grief wears orange lipstick too.
my grandmother showed up in my dream. she had things to say, and now I have things to write.
they say when the dead visit you in dreams, they’re just checking in.
which is cute, but my grandmother never did just anything. that’s not very Cecilia coded.
she came into my dream this week like she used to walk into rooms: unapologetically radiant, ten minutes late, in her signature orange lipstick and a cloud of lavender, smelling like safety, always carrying good gossip.
she didn’t stay long. just long enough to remind me, like she always does,
that love this deep doesn’t go anywhere. it just changes rooms.
so, here we are. this week’s newsletter is about grief. about presence. about how to lose the love of your life when you’re nine and don’t even have boobs yet.
seatbelts optional, soul required. you’re welcome to bring tissues. or tequila. whatever floats your boat.
i won’t judge. let’s get to it.
this is where the grief lives…
this is where the grief lives, in this quiet, cracked-open room.
the air is thick with memory.
the walls hum lullabies i haven’t heard in fourteen years.
the windows stretch wide, trying to pull her silhouette back in.
the moon sits on the windowsill like it’s waiting for someone.
the sun flickers behind my eyelids when i remember her laugh.
i reach out and touch the soft edge of an old dream.
the world is folded into this ache, tucked into the corners of my chest.
beyond this door, there are cities i’ll live in without her.
lovers i’ll kiss and still miss her hand in mine.
grief packs light. it follows.
we carry it like a second skin, a love that outgrew the body it lived in.
come on, it says.
we’ve got so much more to lose.
and still, we go.
let loose in open fields, barefoot and beating.
i wrote this on the 6th of may, 2025.
when i was nine, i lost the love of my life. and before you roll your eyes - yes, i do mean my grandmother. which is a weird age to lose the love of your life. you’re old enough to remember everything, but too young to understand any of it.
her absence was the first great rupture in my reality. and since then, grief became this weird, uninvited plus-one in my life. never confirmed her RSVP, shows up anyway.
some days, she sits quietly in the corner. other days, she rearranges the furniture and eats the last piece of chocolate.
i used to think i could avoid her like that one creepy house on the street we all swear is haunted.
walk faster. don’t make eye contact. pretend you didn’t hear the floorboards scream.
but the thing is, we’re already in the house. it’s not haunted, and there’s no dramatic entrance. no ghost music. just… life.
because to grieve is to be alive. and to be alive is to keep gaining, discovering, and losing. versions of yourself. people. futures. hometowns. recipes no one wrote down.
grief doesn’t just sit in cemeteries, though this is the one we, as humans, are most scared of and understand the least. the one with weird social rules about (basically mandatory) sunglasses i’ve never fully understood.
grief lives everywhere. it lives in people who outgrow you. it lives in versions of yourself you had to bury without a warning. it lives in homes you can’t return to, even if they’re still standing, and painted the same. and yeah, it also lives in the death of someone you love so hard, the whole world cracks a little just trying to hold you together.
when i was 15, i first read a short story that’s never really let me go: A Terceira Margem do Rio, by João Guimarães Rosa. now, if you’re brazilian, you’re probably familiar with this legend-of-a writer.
six years had passed since i lost my grandmother, and i was still quietly unraveling from it. still mad that no one told me how to grieve when you're too young to even have boobs. (it really should come with a pamphlet or at least a hotline for emotionally confused pre-teens.)
this story is about a father who gets into a canoe and just… rows away. doesn’t explain. doesn’t come back. he floats away from everything that made sense. down the river, beyond the river, into the river.
now, there are a million ways to read this story. philosophers and over-caffeinated literature students have thoughts. but for me, it’s always been about grief, passage.
about crossing into some strange, invisible space you can’t name, but you feel in your bones. about disappearing without actually being gone.
i’m about to drop a few translated lines that hit me right in the chest (and refused to leave). but if you’re into haunting metaphors, emotional whiplash, and brazilian literary brilliance that feels like a fever dream - go read the whole thing.
“without joy or hesitation, our father tilted his hat and decided to say goodbye to us.
he didn’t say anything else. he didn’t take food or clothes. he didn’t give a single explanation.” {…} our father never came back. he hadn’t gone anywhere, really.
he had simply chosen to remain in the spaces of the river—always in the middle, always inside the canoe, never stepping out again. the strangeness of that truth was enough to leave us completely shaken. what didn’t exist… was happening.”
i read that and thought: yep, same buddy. one second she was peeling oranges and corn beside me, the next: gone. no warning. no goodbye. no final hug. no chance to prepare my nine-year-old heart for the silence that would follow. after all, how do you explain grief to a child? how do you tell them someone can be gone but still here, everywhere?
she was there. and then she wasn’t. and somehow, she still is.
in the oranges i peel without looking.
in the parts of me that refuse to quit.
in the way i love, and laugh, and fight like hell for the things i believe in.my heart became her new home.
and this last part, the one that never stops echoing in me:
“we had to get used to it.
but really, we never did.
at least I didn’t. in everything i did or didn’t do,
i could only ever find myself in thoughts of our father—
a subject that never stopped pulling my mind backward.”
life had the audacity to keep going. the sun kept rudely rising. people kept laughing at things that weren’t even funny. and i kept growing up, only this time without her hands braiding my hair, without her voice reminding me i was magic, even on my worst days.
that’s the thing about grief, we have to get used to it. as the years go by, it becomes the background noise in your thoughts. in the rare moments you forget it’s there, until something - anything - pulls it back up again.
a smell. a loud laugh. an orange lipstick. a fucking orange, for god’s sake. .
since i’ve first read this piece, i’ve held onto it like a secret language. maybe Guimarães Rosa understood something i hadn’t found the words for yet: that we don’t stop loving someone when they’re gone.
we just find new ways to keep rowing.
i remember the day she left the physical level like it was yesterday.
it was Carnival - March 5th, 2011. i was jumping on the bed with my uncle, pretending we were dancers in the parade. the room was full of movement, laughter, color. childhood.
and then the door opened. and the silence that followed felt wrong. we jumped off the bed, hoping for good news, because that’s what kids do. but life had other plans.
i spent so many nights after that trying to make sense of it all. crying. bargaining. yelling at the ceiling like it owed me rent. trying to figure out what I had done to deserve losing her. she was so young. i was so young.
we had so much life to do together.
i’ve lived a thousand lives since she died. and somehow, she’s in all of them.
she was the first, and one of the very few people in our family to finish high school.
she was good at math. i never was. i still count on my fingers and refuse to be ashamed.
she made things look possible just by believing in them hard enough. in me hard enough.
we used to sit around watching the sun set itself and building dreams out loud. the simple kind and the wild kind.
i made dreams we dreamt together come true, without her physical existence in this plane (which still feels like a scam, honestly)
she dreamt of me going to university. i went to the 22nd best in the world. not that we’re counting (we’re totally counting.) now i’m doing an MBA and waiting to start my master’s in september, because apparently i’m into emotional masochism and academic deadlines.
she wanted me to be strong.
to be loud.
to be kind, but not soft.
to know exactly who i was and still ask questions.
and say what you will about me, but i don’t go down easy.
i fight with nails and gut and spreadsheets and instinct.
i am relentless when it comes to what i believe in. like she was.
and building all of this life - this loud, messy, magic version of me - has been beautiful.
wild. exhausting. like a rollercoaster built by women who never asked for permission.
but don’t let the shiny parts fool you. it’s been hard as hell to do it without her.
she was supposed to be here for the whole thing. the wins, the spirals, the deeply unnecessary panic attacks over packing a carry-on.
but she left me the best thing she ever could: her essence, etched into every memory.
and my mother, her daughter.
but even after 14 years, i miss her in every room.
i imagine her reaction to the chaos of my love life, to my failures, to the moments where i fully embarrass myself in public and somehow make it worse.
i imagine her laugh. i imagine us peeling oranges, talking shit about soap opera plotlines. i imagine taking her to places she never even had the chance to dream of - and me looking over, seeing her face lit up next to mine.
some days, grief feels like a second skin.
some days, like a trapdoor.
some days, like a joke with bad timing.
people think grief is supposed to look like a long, sad walk in black. but mine has already worn glitter, drank tequila and puked its soul the next morning, and raged like a teenager finding out one direction broke up for real this time.
grief has watched me win things and whispered, i wish she could see this.
it’s met me in train stations. in grocery aisles.
in those weirdly quiet sundays that feel like a cosmic slap.
i too used to think grief had to look one way: heavy. dark. unbearable.
but i’ve learned to let it be whatever the hell it wants to be.
however it shows up. however it wants to be dressed up as.
even if it’s 14 years later and someone says, “you’re still grieving?”
yes. i am. i never really stopped. and i don’t think i ever will. in fact, i think everyone is grieving something, someone.
i had to learn with time, with love, with the help of literature and my therapist (queen Lenise) that grief lives in every ending you didn’t see coming. every goodbye you didn’t get to say. every version of you that didn’t survive the plot twist.
to be honest, there’s something quietly beautiful about figuring out how you grieve.
there’s no manual. just... moments.
weird little rituals and emotional landmines.
grief can be loud and public, o or so private it only exists in your Notes app, next to half-written grocery lists and emotional breakdowns titled “random.”
it can be lonely. it can be shared.
it can look like crying into soup, or lighting a candle just to feel like someone’s still listening.
grief is inconsistent. like my skincare routine.
but it’s mine. and yours is yours.
let it be whatever you can handle.
whatever you feel like being that day.
you get to decide what your grief looks like.
you get to decide when it softens, when it screams, when it just...sits there.
maybe it doesn’t get smaller.
but maybe you get stronger.
you learn to hold joy and loss in the same hand.
you learn to laugh even when it still stings.
you learn to keep rowing.
because that’s what we do, right? we row.
through the ache. through the love. through the weird in-between where everything feels like too much and not enough.
and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we catch a glimpse of the third margin - the one where they’re still with us.
orange-lipped, lavender-scented, and cheering us on from somewhere just out of sight.
so if you’re grieving someone, or something, or some past version of you that didn’t make it to this weird, wonderful chapter - this one’s for you.
you’re still here.
possibly spiralling. definitely glowing.
alive. beating. becoming.
row after messy, miraculous row.
anyway, this newsletter is a hug. i hope you felt it through this silly little screen.
loud, slightly chaotic, smells like orange peel and lavender.
just like her. just like me.
and to my grandmother: i look for you in everyone. in places you’ve never been. wherever you are, i miss you and love you with my entire soul. keep visiting me in my dreams.
and if you feel like it, my dear reader, tell me in the comments: how does grief show up for you? in a scent? a song? a shared memory you keep alive? anything-really?
i’d love to know.
with love,
her out loud
me emocionei muito com a sua visão do luto.. muito bonito isso
que lindo amiga!!!!! 🩷