An ode to grief
My grief is like a boulder sitting in my stomach, growing with each passing day. Sometimes, when I roll over at night, it rolls over as well and shifts the pain from my heart to my leg to my groin, and I wake up because it hurts so much, I cant breathe. Some mornings I discover it has grown so much overnight that It is difficult to get out of bed. It takes a long heavy minute to reaccustom myself, push through, and sit up. I put my foot down on the cold marbled floor, which tranforms into a cloud and gives way and I stumble into the pain from yesterday.
Often when the boulder doesn’t grow fast enough, I forget it’s there, till I have to run alongside those who are not weighed down by it and find myself drowning in immeasurable grief. On those days I envy their easy rhtymatic breathing and the shallow waters of their sorrow.
There are days I have concentrate all my energy on remembering to breathe and still end up forgetting, then remembering suddenly, gasp for big gulps of air, which seem to go no further than my throat. Those days I cant pay attention or be present on the same plain on which my body exists. Some days they find me hard of hearing or ditzy or rude and I wish if only I could tear open my chest and show them how battered my heart is, or run an xray which shows the grief that infests me.
A grief which metamorphosizes, changes shapes and colours and form.
Some days its a moss spreading over me calmly, other days, it is chaotic like spider webs. One moment it is a rock hard, heavy, weighing me down, compressing my lungs, pinning me down to it, the next moment it is liquid fire flowing through my veins, and the very next clouds and gasses overwhelming all my senses becoming the air I breathe, managing to reach areas where it couldn’t before, and I am living breathing grief, some how smiling. Crying in short controlled intervals. Breathless sitting at a desk. Inattentive in crowds. A grief which I can not name because naming it might bring me something worse than it. A grief so overpowering that it brings the gift of forgetting why its there.
