Multidisciplinary designer with a focus on storytelling
through type, image, and tone.
💌 Current hyperfixation: Greek Mythology (Hadestown The Musical)
📖 Currently reading: On the Calculation of Volume I - Solvej Balle
💿 Listening to: What’s that You’re Doing - Paul McCartney
🎥 Recently watched: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
I Gave Myself 10 Minutes to Cry
What I couldn’t say outloud.Words & Illustration by Jake Harrison
Published in Groovy Zine (Issue 001)
When I got the call, I gave myself ten minutes to cry. My brother had just relapsed two days earlier; my grandmother had been moved into a care home; my childhood house was being sold. And now this. Destiny asked, “Why is this all happening to you?” when I called her for reassurance but I didn’t have time to answer. Panic surged through me, raw and unfiltered. My mind spun in fragments—Where are my keys? What do I need? What am I forgetting?—each thought louder than the last, crashing over one another like waves. I tore through my room on autopilot, yanking on clothes with shaking hands, grabbing shoes I couldn’t remember picking, my phone, my keys, my wallet. Primal instinct kicked in—just move, just go. These objects, meaningless seconds before, suddenly felt like lifelines, the last thin strings tying me to the mortal world. Ten minutes earlier, I’d been asleep, and you were still here.
Now, those ten minutes feel selfish in ways I can’t undo. They were the difference between seeing you one last time and arriving to find only your absence. The EMT assured me that you were already gone, just "skin and bones and freezing cold." For months, those words circled around my brain, as if saying them enough could rewrite the truth. I started reading Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking shortly after it happened—perhaps a little too on the nose. Didion writes, “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.” Is this how all people with recently deceased loved ones feel? I still fantasize about getting there on time (whatever “on time” means), of rediscovering the magic powers we pretended to have in our grandmother's backyard––I’d arrive, twist my hands into impossible shapes, and you’d begin to warm. Everything would be okay again. I dream of time machines and superpowers. But in every timeline, I awake steeped in failure. But the truth is, I failed long before that morning. Your wonder was gone, replaced by a stillness, I confess, I didn’t recognize until it was too late. I wasn’t there for the one person who was always there for me. Maybe what I actually regret—what guts me most at midnight—is that I never found the right words, or maybe never made enough space, to tell you just how much I loved you. Not in passing, not as a joke, not in the way we tossed affection back and forth like a game—but plainly, fully, so you’d know without a doubt. I wonder if you ever really knew. I wonder if I waited too long, assuming there’d be more time.
Grief, Didion writes, is “a place none of us know until we reach it” –– a shock so obliterative it feels like madness. And madness, I learned, isn’t always loud. Sometimes it looks calm. Mom and I became “cool customers” in public, performing normalcy with a chilling precision, but behind closed doors, we unraveled in loops. We recited the timeline like a chant, as if we could rewrite them into something survivable. – your friend, Mario, told you to go home around 3 A.M.; mom missed your call at 3:25 A.M., her ringer off, I couldn’t sleep that night, but finally gave way around 3:40 A.M.; Dad found you on the floor at 5 A.M.; Mom arrived just after. I was ten minutes late. We clung to these times like clues, as if we were detectives instead of mourners. But the repetition didn’t bring peace. It dulled everything else. Days bled into each other. I floated through tasks—showering, eating, answering emails—with the eerie detachment of someone watching their own life from the ceiling. Grief wasn’t sobbing or screaming. It was silence, and clockwork, and the aching absurdity of brushing my teeth while the world remained unchanged.
