I couldn't remember the exact date this year.
October has gathered losses. by now, her arms are too full for me to see.
you. and faty. and lynda. I imagine the crowd milling at the veil. eager to see us or to make small contacts.
Or maybe you linger indifferently, noticing the thinning with a sigh. a sigh. how lost that word might be to you now.
but it's not to me. I sigh. I think 'Si' and my mind and heart tumble like two lion cubs wrestling down a mountainside, gathering dirt and sticks. You've become someone else or more yourself day by day.
there is still a longing for a word of kindness, an embrace, a way you might've looked at me, a moment of being seen. that will be a hole in my skin that I will pick at for the rest of my days, I imagine. a futile and desperate reach into an empty space that will never fill.
my work to do.
there is a change in the measure of grief. it is a wide net that feels like a thin sky. like fog. like almost rain. most of the time I don't break my stride. most of the time I don't need a jacket or an umbrella. most of the time I just keep walking; sometimes wishing I was inside.
I wonder about you. if there's a you to remember me. I still can't wrap myself around the thought of all of you gone forever and nevermore. yet it's the way it is, isn't it? What makes me hope for some returning and hopeful reunion? I was never bought into the pearly gates, where everyone lives in shangri-la in fields of flowers and sun showers and rainbows. There's not some village where all of you are shimmying around in white flowing robes, full of love and laughter. Theres' not going to be a group hug waiting for me at the end of my days.
this rumination stalks me.
I am not seated in my roots. I have lost them somewhere and I don't know where to return. I live in chaotic hope that something good happens in the end. That all the loss is not lost. I can't bear that P's terrified eyes are last of her. that Faty's suffering was her final statement to the world. that Lynda left without finishing her thought. that you lost everything in the end. It grieves me.
I watch my own denial that rises from groundlessness. I am like an astronaut, loose in the atmosphere with no way to navigate. I drift and drift, embraced by fear, into a no sky of no answers and no ground. Everything is tethered lightly. everything is cut free and falls away into nothingness and no more.
I don't know if I am made for this.
