of me and cleaned out the hurt. This love has reorganized me on a molecular level. It has changed the very atoms holding me together.
IV. The Cracking Open
Something cracked in me. It wasn't a crack like opening a window. No. More violent, more unhinged. It cracked at my very seams. It busted me open, poured me on the ground, and demanded I stand. That is grief, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. What did I do? I stood, because love stood for me, and what is grief but lost love? Love that has lost its place to land.
What if my suffering is meant to change the world, or change somebody's world? What if that is my purpose?
V. April 13, the Afternoon the Pieces Came Through
The longing is not regret, and the belonging is not satisfaction. What could be satisfied in a world without the one who holds our very soul betwixt their fingers, who tickles the very breath we inhale, who speaks our existence into being with a single word?
And to know loss so deeply is to also know love fully. Not a simple "love you too," but "you are my breath, and I cannot survive without you." To know love like this remixes the way the soul is organized in the body. It pleasures the skin without touch. It weakens the voice without asking for sound.
Wild was the heart when its love lost physical form. Unbridled, a raging stallion, too powerful to be held by reins. But also, a quiver of the bottom lip, a silent tear.
What was lost cannot be found. Love does not recycle. It stays in you, right where your life force sits, where the pain was formed, your heart.
It's the steady hand on your knee. It's the hand on the small of your back. It's the way, then not being here, causes an ache so deep, oceans cry. It's a love so profound that when you speak it, the cosmos answers with shooting stars and bursting suns. It's complete oblivion in a righteous container. Love. Grief. God and goddess.
VI. The Barbershop, the Naqib, the Moment of Wholeness
Hiyati, your eyes remind me of the ocean. Tahlee.
And I am whole. The naqib.
At times, in places, for a moment. Some people never get that.
And for a moment, I'm in a place, at a time. I belong.
Maybe that will be something I finally allow myself to own. Sufism. Levantine Arabic. Ya mi usra.
VII. Grief as Mom-mom, the Indigo Note
Writing has probably saved my life.
It gives my thoughts and feelings a place to live without it being inside me, cluttering up the space. Most recently, with my mom-mom dying, I have been writing about Arslan visiting a personification of grief. Wild dark hair, eyes like ice, blue dress.
It dawned on me this morning, as I grieved, that grief meeting Arslan in that room, that was an embodiment of his grandmother. She was ancient, endless to him. Of course she meets him in the chair, in the corner of the room, with the light barely shining in the window, in the blue dress, without spectacle, just certainty. Grief never shames him, never tells him to straighten up. Grief listens. Just like mom-mom did.
There's a song called "Indigo," and anyone who knows me knows I love purple. One of the lines in the song is I used to shine bright like gold, now I'm all indigo. The thing is, indigo is beautiful, but so was gold. Indigo holds depth, wisdom, pain, and what I am learning about this life is, all of them, in their own fucked-up way, are absolutely exquisite.
And she waits, till I'm ready. Blue dress, chair in the corner, wild black hair, tan skin, ice blue eyes.
Zahira, the Origin Myth
Every single morning, I write.
Stories, myths, legends. Because sometimes the pain we carry feels that real, that big. It isn't a tear, it's the vast desert of "not enough." It isn't a longing, it's an ancestral pull.
Grief, hurt, trauma can grow too large to metabolize through ordinary language. So we create myths. Some last generations. Some live only as a family story, a whispered superstition.
My line begins with Zahira. The first Arab mermaid. A powerful en
chantress who loved completely, lost herself in that love, and in one moment of grief-born rage, destroyed the very thing she treasured. Consumed by what she had done, she cast herself into the sea. The Canaanite gods had mercy on her and turned her into a mermaid. What they did not understand is that grief does not need legs to travel. It moves through water. It moves through blood. It arrives in the ones who come after as a pull they cannot name.
Her children did not know her name. They only knew the depth.
I write because it has been my saving grace. It helped me see survival where I only saw pain. It helped me understand that Kevin, Arslan, has always been worthy. He just needed to trek the desert to find that belief.
In that desert he has met his father, ex-lovers, his mother's wounds, his sister's scarcity. He found his husband sovereign in the sand. He danced with his Mom-mom.
He metabolized a lifetime of pain.
Zahira cast herself into the ocean.
He walked out of it.
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