andrea_gibson ovenbird I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark. -Andrea Gibson We shared nothing concrete but our first names, and I only knew you through the words you chose to give the world, but there were so many words to hold and touch and feel. When I first heard your voice it was already cracked by the cancer that would take your life in the earliest dawn of this summer morning. You were here to tell us all what love is and what grief is too and how one never cancels out the other. You were here to show us what it means to hold our own imperfect souls to the light and gaze upon them with wonder. You were here to show us that self-love is the hardest kind of all and then gave us all instructions for how to do it anyway. You wrote: Of all the violence I have known in my life I have never known violence like the violence I have spoken to myself, and I have seen almost everyone around me hold that same belt to their own back, an ambush of every way we’ve decided we’re not enough then looking for someone outside ourselves to clean that treason up. You took all the hurt this world tried to crush you with and said, “fuck it. I’m going to love everything anyway.” And you did. And in the doing you gave us so many new ways to see. You wrote: What I know about living is that the pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo, so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window, when I can see what I couldn’t see before. Andrea, I’m looking for the window now because knowing you are not here, that your voice speaks in ways I can no longer comprehend, lays open a grief I know is carried in a thousand different ways by the people who knew you and the people who loved you through your poetry. And I know what you would say, because you said it. You said: Feel everything you have to feel right now. Keep the novocaine out of your wisdom teeth. These are the instructions I carry forward from here. 250714 ... nr some people just seem like they'll live forever despite all odds. i never actually thought they'd leave us, even though they'd been sick for a long time. may they rest in peace/poetry. 250714 what's it to you? who go blather from