In A Minute, Now Later.

"I love you?”
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off my tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
He did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
- Not Anne Sexton

Amiss

I am fascinated.
The faith with which this life stares at me in the face every morning and the faith with which it reminds me at sunset every day that none of it is in my control, it is bewildering. That none of it is mine, that my world could collapse on itself headfirst but not a single leaf on the tree I've grown up looking at will rustle, or even stir ever so slightly in solidarity, fascinates me.
When then did the trees bow down their heads, the breeze blew not against but with us, the sun hid behind the clouds and the skies shed the tears of the gods upon us, as if in shame, in grief, in mourning. When were divine messages then carried on the wind and crooned into our ears? When?

The intensity with which this sadness shakes my entire being... 

When Words Are Lost over Loss, Grief, Bereavement, etcetera etcetera.

Excerpt from an interview by writer Meghan O'Rourke:

After my mother died, I was supposed to be writing my column at Slate, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had thought of grief as being sad, but instead it was like being suddenly aware of all the luminous, fragile elements of existence. It was also lonely in its way. My editor at Slate said, “Why don’t you write about what you are going through.” I didn’t think what happened to me was extraordinary. But it was what I was obsessed with, and so I started to shape what I was experiencing into a piece.

I was very unprepared for grief. It was isolating. There was no language for it, and no language around it—but I felt that I was in contact with all of these deeper realities; even the sky seemed strangely bluer. But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone. I came across a quote of Iris Murdoch’s: “The bereaved have no language with which to speak with the unbereaved.”

I wanted to see you today.

Is there anything more soul-crushing
Is there any feeling more devastating than wanting to see someone, have just one glimpse at their face that brings all the radiance to your world, ache to just put your fingers between their fingers and hold on to them for just one minute, hold on to their warmth
but then remember that
they're
dead.
You will never see them again;
And that wanting something
even this desperately
does not bring it back. 

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.