By the time Mama wakes up and Lolo steps outside, the calamansi is already in Gabe’s pocket. Gabe sits cross-legged in the dirt, palms empty. Lolo squints at the tree. “Everything is like this when no one’s looking.” “Like…
Grief does not arrive in a single shape. It is both blunt and slippery, as if it should name one thing but in practice touches countless forms of absence and ache. I will try to explain it to you in this way: grief is a permanent shadow of knowing that more goodbyes will come. I wonder how you’d try to describe it, dear reader.
The grief in “Calamansi” is not a perfect mirror of my own circumstances, but it rhymes with them. I’ve wondered if that’s why fiction resonates with me. Maybe stories let me linger in spaces between fact and feeling, where truth is textured instead of tidy.
I chose to center the story around Gabe. He is a collision point, carrying his own diagnosis while watching his grandfather’s memory unravel and his mother bend beneath the weight of both. His family orbits in strength and fragility, each of them protecting and wounded, holding on and letting go. In him, I can touch that word grief more clearly: to be young and already marked by illness, to want to be seen and yet to hide, to long for the comfort of being held even as he tries to shield others from pain. In writing him, I also wrote about the inheritance of loss. Gabe’s story is braided with Lolo’s and Mama’s, each holding their own grief, each bearing it differently, and yet none of them untouched by the others.
But at its heart, this story is about love. I recognize how contradictory this feels—that I would define one word and tell you about another. But if grief is a lineage, so too is love. That word love travels through families, reshaping what we mean to one another. And so when grief shakes our hand, we still hold tightly to love in the other. How bizarre, don’t you think? Love is something wholly human and wholly beyond us—tangible in a touch, in a meal shared, in a calamansi held warm in a pocket, yet also intangible, divine, almost unbearable in its weight. Love compels us to reach for one another even when the reaching hurts. Love makes us witnesses. Love makes us known.
The story is also shaped by my understanding of my culture, one that has suffered from colonialism and war, endured loss of land and identity, and carried grief across generations. Yet it is also one that holds a profound and bewildering sense of love.
Craft-wise, I wanted to ground this intangible weight in very physical, sensory details. Those details are the scaffolding that allow the bigger ideas of mortality, memory, and devotion to land in the body as well as the mind. I wanted the calamansi tree to be the anchor from the very beginning, stubborn but alive.
Writing this story brushed against a tenderness that could easily split open. But it also reminded me why I write at all: because stories can hold what I cannot. And so, thank you for reading. I hope you are reminded that grief is not our only inheritance; love is yours to claim, too.
JOSEPH CUSI TIAN-DELAMERCED is a Filipino writer based in Connecticut with a background in medicine, education, and storytelling. He works as a freelance creative writer and as an editor for The Bias Magazine. His award-winning stories have appeared in CRAFT (the one you’re reading now!), LIGHT, Creation Magazine, Beyond Words, and other literary magazines. You can find more scattered thoughts he weaves together on Instagram @wordsbyjosephctd.
