Grief to me is a blue field. Grief to me is a dusky breeze. Grief to me is a sea of grass, tall like wheat, undulating. Grief to me is a score. Grief to me is grief and me, alone in this expanse, conversing. What it says to me is the truth. It calls for peacetime and wartime. One says put the gun down, the other says I have been trying to reach you for so long. I haven't been listening, see, I haven't been listening. Neither can reconcile. Grief to me shines, like the moon, a mirror face, layers of ice. Some of us wish still to be hidden. If it makes the call from inside our house, I cannot say anything back. Grief to me is a note from girlhood. Grief to me is a summer star. Grief to me is a map I cannot follow. Grief to me is a pattern of lace. Grief to me is the beginning and the end. Grief to me is a swan out on the water. Grief to me is a shell. I want to say there is a pearl there, hardy and strong. Moon-sized. Girl-sized. Fluorescent with love, vast memory, calculation. Full with wishes and dreams. Grief to me is that pain, pain of all pains, the needle and thread, fabric of all things. Grief to me says stop running; stop dashing through the sky. As always, it comes with a command. I ask it questions before the hourglass tips over. What is it that a bird knows about fear? Does a bird know where it is going, all the time? How can it be so brave as to migrate? Does it worry if the conditions aren’t right? Does it dream when it has also known cold? Does it pause before it springs into flight? Does it know how many miles it will travel? Does it know what it means to endure? Does it know what it looks like to survive? Do they store that somewhere, as memory? Do they know what it means, to lose their way? Do they think about it at all, the return? Why do we put ourselves under so much pressure to live? What map do birds follow, that leads to life? Who are you, bright girl? Where have you come from? What will you do with your beautiful mind?
It is not normal for an oyster to produce pearls, you know; they result from an intrusion. This means they are a product of injury. This means there is something beautiful to come from all this yet.
Grief to me is a fraction and the whole picture. Grief to me has been here this whole time.
Do you know the odds against pearl formation are enormous? And yet here you are, yet, still, here you are.
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I don't know that anyone still follows this blog from many years ago. It's been so long since I posted, in a way I have been hanging on. I wanted to take one last time to thank anyone who knows me, or has known me, has written with me, or posted with me, has been close to me or had any proxy to me in the time that I have or I had been around. Stepping away from this blog was hard in the first instance and even harder in the second. To anyone who has ever sent me a kind word, I want to say thank you. To anyone who has witnessed my growing up on the internet in this safe space, this has been a hard goodbye. I hope I can still write and contribute to the collective written word again one day. I wish so much goodness to anyone who is still reading this here. Thank you so much for this corner of the internet, I wish you so much well.
