Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I forget in between how grief cleaves the landscape right in half, leaving me with half a brain for living my actual life and half a brain for trying to reconcile this new world with the old one. Each time--and the each time of it is exhausting in its own way, since I find myself awake at dawn tabulating how many family members I have left and wondering how I ended up with so many--it's a process of trying to build a new world out of fewer materials. I am tired.

There was an article a while ago that explained how the reason we don't like the sound of our own voices when we hear them played back because the voice we hear when we speak is conducted by our bones. Our skeletons lower the frequency of our vibrations, and so hearing our voices without them makes the air uncomfortably dissonant with what our brains expect to hear. Increasingly I find myself thinking about grief in these terms, how part of the disconnect between the world with and the world without is that we have suddenly lost something that we've always had all through our bones. Even when I am not thinking about it the world just sounds wrong, and it will take some time to right it again.