On Grief
November 21, 2025
I’m supposed to be writing a piece about grief for Serena’s zine. I am not sure how to properly write this piece on grief despite it being an emotion I am very familiar with, like an old sad song. I keep ignoring the familiar tune strumming through my brain and body every day. I cannot succumb to it if I am to keep moving.
How can I not grieve? I get on the internet and am bombarded with GLP-1 ads and another celebrity with a new face and another thinkpiece on Substack about said celebrity’s new face and oh lets add a little transphobic quip in too, because apparently this is all their fault somehow. The faces I see at work are taut pulled back and pricked. The woman who serves my latte and orange juice at the breakfast place I frequent has filler and flawless skin. I can’t tell if she’s tired of customer service or can’t move her face. Maybe it’s both. There’s a new ad for an AI necklace companion on the Red Line at the Chicago St stop, did you know that?
It’s times like these that make me wonder how exactly you would react to all of the chaos in the world right now. Maybe it’s always been like this and you saw where it was heading so you had to leave. I imagine the quips you would make about it all. “Thats not Emma Stone, that’s a cyborg” you would say and laugh until you snorted. I imagine what you would think about all of the AI slop there is. I imagine your outrage and how you would react to the genocide in Gaza and everyone around you saying “its not a genocide, the Israeli people have a right to defend themselves.”
I wonder if you may have left at the right time. I know it’s insane to say but honestly, despite imagining little snippets here and there, I truly don’t know how you would react to any of the major events of the past five years. You carried so much grief inside of you, you were full to the brim with it. You tried to empty yourself to carry more and it did not work.
I can carry a lot of grief. So I carry some of yours, I have extra room. Every day though it grows a little more, a grief for something that has been lost in the world. A grief that I hope I grow stronger and stronger to keep carrying. Maybe the world finds what it lost again. Or maybe it disappeared when you left.
