Dear Autumn,

Every year when the air becomes thinner and more breathable, when mugs of coffee dance on my fingertips and Bon Iver lulls me into elation, it feels like I’m coming home to you. When getting dressed doesn’t normally feel like anything in particular, pulling the sleeves of a sweater over my arms makes me feel giddy. If I close my eyes you’re carrying me into the mornings I spent stepping on leafy sidewalks to science class. You smell like the pumpkin muffins my mom baked in our kitchen, shaped like ghosts and emitting nutmeg. And the gray plastic tub with cracks in the corners full of spiderwebs and clay pumpkins. You make my heart race the way a first love does - anticipation and yearning and comfort and joy and restlessness and calm, somehow. You make me feel safe. When does your brother take over? Your last days creep away slowly, but Winter’s frost falls swiftly. I don’t know when Autumn is supposed to leave me, but I don’t remember it being quite so soon. 

Dear Winter,

It’s not your fault, really. Just like it’s not my fault, really. He didn’t die because the grass was covered in frost. He didn’t die because your wind was too much to bear or because your light was too dim or because it feels harder to connect with people when you’re around. Or maybe that’s exactly why he died. You tell me.

I didn’t write when you came into town because you frightened me. But when I finally picked up my pen years later and all I could think about was my foggy breath and the way the grass crunched under my slippers as I walked to the car and the looming gray sky touching the ceiling of my living room, I knew that my pen wanted me to feel winter. Sometimes when you’re not ready to feel what hurts, you feel the only things you know how to. One day my pen would allow me to acknowledge what hurt, but first it let me feel winter. 

Dear Daddy, 

Which season was your favorite? I wish I had put that in one of my emails. Instead I said “Call when u feel like it!” Did you call? I can’t remember. Those were my last words to you; if I hadn’t been emailing you I wouldn’t still have them. I thought I would be emailing you for the rest of my life, and now I only have 16 threads. 

When I was young Mom read aloud postcards you sent from work trips. I remember pictures of tulips from Holland. I didn’t know where that was, just that you said hello. I can picture your blue and black inked words with sharp edges and loopy y’s. When you split up you wrote on sticky notes and put them in my lunchbox and Sören’s. You missed us, that’s why I had an email account. I’m so used to hearing your voice in text that when I write I feel like we’re speaking. I used to write in my journal daily. But that winter, it stopped. Sometimes people suggest saying nothing to someone that’s lost a loved one, because ‘I’m sorry’ will never suffice. What do you say to someone that’s died? Nothing I could write felt like enough.

Dear Mom, 

To propel an unspoken fact into someone else’s scope of truth requires intention. When you can anticipate the burn, that requires empathy. But to tell your children their father has killed himself, that requires something unfathomable. You emphasized the importance of feeling, but none of us really knew what that meant. We let emotion drown us all at once – writing and speaking and reading, that’s how it became comfortable. 

Dear Journalism, 

My pen nurtured me when I didn’t know where to start. In high school I felt that winter for the first time. I felt the grass, the sky, the chill, the confusion. I felt my loneliness. I felt my mother’s hand on my knee. I felt the things I knew how to. It was all right there on my paper, but I don’t think I was feeling loss. I could properly articulate my experiences, but journalism holds an air of certainty. I dug into storytelling with such a velocity that I uncovered only fact, and what was still yet to be seen was my personal truth. “I Forgive You,” was awarded first place, but that didn’t make it true. 

Dear Body, 

You never took up too much space and I liked that. I kept you to myself, carried you intentionally, shifted my body weight onto the right leg at the right moments; my mom always told me I had apparent body space awareness. I knew how I looked to others and as a ten year old, that felt like a superpower. 

For a long time I replaced you. I replaced you with sovereignty when you only ever wanted to be my home. I shrunk you and neglected you, suffocated your pleas because I couldn’t digest them and starved you out instead. My BMI dropped, my heart slowed to a barely observable pitter patter and suddenly I was empty. I couldn’t remember what the lull of Bon Iver felt like or how the scent of pumpkin muffins could have ever been calming. I wanted to smile but cobwebs strung tautly inside my skull and even the dancing of coffee on my fingertips couldn’t seep through. I didn’t want you that way, but by the time I could realize it you were so far gone. When you were merely a vehicle I replaced you again. 

Dear Diary, 

I felt closer to you than I did my body. I let you house my thoughts and feelings when it wasn’t safe to let them free anywhere else. It’s easy to think feelings will destroy you when they’ve destroyed someone you love. But destruction and feeling are compatible if you allow them to be. Feelings don’t destroy you, they carry you out of destruction. 

You taught me how to speak to myself, to gravitate towards delicate language and softer gestures. The language I had grown used to was harsher than I would use with a friend, and it turns out that my body was a friend of mine all along. 

