Stories as Stars
Sometimes when I want to feel less alone in the world as a writer and a poet and a person who deeply feels things, I scroll substack.
Not to find the top authors and writers posting, though I follow those too, but to find the tiny creators, the ones letting their voices be barely an echo in the night.
It’s 8pm on a Tuesday night, I’m sitting on my bed in my underwear in the middle of a July heatwave and my heart is full of all the things. It gets like this sometimes. Full, full, fuller yet until it overflows and everything spills out of me. The love, the grief, the joy, the beauty, the pain.
This week Andrea Gibson died. They were a poet whose work touched so many people, and this collective grief we all share is evidenced by tributes that come in of people who never met Andrea, whom Andrea never met, but who were impacted by their words. Andrea’s poems became lifelines I listened to from hospital beds and closet floors, along with a few other poets, and inspired me to be a poet.
Which is fitting that on this day, the day that I am grieving the loss of a poet I’ve never met, who wrote words that perhaps influenced how I view chronic illness and living in a disabled body most, I’m editing a piece I wrote about living in a chronically ill body and the death of my friends.
As I write their stories, I say their names. All of the individuals I wrote about in this piece, even though their names are never mentioned, and all the individuals who have passed since this piece was written.
I think the grief in more time is found in more people to miss you when you die. That’s also the beauty of it.
I want to live a beautiful life. I want to live life split wide open, and to fill the empty spaces with more of myself. I’m still figuring out what this looks like.
As writers and artists and poets and people, we feel things deeply. Part of being human is the ability to experience life so intricately. Sometimes this can feel like a heavy weight, a lonely knowing to live with a heart so big in a world so wide.
When I don’t have my own words, I reach for the words of others. Poets, like Andrea, and writers I follow on substack and obscure indie artists that no one has ever heard of and New York Times Best Selling Authors. Art, and storytelling, it reminds us we’re not alone.
The most powerful thing we can do is tell our stories (I began this sentence with I think, then erased it. My editor told me to stop doubting myself so I’m trying). To let our voices break through the night. To tell our stories through breath and body and paint and pen.
Somewhere in the patchwork night in the big wide world, my story will connect with your story. If you’re here, it already has. May this collision errupt into stardust and remind us we’re not alone.
