I need to use my words

every day is a gift: that's why it's called 'the present'

Every parent of a toddler is familiar with this refrain: "use your words." As in, not your fists or your spit or your kicking mary janes.

For me, tonight, however, I need to use them because something unfathomably sorrowful is happening to my extended family, for which we are all banding together to meet. We have had terrible news this week, the details of which I will not discuss here for reasons of privacy, but with which anyone who has ever had a tragic family event will be empathetic with a sense of loss.

In the meantime, as we deal with the undeal-withable, I find I need to use my words. My words, written more than spoken, have become a lifeline to me, a way to envisage, as from a distance, what happens on a given day, and a way to contextualise the difficult, the ugly, the scary. I'm going to save for myself the words I'm searching for in our current crisis, but I think I need to use all the other words at my disposal to describe, as I love to do (for whatever reason) the small, quotidien, inconsequential, sometimes funny, always dear to me things that happen in what is real life, although it sometimes feels like real life is nothing more than what you're doing while you wait for something real to happen.

So please bear with me during a difficult time, and know that my "speaking" here, my words here, are a curious lifeline to me, and outwards as well.