The Children of Grief

To go by your side and walk hand in hand, it’s how the love I have for you arose so strongly the moment you were no longer around. For you to take me away again in your car and spoil me on Sunday: We go on grieving and my grief plays games with the image of your face comes out of the abyss and says ‘hello’ and parts and leaves again. You make these strange little visits; hushed, quiet and brief, playing your love across my face and making me cry out in the wilderness where we used to go for coffee.

Upon your shoulders I used to ride high amidst our holiday destination, piggyback me back to anywhere so I am back here with you again. Temporality switched off with your death, my body shrank in the wash and I was five again. Then came being eighty-five and feeling the wars on my body and then back to age five with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I pang with each piggyback ride through my memory but I see them more clearly now and with them you: the grief didn’t go away it went away and came back better, I no longer mind swallowing the meal of your memory everyday and every week and with it the twinge.

Their not you, they: But I’ve found a few now whom I can call home and who know me like you. I spent two years out of orbit, insane on the bliss of grief; that blue opaque sky is now the mapping ground of my life with you or your life with me. I think I can just about fit everything about you up there; spinning cobwebs of images and thoughts and snatches of voice your still quite alive up there, in the sky and in my head. The café did a dance without you and asked why you were missing, I had no answer but my stares at the empty chair where you used to me, the table and the coffee doing a negation through the air, pleading for clemency against reality. I know this is going to hurt but don’t hurt to bad; bring the crying after the coffee somewhere else where jurisdiction of pain in public does not reside. We bleed far more easily than we cry; no one ever felt the impulse to inhibit a cut. I sometimes feel like I pull blood back up into me for the sake of someone else’s embarrassment. After somewhere else is how I deal with you; lodged in the calendar like an exploding piece of time. They, them and it all surround me pointing the finger to suggest you’re not here but I no longer fall into the invisible trap where you are, I have what you were and the why and how to get me dancing around your absence and the game of hide and seek with your alluring shock to the system go on but I know they are all part of the exploding bliss of life.