The Goal Is Not to Miss You Less

What if time does not heal all wounds?

Recently, a friend told me she thought she was doing grief wrong. Said hers has intensified the longer it’s been since Andrea died. Not softened.

Girl, same. It’s been over ten months, and lately I’ve been feeling the thunderous quiet, the viscous absence, the quenchless longing more.

It’s arrived in strange ways. Suddenly I have a rock collection. And all my plants have names. I’ve acquired these odd, domestic hobbies I’m only now realizing are maybe metaphors. Tiny gestures toward proof, perhaps, that the world still belongs to me. Or that I still belong to it.

From left to right: Manhattan, Cowboy, Orecchiette, Starfish, + Rapunzel

I sat with my friend’s comment for a moment before saying, “I don’t think that’s the wrong order.”

How many of our phrases meant to balm the burn of death are useless? We’re socialized to hand each other clichés like bandages, but they don’t begin to cover the injury of loss. Half the time, they don’t even stick.

In the realm of bereavement, the idea that things get easier with time is, at best, a fickle truth. From the vantage point of my little corner of the universe, beside Cowboy (my cactus) and Orecchiette (my elephant jade), it makes absolutely no sense at all.

Imagine a world where Andrea was still living. Maybe they were offered a writer’s residency somewhere far away. A place like New Zealand. A continent so distant they’d look up at the night sky and see Orion standing on his head. Wouldn’t one week apart be easier than one year? Wouldn’t there be the comfort of the early days, when the sweet scent of their head still lingered in the thread count of our sheets?

So why, once Andrea was gone, would my longing be expected to shrink with months apart? Why do we assume time magnifies absence for the living, but diminishes it for the dead?

I’ve yet to read the book on loss that lassos my experience into a tidy animal. Maybe because grief is as unique to each person as their fingerprints. Or maybe because we’ve been taught that it is a private, windowless thing, and most grievers don’t let anyone else inside. That’s not the griever’s fault, but the result of a culture that flinches from another’s honest pain. But I’ve never found safety in secrets. Never felt secure with the doors to myself bolted shut. And so, I write.

As I said last month, I’ve returned to poetry lately as a way of connecting to Andrea, and connecting to myself. Poetry feels like the artistic equivalent of walking. You don’t need to drive to the gym, purchase fancy equipment, or wear the right thing for the right class. You don’t need to set up the easel or tune the piano. You just open the door. I’m so grateful I can open it again.

Here’s a poem I wrote a few nights ago about grief sharpening as time goes on, along with a recording of me reading it. After writing by hand, I typically transcribe poems to my computer afterward, where I can revise them. But I didn’t do that this time. The raw emotion was still pulsing through me, and I wanted to capture it in the tiny time capsule of sound.

In the Soup

I’m going to hold your hand when I tell you this:
you know what’s not going to make a single part
of this any better? Time.

I hate cliches but thought at least we could
depend on them for one thing: being true.
Make it make sense. Why would I miss you less now

than I did those first days, in that early psychedelic
shock? When I’d heard your laugh so recently
the echo of it could still cling to a corner

of our yard? I ache for your arms more
now that it’s been so long
since you’ve had arms.

I’m not a mathematician but
love + distance x # of days
is a lonely equation.

“I can only hold my own hand when I tell me this…”
is what I should have said. The list of things
I should have said is a rusty bucket of thorns.

If I’d said, “Baby, it is not okay to let go,”
would you have cleared the tumors
from your lungs

the way you cleared the ice
from my windshield
so I could see the road before me?

So I could get to where I was going
safely? If I had said the opposite of what I did,
“Look around. None of us are going to be okay.

We will not survive this”
would you have breathed
another selfless year?

I know, I know, that’s not how it works.
But I don’t know how anything works.
An engineer of nothing, playing MadLibs

trying to wrangle the right verb:
time _________s all wounds.
Time sucker-punches all wounds.

Time ferments all wounds.
Time wounds all wounds.
Time, I am mad at time.

I am so lucky
I still have time.
Time to write

bad poems. Time to hurt
and hyperventilate.
Time to waste

and hate myself
for wasting. Time to defenestrate
time. Time to be a snob

about language. Time to realize
the goal is not to miss you less,
but to find you more.

To cut through the concrete and molasses
of my limited, left-brain humanness.

To remember the river
we’re both still bathing in.

Call it gross, but I still haven’t drained
the hot tub water, because I like to imagine

I’m still in the soup
with your skin. Must be nice

for you now without the confines
of a caging mind

that believes the borders
of the bathtub could contain us.

You, now, touching me infinitely
and kissing me everywhere,

just like you always said
you wanted.

---

always.

Once more, I am feeling eternally grateful for poetry, an art form Andrea and I both semi-randomly stumbled into, yet somehow were always destined for. The artform through which we found each other. The art form through which we still do.

Love

Meg [& Andrea Forever]

P.S. Sweet Community, I’m curious to play a little Mad Libs: what do you think time does to our wounds?

Here are some current & upcoming offerings & lanterns:

- The film “Love Letter from the Afterlife" — Andrea Gibson’s final performance” will premiere at Red Rocks Amphitheater on July 5th, with The Colorado Symphony. Featuring performances by Megan Falley, Sara Bareilles, and Chris Pureka. Limited tickets left!

- Now, with every purchase of one of Andrea or my books via the Andrea Gibson Official website, a beautiful print/postcard of Andrea will be tucked inside. Thank you for supporting independent, queer/woman-owned booksellers and businesses.

artists > amazon

- I recently did an interview with Jane Ratcliffe. You can read parts I & II. Part III will be released soon.

- Our Academy Award-nominated documentary, “Come See Me in the Good Light”, has won a Peabody Award. If you haven’t watched it yet, you can now on Apple TV+. I promise, it doesn’t suck.