Grief is a Longing to Return Home,
and be hugged by a child.
To be in grief is to be dislodged from the mouth of time. Someone has knotted the back of my hands, I tell my mother. Someone has tethered me to the trunk of a tree. Its wood scrapes against my skin every dusk.
I’m waiting for something, but there’s no way of knowing what. A spider, exhausted by the web she’s been weaving— drops onto the rug where I sit. I prop her on my lap, & kiss her to sleep. Hush, hush. We will crawl through the night together, I sing. My voice is scrambling out of its coagulated chords. Its blackened pit. I can hold its smallness in my hands— take apart its threads, one by one.
Every night, a bird’s moan disturbs my sleep. This could be a dream, this could be real. I am waiting for a telephone call on my half-broken landline. I am waiting for answers. For the beam of a baby’s laughter. For the child I was as a two year old, to sprint across this blue-tiled room. Where I sit atop an unthreaded rug: waiting for someone to hand me tea.
I am waiting for the child in me to come alive again. Her eyes still twinkling. For her to re-grow so that I can stroke the long back of her hair. Oil it. Maybe this is what grief looks like on some days. A longing for the girl you once were. To run into her arms— to bury your face in her lap. To seek solace in the bobbing rhythms of her head. Her hair flying in the wind.
She is alive, that girl in me. Sometimes I feel her in my chest. Squealing & squealing when tickled. To grieve is to remember the echoes of her laughter as I pull myself out of bed, & fail. It is gathering the wrinkled layers of my body into a unison. A private music.