still life

a picture is worth a word of pain

http://www.darkelegy103.com/gallery.html

It is raining outside my open window, one of those sudden weather reversals Ohio is known for. I am chilled with the effort of saying what I mean, and mostly failing. To live as I do with a fundamental drive to be known and understood is to become emotionally anemic, too often I bleed out faster than I can replenish. And yet, I know no other way to be but to make of my words a tightrope I can walk across, poised between what I think and what I feel. Only in words can I unite the two halves of my knowing. This sounds all complex and mystical, and sometimes it sorta is. Right now, I mostly just “know” that I hurt. A LOT.

We celebrated my sister’s 17th birthday last week. No, we didn’t celebrate, the day just passed. And she didn’t turn 17 because she’s dead. What kind of fucked up world is it where a girl never gets to grow into herself, past that awful adolescent stage?

In my opinion
“gone”
is the vilest
four-letter word…
that someone
so in love with life
should leave it
is blasphemy 

There’s a baby praying mantis on my window. I’ve never seen a baby mantis before. It’s a bright, light green and kind of unsteady on its feet. It’s too new to look fearsome. She would have liked that. I should be delighted on her behalf, if only I could figure out how to feel the happy emotions as strongly as I do the unhappy ones. I wish I knew how she managed it. She could feel and express so much and so deeply without burning out. It was like her super power.

I spent the first months after Rose died learning to breathe again. Then, when I began to trust that I could survive it, immersed myself in a lava flow of creative energy, determined to capture everything I could remember about my sister and what it felt like to say goodbye while it was still fresh in my soul. At least, everything I could bear to commit to the starkness of black-on-white. Sometime during the winter the lava cooled and began to solidify around me. Grief-borne depression is not only dark and heavy, it is also sharp-edged, like obsidian. I had to hold very, very still.