Girl No. 32

*

So, this grief.

It is nothing special. Grief is all over the place, you don't have to go looking for it. It's right there, out in the open. Easy to see.

Or the causes of it, at least.

Maybe grief itself is less visible.

The cause of my sadness is not anything earth-shattering. But it has taken hold of me. I thought for a long time that I was dealing with it. I thought it wasn't bothering me, that I had found a way to get along and not feel it. Like a dull ache, a sore tooth, but not the keep you awake in the night agony.

But then a few days ago something came unmoored inside me and the grief rose up, like a leviathan from the depths of a dark sea, and I was undone. It felt as fresh and astounding as falling in love at sixteen.

I was that unhinged.

Luckily, I am old enough to have weathered a few storms, so I waited, and it passed. Or subsided, for that's all it did. It yet endures. It won't return to the depths, but stirs near the surface, agitated, moony, inconsolable.

***

I am tended to in my grief by my long-suffering partner, who holds me like a baby and soothes me with her touch. What a great gift I have in her. Next to that my grief is but small, truly.

I go on and on in these pages about suffering and beauty, longing, despair, as if I had an understanding of them. I do not. I do not.

I am constantly undone by them in their each particular way.

*

It is something to stand before a problem you can't solve, nor lessen, nor end, ignore, or endure. It is akin to that feeling of standing before the sea in its endless thrashing of the shore, or that feeling of lying under a wild star-strewn sky high in the mountains, far from the stain of city lights.

When you know in your bones you are less than small.

In a universe that is implacable and horrifying for its scope and scale.

*

Ah, we yet endure. For our small span of time. We seek our comforts, and often find them.

I claim this grief as my own. I have earned it. I will not be a bad host to it. I will not refuse it.

You can't say no to none of it.

That's the whole point, isn't it?

*

So, thank you, my good friends, for the kind thoughts you are sending my way. I am glad for them, and glad in my heart for each of you.

*

The world is not kind, but there is kindness in it.

Namaste.

***