All those reading this who have suffered a loss, the kind of loss that lessens you personally; not a thing you have lost but a large chunk of cognition and equilibrium chewed away by fate.
Perhaps it will grow back.
Perhaps is unlikely.
This space is full of ballerinas toe dancing through minefields of grief.
1 in particular arrives at the other side of the ‘stage’, limbs intact, smile intact.
Watching her, you’d never know they move the mines every night, as you stand to applaud you think, “So consistent in her performance,” and yet
as she moves she’s thinking she’ll be happy to hit that grief and sit with it a while, with whatever limbs she has left.
And then she’s reconstituted, maybe takes tea with a friend, something germane and mundane, and the friend presses fatty food onto her, seeing that she only has a pound of fat left on her and it appears to be between her ears
and not doing well/and there are other ballerinas to be visited and given tea
always
always
It’s our job to make other people happy and then they die, and they stole our job.
Of course there’s a long list of things wrong with that sentence
If you really want somebody to be happy it’s not a job
and I say
of course
fuck that noise, it’s always a job, it’s always been a job
but some jobs you scramble through your shower and into your clothes to get to, and that’s what making somebody happy feels like
sometimes
and then it stops. There are no clothes to scramble into, or out of.
There’s a list of tasks with no happiness. There may be the shadow of grim satisfaction that they’re done, but there’s no happiness in it.
You’re an animal. You’re easily distracted. You find a minute, or two minutes, or three, when you’re not a tunnel from grief to grief, stormed and held by monsters that look like every harsh word and uncaring action you ever directed at the dead.
cheer up it could be worse you prick you prick that was the minute the downpour started
Cheer up it could be worse.
My beloved is dead, and I’m alive.
I wanted to be able to feel your love for another hundred years. I’m not suggesting I would have done something as depraved as put your consciousness in a robot but yes I might have, I might have, and now that will never happen.
I wanted you live forever because that’s just how wonderful you are. I can deal with dying but I wanted to believe you’d live forever and now you’re dead and I’m not allowed to believe that anymore.
There are so many things I’m no longer allowed to believe.
This space is full of a waterfall. Thanks to magic it looks white, but once you get close you see it’s not water, and it’s not white.
Every tear I’ve cried since you died is in there somewhere. Drip drip. I think some snot got in there too.
This space is full of steam. Hot water helps. I can still stand in a stream of hot water and let this poor messed up body feel some relief. Steam from a cuppa. Steam from my breath, waiting for the bus. Steam from the tops of buildings. Steam from icy grass as it sublimes. And with the pulse of steam I think of the next breath, which you will never draw, and it’s on me again, riding me like a parody of a savage, except it is not savage, and it knows how to ride.
I look at ceremonies of grief and they are all lacking.
Who will grieve you like I can?
Who will grieve for you when I am gone.