The Year of Mourning

Writing again, two posts in a day, if only due to the quick-glance at the calendar to realize that it has been, indeed, a year and two days since The Loss. It has been the Year of Mourning.

How is a loss a loss when it is a giving-up, a letting-go? How is one supposed to mourn the death of the strands of relation?

I try and fill the sink-hole in my chest. Food or no food, neither works. Sleep or no sleep, neither works. Words, colours, songs, hugs, nothing fills this thing inside my heart that keeps collapsing in on itself, creating a new void again, and again, and again.

My jaw is tight from grief. My teeth are starting to wear with the tension, says my dentist. The doctors tell me it's stress. That I need more sleep, more food, more vitamins. Those don't work, I'm afraid.

Grief does strange things. It makes joints creak when you've cried the water from your body. The ghosts make your head heavy with sleep. Your vision adjusts sharply in the supermarket, doppleganger-fear dilating your pupils. It makes you press your fingers to your neck in the night, searching frantically for your own pulse as though perhaps it could go missing inside your body somewhere, hidden under all the scars, curled up in the corner of a blocked energy pathway.

I still wear black on many days.