Now and Not Yet

I wonder how many minutes I’ve spent mourning in advance all the things that I’ve yet to experience—how death has left a profound impact on me, how it will again, how trees are rooted but lose to the elements every year at the same time. We see the weeping coming and we prepare our shields to deflect inevitable feeling. There’s a sense of depth with which we’re able to extend ourselves in order to not

grieve what we’ve lost
and what we’ve yet to lose.
And we will
lose. Everything.

Thank goodness I think to myself that we will lose it all. We will loosen our grasp on everything we once thought would never fall, never break. The unmendable will lead us back to ourselves. We may never know the glue that holds us together, but we will always bend towards the cracking and craning that we create a space for in ourselves.

Thank goodness that, as fall comes every year—as the day begins to lose the battle of darkness and light—the sun becomes a distant memory. The cold creeps in, invades our spaces, leaves us reeling, fixed on finding anything that can bring us feeling in our fingers and toes again.

Thank goodness I say to myself that spring finds us after every new year. As we thaw, we are new—open to this side of forever, trading in our jackets and boots for sun on skin, all the beautiful things blooming.

Despite this, I’ve come to understand how life will forklift heavy things onto my shoulders, lungs breathing deeper now, and I will follow the sunset every day into each new morning, every moment that mourning brings. It’s how I’ve come to understand the grief in my bones. As a circle: as one thing happens, we know the opposite arch of this bending line, how it’s honest and good, and how we will be back in this spot again soon, with varying degrees of familiarity and mystery. As a ladder: how we take steps with conviction, yet still feel the iron in our boots wreck havoc on everything we leave behind. And we do leave things behind. On purpose and accidentally. We scuff memories and choose what we see, what we remember, what we value in that process.

It’s the grief of the body, the vulnerability of the way we move—stretching and folding into itself. Consider this flesh, how, in all of its complexities we make simple, it bends naturally towards rest. How, with gravity, we suspend our senses to connect at the belly, the hips, the mouth, in an effort to rush towards warmth—all that we seek. It’s what’s beautiful about love: it brings us to cozier heights, new beginnings over and over and over again in our bodies. Fragile and giving, nuanced and breathtaking. We open ourselves to every good thing we can imagine, even when things aren’t as we imagine.

When love leaves, warmth slowly dissipates. It’s not a part of our breath, our bodies, our minds. We work to accommodate ourselves, seeking new and sustainable ways to not allow the frigid in. We become transactional in a sense, even if only for a short time, so we don’t experience cold.

I hope that the next time you crack wide open, you allow all the light to come in. It’s how the magic happens—all this growing, the salt of the Earth, the rain—it’s nothing without the light. Neither are you.