Time doesn’t seem to exist in this new world. If it does, it doesn’t include days. There are no days, only dusk and dawn and the darkness linking them. Seconds, hours, weeks, months. These categories have lost meaning. Life is measured by experiences now.
Good experiences. Bad experiences. Firsts. Repeated. Unexpected. Brief. Drawn out. Pleasurable. Painful. Experiences chain together, some cheer, others chew.
But there’s never a day. Never a full day. Never a day of fullness. I don’t ever fully wake because there’s a big nothing to wake into. Yes, there are also big somethings. My kids, my friends, my work. Reasons to be. I know that. I get it. But the big nothing is always there. And it will always be tied around me like a millstone.
Grief does and will do its work. It asserts itself into every experience, clouding vision, clarifying pain, caressing and cutting all in one fell swoop. Sometimes it grows bigger than me, sometimes I grow bigger than it. But it will always be. How could it not. It may finish its work fencing off this sink hole in my soul, but once done it will just move onto its next job. It won’t stop working.
I won’t let it. And given it was born from our love, I want to show it the respect it deserves. Life doesn’t merely consist of a string of days. It consists of a conglomeration of experiences, all of which shape you, and all of which are shaped by love and grief in different ways. I want to content myself with being carved by grief in the same way I was carved by love, till the end of my days.
