Elegy

Grief is like lead in your veins. 

Everything feels unbearably heavy. Like you are lugging around a backpack full of cement. 

Like your limbs have been tied down with heavy ropes and chains. 

Like you’re trying to run a marathon in mud, wearing stilettos.

Every movement is a struggle. 

Like you are on a very high mountain, and the air is very thin, and you are gasping for breath but not getting any oxygen. Like in a dream, when you are trying to run away, but you can barely drag your feet. Like trying to run under water. Like a motherfucker of a case of the flu. 

Grief makes you the slowest kid in gym class. The one that gets picked last for the team every time. 

Grief makes you an old lady crossing the street with her walker, stranded in the middle of the intersection long after the light has turned red again.  

It's like you're walking around with boulders in your pockets. 

Like some giant hopeless troll is sitting on your chest. Like you’re a scuba diver trying to swim back to the surface of a black ocean, pulling a submarine full of coffins behind you. Like you're running laps on a metal track with magnets in your shoes. Like you're dragging a sad, thousand-pound baby around on an iron sled. 

Grief makes you so tired you could sleep through the apocalypse. 

Like your eyelids are sealed shut with superglue. And yet, rest is as elusive as silence is in a monkey cage. Every time you close your eyes, a new abyss opens up, like the Russian nesting dolls of exhaustion and terror.

Grief is beautiful and delicate. 

Like a paper rose carrying the scent of a long forgotten perfume. Like a lock of a child’s hair found in an ancient pendant. Like the skin of a newborn baby’s toe, or a very old person’s eyelid. Like a melody that resonates through the hollow, aching chambers of your heart and makes you weep. Like a strip of lace from your grandmother’s wedding gown that will fall apart when you touch it. Like a polaroid you’ve kept in your wallet so long that all the color has faded away. 

Like a portrait of a ghost in a dream.