Everything & Nothing

I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?

December. This heart full of tears and of night.

Time always pretends it’s something else. Sometimes it pretends to be a person. Time pretends to be people’s wrinkles, scars, saggy bits. Sometimes it’s faraway, unreachable roads. Time pretends to be a road that leads to the sea—over hills, past hidden places, past mysterious destinies that are never understood, over roofs, chimneys, castles and huts, fields of cow-wheat and forget-me-nots, and under the silvery smooth beech trees of manor houses. Sometimes it pretends it’s the sea itself. And the sky. Sometimes it pretends to be gravestones, children, the elderly. It pretends to be your veins, your teeth, your dentures, or eyes. In Mother’s eyes, these days time usually pretends to be the wall opposite her bed. The window is time. Day and night. Light and dark. Time is yellowed photographs—black and white, figures disintegrating under her failing vision (what time hides from Mother is that these figures are her own faces throughout the years, her children and her husband). Time is a clock that has stopped. Sometimes Mother’s fingers are time—she holds them up against the light and studies them for hours like a child.

Nothing will fit in that hole because what we want back, we can’t get, which is this one person. I’m not going to rush anything and scamper around like a mad person and make myself crazy. I’m trying to be respectful of the absence. I’m not trying to fill it up. It is what it is.

Let me be crystal clear: if you’ve faced a tragedy and someone tells you in any way, shape or form that your tragedy was meant to be, that it happened for a reason, that it will make you a better person, or that taking responsibility for it will fix it, you have every right to remove them from your life. Grief is brutally painful. Grief does not only occur when someone dies. When relationships fall apart, you grieve. When opportunities are shattered, you grieve. When dreams die, you grieve. When illnesses wreck you, you grieve. So I’m going to repeat a few words I’ve uttered countless times; words so powerful and honest they tear at the hubris of every jackass who participates in the debasing of the grieving: Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

You live in the back of my throat. Folded up there. A memento. Your scent. Your memory. Muted and momentary. Heavy. The smell of sleep. Reminiscent. Bittersweet. Once I laid my head on you. Inhaled to match your rhythm. As if somehow that’d bind us close together indelibly. You live in my cavities. Empty spaces of my body. Your voice. Your memory. Planted deep. A pit inside me.