There is a strange calm in this sadness.
There is a strange calm in this sadness.
One does not expect it. And yet here it is â not peace, nothing so resolved as peace, but something that has settled, the way light settles on water that has been disturbed and is only now beginning to remember its surface.
Lately, I have been feeling more. The wool against my skin. The bread that gives me life, the morning light, a stranger's glance across a room â everything arriving with a fullness it did not have before, as though time, in its strange mercy, has slowed to ensure I do not miss what I was always moving too quickly to receive.
All of it passing. All of it, for this moment, here.
Sometimes the wave comes. I have stopped treating this as a problem.
The body is wiser than one gives it credit for. It grieves on its own schedule, in its own vernacular â the catch in the throat at noon, the sudden heaviness of an ordinary afternoon, tears arriving in the middle of a sentence, without asking, without permission, not caring in the least what one had planned. I have learned to set things down when I feel it gathering. To let it move through me the way weather moves through a house left open. And when it has passed â and it does pass â there is a quiet that follows. Strange. Clean. The particular silence of a room after something true has been said in it.
I know hopelessness. That is a different country â grey, without texture, where even grief grows bored of itself, where the days repeat without variation and nothing asks anything of you because nothing believes you capable of answering.
This is not that.
This still wants. This still feels. And there is something in that â a willingness to see, however painful, what is actually there.
And so one lets go. Not bravely. Simply because holding on has become the harder thing.
This is what love does when you allow it to touch you, when you allow it to open every door â and it comes to know the way you breathe at night, and then betrays you, and then leaves. You had let the wall down. All the way down. And now you are wounded, yes, standing in the cold and the light both, which is to say: in the world as it actually is, without the shelter you had built against it. And you begin again. The slow work of gathering oneself back. The strange education of loss â what it insists on teaching, whether one has enrolled or not.
I try to call it by its name.
This raw acceptance of what is â to look it full in the face, to say: yes, I see you, I see what has happened, I see what was done and what was lost and what I have been left holding â and not look away. Not dress it in something softer. Not yet.
There is a strange calm in this sadness.
One does not expect it. One does not ask for it. And yet here it is â tenacious, particular, one's own.
