Little treatss
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Yakari Gabriel
12 years agoFrom Alysia Harris ofcourse
The Physics of It
Thank you for your pity. It is like a pebble on the ocean floor that believes it walls in the sea. Forgetting it was the sea, and all like her, that carried you gently and deposited you in the place you now lay and sleep so soundly.
Real talk all poems aside. I have spent the whole of my twenties so far trying to understand grief. This grief involves others. It involved their joy. It involved my faith. It involved my art and the way we go about making myths of our own lives. And though your life is happening before you, it is still a myth. And though it may be true, it is clearly not fact. For facts do not change, and yet our lives do. So flimsy and fallible so permeable with impossibilities that are now so entrenched they carry their own gravity. Years before they weren't even wind. Our lives are myth even as we breathe.
But how? How does someone who we once knew so well become a legend to us? First they become a memory. But before memory, they were a mystery, something we didn't quite understand and so tried to expand to contain. And not because of anything intrinsic about them. But because of the un- idk the unraveling of our identities around them. And so they became a lens through which we understood self. They were never fully realized to us. But more importantly we became more clearly realized to ourselves.
When we experience loss, we think we become less. I thought I became less. We think the lens we so loved is the world. But this is a dream. I did not become less; I became deep. The depth of my humanity was further hollowed out. At first you fill this depth with what is most easy: desire for the thing lost. But you don't yet understand. You cannot fill absence with myth. You must go deeper.
You must explain the chemistry of your inconceivable life, how you believed your handfuls of coal were diamonds. You must be the reverse catalyst. And still you must go deeper where the pressure becomes a body on top of you. And still you must go deeper. Deeper, deeper through the planes of your soul, of all your motives and all your selves. THIS IS GRIEF.
You do not see the sun, or if you do you do not mention it for the place you are going has a second sun. It has taken me a little less than three years to arrive here. But time does not pass here, at least here it is relative. Everything is slow and made of crystal. Everything is breakable and wants to be broken. This is the posture of being undone. I must if I am to understand the celestial geography of the internal. To understand the orbit of all my little stars. If I leave this place before it remakes me, I shall be utterly blind. Only now, once I've drawn and redrawn the maps, done the calculations and am sure, can I look at my sun and finally not avert my eyes. Only now, can I begin the process of realigning, of recreation. Only now can I move the heaven and earth inside me.
