loneliwish

#10

9.26.2024 : "I'm Lost Without You Here"

You asked me to take a look at your neck. The tenderness of that moment.

Sick with grief again. Crying in bed, comforter pulled over me in the dark, and the light on the wall was blue. Feeling so small, like a bug about to be squashed, vision of you looming over me. And I thought of your bedroom in Utah, with just me in it, the day after you died : the calendar, the plans, details about scholarships, handwritten notes. All the things that didn't happen. I feel sick. I mean I actually feel like I'm ailing. All febrile and weak. Ending a letter to you "P.S. I hope you're doing well" and breaking down again, even more than before. Sobbing when I look at the green oven clock and see it is 8:30PM on a Thursday.

"Open your eyes
you sleepyhead
don't stay in bed all day. . .

Sunday through Saturday
from year to year
the skies are grey without you
I'm lost without you here"

#9

7.19.2024 : excerpts from a letter to C

Dear C,

Where are you ? I went looking for you but you were nowhere to be found. You've even stopped showing up in my dreams. The ghost-theology of pop culture would have it that this means you are a less troubled spirit ; that some knots in you have resolved and now you're even less of-this-world than before. If that's the case, I suppose I'm happy for you, but it's a miserable sort of happiness. I don't mean to rebuke you. . . I used to feel you like I feel god ; you drew me closer to him again, as I had been in childhood. But now sometimes. . . it feels like it's just me and him. I've been told you would want me to be happy. . . I don't know what sort of happiness you have in mind, but it isn't simple or easy.

Don't feel bad about dying or anything, I'm doing good ; your being gone is just a very difficult thing to accept. . . I want to ask you a question now. I want to know that you're alright. Can you tell me at least that much ? I guess they run a pretty tight ship up there, huh, as you haven't got the chance to tell me anything in a long time. Well, that's alright, hey, that's alright.

#8

7.8.2024

I remember ___ telling me how, in some psychological trouble as a teenager, she was taken to a therapist who assigned her Chicken Soup for the Soul’s first volume for homework. She opined how shitty & stupid that book was : a group of stories centered on Getting Some Perspective and Being Grateful. I trusted her judgment, though somewhere deep inside I still wished it had happened to me, that I’d been put in teenage therapy & made to read something like that, for some inexplicable, certainly misguided, & probably dishonorable reason.

The fact is I still feel I’m in some amount of trouble : I still feel constitutively. . . well, broken. It isn’t an issue of the general character of my emotions, or of my will, it’s deeper than that : this is about my soul. Quite simply it feels like a glass pane with a long, faultlinelike fracture all across it : see it’s actually split in two pieces, leaving a strange space between where there is, unreally, nothing : a material so substanceless — so immaterial — that its mystery sometimes rivals that of the soul itself. I’m coming more & more not to see this as a problem of any kind, though, as nothing that needs solving. I want to accept myself as I am & that also means accepting my suffering as it is. ( After all, if my brokenness is as constitutive as I say it is, then the nothingness I describe is just another part of my soul, no ? ) At this point, rather than fixing me up & mending me shut, I think I just want some, I don’t know, reflective commiseration. The kind of food I find in much of Sufjan’s music : “I pretend to cry / Even if I cried alone,” “Spirit of my silence I can hear you.” & so I checked out A Grief Observed by CS Lewis from the library. & for that it was good ; very emotional, poetic stuff.

#6

3.28.2024 : excerpt from a letter to my dear Pigeon

I know that I don’t feel up to healing now. I know that it’s hard for me to imagine healing ever feeling right. . . From where I stand it sounds like a betrayal of my friend, like forgetting. And, god, I don’t want to be forgotten like that. But at the same time, I look down across the years, and healing has happened, an unforgetting kind, and I have grown closer, less bitter : I have shot up like a vine grown by the stake that once impaled her.

You said I could talk about anything — I really like that turn of phrase.

#4

3.?.2024

A friend told me she was almost jealous of the emotional maturity that grappling with loss has given me. Jealous. I didn't know what to say. I suppose I understood what she meant : a sort of compliment. But it's come at such a grave cost.

I wish I'd said, Please don't wish for something like that. Life has no shortage of grief as it is. So please don't ask for more, okay ?