11/2/2026: Mona Lona

11/2/26

I feel powerlessly and never-endingly sad now. I sometimes don’t want to be here and want to be with my mom instead, but she is dead. The death of someone who you loved the most and who loved you the most and saw who you were the most doesn’t feel like anything else. And it’s a very difficult feeling to describe. Now I always feel at sea in my sorrow, and I can’t always keep the sadness from dragging me down to the bottom of the ocean floor where there is no light. I’ve been told so many things so far, like that some of these feelings will never go away. That she is a part of me and we can talk to each other and hear one another, as if we're using otherworldly, two-way radio transceivers powered by love. It’s only been a little over a month since she died. I’ve talked about death with her best friend, with my brother, and my dad. About heaven and God. And how I believe what she believes because it makes me feel closer to her. I don’t want to talk about any of it, and none of it feels real still, but I also think it’s important to talk about. I’ve said that she’s the moon. Every time I see the moon it feels like her. I’ve also said that she is everything that is beautiful in the world; anything I see that’s beautiful is her. 

There’s always a part of me that’s very private, and another that wants to be very open with people in the desire to connect and lessen loneliness. That openness comes from my mom. My mom had a loving grace about her and openness that, among many other inimitable and pulchritudinously transfixing qualities, drew people to her. 

 

Openness, rather than privacy, is much more appealing to me now. But I'm not entirely there yet. My head is still buried in the sand, and I still want to run and hide from the heart I possess now, that's comprised entirely of a lawless melancholy so inhumanly heavy, and with boundless encroachment.  

My life is completely upside down and torn apart. And I haven’t really figured out the way I want to share my experience most honestly with cancer and it killing the person I love the most, and if I even wish to. I have not yet found any words to be enough to fully describe this experience. Maybe, at some point, I will find them. Maybe, though, they will never feel like enough.   

 

My life does not feel real since she died. Even saying she died feels fucked up and doesn’t at all feel like a real thing that I'm saying. It’s like I’m walking through the worst nightmare with no exit.

 

She's my heart and the moment she died it felt like my heart died. 

I can't hug her anymore or kiss her.