Yellow flowers from Diwali are still bright in their vases and I wonder if I should press them for Thanksgiving, preserve this moment, but who am I to say how they'd like to be remembered?
I have things to say about the upcoming holidays, things about prison Thanksgivings and quarantine Diwalis, and what it does to your heart to live in a country that can see those things as fundamentally different from holiday solitudes that actually matter. I have things to say about the space where isolation and grief meet and how both can teach us about the other.
I have things to say, but I am recovering.
We're not sure what I'm recovering from, but at least we know the culprit of the major symptoms. It's affordable, reversible, and immediately fixable, and if that magical trifecta of medicine isn't a blessing to be thankful for, I don't know what is. We found out on Friday. I've felt pretty significantly better every day. Perspective is a funny thing. I didn't really understand I was feeling so poorly until I started feeling better.
I have something to say about this, too. The human mind is a land where many opposites live, sometimes right next door. The human mind is a pessimist, is an optimist. It is ailing and thriving at the same time.
Sometimes we lean too heavily on that duality. Sometimes we use the whole sun as an umbrella just so we can pretend its not raining. Sometimes we hide in a raindrop just to pretend there is no storm, just to pretend that we are not the storm.
To clarify: I don't mean to say I'm not sorry if you are heartbroken over a small or solitary Thanksgiving. Grief is grief. It doesn't come in sizes. It only looks smaller when we learn how to put it in the very back of the city. It only feels like it was always small when we build around it.
Perspective is a funny thing.
