A draft of a poem shared on Instagram today.
After I lost my mother in 2017, there were moments in which her death would suddenly hit me square in the chest as though I had forgotten about it and only just remembered. The enormity of the loss would come crashing down on me and momentarily stun me into a deep, painful, and long period of silence and withdrawal from my surroundings. The remembrance of my grief was terrible, yes, but it made me think about the moments of oblivion. How long was my forgetfulness? How long did I become unaware of the brutal and final truth that my mother was gone forever? In reality, I think it must have only been a few moments when I became so engrossed in something that I tuned out the world completely and blocked everything except my working memory, focusing only on the task at hand. But in my imagination, that time stretched on and on like the ocean or the horizon. In those moments, my mother was alive and well. In those moments, there was no grief. This is a poem about forgetting and remembering — the cycle of amnesia and pain.
A Representation of Itself
