I came home with a heavy heart. The sun was hot and blinding. I took off the backpack that had been weighing down my shoulder and turned to pour some lemonade. Spotify began to play The Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason”.

You are what you perceive
What comes is better than what came before

I sat down and smiled bitterly at my cup of lemonade.

Is it? Is it really better?

I remember Marguerite Duras used to say:

I see childbirth as a form of guilt. As if the child is cut loose, abandoned. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to an assassination is childbirth. The ejection of a child who is asleep. It’s life itself that is asleep, completely asleep. In an extraordinary state of bliss. And suddenly it wakes up. It’s true, it’s a form of assassination. The first sign of life is a scream of pain. You know, when the air first gets into the child’s lungs, the pain is unspeakable. And this is the first manifestation of life: pain. It’s a scream. It’s the scream of the slaughtered, the scream of someone being killed, assassinated. The scream of someone who doesn’t want it.

You see, there was never a better thing that would come your way. The “better things” are perhaps, a lie we tell ourselves to give us a reason to keep going, to wake up every day, grin with excitement, hoping that at any moment that “thing” will come and rescue you from your pit of depression, because in truth there was nothing else you can do. When you have let the best thing in your life slip away, you have entered a point of no return.

I do believe it’s a form of assassination, and the wailing of the grieving heart is unfathomable. But such is the sign of life, of something awakening. It doesn’t matter if I want it or not, it’s a card that was dealt for me.

I walked out to the deck, looking at the lawn, which was now completely drenched in yellow sunlight. I looked at the setting sun and felt something dying—something familiar but no longer mine, like a shirt that had shrunken over time or an old ring that used to fit my finger. Maybe I’m ready to let go, I thought.

Man’s greatest sorrow is the loss of what was once his greatest desire. - Qiu Miaojin

I took a deep breath, and then another, and another, and another….