The Wages of Grief

The wages grief takes are strange and unexpected. My skin is blotched, my sleep restless. I burn from dreams of memories, and memories unmade, sleep gifts no rest, and is a hurdle among many at which I falter,  day by day. My face hangs like curtains off the rail, my eyes sinkholes and my stomach is a constant knot.

What is it about a woman left? How do they know, the men who smile and leer at me as I walk to my office and do my errands? I can liken it only to sharks smelling blood in the water. Is it in my face, my gait, does abandonment have a scent? Someone asked me out to dinner yesterday, and that never happened the whole of my marriage. They could not know. I have not said. I declined and yet I craved the company and attention so much it killed me to say no. It was not him I wanted across from me, I could not bear a foreign approach, I recoiled from the question, and he let it fall.

I feel in a half life, here in my glass box amongst the trees, the skyline view I coveted so much, the cachet, the fortress like quality of being so elevated. I hate this place now as much as I ever loved it before. It was a field of dreams to me. A nest to love and in which to be loved.  Now it seems a display case, a cage.

I should stop drinking, I should stop crying, sometimes I think I should stop living at all, if this is what living must be now. I want to be better than this. I want to have courage. But I find myself looking at the river more and more, and longing for the physicality of true sinking, not just this mental abyss.

I am ashamed of having been left, I am excoriated by my mistakes, missteps. I don’t know where to go from here. I am fearful, and sad all of the time and directionless. I wonder where the girl I was went, the one with the resilience and the laugh that could dispel demons.

I will keep trying, there is nothing else. I will close my curtains on the lights and the river and swim in this terrible elixor. For now, for today, for what it is worth.