A Desperate Attempt at the Exorcism of Grief

I am not a good person.

I know this because the people closest to me have told me so. 

For a long time I thought I was good. I thought, I believed, I was guided by a voice that whispered to me always to do the right thing. It is devastating and humbling to learn that all your good intentions, all your compulsions to live in service to the perceived goodness of these intentions was, and is, simply the delusions of a man so self-obsessed that he/I believed that what was good for me was also good for others. I still don’t quite believe this but I accept that my inability to understand my flaws is the result of the very flaws I fail to understand. The world is cluttered with circles, things that are terribly self-referential and knotted. I am trying to relive each moment of my entanglement, trying to unravel the knotted mess of my life. I know I am not allowed to be happy yet. I know that all my previous joys were rotten with unhealthy desires. But I am trying, and as I lie here in the darkness of my thoughts, I try to imagine where my heart has been hidden all these years. 

The years pass quickly and it seems so recent that I was a child. I try to remember, I remember like it was yesterday. I know there was a time, even briefly, when I was innocent—when my thoughts and desires were pure. I know I must have cared once about the feelings of others, when I was guided by impulses that served something other than myself. But if it is true that we are born in sin then I know mine went deeper than the sin of others.

I see beautiful things. I feel so deeply the sublime wonder of the world around me. I have ached 

with the pain of others but I have been assured that this ache is all a ruse. Even the worst of us must find a way to justify our behavior and I am certainly not the first to mistake tragedy for beauty or abuse for love. If I could see this, if I could understand, surely I would be saved, but my sins do not give me the luxury to slowly unfold into understanding. 

I imagine, no, I am sure, she will remember it differently than me, and as soon as I say these things she will have me believing that my recollection is a fabrication born of my failings. But I am feeling tired and even my grief is barely still breathing. What I had to lose has already been lost. I see the breath rising from my mouth. I want someone to know, I want to make the loss worthwhile, to mean something other than what was missed. What is meant to be is simply the hole which needs to be filled. The pit is possibility or the pit is a curse, but it is there and that is all we can ever really expect.

In my dreams I see my children, almost grown, running to me with their arms wide open. My dreams are a hole I try to fill.  I give myself the option of possibility. This buys me time, buys me time to peddle my soul to the highest bidder. Who can give me more? Who can promise me time with them, a chance to erase my neglect, my cowardice? It is possible that the statute of limitations has expired. It is possible that even their love has expired. But isn’t that what the devil is for, to facilitate the impossible if the price is right? And there is nothing I have that is more valuable than even the possibility of one more moment with them.  

Our past will not leave us. People are wrong to believe life and time are linear; time haunts us, the past hovers over us, wakes us in our sleep, taunts us before it suffocates us, briefly stealing our hope, our breath, our future, before folding back into us, planting its cells of regret deep into our flesh. 

My father died unable to describe what he saw. I think in that moment his mind was clear, the fog parted and what he saw before him was crisp and beautiful. But the dementia still clung to his tongue and the best he could do was squeeze my hand and stare straight ahead into what was to come.

This moment terrified me. I think he saw that there was more, something beyond this life, and this did not bring me comfort, and I think my father was also dismayed to find that there was still more to endure. 

Why do I always come back to this?

I try to embrace the joy that is also there, that is always there if we look for it, but my home is in the undergrowth or the too-bright star light that blinds me to everything else. Rapture is dark, even if it is the rapture of light. But I am trying. I am trying something new, to live what isn’t true until it is. My father told me not to be afraid, that beyond fear is something beautiful. He told me this with his very last words. Did I say this already? Do I say anything I haven’t said before? 

I felt the seasons pass from one to another. It isńt important, specifically, which seasons they were; time passes so quickly that it hardly matters. But the point is, I became aware of the world around me in a state of transition, and in that way I think I slowed the flow of time, even if only by a fraction of its normal rate. But it doesn’t take long for things to creep in and I think I saw something that I otherwise wouldn’t have, something that maybe I shouldn’t have seen. 

