My grief is a malignant disease.
Its parasitic tendrils lurk beneath my skin, scrabbling at my flesh—tearing —seeping into my blood until it floods the yawning cavern of my chest. The gaping hole in my heart screams as excruciation comes and goes ceaselessly like the tide crashing into unyielding rocks that remain rigid despite their exposure to the ruthless elements. I am familiar with such injustice. I understand the bitterness of the sea; the petulance of the somber, airy, anvil-like clouds; the astringency of the drumming rain that pours relentlessly despite the mournful silence of the hauntingly still trees. And my understanding has festered into incessant anguish that offers no respite from this prison.
“Why must you scorn me like this? Forgive me!”
My musings are shattered by the distant wailing of a girl, cutting through the storm within, a distant echo of my own despair. Yet no tide retreats; no tendril relents. Her cries are swallowed by the sea, just as mine have been — meaningless against the unyielding rocks, the emotionless void.
This noise — I know it well. It is a sound I have known since the day she first drew breath, her cries woven into the very fabric of my being. My daughter. I pause, the needle in my hand frozen above the wedding veil draped haphazardly over my lap in the haste to complete the delicate embroidery. I tell myself she is fine. I tell myself her grief will pass, as all grief does. What
comfort could I offer her that I haven’t tried to offer myself?
And so, the cycle turns, merciless and eternal. This is what anchors me to the hellish present. The tide will crash. The tendrils will claw. So, with reluctant resolve, I turn from the sound, the weight of the action pressing heavy on my mind.
There is an old tale, one that is stitched from mother to daughter, thread by thread, across generations. It is said in hushed tones among us women, somewhere far from here, women are free to stand tall, considering it ludicrous to bow their heads in submission. My mother was a victim of this fable and sought for me to inherit her naivety.
I was young—young enough to believe her when she cradled my dirt-streaked palms, the grime as dark as tar beneath my chipped nails. Her trembling fingers caressed the contours of my sun- kissed cheeks, her words soft and fleeting as they embraced my mind. She wove it into the fabric of my thoughts, a thread of hope embroidered onto a tapestry of decay. She promised me this land, this paradise far from the rot of our world, and I clung to it like acrid salt from the sea clinging to the necrotic skin of a lost sailor.
But as I stumbled from a sheltered infancy into an isolated adolescence, my mother’s courage waned. Time stole from her as she grew old, and older still, until the hope she once spoke of faded like tattered cloth into the folds of her weary face. She always kept a mask of dignity, a paragon of diligent labour, despite the purple shadows marring her eyes (trophies of sleepless nights). Yet her story lingered, plastered into my memory like a bloodstain on a chalky wall, impossible to scrub away.
Now, as I gently draw the needle through my daughter’s veil (a mark of a blessed union, but to me, a symbol of her shroud), I see this fable for what it was: a well-woven lie. A canard told by a wily storyteller who ignored the fraying edges of the tale, its loose ends unravelling into a darker truth. The conclusion to such stories is always the same: the sun sets in bloodstained strokes, painting silhouettes of men who stumble toward women with hungry grins: their eyes glinting with hubris; their stance predatory; and their hands stained with sins.
These storytellers overlook how the skies weep as a young girl, her skin unblemished and her spirit unbroken, is deemed “blessed” (God-touched, they mutter joyfully). How when she dares to spy greater things beyond the horizon, beyond her husband’s unyielding, ubiquitous stare, their whispers sharpen into hisses (godless, they whisper harshly, as her hopeful gaze burns and blisters them like an unholy flame).
My grief is a disease. And it is not benign, nor is it quiet. It is a storm of resentment, each drop a memory of all I’ve been denied. Each breath feeds the rot that gnaws away at the life I once imagined — the life I may have sewn together with more defiant hands. Each languid, anticipatory heartbeat tightens the tendrils coiling around my ribs, but I refuse. I refuse for her to inherit this grief. I will not permit her to wear the same chains that have bound me.
The needle falls soundlessly from my tentative fingers as I grip the edge of the veil that would have adorned her. The act feels sacrilegious but appears natural when it unravels at my touch, the thread pooling at my feet like spilled blood, faith blossoming like magnificent carnations as footsteps falter near the door, her presence a quiet weight, like the stillness that lingers after a storm’s first gust — fragile yet undeniable. It fills the room, pressing against me with a force that is both tender and unbearable as her name rises to my lips like the first light of dawn.
“Hope.”
She watches me hunch, like a wishbone, over the ruined fabric, silence stretching between us. The veil is undone, the storm has passed, and from its rain, something new begins to bloom.
“You will not grieve like I have grieved, child. I promise.”
Her name is a thread that has endured, unbroken, through the endless tearing of my soul. She will not be my grief; she will be the defiance that rose in its wake.
And for the first time in what feels like an eternity, I let myself believe in her name.