LOVE

Recently, I learned what it means to love.
To endure it. To suffer it.  To stay inside it.

To remain as it warps,  and outgrows the body that
contained it.

In the end.
Love is what endures.

MADNESS

Grief is the place
The unmapped territory of the human mind
Where the veil between reality and the mythic thins.
Where meaning melts
Where logic dissolves.

Where the walls of reason fall away,

Here – the consciousness spills into something far greater and universal;

it is ancestral, archetypal, infinite.

Time folds.
It loops.
It bends. .

 in all that collapse, There is wholeness.
There is completion.

Maybe, just maybe –  we are the echoes, and not the  origins.

DEJA VU

Grief arrived with a sense of deja vu,  an uncomfortable familiarity,
as if I’d lived it all before.

Maybe the mind does that.
Maybe we rehearse loss long before the curtain falls.

All the suffering.
The heartbreaks.
The failures.
The endless unravelling.

Are a preparation.
A training ground in letting go.

Maybe that is what life is,  a long apprenticeship
in release.

MUTATION

In all this

I mutated too.

Grief is its own hallucinogen.
I became unbearably aware of how alive I am.

Of breath.
Of sound.
Of light.

THE PILGRIMAGE

Eventually, I understood.

The point was not to amend anything,  but to witness it.

Not to fight death, or grief, but to walk inside it.

We are not here to save, but to accept.

And maybe that’s all love really is,

the courage to see things as they are,

and to stay.

THE AFTER PARTY

I thought death would bring closure.

Instead, it revealed love’s scale.
Its limitless expansion.

Now I live in the after

It’s not an ending, or a destination.
It’s a landscape.

I keep a map in my heart of the places where the veil thins;  the river,
a reggae song,  his handwriting,  bread and butter pudding, almond oil,
fila tracksuits,  hats.

People sometimes ask me how I am and I say ok.
Because I am.
But I live somewhere else now.

My humour survived, it’s sharper in fact.

I laugh at things that are not funny.
At the solemnity of condolence cliches.

I talk to him in the grammar of my decisions.

He is the why.
He is the how.  He is the who of all
I am.

Some days the ache is background music.
Other days, it’s the bassline.
Either way it plays.

I’ve stopped searching for signs,  but I welcome
them when they arrive.

Where I am now is not healed,  it is not
broken,  it is continuous.

The bridge is there when I need it.  I don’t cross
as often, but I do know the way.

Love is not the antidote.
It’s the medium.

Grief is not a problem to solve.
It’s a landscape to live in.

Pack a raincoat and your sense of humour.