disenfranchised grief
It is 0130 hours and i am heavy with a disenfranchised grief that i don't deserve to carry.
today i watched three quarters of a family's lives go up in flames. i watched the flames dance and lick the sky. i watched the ashes fly into the air and it was almost like watching snow except it was searingly hot and a disenfranchised grief was clinging to me like polyester to sweaty skin. i watched two children bow with joss sticks to their father's portrait. i watched them stand listlessly before their father's coffin as monks read out a monotonous drone of ritual song at 2000 hrs. come back in 2 hours, they say, they go take a break and i watch them get up and i see that their skin is dry and grief does not cling to it because they do this at least once a week and it is nothing to them. i watched a wife meander through round tables and plastic chairs and flower arrangements. her husband's friends are there and so are her cousins and aunts and uncles and parents and maybe the last time this permutation of people met in a place with round tables and white silk and flower arrangements was at her wedding, but now she is at her husband's funeral and is left to piece him together with the fragments of himself that everyone there carried a few of. her body is haggard and a faint echo of her husband's body before he died and i wish she would take care of herself. and maybe everyone there is 20 years older than they were at her wedding and my spirit is wrung dry when i see the ice-frosted tips of my grandaunts hair, like blades of grass after a sudden cold snap. a disenfranchised grief i do not deserve to carry latches itself onto me and anger sizzles in my chest because no child ever deserves to carry a grief and loss and confusion and regret this heavy and i wish any ounce of what i feel now could take an ounce off them but i know that's not how grief works and that grief metastasizes like a deadly cancer that does not care about how it is festering elsewhere.
i can't hold up my eyelids nor the sides of my mouth not the grief in my chest and i am at once thinking about how absurd and tiring this is because parallel and magnified cases are happening everyday & everywhere and because this was neither my father nor my husband nor friend nor child nor brother nor. this grief is not for me. it is not for the second cousin who makes her passing appearances on triannual Happy Birthday Skype calls. all sides of my head and throat are constricting and being pushed in on all sides and it makes me sick to think about why bad things happen to good people and how tired i am of living in a world where the clock keeps running and how nothing seems to matter because everything is happening everywhere and all at once. i don't like how we need bad to lead to good and i really wonder if i'd rather forsake all the good if it meant ridding this world of all the bad because it really seems like there is just too much bad that i can do nothing about except intellectualise and exploit for poetry that i type from the comfort of my air-conditioned room in my expat neighbourhood. and then i publish this post and close this tab and open Instagram to scroll myself into the ignorant bliss of chia pudding recipes and 1-for-1 promotions this Saturday and before i know it i am swept away by the next wave of life and desire and dreaming and intellectualising others' problems and i have made no tangible impact aside from hurling these words into the void of the internet. i have the privilege of peeling off this grief and scrolling it away because it is not mine.
It is 0304 hours and i am sick with a disenfranchised grief not because it is disenfranchised and not because it is grief but because i fear i will not carry it for long.