Another Monday waltzes in uninvited, and I greet it with an unapproving eye. I have to be nice to it, though. It holds the fate of my workweek in its hands.
Sighs yet another necessary evil I have to shuffle through in order to stay sane.
No one tells you how hot the dumpster fire is until you’re knee-deep in it, and the caps have lost their cartilage.
The crush’s daughter has a new puppy; a pitbull. She sent me a photo of him lying on the carpeted floor – in deep sleep.
Instantly, I’m in love. It shifted my Monday to a new space – one I could appreciate better. Ace is his name. I joke about being a great aunt.
It was the first day of my co-worker’s absence, and I hadn’t worked through her not being there, but I would now.
I realized the loneliness later as hours ticked by and I had to fill in the holes of spaces that my supervisor sunk herself in.
I am filler, and I am placed everywhere. And everywhere is coming for me.
I wanted to play around with this piece that started off as a rant of sorts for my Substack notes. After putting a bit more of ME into it, the above-written work is the result.
“It’s the one thing, I believe, that makes us human . . . it makes us more compassionate if we let it.”
I will share “Something To Think About” for the next twelve weeks on Sunday afternoons. It may be a quote, a picture, an interesting phrase I heard, artwork, etc. Whatever I share will surely be intriguing or involving enough to spark a casual discussion or in-depth conversation. Stay tuned every Sunday for this feature!
Peace and blessings.
Have you gotten your copy of my new book: a collection of serial tales & flash fiction, Séduire (E-BookandPaperback) yet?
I will do a roundup post each Saturday (or Sunday if I run out of time!). So please be sure to participate before time runs out! I can’t wait to read your stories. 😀 I hope that you’ll be back for next week’s Six Word Story Prompt. Have fun! Thank you for participating. Until next week, folks!
P.S: If you have any doubts/suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. The comments section is all yours! P.P.S: Use the tag 6WSP and don’t forget topingback to this post!
I often feel like I have a life of mourning ahead of me–I’m making the best of it, growing how I should, and giving myself grace when I know I need to. Grief is a hard subject to tackle, but I am glad to see it as a prompt theme. Some things need discussion and it is helpful to express them creatively.
How about you? Do you want to give it a shot? What can you dream up about grief? What are your six words?
I am small, tucked into myself, fidgety, and nervous. He is an older, White man from Jersey with an earring in his ear. He asks me about elementary school, my father, my mother, and my strengths.
I talk with my hands. I am animated. I am crafting explanations and recollections of past lives, and he types vigorously on the keys of his laptop. It’s small. It’s black. It shakes on his lap.
I wonder what the screen says. If I’m being cut down to size. If I’m being analyzed on a scale outside my comprehension. If I’m being mentally processed for some sort of unspoken reward.
Barely thirty minutes pass, and I lose myself in a sea of tears. He’s mentioned grief. Which means, I have mentioned Chrissy, and I don’t even remember my mouth forming her name. I can feel the tears sliding down my cheeks, and I say to myself, You will get through this.
We have six minutes left, and he announces a question that sounds like he wanted to unleash it at least fifteen minutes ago and I am all ears: “Do you have the link to the initial ASD testing you did?”
Of course, I do. Of course, I would have it. Why would I not? I emailed it to him, and I watched the results leave my inbox and disappear to a black hole of infinite knowledge and time and space to get to his inbox.
I still struggle now that you’re gone, but I am getting better.
Chrissy and I, Circa 1985-1986. I do not know who took this photo of us. But it’s my favorite.
My cousin was Black Joy personified. Her contagious smile entered a room before her feet could land softly on the floor. She was so many things to so many people; mother, sister, aunt, cousin, healer, and friend. To me, she had been a rock; steady on her feet and a guiding light for my path.
She did not know a stranger.
She was sixteen years older than me. I looked up to her. Every time she and her siblings visited our family down south from up north, I couldn’t contain my excitement. I knew we would have a time with my big cousin, and I dreamt about her arrival days before I saw her.
If my cousin was visiting, that meant I would get all the hugs and kisses I wanted from her. That meant I could sit and listen to the lull of her voice rise up and down, and her accent coat the walls of any room she graced.
If you have never had the chance to know genuine love from a person, I apologize to you in advance. I knew how it could develop and how it could lift you up when you were at your lowest. This form of love from my cousin differed from what I had from my parents or grandparents. It was a high-feeling love. A love without actual description; for there are no words for it. Not any that come to my mind, at least.
