Today

Sometimes grace is all we/I have.

Today, I cried.

Like…bawled.

Wailed.

You know the kind of sobbing that leaves you sweaty and exhausted? The kind that makes your stomach turn inside out and your head feel like someone dropped a cinderblock between your eyes?

That.

And I’m not sure why.

Wait, that’s a lie. I know why.

I suppose I just don’t know why it all came out in THAT moment.

While I was sitting in my big yellow chair.

While I was sipping hibiscus tea.

Was it something I saw online? Was it a thought about the thing that’s coming tomorrow or the next day or the next; the thing not even my stellar hyper vigilance can anticipate?

Perhaps.

But mostly it’s something much simpler. Much less convoluted.

I’m scared.

Down to the marrow terrified.

I know, I know.

I’ve read all the platitudes and pontifications on why we “must not be afraid.”

Whatever.

I’m SCARED.

Mostly because I have the kind of central nervous system that just knows.

It KNOWS.

It knows the worst isn’t even here yet.

But it’s coming.

Which is why that “knowing” is a kind of dagger to my soul.

Because I can’t control none of it. No one can.

We can fight.

We can resist.

But we cannot make their hearts turn to the light.

I can’t put up enough fences or grow enough vegetables or practice shooting enough to keep the evil out.

Maybe we survive. Okay, fine. That’s a good thing.

But maybe wholeness, as we have been known to define it, is out of the question.

And you know what’s the worst of all?

You know the thing that makes me even unable to end this piece despite the ache in my chest desperately telling me to not go there?

The worst thing is, I cannot give my sweet, talented, beautiful baby girl the immediate future she deserves.

And in the end, I might only be able to give her survival. Like the women before me, I will have tried to hand her something more and failed.

But I will still try, of course.

I will write because that is what I do. Because, like Sly said, “my only weapon is my pen and the frame of mind I’m in.”

I will choose a new plan and then another and then another if I must.

Because my ancestors did.

Because my ancestors cried too. And they kept going.

But it still hurts.

Like hell.

So today, my friends, the joy lady is a fraud.

Maybe tomorrow she will stand again on what she knows.

Tomorrow, I will believe again that our joy can heal. That our joy is unbreachable.

But today? The grief and rage are constricting and consuming.

I promise, y’all, I’m doing all I can to just breathe through it but…

I don’t have gills.

I don’t have gills.

© 2025 TMLG

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