Lineal

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 "Why is it that grief cannot be a straight forward path?"


I can't seem to comprehend 

An arrow, shot from the bend of a bow is direct,

Piercing, pulling, tearing,

Slicing its way cleanly from one side to the other of my soul,

Just like the day I lost you.


What bitter games do the gods play,

Is it to their delight to watch me find my way around and around with it?

The same way we may observe a dog chasing it's own tail,

A silly thing to watch them catch it, only for them to realize it was attached to themselves all along.

I can't escape the loss, just like an appendage I feel I've lost, the ghost of sensations that no longer I am able to feel.


I grieve an ever distant growing image of you.

Like a photograph carefully preserved.

I see the corners of your mouth turned up, the way your teeth dance across your lower lip,

Hair ruffled in the way only my fingers could've been the cause of.

Like the photo that graces the front of an end of life service pamphlet,

I grieve that person I see.


How miserable. To grieve a person still alive. To miss the voice that still speaks. To yearn for the look of eyes that are still here to see. 


Why is it that grief is instead incapsulated in the form of a bouncing ball, constantly fluctuating in size and weight, that bounces constantly against the inside of my ribs? Leaving me in such pain that I hit my knees and curse the skies, wondering why the heavenly would ever create something so beautiful that my soul feels partially present without it.

The version of you that I loved still exists, somewhere just on the outskirts of obscurity. Yet never crossing close enough to find its way back to the land of the real. You still walk, talk and share a smile of a joke not even needing to be spoken.

Yet,

It will never again be with me.

How cruel of me, to wish the finite yet sure reality that is death and subsequently what ever lays in the beyond, but I find myself sometimes a woman of great weakness. 

I wish I would've buried the version of you that loved me most, instead of lacking the knowing where and what you are and are up to from day to day.

My soul calls for the piece that not completed [as in it, myself is whole] but instead for the fire that burned so brightly that my body collapsed in on itself.

I wish in this lifetime, to not ever come across another that even faintly rings of you. It is not a lack of healing I seek, but the absence of feeling I desire to draw my comforts from.

My body pining for even a brush of the finger tips that at one time made all of my hair stand on its end just at the possibility of being fully embraced.

It leaves me empty. The world around me never reaching it's same saturation, sounds will never again make me move with the joy that I once sought in it. 

My heart calls deeply into the void, only to have the same echoes of the same unending affliction bounce along the walls of my hollow body, mocking me in its certain (even if sometimes delayed) return.

Comments

  1. Look upAugust 14, 2025 at 10:29 AM

    The absence of feelings is a fleeting, never ending chase down a dark path that is often the easiest. But I feel you already know this.

    ReplyDelete

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