When I began to tell you the things I didn’t want my body to hear, my world started to grow into a place I could survive in. Because even while I thought I had it figured out, you knew that I didn’t. In a world that sometimes feels heavy, all we really need is someone to love us. To give us a hug for five minutes. Someone to walk by our side while we try to figure it out. You were there when I learned how to be that someone. You didn’t save me, but you held my hand while I did it for myself. 

Dear Time,

When you hug me I topple over a bit, but I think that intensity is what makes an embrace worthwhile. No matter how firmly I press my toes in my shoes, you press into me harder. Fall echoes softly, winter shatters, spring settles in and by that time the sun is beating down and we start all over again. And still I feel like I’m not moving, or that I’m moving too much? There’s always something coming, I’m waiting for the next season, I’m waiting for you to stop. 

What I failed to realize is that when I topple, you catch me. When I sway you emulate a winter’s wind and blow me back to standing. I’ve never needed firm toes, just a willingness to let you be there. Slowly I’m learning to nestle myself into our intimate embraces and exist with you. You’ll never stop and some days that breaks my heart. Other days it lulls me into elation.

It’s really scary when someone notices something about you before you notice it yourself. You mean I’ve had this piece of spinach stuck in my front tooth the entire time we’ve been talking and you haven’t brought it to my attention? 

*

In parts of the southern United States, spinach maintains a long legacy because it’s the only place it’ll grow in the colder seasons. It’s planted between August and September and often survives until spring; farmers reap its benefits all winter long because the plant survives temperatures as low as 20 degrees. It’s a pretty resilient plant and doesn’t require much to survive, unless it develops a disease.

*

Freshman year I flew home from my college in Georgia to my home in Michigan. I felt so giddy about being back in the security of my home that I bundled myself up to enjoy my six mile run. Excitement always feels like a blissful rush of energy through my veins. Excitement and control wear the same mask.

That day my best friend had told me she noticed I had lost weight.

I woke my mother later, brought her to my bedroom and began sobbing. I didn’t have to tell her why. When I watched my mom’s eyes on me I felt deep guilt. I felt like I had let the people I loved down in a very serious way, like my body wasn’t mine and the path forward had been shielded by a wrought iron fence. Like my teeth were covered in spinach and everyone was staring. 

*

Pablo Picasso has created sixty paintings of weeping women. His work is normally expressionless, but these women are an exception – the most emotive of any of his human figures. They’re dripping in horrifying violence and contorting pain.

Picasso reconstructed the female form to the point of destruction. Limbs branched from skulls and eyes dribbled onto cheeks like puss. 

*

Persia, centuries ago, is where Spinach originated. It made its way to Asia and Europe via trade and appeared in ancient Chinese recipes. The very earliest English cookbook included recipes that incorporated raw and cooked spinach. 

In 1870, Erich von Wolf, a German chemist reported spinach containing 35 grams of iron. The creators of Popeye – a cartoon originating in the 1930s– embraced this wholeheartedly and included spinach as their character’s method of gaining strength. Thus, spinach was advertised as a “superfood,” which proceeded to save spinach farmers from going under, as sales rose 33 percent.

*

Back at school I biked to urgent care to get my vitals done, as requested by my therapist. They folded my weight and my blood pressure up on a sheet of printer paper and sent me on my way. I sat on my blanket at Forsyth park in the midday sun with my pre portioned nut butter and unfolded the paper. My heartbeat was dangerously low and I felt victorious. 

I never felt sick enough. 

*

But Erich Von Wolf had reported his research incorrectly. Spinach did not contain 35 grams of iron, it contained 3.5. The decimal had been misplaced. 

*

In each era, as the women changed, new motifs arose – a consistent necklace, the continuous line from forehead to nose. Dora Maar was always depicted with her dark features, a prominent forehead, and her elongated hands with sharpened fingernails. Marie-Thérèse Walter could be identified by her rounded face and almond eyes. 

He avoided acknowledging his muses publicly, but as his relationships took turns so did his art. His paintings mapped out his life. His lovers came and went but distress had settled in as Picasso’s personal birthmark. 

*

I went on a date that year and I don’t remember saying anything about myself of note. Not because my date was self absorbed, but because I was more of a dry skeleton without personality traits. I was living for my body, my body was not living for me. I stared at his face from across the table and thought about whether or not it would be normal for me to not finish my ice cream. 

*

In 1901 Picasso painted The Death of Casagemas, Picasso’s best friend, characterized by dark, sweeping linework and hollow shadows. The work served as a headway to much darker pieces, titled his “Blue Period.” Blue for death, for cold, and for lifelessness. His art began to depict poverty, solitude, and melancholic scenes. It began to represent not just what he was seeing, but what was stewing internally. 

