Grief has taken my hand and pulled me down the stairs. I close the curtains during the day. I feel like the sun is asking me too many questions. The heat coming through the window burns hot on my skin. A dog nudging it’s owners leg begging to be walked. I close the curtains until the sun sets. Thick brown curtains hanging heavy in front of my window. I hear the curtains sigh as I walk past them. I hear the trees tapping on the glass begging to be let in. Once the rays of the sun disappear from the fabric, I push the curtains open slowly. All the light surges in, I am overwhelmed with color. My eyes don’t know where to focus and I’m giving myself a headache. Blue. Purple. Pink. Orange. Yellow. I attempt to do some yoga on the small patch of carpet in front of the window. The carpet has consumed all the heat from the day and my feet relax as if I am stepping on hot stones. I unfurl myself. As I bend over I see the moon above the palm trees. I hold up my thumb and match my fingernail to the shape of a planet I’ll never touch but always seems to be following me. “The moon is following me,” I remember telling my dad as he drove me home from girl scouts when I was small. “Well I guess you are a lucky girl” he would say to me. Lucky girl, I think to myself as I fold my head over my knees. I count backwards from 10 beginning the process of falling into a meditative state. I think about being in highschool and seeing my dad bawl at his father’s funeral. My grandmother being asked if she wants to go to the gravesite to see her husband be buried, “I can’t watch them lower him into the ground,” she said in almost a whisper to the wind. Me standing beside her in pink dress because we didn’t have time to find anything black. Lucky girl. A bird flies into the glass of the window. I jump up and my heart begins to race as blood rushes to my head. I stare at the pink clouds blowing over the yard like tumbleweeds. “WAKE UP!” said the bird.
I check my email obsessively awaiting a message from another realm with the subject line reading here’s an explanation to why I left you.
After the funeral. After eating endless melatonin and still not being able to go to sleep at night. After using my phone as a shield from my emotions scrolling until my elbow gave out. After letting the laundry pile up. After I released my hands from my own throat and started to speak, a drowning person coming up from air, I decided to start from the bottom of the stairs. I looked up and saw grief standing at the top and realized to meet myself whole, I would have to begin the journey of getting to the top of the stairs by myself. I would have to face my fears. I would have to reach out for love. I would have to open the curtains and dance in the sun. I placed my feet on the first step and it creaked, lucky girl, I started to walk.
With grace,
T.
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