the city is waiting for you; so am i
how to grieve
In my screenwriting seminar, my professor taught us that if something weird happens — with your characters, with your plot — you should point it out to your audience, because they will notice.
It’s late January, or maybe early February, I can’t remember anymore. But it’s cold in the room and in my body and a well-meaning friend attempts to warm me with her company and her words. It’s January or February and I haven’t eaten a full meal since December, let alone written. There’s much, too much, to mourn and miss and lament and wonder about. I’ve failed, laughably, at writing around the conspicuous.
She goes on: It’s okay to talk about obvious things. Necessary, even. And I know she’s right.
Still, logic is no sweater.
one: denial
You eat frosty chicken tenders with dirty hands, haunting the fridge like some piggish ghost; you can’t bring yourself to hurt anyone but you.
Your brain is a rusty spigot, a victim of the climate crisis like the rest of us. What are words? Language? You’re unsure. But laughter is a salve, you’re certain of that, so you watch that one episode of that one television show for the forty-second time. It makes you feel normal. The clock flashes 9:31. AM? PM? Time is untrue and so is whatever you claim to be feeling and that’s funny, too; you laugh some more. (Though it feels less normal.)
In the night, you succumb to unbounded waves of almosts, crashing cruel upon stony shores of not-quites. You wake sweaty and suddenly, thigh-high in longing. It happens for six days straight.
On the seventh morning, someone will call and sigh your name like finally, like gracias, like I just want to be in the same room as you.
two: anger
This country is killing me.
I landed last evening. When the sun shortly rises, I undo the blinds; stare vacant at the concrete sky. I forget where I am. Dallas? Chicago? Highways slice the gray with a darker shade; skyscrapers offer some sick sort of respite. At least they glimmer, sparkle even, just a tad.
The hotel breakfast consists of printed pancakes and sausage and eggs made from powder. There is coffee from a machine. A round, brown woman refills the Sweet n’ Low, her nails the same nauseous pink. Syrup drips from the dispenser, slow, monotonous. The TV blares war and taxes and disaster. My veins pump the same old boring pain. I take a bite of the rubber patty and lob the styrofoam plate into the trash.
Are the birds real?
There is forgiveness and there is future and perhaps they don’t have to coexist.
three: bargaining
My heart cosplays as a storm drain, swallowing some things whole, rejecting others, leaving them plastered to the grate like unlucky insects. The result is, inevitably, illbeing.
Comparison is the thief of grief. (Joy is not the only thing worth feeling, y’know?) A sick heart trumps a heart of ash because one still beats, at least. I could be dead. I could be dead. I could be dead.
Have you considered seeking pleasure from the verb of it and not the noun?
I saunter downtown with a pocketful of delight and handful of disappointment. Are they thinking of me, too? Ice cream, chocolate, drips down my arm. The wind tussles my curls and I pause in the window of a nearby storefront to fix them. An employee sticks their tongue out and I flash mine back and smile for the first time in days.
I could be dead.
four: depression
Do words rot? Does ink spoil? I don’t think so. Neither does pain, nor love. But they fester and they ferment and they change and change and change.
I bathe in the dark so I don’t see as my blood turns the water pink; a sort of assumed penance. Hopes, far flung and further fetched, settle into the navel of my mind. I cradle them for half a second before I turn the water to hothothot, burning them away.
Does the snake enjoy the taste of its own tail?
Conversations with friends dissolve into wisps of uh huhs and yeahs, vaporic and thin. My hair pales to silver. My wife tells me that it looks like Christmas tinsel, which is kind. I slick it back into a ponytail again.
While I work, I listen to a playlist I made years ago, titled sad. Do I actually want to be happy? Have I found some bliss in the butter of wallow?
five: acceptance
A crow perches on the fence post. I swear it winks at me. The wind sneaks a kiss through the cracked window and I’m reminded that there is an outside.
You think: modernity, after all, does not lend itself to magic.
or: If there’s never anything else, at least there was this.
So much imagery and feeling here. Thanks for taking us on this journey through grief.
goddamn.