RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

I tried tucking it between book pages, pressed flat like a flower. A memory kept, but forgotten, softened by time instead of dust.

That didn’t work.

I tried to push it further and further away from myself, until I had surrounded my own life with the notion that I had an obligation to forget my trauma.

One day I tried a different approach. Put the grief in a different place, take it out of the book, and put it on display for all to see.

I poured it into the cracks of my life, to cement the broken pieces together. I sent it out in letters I never mailed, let ink soak up what my chest couldn’t bear, until the weight of the words felt like a story instead of a wound.

Just acknowledging that it was there made it easier to carry.

I let it rest in the quiet, in sunrisen mornings, in laughter, in the spaces where love once lived, because grief is love, just with nowhere to go.

Some may be unsatisfied with that. But, for me, that’s enough. Maybe grief doesn’t need to be buried or forgotten.

Maybe grief is just like us, looking for a permanent place to live, to occupy.