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Grief on a Monochrome Loop
Grieving the dead is an indescribable torment. It is slow and unpredictable. Minds, hearts, and souls take time to heal and accept the losses we grieve, but eventually, we move forward, slowly remembering how to live again. Grieving the living is an unbearable pain that dismantles you piece by piece, leaving your heart ravaged, your bones weary, and your mental and emotional states decimated by the inability to bring them back to life, back to your life. I am buckling beneath the harrowing weight of a grief I cannot control or reconcile. The words on these pages reflect loss, hurt, and emptiness in the aftermath of human connection. I am mourning the absence of what once held me captive, nourishing every part of me. I am breathing while drowning. I am on a solitary journey to find who I once was, knowing I may never be myself again. |
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Glass Chambers The rooms of my heart are lined with windows Yet the only light that enters shines from your eyes And radiates from your smile But you don’t visit these spaces anymore They remain heavily cast in shadows Behind richly brocaded draperies Of blues, grays, and plums I breathe you in, filling the chambers with life’s blood Exhaling your name, softly Like a desperate prayer The extraordinary fragility of my glass heart The secret I keep deep in my soul While you hold the fragments and shards In the palm of your soft and gentle hand Second Hand News I know they mean well Making small talk about you Telling me you’re doing fine Recounting trivial details of their conversations Because you have no one to talk to But you did, once And you do, still But you’ve traded me in, traded down My ears bleed with every story While the pain where my heart once lived Paralyzes my body and renders me lifeless Wishing for one moment we were in your enclave Sharing a laugh over apples and trombones Where I was the first to know your words Your wit and your charm The first and the only Whole I once was You made me so Now I am a shadow Fragments of light and dark on blank walls Phantom pain where you once were At arm’s length – sometimes closer Intense eyes locked while we spoke Feasting on your every word I am no longer an equal measure of what I was Not half. Not a fourth. Not an eighth. I am a tear-shaped droplet Of the woman I became Of the woman you made me But now, barely a memory in the foggy haze Of the days and hours you spend Without even a passing thought of me |
Official Transcript Every word that passed between us Exists in a string tethered to my soul A ‘thank you’ for your birthday Discussions of meetings that ran far too late A midnight message from Vermont Discussions of girls’ names ending with an “I” And your nostalgia for your once upon a time cheerleader Talk of school and being students Talk of planning parties for departing coworkers File cabinets and high school banners Your instructions on how to interview and win Your support even when I lost So many words I read over and over again They are all I have left to remember you by Venom The syrupy sweetness that flowed through my veins Every time you walked by Each time we spoke in the late quiet hours Whenever you wrinkled your nose Just before laughing through your beautiful smile Turned acrid and resentful Carving a path of fire Burning my body from the inside out As you turned your back and went about the business of living My lips deliver a poisonous kiss The likes of which you will never know Because the venom I spew will never reach you Now that you are a lifetime away from me Curious Hollow That image of you haunts me A little boy of very few years Dark serious eyes unlike the icy steel Of those I came to know What story could they tell without words? I fear the worst without knowing the truth The answer is in their curious hollow Now, in the quiet aftermath of what we once were I ponder the abduction of your innocence Wishing I could banish the ogre From the kingdom of your memory Turning dark into light, your years into youth To live as a child cloaked securely in love The way I have loved you from my very first breath |
