We could not be strangers. It was impossible. We could pretend to hate each other. Or maybe you did hate me. I don’t know what was going on inside your head. I would still look for you at parties or those moments where we’d cross paths. We moved on while still hanging onto the small threads that we could. Slowly over time, they break. There were moments were we’d creep up on each other. The truth is though, once you hurt someone once, you don’t look at them the same way again.
oh, this feeling again. you put so much energy into this moment, into this relationship, and it gets eaten and devoured rather than turned back to fuel you. how many times, little sun? how many times can you dance around like this in your warm skin, saying: i’m fine. i’m fine! i love trying so hard.
let yourself be consumed on the stage. why not. nobody is really looking anyway.
“I remember colour. Everything was awash with it. Red dripping from my hands. Red dribbling down my shirt. I was bleeding freely, cut open for everyone to see, but no one offered any help. No one even said a thing, like the sadness was contagious. Like the grief was all over me, spreading and spreading, a dark cloud that followed me everywhere I went. It was how people went out of their way to avoid my gaze that cut me to the core. Not the way they looked at me, but the way they did not. I’m not contagious, I wanted to say. I’m just lost and I don’t know who to turn to. But for a long time they did not hear my silent pleas. I was screaming with my mouth closed.
I felt myself wanting to assure them, heard myself saying things like: if you look at me just this once, I swear I won’t pass my grief on to you. But if you offer to carry it with me for a while, I’ll let you. Just for a moment. And when you’re done, you can shrug it off again, like an old coat that no longer fits.
And some of them heard me and did. Some of them drew closer, after days of being trapped inside that black hole all alone, and they sat down with me inside, bringing fairy lights and candles. They did nothing but take my hand and let me speak. And together, we shared memories, laid them out on the table in front of us like a five-course meal and gorged ourselves on them. Until we’d replaced the endless pain of loss with gratitude for a while. Until I could breathe a little easier, at least for a moment, knowing that there would come a time after the grief. A time when I could think of you and your absence with a smile on my face. Still sad, but grateful. Still hurting, but a little less. That time was not now. It was possible this time would not come for a couple of weeks or months. But I had this small hope to hold on to. And I kept the lights my friends brought me, slowly turning the black hole into a place of retreat, no longer a place of loss and grief.”