Sometimes,…often, I feel very much alone, but I know this really cannot be. There are so many of us, and while I imagine there are billions different ways to be a person, there are, or must be, many things that overlap. So as I feel much alone I also imagine some other having a similar feeling far away or right beside me. I ride this bus every day. I am neither social or non-social; I will strike up a conversation if the situation is right or often I will sit quietly and feel each bump and sway as the bus takes me closer to my stop. I don’t know much about the others who also, daily, ride this bus. We exchange greetings, glances, acknowledging the camaraderie that comes with shared experience. I hear the occasional detail but nothing that gives me a full picture of the life any of them leads beyond this small shared experience. We are all strangers but I imagine some of them must also feel, from time to time, this same nameless emptiness that sits with me whether the seat beside me is occupied or not…

No, that’s not right. Let me start over.

What do we know of loneliness? I use the word we because I am afraid to think that I am the only one who is lonely. I want to stay objective, the subjective I is too close to the question I’m asking.

But who am I?

God, I hate this question. I hate that I am asking it. And to you! To claim this timidity, this astonished ignorance of the most intimate thing.

But tell me, who am I?

It is clear I do not know and I have tired of pretending otherwise. I cannot know this intimate I.

I can only know who I am through you. My confusion arises only in the naming of things: who am I—and then also it follows that the what, where, how, and why must also be answered—and named. But how do I juggle all these labels? How do I stay within the definition? And doesn’t this by nature eliminate the possibility, in fact require the elimination of the “I” from the equation?

Well, how would you describe me?

Shall we begin with that?

You tell me I am good. It is a sweet gesture that leaves me filled with sadness because even the earnestness with which you believe this, the earnestness with which you try to make me believe it, is simply desire and not truth. I want to know what is only known, what cannot be disputed. You struggle to do this and I wonder why you can’t even start with the simplest things. You look for something deeper, something more. You think there must be something worth describing that would give substance to your assertion of my goodness. But I think even you, when forced to come up with something that deviates from what you want to be true, are faced with the realization that what passes for goodness is only a trompe-l’oeil effect covering a terribly flawed reality. But you are not the only one, and I too believed this trick of perception, so much so that I would always be genuinely shocked when my true nature was revealed to me. But to be human is also to learn, and after some time I learned to no longer be swayed by my own public face. At first I tried to warn others, I tried to get them to see deeper but they were always seduced by the things I could not control–My smile? My eyes? And so it was, in spite of my efforts to be good, despite my knowledge to the contrary, that I began to feel no longer responsible for how others perceived me. And here is the proof of my nature.

We are only what we are in the moment. We fabricate everything else. And it is impossible to keep these two states separate, they are entwined immediately upon inception of what is real, what is of the moment. So it is really impossible to be present, we only exist in a state of perception, that of others and ourselves, but we are always removed, standing just outside ourselves. 

What is it that knows what it is? I watch life around me. The bees, the ants…they seem to have purpose, they seem to know what they are, what they must do. Then what? The birds? The squirrels? I’m not so sure they know. They seem conflicted; distracted by an impulse for play, an awareness of what they might be missing. And the awareness of what we might be missing is, I think, the dominant awareness of being human. It animates our moods, our thoughts, our actions. It puts us always outside ourselves. 

I wonder what it would feel like to be loved. What would it feel like to be in the world, to be in one’s skin? What would it feel like to have the pressure on the outside meet the pressure on the inside with equal force? I think to be loved is to find ourselves weightless, to find ourselves consisting of almost nothing at all. 

What does it feel like to be loved? Does it feel like a burden?

                                                                                        a gift?

I ask because I do not know.

I ask because I want to be loved.

When I come to the end of my life what will I fear most? Will I be like my father, unable to speak of what he saw? Or will I fill this world with the horrors of the next? 

Why do I see things this way? Why do I imagine the worst when the unknown could just as easily be imagined as paradise? 

