Member-only story
An Inventory of Losses
How do you mourn when you’re still cataloging all you’ve lost? You hold the days you have left, grateful for even having them.
Remember when home was a place you returned to? An unfinished canvas that housed our pots and pans, books and dead plants, dirty sheets and clean clothes? We told ourselves we’d finally get a frame for that picture, and this would be the year we’d no longer be a cactus killer. Our homes were boxes where we landed, not barracks we retreated to in defeat from the world outside our doorstep.
We’ve become hermit crabs trapped in our cramped shells.
Now, we tend to the care and feeding of sourdough starters like they’re small children. We wait for the mail to come. Our phone and laptop screens are proxies for our love. We’ve lost our sense of touch. We play the same movies on repeat because they’re the only certainty — we know how the plot will play out and mouth all the lines, and there’s comfort to that, the knowing. We set off the fire alarms because we can’t gauge the heat. Our homes are gluttonous to to the nines — we tell ourselves we can buy all that we need.
We have all that we’ve ever wanted.
We’re told our homes are the only safe spaces to go, but no one tells you about the loneliness; you…
