Transition

The Shape My Grief Takes

They say grief comes slowly, the way frost climbs a window without anyone watching it start. They say it begins as a weight behind the sternum, something with no shape yet, no name, only pressure, only the sense that a door has opened somewhere inside the chest and will not close ever again. They say it takes on texture, grey at first, like an ash before it remembers it was once wood, once something that could burn and give warmth. It gathers in the throat, thick as an unspoken things always are, and settles there, refusing to be swallowed, refusing to be spoken. They say it will grow a spine of its own. Mine curls itself around the one that already belongs to me, until I cannot tell where my grief ends and where I begin. It grows a mouth, and out of that mouth comes silence shaped exactly like your name. I have become the shape grief takes when it needs somewhere to live and I run to the forest. I sit deep in the forest, my veins throb, my head swelling, I feel my feet touch the grass, the mother earth, the ground wet and muddy. I wish to forget to set myself free but at the same time the underworld waits. He waits for me. I feel how my legs grow inwards in the solid as the roots of the tree. My hands start to cover with the moss, soon to be the home to the flowers. My body is a canvas for growing sorrow, missing and loneliness. Underground is where my spirit calls, my veins are filled with the smell of spring and something more: expectation, hope and fear of what is about to come. I feel the trill in my body, my heart is heaving, and my breath hitches. I feel the purple violets growing on my chest breaking the skin, desiring freedom. I feel I bloom, and I suffer. I bloom and my insides fill with desire, with belonging to earth. Underground is where my spirit calls, my veins are filled with the smell of spring and something more: expectation, hope and fear of what is about to come. I do not know which of the three will win. Perhaps none of them will. Perhaps they will simply braid themselves together, the way roots do when they have grown too close to separate. I feel the trill in my body, my heart is heaving, and my breath hitches, catching on something sharp and invisible, something lodged just beneath the ribs where language cannot reach.

I feel my mouth tighten and fill with water. This pond is a limitless water source. I am limitless, I am a source. Closing my eyes, I feel how my eyes are not mine anymore, they are the forest's eyes now. They belong here, never to be recovered, never to be returned to whatever face I used to wear. My temple is autumn, letting go of the sorrow and loneliness, letting the leaves fall the way I once let tears fall, without asking permission, without apology. Shedding my own self here, in this muddy soil in the forest, I feel my heart weighing down, going underground to forget, to release and yet to rise again. My hair becomes the valley of leaves the others will cry to and tell their secrets to, a confessional made of gold and rust, a place where whispers are absorbed and never repeated. My spirit becomes a moonlight spreading with the wind, untamed, touching everything and holding nothing, the way light does when it has finally stopped trying to belong to a single window. Travelling through time, space, dimensions, and memories just to get to you… Hades

Even your name is heavy. It sits on my tongue like a stone pulled from a riverbed, cold and smoothed by centuries of water. My head hurts, my ribs expand with difficulty, as if my body is being built again from the inside, as if every bone must first break before it can hold your name without crushing. You consume every cell in my body and in my brain, and I let you, because some hungers are meant to be fed. I become you. Or I become a forest where you will go, where you will find your peace and settle on the ground, finally still after however many centuries of restlessness, however many centuries of ruling over a kingdom no one wanted to visit.

You will touch lilies grown from my chest; you will look at the moonlight kissing your face, and for a moment you will forget you were ever a god of anything, forget the weight of the crown, forget the names the living whisper about you when they think the dark cannot hear. Autumn will follow you wherever you go, trailing behind you like a cloak you never asked for but cannot take off. What a price to pay for missing darkness — to become the very thing you were running from, to build it out of your own ribs and call it home.

You will touch the roots, the roots grown from my feet, not knowing you touch my legs, not knowing that every root is a nerve, that every root remembers what it felt like to walk, to run, to reach for something above the soil instead of beneath it. You will drink water from the pond and look at the moon, observing the slightest changes, a sliver more light, a sliver more shadow, the way lovers count the small differences in each other's faces after time apart. You will not know it is my thirst you are quenching. You will not know that the water remembers the shape of my mouth. You will simply drink, and rest, and stay, because I have become the one place in the world built entirely to hold you, root and moss and moonlight, sorrow turned to soil, soil turned to spring.