How It Feels to Lose Someone
If someone had been gone this long the authorities will have presumed them dead. So I threw you a funeral. The kind with no casket and no body. No sympathies, no condolences, no simple white lilies. No one’s wearing black, no one’s lighting candle. A devastation only I can feel. Although sometimes I do wish you were dead. So I could slice this sadness like a cake and share the pieces with someone else. Perhaps with your mother, or your sister, or some stranger across the street who’s heard good things about you. The day you died, I wish I could mark it. Carve it into a tree, scribble it on a wall, let the grief settle somewhere that isn’t always me. But I can’t. You’re still breathing somewhere— whole, content, and perhaps fulfilled. And sometimes it feels unfair but other times it feels deserved. For all the strings in the past— that I cut without blinking, I’ve finally learned what it feels like to lose someone.