Tears pour out like an ocean from hidden depths, grieving a loss too old to express in words and too wide for thoughts to confine. I sit, surrounded by salt and sea foam, on a desert of water. Seven years of hiding, twenty years of believing. I wake to an ocean wide with solitude, rocking on the tide. I cry and heave into her unfathomable spaciousness, a salty offering, one drop at a time. Mind echoes the voices of thousands, "I am a wave imagining itself separate from the sea". Words. They fall heavy into the depths and I am left thirsty, surrounded by water and longing for a drink.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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