My body remembers even when my heart wants to forget
You are vivid, alive, living in my reflection
You are my eyes, my nose, my hair, my toes.
Lightning splitting through glass.
Tremor boiling beneath the skin.
An aching eclipsing reminder.
A knowing
I will never ever have you, again.
My heart begins to crumble.
Piece by piece.
Free falling
into a void
over and over
again.

I fear the poetry that will crawl out of me now that you are gone.
Forgive me,
my temporary devastations.
I’ve mistaken many things for heartbreak.
This
is an onslaught,
a tempest flooding, a catastrophe.
You never came close.
I wait for the grief to find me. I wait for it to cripple me.
The symptoms come on slow.
Gnawing ache in my chest, somewhere deep
begins to hollow.

Executioner, resurrector. I myself exhume them.
Like soil breaking after rain. A stirring beneath the stillness.
The dull scrape of memory
against bone.
The smell of crushed handkerchief
damp with sweat.
Oats, no sugar.
Your signature
a loop of unbroken motion,
a relic.

I stare longer at greying men hoping to catch a glimpse of you
in their aging faces, their rounding bellies.
I imagine you in their cautious crossing of streets.
In grocery aisles, on sidewalks, at red lights.
I’ve started exercising,
as if tracing steps
could rewrite stories.
Grief sculpts memory in its own image.
Chiselling truth till the ache resembles joy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash