When My Pen Screamed: How 1200 Days of Jagged Words Reclaimed My Mum

When My Pen Screamed: How 1200 Days

of Jagged Words Reclaimed My Mum 

Writing has allowed me to shatter and rebuild, to remember

and mourn, not because it saved me from drowning but

because it taught me to swim in the unsanitised waters of my sorrow 

Ma, it has been 1200 days since my world split open suddenly, 1200 turns of the calendar, where I have had to mark the painful absence of your birthday, of your anniversary, of any day at all, and in that time, writing became the rope I held onto, so I would not drown, as it has been the only thread strong enough to keep me connected to myself, to my memories, and to the version of my life that existed before everything changed irrecoverably, the only place where my grief can finally breathe, and the only constant in a universe that no longer feels familiar, I have not just write about you, I write to you, I write with you, I write because the words are the only space left on this earth, where the distance between you and I feels small enough to bear

 

Ma, when you departed, a silence fell, that was more than an absence of sound, it was an absence of context, you became a monument - "My Mum", a figure defined by your finality, your role, and my grief, I felt stranded in a language, no one else spoke, and I was left with a stranger made of the past, and the terrifying sense that you, the person I loved most was slipping into the fog of nostalgia, I could not let that happen, then, 1200 days and a lifetime ago, I picked up the ugliest pen I could find, metaphorically speaking, I decided to write not just about you, but from the crater you left, and I would document the wreckage with brutal honesty, this is me, bleeding through a pen just to feel your warmth in a world that abruptly turned so bloody cold 

 

Ma, my writing in these 1200 days has been more rupture than reflection, more than ink on paper, it has been a doorway, a refuge, a return, a shovel, a scalpel, and a ragged scream, that caught in the cage of my throat and finally released onto the page, and it has been the sound of a heart tearing itself open, because it did not know what else to do in a world that moved on without you, as grief does that, it strips everything down to bones and truth, and I started writing, not to make sense, not to create beauty, not to eulogise, but to ventilate, I wrote because I had nowhere else to put my tremendous ache, especially, when the world wants grief wrapped in pretty paper, but my pen, stubbornly refuses to fold neat corners, it cries, it bleeds, it howls 

 

Ma, I do not write pretty poetry, or gentle metaphors, or lyrical verses with neat bows at the end, I never have, as my sorrow does not give me that kind of elegance, what it poured out of me instead, were jagged, messy, unrefined words, and ripped open sentences, the kind that claw its way onto the page, because they cannot bear to stay silent, the kind that spill out before I even know what I was trying to say, I have not writing elegies for the past 1200 days, but incident reports, since my notebook is a crime scene, a construction zone and an archaeological dig, the pen in my hand, is a chisel, a pry bar, that catches on the snags of memory, and exposing the fabrics of a polite, packaged narrative wide open, and from that bloody frayed opening

 

Ma, when my heart was broken beyond repair over the unexpected loss of you, writing has not been graceful in the last 1200 days, each line I scribble carries the rawness of a wound that never fully closes, it is my survival notes, fragments of thoughts that demand to be felt, as my pen has scraped every sharp corner of my grief, every tender nerve of yearning and every late night ache that refuses to fade, no matter how many sunrises come and go, the words were just sound, a chaotic noise, in the beginning, the "why", the "how", the "unfair" scrawled so hard the paper tore, those were the inventory of the hollow - your empty chair, your favourite flowers, I wrote to vent a poison, thinking perhaps I could expel the grief, if I could name its ferocity

 

Ma, I did not choose writing as a hobby, or as a craft, but, for 1200 days, I have been clung to it as a lifeline, the only place where I did not have to explain, I could be honest about the ache that still pulses beneath everything, there are days the words arrive in broken pieces,  days they rush out like a storm, days I can barely write at all, as the pain is too intense, too overwhelming, too heavy to hold, but still, I return to the page, where no one asks me to be better or moving on, my pen gave me a tool to dive deeper into the wreck, to lay bare each crack, each precipice, each scar, in that dark, unpretty excavation, between the ink and the ache, I have found you again, not lost, not gone, but present, fiercely, quietly, unmistakably real you, my darling Ma

 

Ma, in those broken lines, you come back to me through the words, in the angry scribbles, I feel the weight of your absence, in the tender pauses, I feel the warmth of your love, that refuses to vanish, even after 1200 days, and in those unpolished sentences, the ones that gush out in the middle of the night or on a morning when your loss crushes me, I meet you again and again, not as a fading figure, not as a saint people offer in condolences, not as a version, grief tries to carve into stone, not as the absence that destroyed my soul, not as a distant memory blurred by time’s cruel hands, but you, the specific, peculiar, breathtakingly human you, and your stubborn charm, your quiet pride, your quirks, your tenderness, your flaws, your love, all of it

 

Ma, for 1200 days, writing has become my one remaining language with you, as it is how I seek out for you in the darkness, it is how I stitch myself back together after every wave of grief, it is how I remember who I was when you were still here, you loved me unwaveringly, in the ways only you knew how, and my pen has been my way of loving you back, with the messy, and utterly truthful devotion, the page lets me be exactly who I am, a daughter who still grieving, a heart still longing, and a soul still learning how to keep living without you my irreplaceable mother, with a big heart that beat in a rhythm that perfectly synced with mine, between the lines, you are right there, still imperfect, still beautiful, still mine, in my writing, we are together, always