My cousin was magic, and I yearned to Houdini my way through my pubescent years as magically as she had seemed to do. I clung to her safe space as tightly as I could from as young as the age of five, which is my earliest memory of her.
I have a picture I take out occasionally on which to reminisce. I give it a once-over, shed a few tears, and then I smile. As you can see, it is of her standing behind me and raising my arms out far and wide. We’re both smiling as hard as our jaws would allow.
The event had been my great-grandmother, her grandmother’s birthday party. I do not remember what we ate, what music played, or what time the party ended. But I remember my cousin’s smile. I remember the imminent peace that radiated throughout the room with her there. I remember her laughter and, of course, the hugs.
I remember the fun I had with her and not wanting the night to end.
I have a few photographs that I love of the two of us together, but the photo shown above is by far my favorite. It has been a savior for me when the depths of some dark days hover over me without an invitation.
It’s my go-to when I feel like I want to remember every detail of her face; every smile-line, crow’s foot, and beauty mark. It’s my inThe Grieving Room get-by healing memory.
I always come back to it.
No one tells you how to grieve.
Not for an older cousin who mothered you in ways you searched for mothering. No one tells you the pain that lasts; how it creeps in and creeps out when you least expect it.
There is no how-to manual on how to stop your heart from breaking when a patient sounds like her on a scheduling call or a friend says something she used to say. You cannot stop yourself from crying out of the blue because the wind hits a certain way and suddenly emotions pummel you without warning.
There is no cure-all for deaths that come unexpectedly and during your happiest moments.
Just when I thought, I’m proud of myself. I’m doing so well moving through these phases of life, God’s plan swooped in and stirred up something.
I thought, Years of therapy—down the drain, but my cousin’s death allowed me to open up more during my therapy sessions. It allowed me to be vulnerable; to cry without warning and to witness my former therapist at her most engaging and encouraging. “I know it has to be hard for you, Tre. Crying is good. It’s a release. There’s no shame in crying.”
And there wasn’t. And there isn’t. There are days I wake up with sunshine flowing through my bones; ready to take on anything thrown in my direction. Those are the days I think to myself, I wonder if she sees me getting by—mastering every obstacle and jumping over every hurdle.
And then, there are days I wake up so out of sync with the world and my surroundings and I want to lie back down and let sleep consume me. Those are the days, I think to myself, What would Chrissy do? How would she conquer this day?
Chrissy’s Selfie and the Waves. Photo Credit: Christina M. Georges
The finality of her life made me more in-tune with everything around me and my most inner-tormented self.
How warped must my brain have been to stay stunted and recycle the same events yet repress them as well? Losing my cousin in her physical form pushed me to challenge what I feel, how I feel, and to sit with those feelings and move through them until I no longer freeze in place from pain.
I will not say I am at my best now since her passing on February 18, 2022. I can’t say I am at my worst because I have been there, and it had not been a place to which I wanted to lay claim. I am, however, somewhere in between where healing appears to be more like second-nature than something I cannot attain.
Born in October, years before anyone thought about creating me, she was a star before anyone said she was. Her light hovered over us in life.
And it still does in death.
If I can be honest, I still talk to her. I still ask for her advice, and at the oddest times of day—when the light hits my balcony door just right, or an epiphany greets me without warning, I hear her. She still answers me.
I have had so much time to write poems, essays, and create characters to shine a light on my cousin and her life. But the following is how I’d written about her just a couple months after she died:
On February 18, 2022, I muttered my last ‘I love you’ to my closest cousin — one of the greatest loves of my life. She had been significantly older than me, so she mothered me — nurtured me — allowed me to be guided by her.
She could rain down love without being coaxed or manipulated. It simply fell out of her and onto/into you without caution. If you loved her or had been loved by her, you knew it. You felt it. There was no reason to question this love. It was genuine and given with every ounce of her being.
I no longer view my cousin’s death as the end of her life.
It is more of a continuance of her spirit’s presence in ours. I have her spiritual form comforting me every step of the way.
Surviving her death is an incredibly talented son, a beautiful globetrotting daughter, an intellectually sound husband, and countless others.
She has connected us and in us is that love she deposited the moment we met. Even though I miss her deeply . . . even though I can’t get through some days without completely breaking down . . . I am getting better.
I am not afraid to walk the path of this life without her.
Not anymore.
The above essay was written for a prominent online magazine this past January and was recently declined. I decided to share it here. Peace and blessings.
