on dressing up

The world has always been clever at dressing its wounds. We hang tapestries over cracked walls, plant gardens atop ruins, pour perfume into rooms heavy with smoke.

Even grief learns to speak in the language of beauty, to step carefully, to not disturb the delicate balance of what has been curated to keep us from noticing the fracture beneath. You can build walls around suffering, around aging, around death itself. Walls made of silk and gold thread, walls that hummed lullabies to keep the harder truths at bay.

There is a particular kind of violence in loving something so much that the only merciful act becomes departure. Not the violence of anger or betrayal, but the violence of tenderness: splitting the chest open like overripe fruit, spilling seeds that were meant for distant soil.

The paradox of genuine care sometimes demands letting go. And still, even the sweetest song runs out of notes. Even the most golden light fades to something sharper. It is to know when the holding on becomes a harm, and to let go anyway, not with anger but with a kind of brutal tenderness that asks nothing in return but remembrance.

Yet, this is not absence. It is presence. It is evidence that something was loved enough to be released into its own becoming, a river learning to love the ocean by surrendering its name.