It lingers.
Wine-dark where bone met earth, souring
into a moss green, then a jaundiced yellow that gnaws at the edges like
something with an appetite. Each stage rotting into the next so slowly the eye
could swear it had gone still.
As my bruises decided their color, death
entered and robbed me of a life I had known by weight, by warmth, by hunger and
sleep. It rendered love down to bone dust and grit, something impossibly large
now small enough to be cradled between two fingers.
Ash was still lodged beneath my
fingernails when suicide pulled the trigger on a life I had known by voice, by
laugh, by the weight of my head against a shoulder. The report buried itself in
my ear and has stayed, flooding out everything it touches. Even comfort arrives
jagged now, bleeding, as though every sound must pass through the same violence
before it is permitted into my skull.
Twenty-eight days ago, I had warmth. I
had life. I had the whole cathedral of sound.
My flesh keeps no ledger of separate
grief – it has sutured them into a single wound: impact, ash, powder, silence,
one long violence still threading itself through different tissues.
None of that shows.
The bruise does. It is the only grief
allowed to be ugly in public. It may darken, spread, ache under a hand. No one
asks blood beneath the skin to be less dramatic. No one mistakes a change in
color for the end of pain.
The body dismantles violence by degrees.
Grain by grain, cell by cell, it draws
itself back. Without urgency and without apology. It takes what it takes. It
has not consulted me. It has never once asked permission to still be here.
It is doing what a body does when no one
is rushing it.
It is doing what I have not let myself
do.
So I press my thumb into the worst of
it, forcing something inside me to respond the way it is supposed to. I touch
the wound and the wound answered. It does not lower its voice or translate
itself into a tolerable language. There is no distance between what I ask of it
and what it has lost.
I am not further along.
