One Thousand Faces

I apologize, little one. I don’t mean to hold your untimely departure  against you. Still, you have gone, while we remain in this awful and  vacuous bell jar. In so many ways, I hold it against every parent on  this planet who has never felt the pain that I feel. I have spent so  many years angry at God ~ calling him a cruel God ~ for taking you from  me, that I feel like He would banish me from His presence. My anger  leaves me to believe that I am not entitled to ask God to help me carry  this monstrous pain.

I have held onto my grief for you so tightly because I know of no  other way to keep the memory of your existence alive, alive inside of  me. If I let go, I will have to live my life in spite of your absence.  How can the world go on, how can fate continue executing itself, in the  wake of my little one’s death? It seems cruel. So very cruel.

Plunge

Her crushing beauty struck me. It had the power to annihilate. Resonant, it echoed in the far corners of my mind, long after we parted. I have not done enough to save her. A cruel thought, and it echoed, haunting me. I wondered, if perhaps, like Icarus, she had fashioned herself a pair of wings. And I wondered, also, if, like Icarus, their wax adhesive had melted when she chose to fly too close to the sun.

I willed her to awaken, as any fallen angel would awake. She did not. She remained motionless, broken, and so crushingly beautiful. Broken things can have such beauty. Just as beauty can break. And break. And break. And still remain beautiful. Seeing such beauty broken, my heart fled. It took a shadowy and circuitous route, between particle and wave, between desperation and satiation. It spoke in iridescent fragments, punctuated by the passion of frenzied electrons, washed away by millions of teardrops doomed to eternally wander. Then plummeting, with cataclysmic passion, toward a sea of melted wax.

And then, I felt her spirit, tender and gentle, touch my cheek. 'I came to comfort you,' she whispered silently, 'to offer you deliverance.' I did not want comfort. I did not want deliverance, I wanted to follow my heart, to plunge, into silent oblivion. In my grief, so precipitous, I sought only the heaviness of descent. I could never conquer my grief. And so, I surrendered, allowing it to conquer me.

Lonely Silhouette

He evaporated, leaving only a memory, etched in my mind. It left me feeling lonely, the kind of lonely one feels after the amputation of everything familiar and treasured. An amputee, yes, I felt like an amputee. Complete with phantom pain. He evaporated, leaving my heart feeling desert-dry, and at the same time, like a great swollen river which has flooded its banks. He evaporated, leaving a lonely metal soul, seeking. Seeking nourishment for my loneliness, seeking something to fill the nothing.

He evaporated, leaving his flesh dissolved, and his form dissipated. And leaving me, to become a mere silhouette of my former self. A silhouette who drowns in the darkness, uttering soundless words. In that moment, the moment of my drowning into the darkness, I realized that I don’t choose fate, that fate chooses me. Then I reached the point of no return, a point from which I seem unable to advance. Then I reached the utter desolation of depression.

An unfamiliar voice welcomed me to this unwaking world of violent sadness ~ a world where tear drops flow into a sea of despair, and where death seems like a welcome retreat. In this domain of the world, jelly fish speak, and the sea breathes ~ ebb and flow, inhale and exhale. And the only other sound I hear is the hollow, metallic rhythm of my heartbeat. Hollow, because of my heart’s incredible emptiness. Hollow, because I have vacated myself long, long ago. In this domain of the world, time does not extend and stretch itself, I do, up to and beyond the point of my breakage. And so walls erect themselves, to keep me inside, and to keep others outside. And everything becomes a tasteless, shapeless shadow of itself.

Perfect Despair

Without you, I feel the weight of homelessness, in this, the home we shared. For so long, I made my home inside you, inside your heart and mind. Now, the immensity of the silence and solitude here seems to swallow all sound, movement and light. Each moment that steps into me completely resembles the previous one. I live inside the emptiness of your absence, unwilling to find my way out. This enormous landscape, known as mourning, keeps me anchored to you. Still, I cannot stand it, this razor sharp loneliness.

And so, I walk the streets aimlessly in this notoriously feverish city, carrying my sadness close to me, like some sort of comforting plague. I want to drown my endless longing for you in the beautiful anxiety of life on the streets, to scatter my pain amongst the echo and tremble of their excessive noise.
But the more I scatter my pain, the more it pulverizes me, seed by seed, grain by grain. Abstract, intangible parts of you linger in each granule of my pain, like dust floating in the air. I cannot touch them; they do not suffice. Right now, in my perfect despair, I feel as though I could die of this life without you, missing you as I do.