On Loss

Loss is the hardest. The lengths I will go to hold on, to avoid this finality and grieve are extreme. Sometimes I see myself moving so slowly, like an unoiled tin man. The resistance to change in the joints of my walking legs.

I can feel the push back in my mind, a wordless wall of inmobility. This is the state I enter when I have to take action to leave something behind. The motion is forward but the resistance is not the fear of the new or different, it comes from the loss of the old. It is the unwillingness to let go.

I used to move, birdbox style, through my life, deeply uneasy, clumsy and ineffectual, with the deep visceral belief that if I open my eyes what I would see would inihilate me . Sweaty fingers grasping all of the imagined futures and storied pasts like a favorite dog eared book.

I will stay until I am on fire. I will hold on until my fingers break, until the pain makes the letting go feel good… long after the building has burnt to the ground, and any beauty that was once there turned to ash. Then I will still carry that book around and flip through it every once in a while. I have a library.
Karla McLaren said about avoiding grief, “each loss, because we don’t feel it properly, just stacks itself on top of the last. ” Anger is my go to salve for loss. It whips me upward away from the deep knowing and acceptance that things have irrevocably changed. Anger is movement and fire, loss is the cold underwater, where the world looks different and light seems far away. Maybe grief is the steam, some alchemy that tempers and changes you.