The woman I fell in love with and called my lover has left me. Now, you see, what I never confessed was that my father grew old, and I saw his grey hair on the days when he would go for long without a shave, and I’d be troubled by the realisation that he was slowly leaving us.
It has become the sort of thing that happens and then your life splits into two parts: one before and after the incident. I know that this will change me. Already, I feel myself becoming different. I now look at things from a perspective of seeking the utter point and essence.
Let me tell you: there's no point at which you become sufficiently prepared to lose anybody. You might think it, you might imagine that it’s capable to bear with grace, you may have watched others go through this phase and believed that you understood the shape of their grief.
My nights are scarier nowadays. I wake up and, for a few seconds, I am simply alive. Bereft of the knowledge that she has gone. I wake up and I have not yet remembered what has happened to me. Then it comes back, and I have to become the person who knows all over again.
I thought our love was something you could tend to, like a garden, and if you were careful enough and particular with it, if you watered it when it was thirsty and protected it from strangers, then it’d have a reason to stay alive. But alas, my lover has become someone else’s.
You notice that they no longer call your name with the same tenderness you've grown accustomed to. You begin to wonder when it happened, when the person who once looked at you as though there was nowhere else in the world they’d rather be but your arms, began looking past you.
I’ve learned that physically healthy, able-bodied people think they can “earn” their health. That if they eat right, exercise, and “don’t be lazy,” they’ll be able-bodied forever.
This belief is the insidious underbelly of every piece of disability or healthcare legislation.
One of the most effective ways to keep people from questioning an unjust system is to convince them that their ability to survive it makes them morally superior to those who can't.