With December coming on, it’s unreal to think that another year has slipped by.
To be totally honest, it’s been a bad year for writing. I’ve published, I’ve editted, and I’ve stared down the blank page like it was a thing with snaggle teeth, dripping in rank drool, hungry for the flesh of my mind.
Whenver I start to write, things go one of two directions: sideways or nowhere at all.
So last night, I started a free write just to see what happened. It wasn’t quite a poem, but it wasn’t quite a journal session either. It was allowed to be whatever it was. Here it is:
The way they smiled was magnetic, undeniable, like a perfect mathematical equation. Stunning–a sunset on fire in ember orange and pastel pink.
The truth of their fingertips on my arm was an electric current straight across my heart. Dangerous in the way a wild fire is: too hot to even comprehend.
Their eyes were oceans after bitter storms. Their breath, the warming air of a tropical storm. In their gaze, the world was exactly as it should be. Not a modicum wrong. Not a molecular particle out of place.
I say “was” and “were.”
Did you catch that?
Death is an unforgiving educator of lessons we had no intenion of learning. Cruel, relentless, and vengeful. After blood, but no one understands why.
Our last days were some of our best, basking in the joy and fulfillment we had no way of knowing was about to be ripped away. Even after you’d gone, reality would not sink it. The truth would not settle. The unalterable *certainty* that we belonged together in that suspension of utter bliss for a lifetime could not be shook free. Details and reality be damed.
Life be damned.
Two years surely could not have passed yet.
And still.
The calendar speaks a truth my heard cannot–will not consume.
All I feel is loss now.
Joy is caught in brief snatches, but as in a phobic animal, it only ever lives on the defense. Bated breath, elevated heart rate, increased cortisol, and wide dilated eyes.
Joy no longer sleeps soundly through the night, but it doses in feverish sweaty fits. It wakes in lurches and starts. Incapable of dreams; it is never well rested or at ease inside me.
It no longer preens and rarely eats. It cannot care for itself or perform routine maintenance. It seeks no enrichment and barely shifts from one foot to another unless in a spooked panic to escape.
It is a rescued animal I cannot rehabilitate, unfit for the wild, incompatible with a quiet protected life. It thrashes against the jagged confines of its shattered confines inside my ruination of a heart.
It bred once, readily and free, with enthusiasm and all its instincts intact. Now, it only sits and stares. It will never breed again. Should all the external conditions be met, it now only barbers itself. It plucks out the barely rooted pinfeathers of hope and chews them to shreds. It mutilates its own shape and form until it’s so unrecognizable that we cannot call it joy anymore.
I have tried with all my strength to chase some shadow of the way it had once been, but every version of this life without you in it remained pallid and disappointing. Every color is dulled, sensations numbed. All I feel is the sharp and angry fear of losing again. Immobilized by the dreads that I might also lose those who have come to cram themselves collectively into the hole you left behind.
I can no longer tell if life is a hollow lie because I’m doing it all wrong or if it’s because I’m meant to keep doing it without you.
The loss will never fit, but I cannot return the unfitness of it.
I’m stuck, and you aren’t here to help me move through like you used to. So I chase the fading echoes of my own voice calling for you while the memory of your voice fades…fades…fades away.
And the hole does not close. Only the vacuum grows.
Somewhere, will there ever be a speckle of starlight?
Or will I learn to see in the dark?