Grief’s bite

[Trigger warning: loss, grief.]

A year ago, I was spending my very last, beautiful and yet heart-wrenching, days together with my European queer ex-lover before they returned to Europe and our relationship, de facto, ended. 

Honestly, during this whole month of July, I haven’t been thinking about this much — not nearly as much as I thought I would. The grief that I feared would hit me hard for all the memories of the intense events from last July both around my father and connected to my European queer ex-lover never materialized. I think the trip to Salt Lake City that helped me reset in June and all the “self-therapy” I’ve been doing in the past couple months along with the sparse but meaningful presence of friends have softened the pain, and the loneliness and grief have been mostly kept at bay. 

But grief, once we experience it, will stay with us forever — it just becomes part of us and will come back to bite unexpectedly. 

It’s biting me today — and maybe not so unexpectedly, given the time of year it is and the fact that yesterday I had dinner with a friend/colleague whom I met through my European queer ex-lover because she collaborates with them on a scientific project, which brought the memories of my European queer ex-lover back more sharply. 

There’s also something else, though, something that is still hard for me to wholly put into words, something that I can feel there as a seed inside me and might grow into yet another “coming out” sometime in the near future. It has to do with my “relationship to relationships”. The seed has been there for as long as I can remember and, in fact, it’s the main reason I started this blog in the first place. But now it’s as if it were getting “newly fertilized” through the book “Ace” by Angela Chen. I’m recognizing so many of my emotions and beliefs in this book and it feels very validating but also scary and somehow makes me see so many of my intimate relationships through a different lens, giving some of my past relationships, including the one with my European queer ex-lover, an even deeper meaning, a stronger importance. And making me question even more sharply, when it comes to close relationships, “Where do I go from here?”