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.
I think this is it. I think this is finally it. Do it. The wall we built— so cracked, it’s barely standing and you get to throw the final strike. Do it. Let this be the end of it. Tear down the wall I plastered with my sweat, my blood, my devotion, my denial, everything I was, everything I had left. Tear down the wall that held every hope, every what-if, every should’ve, would’ve, could’ve. Throw one final blow, and that’s it. Let the bricks rain down on my body. Let them break my jaw, crush my spine, fracture my ribs for I am only— a small price you have to pay. A collateral damage too insignificant to notice. Break me until each neuron in my body stops screaming your name. Make me feel nothing. Turn me into nothing. And maybe, by then, you will be nothing too. Or so I wish.
They say grief never really leaves. It stays, like the scar on your knee after falling off a bike, like the stain on your favorite white T-shirt. They say you grow around grief, but after three hundred thirteen days, grief evolves. Grief used to knock at midnight. Now it barges through my door at seven in the morning. It waits for me— in the bathroom mirror, slips into the ten quiet minutes I spare before getting ready for work. It swallows me whole as I brush my teeth, wash my face, scrub a body that still carries your scent I cannot rub off. Grief has rusted the edges of my hair straightener, leaves me with a screeching sound that burns into my ears with the question: does it matter being pretty on days you don’t see me? Grief strikes at seven, primes my face with tears, and holds me hostage until eight. Three hundred thirteen days, I’ve learned how to dodge the grief that crawls under my blanket before I sleep. But I still don’t know how to escape the kind that comes at s...
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