*

I cried over many shamefully ridiculous things, like ice cream, and I don’t know that words will ever tell those stories eloquently enough for me to feel less than stupid about it. I remember wanting to crawl outside of my body because my skin felt suffocating. Every moment that my body felt too full that suffocation draped itself over me like a wet blanket. It was heavy, cold, and lonely, and nobody was ever able to crawl under that blanket with me no matter how hard I begged.

The only way to escape the sensation was to lay flat on my stomach in hopes that my ribs would touch the floor and prop me up. It was easier to succumb to it and be still than to push. I would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat – they say that’s your metabolism trying to catch up – to me it felt like my blanket had been torched.

*

The botanical description of this plant includes stem, leaves, and flowers. The spinach plant is generally observed with simple leaves that stem from the axis. The stem grows straight from the ground, regardless of the variety, but the leaves vary in color, texture, pattern, and size. Spinacia Oleracea L is its given name, it can measure anywhere from 2-30 cm long and 1-15 cm wide.

*

During my sickest months I had the tendency to eye the limbs of other women, attempting to gauge whether my body was smaller or larger than theirs. Some days my body felt frail and chilled, incomplete and too small. Other days it was rapidly growing outward with no constraints.

*

Superfoods don’t have an exact definition in nutritional science or in the medical community, even Von Wolf would have agreed. They were born as a marketing strategy. The hashtag, #superfood on Instagram has 5.5 million posts. The trend is closely associated with “clean eating” and both rely heavily upon labels that categorize food as good or bad, which aligns intimately with the person consuming the food. It’s a value judgment that blurs the line between self worth and food intake.

*

There is a painting hung on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that’s as tall as I am; it’s of a woman seated on her knees, braiding her hair. She’s naked and her tummy rolls under her breasts. She doesn’t have a name, just ‘woman.’

*

My hips are curved in a peachy tone that wraps out, and then in like a vase. When I was twelve I thought it was too much, I wanted the background to soak them up a bit more. When I was sixteen I thought the change in circumference from my hips to my waist would be my sharpest weapon as a female, and now I hate that my waist will never be as small as it once was. My arms were a neutral color once, and now they’re varying shades of an alarming red.

*

Picasso painted it with a warm glow. And it was challenging to not watch the glow cascade around the tummies of the women I was standing beside on the fifth floor. It looked nothing and everything like me and the young brunette to my right and the older woman in front of me and the blonde across the room. We were looking through the same eyes.

*

Our bodies are either too big or too small, too curvy or too flat, too much or too little. The success of ‘clean eating’ as a trend relies almost entirely on women believing their bodies aren’t good enough.

*

It’s really not that I don’t like spinach, it just gets stuck in my teeth.

Grief isn’t something that fits neatly into a pamphlet or rests easily on your eyelids at night. It doesn’t float, flutter, twinkle or sparkle; it looms. Grief hangs over you and demands to be seen, until one day you glance up, just for a second, and it takes you.

From each experience with grief I’ve had, the biggest commonality seems to lie in the way it circles your brain, the tricky part being that no matter how big or small the loss, half the time you don’t know what you’re losing.

Being a senior in high school means a lot of things to me. It’s a time to cherish memories with your friends and family, make big decisions about where you’ll be heading for the next four years and grow into yourself just a little bit more. But above all, it’s our final goodbye to everything we’ve known these past 17 years; we need to gain closure in order to start our next chapter.

But suddenly, that opportunity for closure has been cut short and we’re left wondering how to rewire a mindset we’ve been developing for years: This was supposed to be our time.

In sixth grade I lost my dad to suicide. Anyone that has experienced that type of loss knows that it takes years to rewire your brain so it can function without the expectation that the person you’ve lost will be by your side. For me, it wasn’t as much about the holes that were burned into my everyday, but the gaping crater that crept its way into my imagination. I was forced to forget memories that hadn’t happened yet, like his arm hooked in mine as we walked down the aisle, and his thoughtful guidance as I made decisions about my future.

Graduation was supposed to happen after prom, which came after our final sports seasons, which came after our last classes of high school with our favorite teachers, unforgettable weekends with our friends, nights out to eat with our families and weekend road trips up north. We’ve each dreamt about it a million times over.

But this wasn’t just about the months of excitement and celebration; it was our way of embracing what’s ahead and closing off a part of our lives that we cannot return to.

Now that this has been swept away, the class of 2020 is left with the same gaping crater: grief.

Grief appears in different ways. I grow irritable, while others experience the sadness full force. It can come as a wave of depression or appear to be completely insignificant. But regardless, it deserves to be acknowledged.

I have no doubt that our loving teachers and parents will mold makeshift milestones when this pandemic has passed. We are strong, and we will thrive. But we have lost pieces we will never be able to recover.



This is still our time. Let us feel.