Elucidating Questions

Saying goodbye is always like breathing out and never breathing back in

Their scent, their voice, their smile, their presence

The air changes

It is never the same again

It always confounded me, the ability for the world around me to go on like nothing had happened

Everything from 9/11 to my sister dying

Seeing life continue was the old definition of queer

Man I wish that word hadn’t been ruined by homophobes, it has a different connotation than weird

It was queer like everything seemed slightly wrong

Like a nightmare come alive

Like, should people not be reacting?

And, granted, with my sister, no one else knew

My grief was simply so great it encapsulated the real world and turned it uncomfortable, and wrong

But I wish we took mourning seriously in this society

I wish we joined in mourning with people when elders died, when young people were lost

I wish it wasn’t at the most one brief mention in the paper

I wish we felt loss like a community

That we understood that every life graced upon this dirt was so precious that any life lost is worth mourning

Yes, even the ones who did terrible things

And I’ll tell you why

A life gone wrong is a life that caused disruption and pain in others

A life that has gone wrong is a mirror of the society that created the person that wanted to go wrong in the first place

We should mourn them

We created them

That is a life lost in a time before their death

It’s hard to watch others go through loss

I never feel like I have enough emotions

Not for lack of them

But if we all went through loss together, maybe we’d remember more people throughout history.

Maybe there wouldn’t be some billion billion lives lost to the sands of time because no one cared

I wish we cared about life