Mary’s Land #1: My Heart is a Patchwork Jacket
an essay for love and grief.
I’m crushing pellets of blackberries down on my front teeth, thinking about a recent film I’ve watched called My Old Ass. It was something I almost saw in theaters a couple of months ago with Mimi, but instead we watched the Batman Forever anniversary showing where we received mixed-matched socks and a pen to take home. Laying up in bed back at my family home in Maryland, I’m sprawled out across mother’s very large bed, hand tucked under my hooped-ears watching. There’s Aubrey Plaza and Maisey Stella, and Maddie Ziegler—who seems a bit awkward—and the long-haired boy from Wednesday. It’s a little generic, and very seasoned around Gen-Z culture from a young white eighteen-year-old girl’s perspective, who makes out with her light skin situationship in a creaky boat, which is pretty organic, and falls in love with the boy from Wednesday who’s name is convincingly supposed to be named…Chad. I’m sorry, but he has such a Shakespearean-ass face, Chad just feels offensive.
Chad’s very ‘written by a woman-coded’ and I can say the dialogue between Eliot, the protagonist, and Chad is pleasant, very late high school, very squeal with my eyes closed. Older Eliot, who she meets during a shroom trip with her friends on her eighteenth birthday, played by Aubrey Plaza tells her softly to stay away from Chad. Turns out my son Chad is going to die in the future. And future Eliot will find herself grieving, and mourning, and unforgiving, and unwilling, the men and women of her circuit invisible because of the joy she carved out of an oak tree with Chad. Gosh, I hate having to end that sentence with Chad. It’s very 2014. Once future Eliot reveals this revelation to young Eliot, who pesters and pushes the truth out of her older self, after already falling so spontaneously for the long-haired Canadian, she is forced to make a decision.
She decides to love Chad anyway. Now, I feel like we’re getting somewhere. It makes me think of Cher. The bitterness that future Eliot feels, this anguish, and never ending cycle of sadness is something she nihilistically enforces her younger self to retreat away from. If she stays making out with light-skinned baddie in the boat, she’ll stay comfortable in the possibility that the love she acquires will always be surface-level. Thus, it will be easy, it will have systems, it will not damage in permanence. Young Eliot said that it’s up to her very naive and impulsive self to love Chad because that’s what he deserves. And Eliot, herself as a whole, deserves to experience a love so enrichening, and time-changing because to receive—to be offered a love as mighty as that is not something we all get the chance to partake in.
When Cher sat in the auburn studio and produced, “Believe” she at the time merely made a song we would forever dance to regardless of the relatability. But now, as we’re all getting older, and greedier, and happier, or for some—meaner, the idea of love and life and which one is more important is really becoming a physical topic. Isn’t this concept, these pillows of philosophy how we emerge to the simplicity of grief? Love is immortal but life is not, but if the life of someone you love flickers away, then the love you have triples, and expels into something else that is immortal: again, grief. You know that bullshit from Wandavision, “What is grief—if not, love persisting?” Yeah, what he said.
What are those conversations we have about the death of a parent? This modeled clay figure or figures who has/have watched us walk with our thick little legs of yeast, seen us cross a stage or three with a diploma and a squared cap, our relationships with them have tethered into wraps of cubic gimp—our love for our parents, even in their complications is beyond. And poof, God decides the day, points to them in the grocery store, or the highway during an unplanned snowstorm, he sweeps their head during a quick nap before work, or provides them a contract to death through a mammogram; we all know that the life we envision after our parents leave will become something cornered by darkness. We can still be happy, but oh, do we wish we had them to be happier.
Do you believe in life after love? And does that love have to disappear by fatal tragedy for it to be confirmed as gone?
Remember your first months in high school or college? And you made friends with the girls in homeroom, or went to get something to eat with the teammates on your rugby team. Remember when you all were thick as thieves? Before the long-distance settled in, or the resentment crashed, the fact that one of you forgot a birthday, or the group chat went cold because the memes weren’t funny anymore—remember when you saw these lifelines fade? Did they die? No, but did your friendships? Yes.
Friendship breakups, we grieve them. Sometimes we don’t internalize all of the love we lost because we’ve determined that the ones we fell out with, those still alive, are directly replaceable. And sometimes we don’t internalize all of the love we lost just because of the inherent fact that we lost it, or gave it up.
