Here I am again [Content warning: Grief]

Sometimes a little nudge is all we need. "What happened to your blog? I read every post. You're a good writer!" Flattery can give even the laziest occasional-blogger a little gas to go a bit further, write another post. So, 8 years later, here I am. ---- What to talk about? I had a calamity happen a month ago. I went back to my hometown for a couple days, and my heart is still (metaphorically) red and raw -- jarred again and again by the neatly-organized computer files ending in 2013, by the quiet of a house that used to be filled with incessant chatter, by the wilting flowers at a fresh cemetery plot. It feels like part of me is lost - maybe transmuted? - into something I don't understand. Happiness tinged with sadness. I set my intention while trying to survive a ridiculously difficult Youtube workout. "Whole", I breathe harshly (it really was quite a workout). Not the same, not even in some wabi-sabi way - I am not a pot - but softened and hardened both at once into something fuller, more accepting of the world as it is in all its beauty and contradiction. --- How do parents love so completely? How do they give up so much of who they are to satisfy their children, the psychopaths (Daniel Levitin's words, not mine)? I think about how I treated my mom. Looking at each visit back home as a duty, something dreaded, to get over with. How much I thought I sacrificed - building excels in intermittent wifi on the train back; saying "I'm on a call!" exasperatedly when she was talking to me, not realizing I was off mute; working at restaurants and in cars because I didn't take the day off. A little part of me was afriad that we didn't have a lot of time, that the best years were over, that it was decline from now on and we had better enjoy what we could while we can - and so spending time together was the right thing to do. But what quality of time did we have? Me, worried, exasperated, impatient. But, flawed as she was, her love for me was full and simple. How much she anticipated my coming home. How much she talked to others about me - both my accomplishments and the daily accounts of where I was traveling and what I was doing. How she prayed for me. Part of growing up is also realizing the entire lives your parents lived, before you and alongside you. Their daring exploits, their mistakes and the lessons they took from it, their friendships, their own family sagas. For me, discovering new aspects of my mother from her schoolmates' tributes - how, as prefect, she covered for a classmate who was skipping class - and from friends is a bittersweet experience. Whole.