Still Here, Still Gone!

Weeks and weeks keep hitting you like a shower of arrows falling in the forest — casualties that are shared with certainties; a second cup of tea that was never made, or your half-finished sentence dangling in a room now echoing silence.

It is like this: silent, in the manner of an unnoticed phenomenal action, of a season turning that you discover one afternoon in October; —you look up from where you've been working for hours and find that light has changed already—a month ago at least and what are these trees doing here?

Once that's gone you become an archaeologist of small things. The indent in a pillow. A voicemail that you just can not bring yourself to delete. The awful silence of a Sunday that used to hold what only you now call disbelief.

They say grief is not a wave, but I have felt its undertow — not the crashing swell, but this slow drag back into what was and by all rights should still be there, sand shifting underfoot as the ocean takes what it will take without ceremony, without apology.

You set the table wrong after it's gone. And you continue purchasing from the brand they chose. You start every sentence with we and end it by yourself.

And time doesn’t really heal so much as allow for accumulation—new days piling on top of old ones and eventually you have to ascend a little bit to still be able to look back the way it was.

And still you climb. And still you look.

The loss does not diminish. It learns to just live beside you, sits in the passenger seat on long rides and walks a half-step behind you through rooms that have learned how to bear what they bore.

Through time, you move beyond the something which is no more. It exists in the catch of a song, In the scent of rain on hot pavement, In the uncontrollable arrival of a smile before an ache —

Brief, Bright, Unbidden —

Proof that it was here. Proof that it was real. Evidence of how love still perseveres, even if stubbornly, like light in a room once the door has closed.