Today I woke up sad.
It’s not the bone crushing kind; the kind that makes you believe maybe you won’t make it through the day. It’s not the kind that syphons all of your energy so that you no longer know whether your hungry or thirsty or full or tired or turned on or tuned out and all you know is sad. It is not the kind that alters your face. It does not turn you into a munsch painting where you are melty-faced and screaming or just looking transcendentally morose. This sadness is a weighted blanket; almost a comfort, because it is a reminder of love. This grief is a taught wire connecting love and loss on which I am—these days, it seems— always balancing.
This morning the wire leapt up, as if blown by a forceful wind, to cut my heart and crack it open, which really is the way it has always been—cracked open—for all of us. Really, the way it always is the moment we decide to allow love into the conversation (and was it ever not there?).
It.
Love.
It is in movies and songs and paintings and poems as the the missing piece of the puzzle that makes us whole; as completion. But it’s also a cutting open; all hard exterior split in two with the gooey stuff of vulnerable life visible and available.
It is also separation.
It is also pain.
I have been looking for a photograph of myself from 1988. In it, I am eight and wearing a nightie and cuddled up in a blanket and sitting on the floor of Dad’s old place on Attorney Street on the Lower East Side.. There is a black figure eight, a train track making an infinity symbol with a tiny train mid chug frozen in time working its way around and around forever. Just behind me and off to the right, in a window, you can just make out the beginnings of the words MERRY CHRISTMAS and JULIA MOTYKA in my newly minted eight-year-old cursive in aerosol spray snow. Behind me on the other side is a sign that says, on two pieces of cut two by four, CLUBHOUSE (on one) and MEMBERS ONLY (just below on the other).
I have been caught in a moment of surprise and am looking over my shoulder at the camera making a silly face. It’s an unposed, un self-conscious, filled with love and joy and abandon face. In this photo I am not measured or beautiful or pensive (which is how my family mostly describes me at that age and in general) I am just having fun in the clubhouse I’ve made. This photo is a reminder to hold my life gently and with an open hand. It is a reminder to myself that things are never so bad as all that. It is a reminder that while there is and will be suffering, of course, there is also the clubhouse. And I am a founding member.
This photo is good medicine.
And I cannot find it.
I have not been able to find it for days.
This morning, as I was waking up and still in that liminal space of not-quite-real-life-not-quite-dreaming-not-quite-myself-not-quite-of-this-worldness, before my container of adulthood and motherhood and selfhood I thought: I’ll ask Dad. He will know where it is.
But he won’t because he’s gone and the only person who has the picture anymore is me, and I have lost it. This version of me that he treasured and saved and kept safe. It is only mine now. And I have lost it.
And so this sadness wraps me up because he is not there to do it. He is not there to say, “Oh, Darling, it’s just a picture. So what.” And laugh. And with that laugh
remind me that I’m in the clubhouse with or without a picture to prove it, and he is there too and isn’t that so much more than enough.
This sadness is proof of life.
It is proof of love and joy and history and abandon.
His.
Mine.
Ours together.
And I have it.
And isn’t it so much more than enough.
This was absolutely beautiful 🥺