I’ve used Bumble. And I’ve made some friendships with gal pals who I’ve driven to Santa Cruz with or eaten spam—and I fucking hate spam—just because it made them happy. Nonetheless, I do think about the friends I’ve lost during the pandemic. Or during college. Or during middle school. The ones I got off the bus from WalMart with the family to race to see behind P.S. 96 so we could remake the cheerleading pyramid. We sat in a friend’s basement in Fresh Meadows watching NigaHiga and eating bacon egg and cheeses with ketchup alongside tropical skittles.
Writing this in Maryland, I think about the friends I grew up with at 71 Strawhat Street who I took the bus home with from Owings Mills Elementary. I stayed over Sia’s house and ate toaster’s strudles, and we watched Shake It Up and danced to Ciara. Marlon, with his ginger low-top and brown freckles, and how he was always sardonic and overly confident because he was in both honors English and our honors Math class. Michael whose face was always ashy and dried in his saliva. At Deer Park, Dustin and his mixed “Can I have a hug?” ass and Gabriella who also hated gym as much as I did. These are more disappearances than breakups, but the love still grieves the same because we committed to no longer being a part of each other’s lives, as a symbol of life itself.
When I was still dancing—and blonde—shoving myself into six-foot lockers so my friends could record for Snapchat, this was one of my peaks. We used the days Ms. M was somewhere in Brooklyn doing pull-ups on construction bars to play Rich the Kid and Migos. On prom night, none of us came with dates, except my best friend, but her date was in the friend group at the time, and regardless I fell asleep on the couch trying to hide my face from the Cat in the Hat adaptation blaring on the screen. None of the people in this friend group, besides my best friend, really contact each other. And yet we were close during one of the most developmental stages of our lives. We were all dealing with how to turn inside out from the fetishes displaced onto us by the boys in our grades, the men on the train, the men in Jamorra’s plays, the men who worked at Staples with us, the men who slid into our messages—knowing we were underage—we were there. Is the life or the love gone?
In the middle of the night, I’ll peer into Google Photos to look at the edited videos I made on iMovie about my freshman year of college. I’m thinking I’m drunk off rosé a friend smuggled into the fifth floor of the cafeteria, and we’re singing “Ivy” (you know my mom asked me the other day who Frank Ocean was? I didn’t know what to say) and my hair is in a pixie and my eyebrows are blonde, and I’m happy again. We’re sitting at the edge of the University of San Francisco sign, now that the black boy in the Thrasher hoodie who’s come to us with his mixed white mother brigades has taught me how to inhale, and Björk’s playing, I have Reese’s cups, and we can all afford tuition. Now we have to leave, COVID’s calling. Friends get left in the California LA ditches, arguments adjourn, and all I have left of them are my Finger Knees pilot draft and those shitty edits. I still grieve for them. I still grieve the little bits of hope that flicker and gleam when I press play.
We don’t give enough grace to the little fires of heartbreak we endure. Out of the main character plazas we build for ourselves, we limit our trauma to the most catastrophic things we’ve experienced. In contrast to those who may have been birthed to lives more colorful in privilege, those who have not, condense the latter’s sadnesses as iridescent—glittery and performative—they’ve never really “been” through anything.
And if love is universal, then why is grief so straight?
To believe in life is to also believe in the future, so why can’t we acknowledge the disappointment of knowing some of the people we love now won’t make it to the end of our chapters? Even if we’ve wanted them to. There’s a family in New Jersey I miss. I miss the frozen empanadas and fresh salad a mother used to make, and how we all sat on the floor of the living room to carve out pumpkins. Fireworks with their bones cracked in the middle of the streets for Fourth of July—I am still grieving this. I miss the essence of getting on the NJ Transit to spend a week with them. Just because they were my family at the time too. And yet, out of loyalty for our new experiences and loves, we don’t ever come back to the other moments that made us ‘us’ for the simple ego of being over it. I for one may be able to pass a lot, but for me being over it feels like a different branch. How does love get so aloof? How do we get complacent in that aloofness, an ignorance to confess, express, and address this love just because we want to be ‘over’ it?
