Last night I dreamt that someone came knocking at my door at 6 am in the morning. I noticed the greying strands of hair across my shoulders. Turning towards the mirror, I saw the sagging eyelids, the wrinkled skin hanging in folds around the corners of my mouth. My breath held itself back for a second. I suddenly remembered that I'm not seventeen but seventy. It was as if my body had more control over me than my own 'self', as if I had learned to recognise myself separate from it.

The girl who knocked at my door asked me how much of my life I remembered even now. The apples of her young cheeks grew red with excitement when I finally uttered your name. I felt my heart swell up with joy at the thought of you too, at the thought that you were the first. It was the thought of you being the first one to put up with all the stubborn, tantrums of the naive, seventeen-year old, the first to share the punch of anger and the touch of warm secrets, the first to hear the raising and lowering of voices, spilling out thoughts off the top of our heads fearlessly, recklessly through sunsets and sunrises along with the endless silences our adolescent pride imposed on us through months. I felt the hair on my knuckles stand at the excitement rushing through me at the thought of you, as if time had stagnated for a couple of seconds, as if you would walk back into my life unabashed like this thought, until a snap of fingers and the young girl's voice pulled me out of my reverie. "Tell me everything you remember!" she shrieked, and in the exact next moment the excitement sank to the bottom of my gut with a loud thud, the loudness of which no one else could discern. I felt the grin on my face crawl back into the folds of the wrinkles, sagging my mouth, as I realised that I carried nothing else with me into my seventieth year, as I realised that the only thing I remembered of myself was you. 

I tried to tell you my secret, but you were running out of time.
I tried to be your 3am but you were running out on sleep.
I tried to be with you, but you ran,
Ran too fast for me.
Now I don't know how to keep still.

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.