In the aftermath, Mom took your black Vans sneakers and I, your collection of dice—tiny symbols we hoped might tether us to you, as if grief could be softened by possession. Deep down, I knew I don’t have magic powers. And yet, I clutch them like talismans, their edges sharp against my palm, as if they could anchor me to what’s left of you. But even that couldn't bring you back to life. And maybe that’s why, when Mom told me just a month later that I should still go, still chase the dreams we’d once whispered about over late-night drives, I said yes—because the idea of staying, of sitting still with the pain, felt unbearable. I packed with a kind of desperation: passport, phone, keys to a house that no longer felt like mine, a photo of us I couldn’t bear to look at but somehow couldn’t leave behind. I wasn’t moving toward something—I was trying to outrun everything. Call it ambition, call it escape, but really, I just longed to forget. I wanted new sidewalks, new distractions, new people who didn’t know what I’d lost. I left with the hope that if I ran fast enough, far enough, I might finally step outside the outline of my grief.
When I leave, I say goodbye to everyone I thought I could disappoint—people I loved but rarely told, afraid my love would land wrong or sound too much. I say goodbye to the city that held every version of me, from the unsure boy who second-guessed every decision to the one who now knows regret too intimately. I tell myself I’m leaving to grow, to start fresh, to stop making the same mistakes—but what I really mean is: I want to stop holding my love hostage, stop silencing myself out of fear, stop assuming there will always be more time. I leave under the guise of self-discovery, the ache of longing. Call it selfish if you want—I know it’s something closer to survival. Leaving home wasn’t just escaping from grief or responsibility. It was an escape from the ghost of who I used to be: the boy who was afraid to show love, the boy who froze. And maybe New York isn’t salvation, but at least it’s motion—new streets, new distractions, new ways to carry pain.
Somehow I feel you even more here, though maybe I’m just lonely. But I feel you like the inertia of a subway car and sometimes lose my grip. I see your face reflected in the window of a neighboring car, blurred and fleeting, like a memory just out of reach. I wonder about all the lives you could’ve lived—the ones you dreamed about, the ones you never told us. I feel you in the wind that pushes me a little too hard while vaping on the streets of Kips Bay, like you’re pleading with me to stop. Even here, surrounded by too-tall buildings and bright city lights, I carry your absence like an artifact I can’t put down.
I’m experiencing my first real seasons. Autumn arrives like an elegy, my favorite color engulfing the landscape – almost burning everything in view. I walk through yellows and oranges and pretend they’re golden– in the way I sometimes saw you. Still, I feel the guilt sink deeper when our cousin Vanessa asks, “What was his favorite color?” while drafting a memoriam post. I pause too long. I don’t know how to respond. How can someone be so central to your life and yet, somehow, there are things you never thought to ask? It haunts me—that I can recall the exact time of your final missed call, but not your favorite color.
I tried again to give myself ten minutes to cry, but the water never came. I just stared at the ceiling, hollow. Instead, I take ten puffs of my strawberry mango vape—like substitution could ever pass for grief. I know you liked mangoes—does that count for anything? “New city, new me,” I type in as an Instagram caption, the words bright and hollow on my screen. But winter is arriving fast, and I’m all alone.
“I still really haven’t been able to cry,” I tell Destiny, now 3,000 miles away, my voice brittle as I walk through Central Park for the first time.
“We never really get that time again, huh?” she says, and I don’t respond. I just watch the ducks move in slow circles across the pond, carving quiet spirals into the surface. Their rhythm is soft, instinctual, and I envy them—how they seem to know what they’re doing, where to go, even when the world is cold.
I wonder if I’m too locked into my own patterns: fleeing when things get too hard, turning to vices when I can’t cry, clinging to routines instead of healing. Searching for signs in the wind, in strangers’ faces, in the shape of clouds—not because I believe in magic, but because I need to feel something. The moment passes, and keeps passing. You’re still gone.
God, why can’t I cry?
I remember everything in sharp fragments, like a mosaic of irreversibility: call, ten minutes, jeans, wallet, keys, drive, pack, leave, vape, write, eat, not cry, vape again, autumn, yellow, skin and California bones and freezing cold—artifacts and memories and nothing more.
When I got the call, I gave myself ten minutes to cry, but I never stop wishing for ten minutes more.