A side effect of all this living is how these grief events keep building up, one after the other, on and on and on until I am one myself. You could cut me open and see them there like tree rings, the lean times when everything but gray seemed in short supply. I'm still leaking sap all over the place right now, of course, but in not very long it will all be hardened over and sinking in, just one more thing in a long list of things. Nothing very good or very bad lasts for very long.
This one is the hardest one yet, a little bit I think because it has so much of my identity wrapped up in it. I've always believed in an alternate universe where we worked harder for what we had and made it into something big and crystalline and beautiful. I love the life that I built instead, of course, but I could have loved that one too.
I keep a sporadic list of things I want to track down, something I've read in a book that I want to focus on more closely later, books I want to read, people I want to research. Scattered among the list are the names of poets and looking back I'm never sure if what I wanted to make note of was their life or their work. Was it an action or a phrase that struck me? I never remember to record what I want and most of the time I never find my way back to the feeling that led me there. And yet now I keep hoping there's a secret there, a poem or a fact at the end of these breadcrumbs that will lift the weight on my heart for a moment. When really all that can do that is time.
There's comfort in that, in time, in the way that it just keeps on going. Tomorrow I will wake up, and the cat will bump my head with his, lick my nose, and chew on my phone, and it will be one week and one day since I heard the news. And then more after that, until one morning I wake up, and the cat bumps my head with his, and I forget to keep counting.
This one is the hardest one yet, a little bit I think because it has so much of my identity wrapped up in it. I've always believed in an alternate universe where we worked harder for what we had and made it into something big and crystalline and beautiful. I love the life that I built instead, of course, but I could have loved that one too.
I keep a sporadic list of things I want to track down, something I've read in a book that I want to focus on more closely later, books I want to read, people I want to research. Scattered among the list are the names of poets and looking back I'm never sure if what I wanted to make note of was their life or their work. Was it an action or a phrase that struck me? I never remember to record what I want and most of the time I never find my way back to the feeling that led me there. And yet now I keep hoping there's a secret there, a poem or a fact at the end of these breadcrumbs that will lift the weight on my heart for a moment. When really all that can do that is time.
There's comfort in that, in time, in the way that it just keeps on going. Tomorrow I will wake up, and the cat will bump my head with his, lick my nose, and chew on my phone, and it will be one week and one day since I heard the news. And then more after that, until one morning I wake up, and the cat bumps my head with his, and I forget to keep counting.
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