I give myself over to the impending end. There is grace here and a sense of peace. Colors seem richer, the air around me more sublime. At times I seem to almost float and I find happiness in the contentment of this submission, but quickly I am pulled back into the reality of the unforeseeable—that the end may still be farther ahead than I can see, farther ahead than what I am sure I can endure. And I am once again in the oppression of planning how I will get through this day and the next.

There is no difference between the dream and the real, and if you can gain any sort of dominion over either— that is, if you know when to open or close your eyes—... If I am dreaming now, I can wake to a different life that is just as real. If I am awake, my dream will take me to where I am unknown and unafraid. If there is no difference between the sun and the moon, the air and the sea…if there is no difference between the when and the where I might have been loved or unloved, then everything is worth imagining an outcome that is more beautiful than what we know or what we believe we may deserve. 

When did I become an artist? 

Was it simply a cave I entered for protection, for escape? A cave is half darkness, half light; half death, half life. I see the world pass, I see the dawn and the setting sun, see the wind swirl and howl beyond the threshold of my hollow. I build a world in shadow, waiting for the long low rays of sunlight to fill and crawl across the things I have scrawled upon the floor and walls. 

When did I become an artist? 

When I dropped all the things that were not that, when I crawled into the darkness daring the light to follow. 

So many times I’ve left my life behind, just left it. Every scrap, book, remnant of my past simply left where it lay, and me leaving without even closing the door behind me.

What once was right there within reach—something all your senses were engaged with—is now, deliberately so, obfuscated by the rules of navigation for the maze you must follow. What once was yours is now somewhere in the distance, is now made holy and out of reach. This is the process by which you move through the world, this is the process you have decided you must enact.

So I am bathed in light. I am too hot to get close to, too molten to touch. And can I see beyond the flames of my own immolation? Doubtful, and before now I hardly noticed. But I notice now, and I feel the flames; I feel the almost too hot crackling of my thoughts, the almost too hot smoldering of my desire.

Often, I visit you in dreams. In dreams I am looking for something, though I am never sure what. And sometimes you go with me, looking for something also. Sometimes in dreams I don’t feel so alone. 

Often, I think of this other life.

I tried to be honest with you, I tried to push you away. But you insisted you knew what you were doing, insisted you knew what you were getting into. I look at you and know that I love you. I look at you and know that out of the rubble of my life I built a bridge to you. 

And I want love more than anything. But isn’t that the easiest thing for any of us to say? Maybe it’s recognition more than love that I want, maybe it’s the constant knowing that I am seen, that I can’t be invisible even if I tried. Maybe it’s a glance, or a touch on the shoulder, or even that unfathomable thought that someone would miss me when I am gone…

And this is the essence of being human, that we must jump into the world so that we may be noticed by anyone, or anything at all. 

But I can’t even take refuge in debauchery or find solace with those who suffer in kind. I am too timid and self-conscious to revel in excess, too judgemental and self-indulgent to believe anyone is anything like me. The cycle of my sadness is like the orbit of the planets, my ambivalence is the gravity of my sorrow.    

And that’s all there is, though I try to write a story of something else.

Once, you put your hand softly on mine.

Once, you told me that you loved me.

But once, also, you begged me to never leave you and when you said this I knew it was the end. We only beg for what we know can never be ours.

In the time before time, in the time before sorrow, is where my story takes place—the story which I am trying to write.

In the time before time there were no words and sorrow only entered when language did. 

And who would know the language of my sorrow?

Who could ever form the letters in their mouth?

When language came I filled my buckets, thinking that words would save me.

If I were everywhere I would open all the windows in all the old houses that were here before I was. I would let in the birds, let them fill the rooms and build their nests in lampshades and closets and lay their eggs in pairs of shoes and underwear drawers. If I were nowhere I would imagine a dream in which I was everywhere and would do this all still before waking.  

And still, I always look inside my shoes before stepping into them.

