DEAR—

This is a love letter to myself, but I'm hoping that if I do it well, it will also be to everything. There is a flower that has bloomed inside my chest. It is not blooming; it has bloomed. It is beautiful and colorful and wide and has so many layers of petals that you can run your fingertips across them forever and each rim will still offer you something entirely new. Like all things, it has a heart in the middle. I did not bloom this flower. It bloomed itself. I was just the garden.

My friend died this week. His name was Ryan. He was a flower, too.

I was never one for romanticizing flowers, but after Ryan died, I went to the farmer's market and bought myself a bouquet. Used an empty jar of tomato sauce as the vase and put them in the window beside the bed. I've been staring at them every morning before I find the courage to move the body. Sending silent prayers that seem to have lost their words.

Loss.

Beauty and loss hang like a braid down life's back. It feels like an intimate knowing when you find it: sometimes we are afraid of the most beautiful things because we know that, one day, we will lose them.

Ryan always seemed so unafraid. I know it can't be true, he was human, but there are pieces inside of me that found the heart to be themselves by being in his presence. In all these conversations I've had this week, painted over with grief and love, it awes me how many little flowers Ryan bloomed deep inside these people who got to love him and be loved by him. It's like a million little intimacies. Is this what we do to each other? Going around, blooming millions and millions of beautiful things in each other's gardens?

Now, everyone is becoming different. I hear it in their voices: his best friends are different. I think the whole world might be different. We say that nothing is permanent, but I think permanence is relative. Ryan is gone, and I think that loss has changed the composition of everything.

I have to go to the words to find some truth in the feeling. The word loss is from the Old English los, meaning 'ruin or destruction.' That is what it is like, living with an open heart: allowing the beauty to ruin you.

Ruin is from the Latin word ruina, meaning 'collapse.' Loss is an undoing, a collapse of a structure that I'd neatly tucked some of my identity in. There are some losses that I'll go years avoiding, like the images in my head of the futures I want—the experiences I say I want for myself that I have unknowingly allowed to define my existence. It is an act of faith to allow those images to collapse: that there will be something of me still standing once they do, and that I must allow the undoing before I know what it is yet.

Allowing loss means I must relinquish control. It means I must trust the intelligence of the life that animates this thing I call self. Allow the self to decompose and place no demands on what will grow from it next. Stop trying to bloom my flowers. Let them bloom themselves.

And then there are some losses that do not require my allowance. They ask no permission. They will ruin me. What does it mean to know how to have that? Can I? I think my capacity to have my beautiful things might depend on it.

I think I'll live more like Ryan. Unafraid.

Dear Nicole, collapse. Let the beauty ruin you.

Dear Nicole, protect the flowers in your chest. Only allow those to plant seeds who will tend to the garden with care. And dear Nicole, also do the opposite. Let your garden surprise you. Don't assume you know the flowers people can grow.

Dear Nicole, make the loss granular. Break it down. Weave it into every petal. Let it add a sharpness to each beautiful little piece.

Dear Nicole, lose. Let others be your perpetual undoing. Change and be changed by their existence. Decompose. Compose again. Flower and be flowered. Open up to it. It is the most beautiful thing.

—SINCERELY

Full Moon

Sometimes