On the tail-end of a recent move, I’m basking in light
Our living room space — open, airy, and full of natural light. That’s Jernee Timid photobombing because that’s what she does best! Photo Credit: Tremaine L. Loadholt
I awakened this morning to a pool of emotions — overwhelmed by their presence, I called my job and reported the absence I knew I would be taking. Last year, I had several emotional breakdowns, and much of the therapy I had become so used to applying to everyday life dwindled between my fingers and lifted itself away from my mind and body.
I was crumbling.
Because of the incredible shift in my mental health and my heart after experiencing a loss I never thought I would encounter, I applied for FMLA through my job. It took months of convincing from my supervisor and one of my Work Force Managers for me to actually have it sink in that I needed relief.
I needed to be open and honest enough that I could not continue to press forward with the intensity of work I had been pushing myself through while trying to grieve. I wanted to be able to write my way through it — to grieve pleasantly and intact.
But there’s no such thing as grieving pleasantly or remaining intact when there is a loss as deep and as heavy as the loss of my older cousin (who was much like a mother to me). I spent much of 2022 hating every single month without her until November.
The struggles of living life without her were still fresh and weighty, but the days did not feel like Mack trucks driving over my body — crushing me in real-time. I was beginning to experience other emotions instead of anger and pain. I was moving through acceptance, understanding, and trusting the design of this world — even if it meant not having my cousin in it.
And even though I was striding toward digging myself out of a deep pit, some days still hit me harder than most. This being the case, I applied for FMLA in late January of 2023 and was approved in March of 2023. Five months later, I am using my first day as a leave of absence.
Let me reiterate … five months later … the first day of leave is being used. I have had days of PTO that I have requested prior to as commitments to doctors’ visits or the monitoring of my sight, but to actually wake up knowing I would not be 100% mentally available and take the time approved for me to use, I had not used since its approval date.
More Professional Responsibility Leads Me To Care Less About Myself
Today is the end of a 4-week training commitment I acquired. After training five new hires (at once), witnessing their graduation yesterday, and knowing they are equipped with the tools they need to venture out into the radiology scheduling world, I can breathe easier. I was informed earlier this week of the possibility of them getting to log out and go home early from the office, and I beamed with pride.
Part of me wanted to be able to be available for them today remotely and the other part spoke louder — you need to rest. You just moved and you immediately hit the ground running again as if you did not need more time off. They will log off early anyway. You’ve done your job.
So, as you may have guessed, I am listening to the other part of me. I have to.
Late yesterday evening, I had all intentions of getting up this morning, logging on to take calls, and being available for the trainees, but I could not get past the emotional hold on my body and my heart.
As much as I did not want to — the fight between my two selves took place and I begrudgingly pushed the weight of more responsibility to the side and decided to take care of myself first for once in a long time.
The Light of the World Exists In My Living Room
On the tail-end of a recent move, I’m basking in light. To help with my emotional imbalance, I am sitting in one of the spaces in our new home that provides me with plenty of natural light and peacefulness — two things I welcome with open arms.
I had been a black-out and dark curtains person for such a long time, and deciding to allow God’s sunlight into my home in every corner is doing wonders for my mood. And on a day like today, I am more aware of the necessity of it.
Our living room space from another angle. Photo Credit: Tremaine L. Loadholt
I have four plants that I love and adore just as much as Jernee. Their names: Dora, Lyric, Sage, and Jupiter. They have their own little space in the corner closest to Jernee’s resting space and our balcony door, under my artwork display of birds.
While resting in this spot of our home, I am overcome with a variety of beauty and more chances to appreciate what natural light, an open layout, hardwood laminate floors, and color can do for the mind. My mood is enhanced in a positive way and moments of pure joy tap me on my shoulders.
Jernee prances around yet keeps close to me as well. She can sense I am a bit off-kilter — protective mode is on. I am grateful for this, too — her own little version of light for me.
I knew we needed a change. I knew that I could not, would not continue to give my hard-earned money to an organization that refused to carry out its clause when I signed a lease with them five years ago. If I was going to pay the amount of money I was paying, I needed to see and feel the reasons why.
And here, I have my reasons.
Having A Sense of Peace During Rough Times Is Priceless
I do not know what the rest of the day will provide for me — how I’ll move through the overwhelmingness of emotions, and what I will do to further help me get through, but I am thankful for the beginning stages of peace.
I will not take any of this for granted. As I feel more tears readying themselves to trickle down my cheeks, I am grateful for them, too. Being vulnerable when I need to be and accepting the integrity of a grieving mind and its influence whenever it pops up can be motivators.
I welcome peace. I know it will be the end result of doing what I needed to do when I needed to do it.
A Cornered Gurl 
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