How can our life become so different than it was? How does the story of a life simply end and become another? I feel that I am a character in a novel, dropped halfway through, into another book.

Someone else owns my memories. They bought the rights with a currency I cannot use. It is as irredeemable as I am, so this is why I try to dream a world that contains a history that is mine and I make a place for you hoping that someday you will find your way there. 

I know that the two of you occupy the same place; the space that occupies the world. I know the two of you sense me somewhere, feel me somewhere in the rooms that are otherwise empty. You walk, hand in hand, knowing something is missing. I whisper into the darkness, hoping you will hear me. 

The story of the world is a love story.

The story of the world is written in the silence. 

I can’t imagine seeing you again any more than I can’t imagine not, and this perhaps is the indication of my fall. This is the irredeemable loss of hope, the abandonment of possibility. Do we continue to believe long after we have lost faith? Do we continue to worship what we cannot see, what we know is not there, long after our certainty of its absence?

What is it to be this human thing? What is it to be here, to be aware and to wish also sometimes that we weren’t? It is a very human thing to want to be free, even from our body, even from our awareness that we exist at all. I want what I don’t have but I want also to forget that I don’t have it. But I can only be aware of this desire if I remember, and what I remember dismantles me in the process. 

Once, you kissed me and told me not to be afraid. Once I believed our love would protect us. 

Once, I believed you and once, I had no fear. My dreams tangled in the madness of your hair, my dreams formed on the impossible softness of your skin. I rested my fingers at the soft fold at the top of your thigh, I closed my eyes and imagined an endless life…

I wrote a poem once about my father. I read it over and over, moved immensely by my own words. I read it until I knew it from memory. When I missed him most, I would recite the words in my head, bringing me back to when I wrote it, barely hours after he died. That was many years ago, and when I miss him now, I close my eyes and try to find that poem somewhere in my memory, but I cannot recall a single word.

I was born a wave, born as the light sparkling on the surface of the sea. I was born as breath, born as vapor, fragile as smoke. I was born nowhere, but everywhere at once. I cannot take form, I slip through the fingers of anyone who might want to hold me. 

I’m locked in my body, I’m locked in my mind. When we stop believing in what is possible we confront who we truly are and I am locked in the gaze of myself to myself. I am confronted with my predicament, unsoftened by the dream of an exit or the potential for greater things.

It is really only that my heart aches and drifts. And what else is there but to acknowledge this? I try to find more but if we have no one else, there is only ourselves—and if we see the world, arms linked, through collective eyes—well, that is not mine to imagine. I have only my own eyes and arms that link with no one. I am the untouched, the unseen, and I know there are others, but if there are, they are just like me, and if they are just like me they are as deeply lost as I am. 

And still, how do I wake each day? How do I take a breath? How does my heart still beat, bored through with this sadness? How can one live with such a hole in one’s heart? It is a hole that would fit snugly around you, if you were here.

I am surrounded by the soft, big universe. The air is warm, almost warm as day. The hills around me are burning. In the distance I hear the long anguished sirens and the air seems filled with invisible sparks. I lie on the lawn chair, folded back until it is almost flat. I stare into the night sky, seeing at first only the brightest things. My ears acclimate only to silence, my eyes, like small telescopes, adjust to take in more light. After about ten minutes more stars begin to appear in the darkness, and then rapidly others, and others, until there seems to be more light than dark. The soft night folds down upon me. I am wrapped in threads of light and still more stars appear until they too wrap around me and under me. What does it feel like to be embraced by something that wants nothing from me, wants nothing but for me to be there if I wish. And I do wish, and I fling my wishes at all these stars. I lie there waiting for anything to come true. 

And while I wait, I look. I look deep—beyond what I can see. I want to meet something halfway, some other light, some other far away gaze—not knowing also what is to come. And still more stars appear, and swirls of things almost invisible but still there, waiting for my telescope eyes to open wide enough to see them. 

