I will build a living, breathing memorial to Cindy Sherman.

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Sherman gave me language before I had lived enough to know what I’d need it for. That language returned to me through the smoke and silence of grief. Like their work, grief, I came to understand, is a character. A shape-shifter. A performance. You don’t always feel it when it first arrives—you learn to act it, to put on its face. You stage it for others. In the theatre of mourning, you become the main character, where the lighting is always off balance and the audience doesn’t clap. Sherman’s photographs—so often misread as self-portraits—are, in fact, portraits of the masks we wear to be believed.

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Ain’t grief just that?

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The mask you and I try on in the mirror before stepping out into the world? A performance requested by the unknown crowd, to be performed just right, or else…I do not cry. I wear grief. I dress it. I cast it. I become it. I smear eyeliner that never fully runs. I sit in poses too composed to be accidental. It's not realism that I want — it's recognition. Because grief is performative not in the sense of faking, but in that of ritual. It is costume and choreography.

An inheritance we enact. Some griefs I’ve lived. Others, I’ve absorbed from stories, from the shapes of people I've loved, from collective mourning gifted to me like an heirloom. Maybe the truest version of something we know too well to name.Two decades later, my mind remains haunted by her, the woman looking back in some of her stills. Not crying—but almost. Not broken—but almost. Two decades later, my mind remains haunted by her, the woman looking back in some of her stills. Not crying—but almost. Not broken—but almost.

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A woman on the brink of something—loss, realization, abandonment. Each photograph could be a study in pre-grief, in something like the suspended possibility of rupture. A vibration so high, a muffled scream of something unknown.Grief as performance. Grief as cinema. Grief as drag. Grief as self-portrait.

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