To Be in a Time of Grief

To stand, to walk, to smile. To smile at how simple the world can be and yet how beautiful, to close your eyes and breathe in, then out. To feel like everything is okay. Not to realize it isn’t.

To read. To stare at the words in front of you, your eyebrow furrowed when time stops, because these words don’t make sense. To fail to have the words leave your throat. To have all of them leave at the same time. To remember that this is who you are now, no, this is who you’ve always been. To say that it isn’t fair, and you know it isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel wronged from it. To force yourself to smile. To say that it isn’t okay, but these are the rules that we have to play by. 

To hold in a scream. To process. To let out a controlled statement, to only a select few.

To not want to be in your own bed. To feel as if you are in a dream, that it isn’t real yet, that it can’t be real. To not want to sleep, because what has happened will have always happened today until you wake the next day, where it will have happened yesterday. To feel your heartbeat racing, your fists clench and unclench, your fingernails cutting into your own skin, your breathing quicken, your mind suddenly flooded with thoughts that someone forgot to filter for you. 

To be slapped in your face violently, with the thought that you did not know what you once had. To be lost in thought. To feel the silence around you. To hear the words that people have said behind a screen. To hear the words they never said staring at you. To prove them wrong. To prove something only you have to prove. To feel the questions breathing down your neck, the questions you hear so often you start to ask yourself them when no one is around.

What have you lost? What were you given? What was stolen from you?

To finally shower, to feel the water beating down on you, to feel your hands running through your hair, scents of green apple grasping at every handful. To forget. To forget your shampoo in the shower, only to have someone throw it away.

To let your thoughts out in one long stream of consciousness, because you need to somehow let the world know that yes, this is real and no you aren’t making this up and throwing away the thoughts that whoever you beg to listen can relate even if you know damn well they don’t and stopping and thinking that somehow they might, even if it isn’t the same. To know you aren’t alone. To realize you were never alone.  

To breathe. To laugh. Not to forget. To smile.

To continue. To continue. To continue. To continue. To cont–

Process Notes

I tried to merge a few different experiences of having to deal with grief, one of which having to deal with feeling discriminated against. I don’t know if that makes the poem more powerful or more overstated, but I actually really like how it all blended together. This also made the poem really hard to write. I feel like this is something that can take additions fairly easily, and that the more details the stronger it becomes. I decided pretty early on on the ending (as usual) and I like the open ended way it ends, because I don’t think any of the experiences I reference are ever completely shut.