Reya Mosby does not know how to handle grief. In fact, she sucks at it. She compartmentalizes, avoids, and distracts — anything to keep reality away. Maybe it isn’t the healthiest way to cope, but it keeps her going. Reya knows that the second she lets it all in, her grief will completely and utterly consume her, so she suppresses everything. 

 

On January 28, 2024, Reya lost Norel, her cousin and one of the first true and best friends she ever had. Upon first hearing the news, she felt overwhelmed. It felt like jagged broken glass sat heavy in her chest, harshly scraping against her every time she tried to breathe in and out. Once the initial shock faded, a bleak and consuming fog filled her head. The young girl never lost someone so vital to her life and had no clue how to even begin processing it, so she didn’t.

 

To be fair, she didn’t particularly have the time to lose herself to grief. She had classes to attend, essays and articles to write, and plans to prepare for, so she took a deep breath and shoved every emotion down. Going against her usually very emotional nature, she forced herself into this really consuming numbness, ever so tilted towards despair.  

 

But no amount of compartmentalization could keep her from always feeling the sharp and cold claws of her grief tightening around her heart and mind, constantly reminding her of what she tried to suppress.  

 

For a long time, grief weighed on her body since she wouldn’t let it touch her mind. It sat heavy on her shoulders, her arms, her chest, and her legs. Every part of her felt it. Reya never knew grief could be such a physical experience. 

 

Every day, it felt like sandbags were attached to all her limbs, forcing her to consciously gather energy and strength just to move. It felt like every single bit of gravity in the universe was solely focused on her, pulling and pulling and pulling. During her bad days, that weight felt and still feels like a behemoth — a foe too fierce to face. 

 

It’s been a little over a year since it all happened. Even as the months continue to trudge along and living with the phantom claws of grief wrapped around her heart and mind becomes easier, there is still a part of Reya that doesn’t ever know how to move forward. 

 

It was the first time she ever truly experienced a harrowing, gut-wrenching loss. While she repressed and avoided a lot, there was one reality Reya could never seem to hide from — the idea that love always ends in loss. 

 

To be transparent, I, the author and creator of this project, am Reya. I typically find writing about myself to be an extremely daunting and unbearable task, especially when it comes to writing about such personal and emotional aspects of my life. However, if I asked the people featured in this project to bear a piece of their soul with me and everybody reading, I figured I should do the same.

 

At this moment in my life, love feels so finite, so fickle. It feels very cynical to write, and this skepticism surrounding love is very new to me. I have always been a true hopeless romantic, holding on to the dreamiest, most idealistic notions of love. It wasn’t until I experienced such a life-changing loss that I truly saw love’s own mortality. 

 

That is the origin of this project — my own damaged relationship with love. This website and the stories featured on it work to unpack the question: Given the fact that love is transient and losing our loved ones is inevitable, why do we still fight for and pursue love?

 

While I now have a fully fleshed out understanding of the purpose of this project and the way it connects to my own experiences with grief, it took me a while to get there. For a long time, I kept my experience with loss at an arm's length away from this project. That’s one of the reasons I chose to only cover romantic love in the stories I featured — why I stayed far away from familial love. 

 

However, after spending substantial amounts of time conceptualizing and crafting this project and this body of work, I’ve come to understand that the center of all of this undeniably lies in my own experiences with grief. 

 

Now more than ever, it is abundantly clear to me that people do not stay together on this earth forever — whether that be your partner, your best friend, or your family. Despite memories, attachments, and emotions staying with us, people never do. Even with that being the case, people continue to relentlessly chase love. We really normalize or even dismiss how brave that really is — continuing to keep yourself open to those connections despite the caveat of promised endings. I wanted this project to ponder why and how we fight for something so doomed and shine a light on this really beautiful and brave part of humanity. 

 

More than that, I hoped that conducting these interviews and writing these stories would help me realize and internalize that love is always worth the loss — that love, no matter how fleeting, is a gift.

 

It would be easy to ignore the ways in which this work comes from an incredibly raw and personal place. In a lot of ways, I think of this project as a piece of my heart and soul that I’m laying out for the world to see, and there is safety and comfort in keeping that to myself. However, if the purpose of this essay is to contextualize this project and its creation in a meaningful and vulnerable way, it’s important to acknowledge that this project is centered around my grief and experiences with loss.

 

So, my sweet cousin Norel, who helped me see and understand love's beauty and value despite its impermanence, this is for you.