Grief

August is here again and so are the winds. I wrote about them four years ago. Do you remember?

There must be something about Winter’s death that leaves it’s mark every year and changes me. The wind smells like the coming Spring and the seasons keep changing while I am here, unmoving. Can you understand why when I see the flowers ready to bloom they make me want to cry? Please, please take me where it's snowing so I can bury myself in the silence. It’s so loud here in this place; here in this place I once belonged to.

I remember how before I met you I so naively thought that there was something wrong with me that I could not return people’s love. You helped me to remember how momentous my love is. You taught me how to love without throwing knives. I never knew what it really meant when I asked for a love that would break me open.

A month ago I sat, in vigil, and watched my grandmother in her last days, holding her skeletal, wrinkled hands in my own tiny palms. I hope she absorbed my love through her bones. I hope she knew how grateful I am. I used to brush her hair and rub the life back into her feet when she could barely walk. My love language has always been touch. Now we put flowers in the garden for her. Lavender and lilys, pink and purple as the sunset.

I hold a hot water bottle against my back at night to pretend it’s someone holding me while I sleep. I am lonely in a way that aches, like a child full of longings and fantasies. I imagine baking cakes with grandmothers who are now only ash in the earth, ash blowing in this wind, simultaneously not here but everywhere. I imagine a love filled home on a mountain with a cat, and plane trips to foreign countries. I crave life in all this isolation. How do I get my bearings in this chaos? How do I transmute this grief into life?

Maybe these words hold the answers.