R.I.P

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be. … Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”

...

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

- Joan Didion

Flailing Mess.

You know what my deepest-darkest secret is?
It's not that I murdered and a hid a body in a chest that everyone thinks is a dinner table.
It's about how I'm that greedy, fat kid who's stuffing its face with chocolate cake in the kitchen at 2am when everyone's asleep. Stuffing its face with ham-fisted movements, head shoved into the cake box, chocolate frosting smeared all around the lips, licking it rapidly every minute or so, bending over with her back to you, with over-sized hips bulging out in her one-size-too-short jeans, and thin strands of hair getting into the face and between chocolate stained teeth. That greedy, fat, kid with sky-rocketing blood sugar levels, cheeks reddening with the spike, and watery, red eyes, and gluttony hanging on to the double chin and layers of fat on the wrinkly neck, as she burps repulsively leaving her heavy chest wobbling. 

I miss you that much.

Sometimes, and I mean only 'some'-times, I get this urge to write about you and pour all my feelings on paper. Then I think I would rather have anyone dig their fingers through my skin, tear through it, make my body cross all thresholds of physical agony, and goad my heart out with their raw hands than confront this undulating, ceaseless, omniscient pain that your absence has left me with. How do I even express that you who raised me with your own bare hands, you literally were the backbone to my body, such that at times, I find myself unable to sit up, walk or do any of the normal things normal people do now that you are not here. Is this the kind of void, the hurt, they say, you carry with yourself all your life?

Something goes.

"Well, I love you in messed up ways too."
That is probably one of the few, most beautiful, best things anyone has ever said to me. It's like one of those few sentences that get stuck to my memory, and oddly enough I end up remembering them years and years later exactly as they were uttered in that moment. I have a bad memory. If you ask me what I did in the last few hours, I am likely to not remember, but there are few things I remember, especially few words that were said to me. In fact, most of the memorable things that were said to me came from you, now that I think about it. You are not just occupying my present, you are writing stories of yourself, carving out spaces in my mind with permanent ink. You are not just here today. You were there yesterday too. And I know for certain, that though there is much that I tend to forget, you are now far, far from that part of me.
I love the fact that I am the person you choose to reach out to when you wake up in the middle of the night. I wish that you had more peaceful, uninterrupted nights but I just love the fact that I am the one you choose to trust at 5 am. Sometimes, I really wonder why and reach the conclusion that it is a selfish need to feel wanted that makes me feel this way, but lately, I've come to realise how it is anything but that. Perhaps it has something to do with this overwhelming kind of gratitude I've been feeling towards life these days, grateful that I have you in my life. Perhaps, it is the sense that someone like you can give that place in your life to someone so unlike you, so undeserving, someone like me. And I am so grateful for that; grateful to you, grateful to Him. I think it's strange and kind of darkly comic that you don't believe in Him and yet you are one of the few reasons that make me feel that He exists, so strongly... because how else is all this possible otherwise if God doesn't make miracles happen?

I don't know what will happen in the future and I've abandoned the question only to completely live today and fully enjoy this sense of having you there because god knows how spring turns to autumn when you go.

I hope some day you honestly do actually get to cross the Indian Ocean on a boat. And I also secretly hope that I'm with you on that boat because something(I know, I've been using this word a lot) makes me feel that I might even recover of my fear of the sea if I had to cross it with you. 

No one, and I mean
no
one
ever
should have to go hungry for even one day. No one should have to go bed on an empty stomach even once, just because they couldn't afford something that should not have ever come for a price in the first place. 

Which tense do we belong in?

You are so different
now
than what you
were
It's almost as if the clock itself could not tick,
I could not press these keys
to type those e-mails
(I often now 'save as a draft')
as fast as
this change in
you
It's too great
for me to be able to tell
if you once were,
or are.