this title is a formality.

or whatever title makes you click this.

Today I realized, I am writing my way through a wound.

I am tending to something that refuses to exist as a retrospective.

Still from the 1989 short film Tanea by filmmaker Tânia Cypriano

I stood at my altar yesterday and offered my spirits the salt of my tears, feeling something in me break - or rather, noticing that something within me had already broken and I finally let myself feel it.

Nobody knows the depths of what I am wrestling with, not even me.

I keep trying to assign myself another task when what I need is a hug. I am reckoning with the fact that there is no way for me to successfully brand myself while I am trying to stop the bleeding.

I’m grieving a terrible loss and I have not truly reckoned with the death that drapes over me and hollows me out. Everyday, it morphs and manifests as a different ailment, so that the only diagnosis that makes sense is RUN. And to run, I need resources.

Hence the habit of focusing on productivity and peddling my essence in this digital marketplace where there is no corner that has not been claimed as ad space.

Art of Skin Campaign for NABLA Cosmetics, photographed by Desiree Mattsson

As my lunar return, the new moon, and my period approaches, I have decided to lean into the breaking. There is something waiting for me on the other side of this hurt, but I will not get there with feeble attempts to optimize my grief.

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Love,

Mila