the absence of grief like a wound

the rain falls blue on the sidewalk. in the great throat of thunder, my heart runs away from me again. it’s like catching frogs in the pond up the hill when i was young, mudded to the knee and always only barely avoiding falling headlong into the water. this makes it sounds impossible, but really i was good at it: the silence and how you wait still as glass, watching. the catching is the easy part, what’s hard is the holding on. it’s the same now as it was then. trying. failing. trying again. each time, i am left asking: what remains?

i am, categorically, a person defined by loss. my only absolutes are the negative spaces, the rest of me thick and hazy like low-hanging clouds, wringing their hands on the horizon. i mean this in the manner of house-hauntings, the way some things stick around like rainbowing oil slicks across an empty parking lot. i don’t mean this to be a eulogy. summer is thick in the air and i am again all-over gripped by the urge to disappear into the wind. is this all it is, then? a long series of leaving-behinds, never quite saying goodbye the way i mean it? from time to time, i unroll my memories like film negatives hung to dry and point at each place i wish i had said something that i didn’t. it’s not regret, this feeling, more like a turning-backwards.

i am coming home again to the senselessness in the afterwards. the way the days are dreamlike, the sting of another coming-going fresh on my tongue. i am soaked to the bone in the rainstorm now, the skies opening up to give everything they have. we are alike in that way, i think. there is always an after, always only an after. it’s the grey nothingness i understand the most these days. the fog, the dense blanketing, the hush. it’s hard to write about absence in a way that isn’t contrived, the same few words always grieving the same. here is the space where something was, here is all that is left behind. it’s the framing of it, i think, that treats everything around the space as what is real when really it’s the opposite, the edges of loss the only thing distinct.

here is the moment i am always rewriting: the quieting of the storm, the same deep ache and the way the past ripples as i walk through its ankle-deep puddles. i am not mourning. it might be easier if i was. that way, at least, i might understand better how to move on instead of carrying all of these afters around in my pockets like coins. i am running to the riverbank now and falling to my knees in the mud, elbow-deep in the water chasing down my heart again.

published july 16, 2022

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