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Hospital Notes From Last Winter

I would like to start by saying that grief doesn’t really begin all at once. It’s not whiplash. It is not violent in it’s arrival. It does not descend like bad weather. Grief takes its time, softly settling into the grooves of your patience and repetition Grief covers you like a tide. Grief crawls over your shoulders. It lives in objects, in choices, in a wink or a gasp.  Bubbling and desperate.

It lives in fruit bruises and paper thin skin. It lives in each delicate sip of water. It languishes and picks its moment. It performs alchemy and transforms mundane gesture. Swabbing fluid and shuffling through folds of flesh become worshipful. They become offerings to the thing sniffing at the door. To that crabapple shadow. The love that slips, drop by drop through hollow needles. Little by little. Grief is an overflowing sink. The clockwise churning under the breastbone, replacing the drumbeat of a heart. Each staring, hot cheeked minute out the grey window gives signal. I know. I can tell you are coming. I can feel you here already. I have dusted down each surface. Deposited the endless treasure hoards of fuck all from the brimming cupboards into the trash. Except one napkin, kept for the sake of grief. Kept because grief does that too. Grief is a mind gone soft. Grief makes gold from nothing. I would show grief that we are not to be bad hosts. Grief is that grey blue ring around a brown eye. The measurement of time and breath and bone. Grief is a thing with a phantom face, the shrill conversation had with no one. As free as a bleeding leech. Cracked wide open and leaking forward. Pressing us to sediment. Grief is the staggering of generations around one small space. Grief is a seizing of laughter, stuffed down. Barking forth. Grief is my companion. Grief is a ghast. I am very tired. Grief does that too.

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On A Napkin

( Listening to: The Ocean – Linnea Olsson )

Oh my love, I apologise. Oh my love, I apologise. Oh my love, sitting in cold spaces, unprepared for the weather. I thought I left long ago, And moving backwards pains me. I would learn but, love, you will not show me.

You are spitting. You are snapping-angry. You are lunatic. Tripping over open pockets in the flooring tiles. Snatching at strands of animal hair left on winter wool.

A moment pulled out of nothing that is precious to nobody, except me. If I give it over to you, I’ll watch you pull it to pieces. I’ll forget it for you.

Oh my love, I am shocked stiff. I apologise. How horribly I come knocking, feet bloody and soaking. Oh my love, I’d rather drown. When I shut my eyes, I let my lips cake up with salt and I can no longer speak.

Oh my love, you are shallow. I apologise. Oh my love, you are cruel and resentful. Oh my love, you are withholding and I am starving.

Love, my love, you are leviathan. Hulking and unknowable. Created anew, transformed and set to swimming. Twinned with the fear that keeps on coming, Riding in its waves. The fear, it keeps on coming. The fear, it keeps on coming. The fear keeps on coming, baby. To dance over the threshold and run its tongue along the door frame. It keeps me perfumed, My mouth twisted shut. What if this doesn’t stop, love? What if there is no peace to be found here? Oh my love, I apologise. Go and find a warmer place.

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Scribbled In Kitchen

( Listening to: Vigridr – Danheim ) Two tumble out into the night. Switches at their heels. Melon-sweet, alive, Each as helpless as the other. Speak to me – says one. Cry out, make it loud. Before we find knives to run onto Before we dry out. I would hear the sound of it out of your mouth before it’s over.

No. Never. Not mine – says the other. I am not sure I should. I’d rather spin twine out of it. Duplicate myself. Count each step and each crack in the wall. Hurl you at others. Lay the dead at your feet. Beat the sun into hard stone. Chase each turn of the wheel. Sit bristling and still. Watch your face in quiet moments. Sway in electricity. Churn leaves around. Give up completely. Take off my old skin. Teeter towards the verge Before speeding towards each hungry blade and repeating this fucking cycle over and over.

No, you first. Sound it out first. And so they rush on, in silence.

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"Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship." - Clarissa Pinkola Estés