Love Letters to Grief

I.

How do you write forever on paper, then let the ink drown me?

You dipped your pen in something red, pledged that the distance between us would one day bow to our union.

And still, I cannot call you gone. The wind has not learned to tell our skins apart.

I smooth the damp edges against my knee. Every night, I lie in the dark, reading the same sentences until I can no longer tell which of us is speaking.

The house is empty. Sometimes, I hear myself laugh like you.

Why, then, should I name these letters after you when all you left me was an old friend, Grief?

II.

I knew you had been bargaining with something I could neither see nor name, and I kept paying for a war I did not know we were losing.

You let goodbye rot in your mouth, then dressed your leaving in small grievances, arraigned my flaws as freshly discovered crimes, as if the mouth you once kissed had only now begun to disgust you.

Sometimes I wonder: Did you rehearse my absence while I was still building you a future?

I imagined another man where I once stood, calling ordinary what I had called sacred.

I cursed him to death, a man I cannot swear exists.

III.

And you, Grief, what became of our truce? I asked only that you spare her. You caught her scent. You found her pulse. And when she left, you stayed to count the ruins.

She doesn’t know, does she? That I bartered the last of me, pawned my blood to keep hers running, stripped my rooms bare for the dress she wore.

Maybe I should have sent pride out on an errand, moved my own lines a little each time she frowned, and returned less the man she couldn’t keep, more the man she couldn’t leave.

How much of myself would I have had to lose to make her stay?

IV.

A younger me begged her in ink: “Please. Don’t give up on us.”

I dreamt she kissed distance on the lips and waved with the hand I once held.

Yesterday, I opened what I’d sworn to burn. The plea was still there, and the future I had feared was waiting in my own handwriting.

Now she dances through my sleep, wearing the future we buried, her feet keeping time with a song I can no longer hear.

I wake to the thought of another walking the garden I planted in her, of something I nurtured outgrowing the hands that made it.

The letters lie where we left them. Twenty promises in our own handwriting. No hand reaches for the match.

She left. I have not met myself since.

Some part of me still reaches. But Grief, what you’ve left inside me has memorised the shape of a blade. I fear for the next hands that reach for me.

V.

I will not curse the rain for falling on her roof. But I have not learned to bless the hands that keep her warm.

Perhaps the garden has grown wild. She may no longer remember which roots I buried deep, which ones tore through the earth to breathe without me.

Yet what blooms there now is hers. I cannot ask the flowers to bend towards a hand that no longer tends them.

I will not haggle with the wind to return what it has taken from me. I have spent enough of myself asking the gone to answer.

Grief, you may stay. Sit beside what you have made of me. I have nothing left to ask of you. Isn’t that what friends do?