My heart is a patchwork coat, a scarecrow, fabrics tethered together built on behalf of all the love I’ve encompassed so far. Crumpled movie tickets, bread crumbs on the kitchen counter, mugs of apple cider during night time, a basic blue adidas box from Footlocker, an original recipe for cinnamon rolls, a vinyl pink and polka-dotted raincoat, my Bible, my grandma’s Bible, all of the pashmina paisley scarves i lost in high school that mom gave, the silver pence i found in my jacket at Aldi’s on Sunday, the one plaid newsboy hat during my second trip to London, all of the hysteric glamour clothes i sold when i was broke as fuck, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs in Gleeson, all of the cutesy stickers Lilly’s given me that are on my laptop that make me look so young during my work meetings, the Nutcracker receipt that Kalena’s mom got for me before I left San Francisco, the oatmeal cookie my coworker’s bought for me when I would get anxious and invisible during my hour of A-rank tagging, the packets of hair cream from Laila, my sister’s spicy chocolate lip balm because my lips have been so dry here, our baby photos, my Morris family reunion t-shirt even if we may never get it right, the ‘I Voted’ sticker on the floor of Sid’s car, the cross breed Chihuahuas who fall asleep four times a day in a little town on Gatcombe street, abuela hot chocolate to go with my yogurt parfait during family breakfast, a picture of me knocked out and double-chinning on a trip to Reading, Pennsylvania, a picture of me knocked out and double-chinning on a trip to Santa Cruz, California, triller videos to Pop Smoke in the UnderCaf, writing “it’s my birthday” as an opener on Tinder for a friend, butt socks from Happy Socks, a ladybug cardigan that is given to Suroor, the crochet flower bucket hat I left in someone’s closet, and the black hoodie that someone has left in mine—the howling silent for a second belly aching and throat protruding laughter, forgiveness, yelling on the phone for thirty six minutes on the St. Nicholas Ave porch, hug during the night, refusal in the morning because Jamorra said I misplaced her keys and it was actually in her bag that has her face on it this entire time, running where there’s no tomorrow, and crying where there is—kind of love i’ve given to these people, and this kind of love they have given back to me.
And whether or not I have all of them now, they are still in my pocket. Whoop, reach into the seam and, pull out a heartstring.
I will say, it’s a beautiful thing that we get to receive people on a seasonal basis. Even if the love we watered for them outgrew the confinements of the time we had. And that’s the difficulty of still believing in love after life. Life is that inevitable. And death isn’t just the crossroad for it.
Breakups of all sorts, we’re grieving the person we thought we would have been six months ago, two years ago—the child version of ourselves is looking at us with a head tilt, a code of skepticism. We are mourning when grocery prices didn’t make us count the days till our next paycheck, or when the action of buying a house was accessible and not a children’s fable. Are we not mourning the lives we could have had—the lives those who have passed during the pandemic could have had—if correct protocol happened, or if, oh, I don’t know—if it just didn’t happen? Some of us have direct contact with traditional grief, but the majority of us have the backside of disenfranchisement.
Our lives after love, both fatal and punctual cause collateral. One may rip. One may peel. But we still bleed both ways.
In both our traditional and disenfranchised grievances may we act like Eliot once she’s chosen to love Chad. We must love furiously, intentionally, and selflessly. Even when I have to haul my ass back on the Flix Bus to get back to the very loud city streets, I’ll leave a sleeve of my patchwork on the banister so mom eyes it before she does laundry, and Jamorra puts it on when she goes weekend driving. A shoulder blade for my loved ones back in the Bay Area, especially for Uncle Patrick at Decades of Fashion to stitch-rip behind his celluloid desk, an elbow pad for the London mandem and the man of them whose clothes I share, and love I keepsake, and just a little gold button for my dad because that’s what he’d call me. A little button he’ll raise to his yellow-tinted eye so he can remember how cute I am. I keep the chest, and God keeps the back, so I can be assertive about my self-love and He guards me because there is hate for me I cannot see. That is my jacket, that is my heart, and it is vintage, and it is worn, and in certain areas there is numbness and stubbornness but there is earth, and for others it is home.
One day I am also going to go, and I will leave the lives of those I love, and for some it might be mutual, and for some it may feel like I was taken—but in the weeds, I’ll still sprinkle, a bit of dust on the bridge of their noses—a little sneeze, achoo! If anything my love will grow, because now our love is not confined by time nor space. In order to love in some cases, you might be asked to leave. I think that just made me love a couple of people more.
Let us be joyful that love has accepted us to receive it, and for me, two things again are true at once. I might not live the same when love is gone, but I will love ferociously as long as it exists in my life. And as long as I exist in it.
j.
such a beautiful read!!