I was watching a man play the cello.
In observing the narrow intersection where no one was paying attention I felt sad that he had no audience. I did not consider my own participation, did not think my listening counted because I did not think I was a real person anymore. I was too heavy with grief. My sadness had rendered me utterly lost to the world, untouchable, and invisible. No one, I thought, was there with me in it. I was trying that summer to figure out when that had ceased, when I had stopped being allowed such precious humane things.
I found the far border of each end. When I last remembered being real and when I first felt outcasted by my grief. There was, however, a large gap between these two points that I couldn’t get closer to. Within the expanse of memory was too much cruelty and carelessness, casual humiliation and belittlement still settling from the person who had caused its void before leaving just as seamlessly. They were gone, and I was gone, and I was waiting on the corner of the street, stuck, like my old heart might hear the sad song playing and return to save me with its hope. I thought my previous heart would bring with it my old self to take me home.
Earlier I had been eating cake in Washington Square Park with a friend. It did not occur to me that I might tell her what was happening to me, how I felt stranded by the real loss that had happened a few weeks before. The loss where something had been and the tangible sight of it. How the place on the ground next to us where the grass had not been pressed down by another body was an obvious vacancy. I thought it would look foolish, to tell her I was gone when really I was sitting right there.
Even if there were words to explain I was embarrassed by both the desolate place that I had viewed my situation and the imaginative quality of its existence. Yes, someone had gone, but there was a sense of grace being allowed for me to regain my balance. I remembered how I used to feel. Once that grace period ended I would look for her, remember how to think that way. I would forget what I had come to know, forget the things I had learned that I did not like knowing. I saw my heart as elastic, it would return to its usual shape, and I would find the weight of it once more.
A duology was being written of my mourning. The story of two separate ideas that really ought to have been one, where loss came in permanent and impermanent editions. I knew that I would never fill the space for the person who had hurt me. That even if they did come back with love again they would be changed and new and unlike who I had known. I did have control over my own loss. I could reverse what had happened, walk backward far enough into the past that I would return to a future carrying the old ideologies of someone who had not experienced what they had in a body that had healed from its wounds.
It was a simple devastating fallacy, that loss could keep continuity. And maybe they were different from each other, my two losses. One tangible, coming accompanied by its intangible counterparts. Yet the threads of their ruin are still woven together, so tightly that it is impossible to lose one without also losing the other. So too, if it were possible, one could not return without the other. Their destiny is bound. I was telling myself a story that didn’t exist, that my grief was a momentary isolation, but really I was in a story that had already happened many times. I had not learned from the heroes of myth, that to rage against fate almost always ensures its arrival.
The sad song ended and I realized that no one was going to take me home. I took a step onto the cobblestone and watched the cello player longer maybe than was polite as he readjusted. He began a new song, but as his hands moved the bow with delicacy he looked over at me and smiled. It did not stop me from my despair, not in that instant at least. I nodded, aware that he could see me, aware of how strange it was to think he could not, and listened to him play as I walked away. I did not think much about his kindness, mostly I tried to guess if the new song felt happy or sad.
It took me weeks to realize I was not coming back. I had been sitting in a room telling someone I was tired, tired of not being who I was before everything happened. Suddenly there were words where words had not been and they nodded along like it made all the sense in the world. When I took stock of what had truly been lost, how real it was, I pressed my palms to my eyes and I sobbed.
I remember thinking about that cello player after I had said everything. As if that moment were the beginning of a thought that had just concluded in that room. The words coming out like something I had known for a long time. Maybe this is simply a trick of memory and hindsight, but if I followed that thought back I feel the beginning of that greater truth. The acknowledgment in a nod at the end of a sad song, which captures a woman so readily it must be indicative of what she was feeling, and says I am here with you. And I feel a kind of love there for him, for the shared community that was made in that instant of someone who might have realized I was lost and was pulling on the tether between us.
It is a finer existence, more real than the one I had before. To see what I could not see that day in the heat of summer. How obvious it is now, the way our grief bridges between us and people are waiting to offer that sweet simple kindness. The realization opens, blooming in the crucial center of my chest where that lost thing had once been. For a moment it feels like it used to, that love and care, to extend my heart with the vulnerability of being seen. Then it vanishes again as it is meant to, because I will spend forever losing the things I once had. Yet its memory really an acknowledgment, that something new and equally precious is willing to take its place.
Last week I watched Zach Braff’s most recent movie A Good Person. I was taken by the great expanse it covered in regard to grief. The communal vs the solitary grieving process. How we help others, how we ask for help, and how we save ourselves. What it means to mourn, what we can mourn. It inspired this impromptu newsletter and I was given the opportunity to talk with Braff on the movie which I would like to share in part with you.
Chloe Williams: I was hoping you could kind of elaborate on, or tell me your thoughts, of grief that is intangible. The kind of loss that happens when we lose the future that we wanted.
Zach Braff: For me, that was one of the most powerful things in the film…I’m just a sucker for lost love, and whether it's familial like the two sisters in Color Purple being separated, or the son in Field of Dreams who only gets one chance to have a catch with his dad. The idea of saying to someone, I don't think this is going to be and I want you to know, first and foremost that I will always grieve that. That just felt like one of the most heartbreaking things someone could say to someone else.
CW: It definitely was, I think the most powerful when I was watching, it was definitely the part that I was most drawn to that really got me thinking about my own piece. I also really loved the shot where it shows the young child in the background and the watch in the foreground. It made me think of, you know, therapy inner child and that healing moment of how ultimately Allison was experiencing this grief with a community but in the end, the thing that got her to this place of healing was the actions that she took by herself.
ZB: Allison has really regressed to a teenage self. She's riding the BMX bike, she's acting like a spoiled brat. She's, you know, in the fetal position on the couch, taking OxyContin and yelling at her mom. And you just made me realize something that's kind of there that I didn't really know is there. But when she is finally at her nadir, on that couch. It's the little boy, the child who very ever so subtly is the one to look at the watch, which brings her at her lowest, childlike self, to have the revelation that the watch is the key. You know what I mean? The watch, her father that she wanted help from, actually can help her.
CW: I think, what was so interesting to me was seeing her go to these meetings, and that definitely helped her get to a point I think in which she was able to, I don’t want to say like, pick yourself up by our bootstraps, but…
ZB: You have to pull yourself back to zero. I mean, all of this acting out and all of the drug use and all of the, the numbing of oneself is all to avoid dealing with the core of the thing. Whatever it is, right? There's a saying that I use a lot that is very impactful. And I sort of meditate on it all the time, which is, “What are you pretending not to know?” And I feel like when I'm in a low point, or when I'm battling my own demons, it makes you go, what is the core of the thing, and you can't really necessarily find that always, but you certainly can't find it on drugs and alcohol, you certainly can't find it when you're in total absolute grief lost in anguish. But when you can, when you can level out a little bit. For her in her case, it's going into a rehab with a set program to detox off the Oxy with medicine, with counselors, with help. She's able to get to the place where she can see what she is pretending not to know.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
such a stunning and beautiful interview ❤️ you are an incredible writer!
I loved this!!! Bravo Chloeinletters❤️ Both you and Zac gave me things to think about