It’s not easy loosening your grip on someone you love who has left you and it is nearly impossible to ever let go of that yearning. The ghost of them haunts you in the most inconspicuous ways and places. Their absence you carry around like a weighted blanket. Your heavy and sore heart dragging on the floor behind you as you make your way to the couch or the bed. Hiding under it for comfort, you reminisce all the times you embraced them with an urgency, to feel their heart beating placidly on top of yours. You envelope yourself under the thickness wishing to be swallowed in your grief. You close your eyes and feel your heart sinking down to an abyss of emptiness, a forrest full of no directions, no signs of an exit. The tears steamroll in a perfect line, curving over the bridge of your nose as your lips quiver from the tornado that has erupted inside your ribcage. There seems to be an infinite supply of salty water and deep breaths, but a shortage of hours to mourn the love you can no longer touch. You hear your name being called in a nearby distance of delusion and hysteria and it paralyzes you. Fear and curiosity have snuck up beside you reminding you it’s your grief taunting you, not them. They are too empathetic to play such cruel games. So you continue to lay there, with a shattered heart and puffy eyes, wrapped in a burrito of discomfort and loneliness. A heart squeezing and breaking so quietly, blood seeps out of your nose the speed of honey. Nothing and no one can offer you healing or peace. Grief is a journey up the mountain of Everest, often travelled alone, bruised, tired, exhausted. A journey that appears to never end, you acclimate, try to get familiar. The familiarity never settles in. The tears are new every time. The year may change, Summer may be kind to you, new adventures might be conquered, but waiting for you is always that reminder. A color, a fabric, the wind, your plant you named in their honor in a pretty lilac plantar in the corner of your room. Death humbles you, brings you to your knees, or to a cold bathroom floor at 2 am. Grief is your reminder that the love you feel will always be within you and this love has found a new purpose; working overtime to heal all the parts of you they always seemed to do with ease and magic.
-Chloë Mitchell