Hey, it’s me... Grief (again)

 Grief is demanding companion. 

Maybe you crave an escape. A quick fix. Something to distract and numb so you can catch your breath. Music, mallomars, Merlot... meth?

Sometimes you find any song with a minor key that will help you lean into its madness and you let it swallow you, drowning you whole into its oceanic murky depths. You let your pancake melt the shellack that hid the red from your nose and the puff from your eyes and you walk among the land of the damned and surrender to your new uniform of dirty sweats and cigarette stained hands and sticky-saltwatered hairs... 

At times, grief blots you’re runny mascara and snotty nose and reminds you of the enormity of what you loved that reveals the true value of what was lost. That’s what the hallmark card said. You nod in accordance, while you pour into the puddle and plummet into pathos in a Publix. They wrote this for you. It’s a sign. An omen. Maybe someone felt this before? Mask-cloaked consumers caustically console and lend lame laments while pushing you from protruding their purchases of People publications you mistake for pity.

In time, you think maybe she finally found someone else to pick on and for a moment you’ll forget your tormentor. Grief, that gobsmacking goddess of grunts and gasps.. gone? Good. Good riddance. Go.

Then one day, you’ll be eating a bowl of ramen and the tiniest piece of paper from the stolen Publix chopsticks falls into the center of the bowl and as you watch it drown, you’ve found yourself immersed again in her threshold: scabs all re-plucked and picked and she’s bloodied down your body,  behaving as brazen as before. 

Grief... I’m not sure she ever really leaves you. In time you go from violent swings of anger and screaming and pleading and bargaining and ignoring and crying with fists shaking at the sky to maniacal laughing ...and then soft, surrendering whimpers. 

She swats the sustenance from your soul and sticks her sorrow down your stomach and steals your sanity and you spit it solemnly, but your barf is barely bile and you’re barely breathing.... you’re broken, barren. 

Some days, you quietly walking beside her with a new color of callous... A new wrinkle line in your brow from forming your face in such a way to welcome her.. a new hair that was spun directly from the silver threads of her throes and you decide you won’t pluck this one or dye over it cause you didn’t die from it and it’s become your badge of bravery.

She’s a nagging toddler, tantruming and turning your tummy into taffy when your day was already tough.

She’s a babbling bimbo barraging you with bullshit until you’re blundered.

She’s your maddened mother mourning over your mishaps and mending your membranes from malaise with legendless maps to lands of lament.

She’s your giving grandmother you grieve over who gave you the gift of gab and was gone before you grew. 

She’s the aunt of antagonistic agony.  

She’s the breadth of breath, born of bereft.

She’s the cunning cunt, the Consulate of consolation and calamity. She’s the distress and dismemberment and her disease disrupts your day, declared by her diploma of death.

She’s the Empress of exhilaration, the ear mark of the exiled from all you’ve earned and eradicated.

She’s the foe of friendships, the fear of the fire, the flames of the forgotten.

She’s glib with grief and hails all hopelessness and heartache.

She’s is infirmity, indignant; one who irritates your ills and jabs joyfully while killing all kindnesses. 

She leers over love and lies that’s you’re lost. She mocks morosely while nipping at your nights of Oh’s by ordaining with ordeals of pain and plagues you. She quarantines you to rooms of regret and renders your remembrances of relics as ‘recalled’. She sets her sights on sorrow and tortures you with tribulation and torments. She unequivocally upsets with vexation and vehement worriment and woe and x’s out your yearning; a zealot for a zoo-like zephyr with a zeal as a zeppelin in your zone. 

She’s the Santa Clause of sorrow. The Tooth Fairy of torment. The spirit in the night who thieves your thought and leaves you presents of pain. 

You’re so tired, but she cries with hunger, so you begrudgingly un-bed, and bottle and bathe her.  

You’re so sad, but she pulls at your pants to play, so you pull up your pity and pour her a pint of paint to pacify.

You’re still uneasy, but you realize the feelings are fading, so you fastidiously fashion yourself a frame to fit it all in and face the fallen.

And then one day... it’s fainter. A navy tattoo from another era of an anchor on the leather skinned arm of a life lived long. A bluish blob with the same prominence of the pencil lead stuck in your finger from first grade. When did it lose its darkness, when did it’s dazzle dwindle? When did the depths of the dam dry out and dim to a dimple? 

It just did... 

And it does.

Not today, not tomorrow. 

We can’t say when, but it will. 

So, wait....

Wait it out. 🙏🏻