The Pleasure of Grieving

​​My grief had a growth spurt.

This past week sucked me into the hole of a feeling that I never seem to shake. It dies only to be reborn and announces itself with the itch of a burn beginning to heal. This grief feels like ice forming around a fire, it sounds like snow falling on water. The collision is seamless, the encasement suffocating. I am unsure where its roots are buried in my body, and my vision blurs each time I try and pick it out from past, present, and future line-ups. There are moments when it grabs me from behind and I learn it is a ghost that is urging to haunt, but then there are seconds when it slaps me across the face and I am acutely aware of its present grip.

In these latter moments, the symptom appears in a pang of incorrectness. A feeling that something is inexplicably wrong and I must retreat back into the hole I dug long ago, the space I made to hide. It is there I find comfort in the stored collection of patterns that, at one time, I had failed to see.

There is relief in believing that if I never let them out of my sight then their faces will never become foggy. Identifiers must remain clear in order to avoid the all-to-recognizable consequences of missed signs. If I let even the slightest bit slip from my mind- if I forget- then I risk repetition, and I will not let these old wounds gain any sister scars. Though my body now believes these patterns to protect me, their origins lie in the expansion of my affliction, of this unconquerable sensation of grief. The cause of pain became my safe haven. That is absurd. Paradoxical. Yet, I lug it into every new room and drag it through all latest experiences. Learn from the past, but do not let it corrupt your present, do not let it poison your future. I am so aware of this suggestion that it sets a tiny flame under each of my fingertips as I write down the words. It is the sting of failing to take my own advice. “Things can be different! Things can be different because you are different!” followed by a swell of “Because you know! You will know this time! You will know!” These attempts to convince myself that the past is not doomed to repeat have had little success.

​Life is not always cyclical- but when I find myself sitting across from the things I once begged for, the saving graces my godless self once prayed for, all I can remember is abandonment. I am struck with negative nostalgia that leads me back to wearing grey-colored glasses. Then, I succumb to the persuasion that what has been, will be again. These are the moments that I find comfort in my grief. The familiarity, the painful consistency, the endless exploratory void- but most of all, the promise to feel. Once the brain has been contaminated by a particularly unpleasant experience, the ability to feel- especially in the present moment- is scorched. So, there is hardly an emotional tether to prevent the mind from straying, to stop the seconds from mindlessly passing me by. This grief holds my hand and serves to fill the vacant spot that longs to feel- and when the alternative is an abyss of anticipatory fear, I choose grief. Do I make this choice? Or has the pervasive feeling made it for me? I would be a fool to take away the accountability of the self in this admission. If I am not choosing it, then I cannot release it. That is too dull a reality to be true.

The extensions of my grief touching other people-

the fear that consumes me if it lingers too long. Though there is no evidence backing this, it does not lessen the incessant, merciless banging behind my brain. Quite a useless way to think, isn't it? Grief makes your brain silly, I suppose- with all of its assumptions and heavyweight. Am I still talking about grief? Maybe, and maybe not. I write of grief but the perpetrator of these bad days may not be grief, at all. Maybe grief is just a side effect that grows and grows until the real culprit is caught.

I would like to begin my days by waking up in the bed I fell asleep on rather than the mattress I left on the roadside of an old apartment.

To leave the grief behind in exchange for an honest, present moment, is a choice I wish came as easily as the hand I choose to hold, instead.

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