Some Days I Can’t Swallow the Sky

In honor of Andrea Gibson

Andrea Gibson died yesterday, and something in me went still. Their voice was the sound of someone holding a lamp beneath their own ribs to show the rest of us what breath could still do. They wrote poems like bandages that didn’t pretend you weren’t bleeding. They told us: grief is a form of praise.

And I believed them.

They asked themself, “Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?"

And I believed that, too.

So today I put on one of their old recordings while rinsing dishes. My hands in the warm water, their voice in the air like birds startled from a field. I remember the line about loving harder when the world ends. I remember their face—tired and radiant—as they said we were made for this. I remember how they said the world needs those “who know the darkness contains truth that could bring light to its knees.”

These truths about darkness and light are what I will remind myself on mornings when I wake already broken—before co…