I place the memory of those stars on canvas, I spread out the loss of you on a page. My fingers sift through mountains of grief. I pick out slivers of happiness and build a shrine to those brief moments. Thirty fingers intertwined, thirty fingers digging through the rubble. If I could walk with you hand in hand—the three of us simply walking into the sunlight…

I want only what can never be given, I want what can never be taken away. 

The days pass. They pass like headlights on the highway beyond the fence. The days pass and I am beginning to fear when they no longer will. And the life that was always possible passes with them also. 

I am afraid and my fear grows. It grows deeper and thicker daily. It is a thing I need to cut through but the blade of my will grows duller also. 

It has been four years since I’ve seen my children. It’s been four years since I’ve taken a breath. I sleep, I wake, I try to keep the sadness at bay. But the world fills with it and if someday I can no longer hold back my tears I fear the whole world will be drowned by them. I have been embalmed by this sadness, It is all that runs through me. 

There is so much suffering in the world. So much sadness and I know I’m not alone in the crush of it. So much tragedy is the consequence of being here. And if it were only that, we would learn to endure it—but there is beauty also, and joy, and the sublime miracle of love—so that it is impossible to simply acquiesce. There is beauty in grief, only because we know we will never completely give in. I have not yet died of my sorrow, though it should have ended me long ago. I move toward some hope that has no form, except for the form of my refusal to succumb. 

The clouds finally broke. The sky is such a startling blue. It has been so long since I’ve seen it like this. The sun sends shafts of light through the open door. I bathe myself in this forgotten warmth. When I close my eyes I see halos—radiant rings of magenta and blue. When I close my eyes this warmth is all there is and I briefly forget the things I no longer want to remember.

I miss them all…

I wake in the middle of the night with an all-encompassing feeling of loss. It is debilitating, it fills me with terror. I want to wail but I do not want to wake you. I contain the grief in the silence of my isolation. Even with you wrapped around me I am unfixably alone.  

When I dream, I dream of the simplest things. Before, I would dream of flying or of great waves overtaking cities; the ocean rising, the ocean churning. But now I dream of the simplest things, the simplest reality of a life with a different outcome. I dream of holding my childrens’ hands as we cross the street to the park. I dream of my girls bringing home new partners; sharing their joy of potential love with their father who loves them without condition. I dream of the simplest things, which my terror suggests will always exist only in dreams. 

I try to remind myself that this gift, this miracle of being alive, is just as rich, just as precious, even when we suffer most. I would not trade this suffering, I would not trade my pain, I would not trade for any life that would have me feel and desire less.  

The terror of drowning is the memory of air. 

What would it be to learn to breathe water?

I miss them all; my father, my mother, my children…I miss all those I felt connected to, even for a moment. I am not a good person but I wonder if any of them would say that I was. There are moments I remember when I think I had merit, that there was some value in knowing me, in being close to me. I miss feeling that someone loved me, even if it wasn’t true. I miss the slow, simple knowing that I might be missed when I wasn’t there. 

I miss the waves; the way our bodies became weightless as the swell lifted us, our feet becoming unmoored, unbound to the soft sea floor. I miss the way that motion brought our bodies closer, the way our wet, salty lips pushed together like there was no going back.

I miss the possibility that life could be remarkable; that anything was possible, that anything,  and everything, could be left behind. When I looked back at the shore, feeling your skin press harder into mine I felt the swell, not only outside of me but inside also. I felt the swell of possibility, the sense that I could be anything with you next to me. 

What I miss most is the feeling of feeling. 

I am not this or that, or enough of either, or too much of one and not the other. I am not happy, or sad, fully present nor fully gone. I am not free, though I am not fully bound. I am not what is wanted for me to be and that, it seems, is a most offensive thing. I am other, even from the other. I am not loved, but perhaps once, for a moment, I was. 

I want to believe this is true,

That I simply missed it when it came for me. 

A man was here, and then he wasn’t.

It is, it seems, as simple as that