What my grief looks like

I am taking a free on-line writing class, and one of our prompts was to write about what our grief would look like if we took it out of us and looked at it…it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Grief – that black, slippery mucosal membrane that lines the inside of my stomach.  I would do anything to get it out, vomit, wail, scream in the shower, smoke a pack of cigarettes.  A slippery marble ball, I can’t grasp it, it is constantly sliding through my hands, rounding out and hollowing more space in my body.  The more I try to stand on top of it, the more I fall off.  When she died I was right there, slipping through the pain and dreams of her loss, unable to grasp the gravity of the moment, rolling in the profundity of the voids that had been left behind, sounding like empty school halls echoing with bells, that sharp bleak sound.  Grief, it ties me to sounds and beliefs I don’t have in the daylight, it makes me hug myself, hold myself, steam drips off my tears and the holes pierce wider and deeper into me.  It is a soulless creature, a bare light bulb in a hungry room, a child sitting on the floor leaning against the corner of her bed.  It is thick and black, so as not to let the light in, it is the sound of metal hitting the floor, and the taste of blood in my mouth.  Grief is a dark wind blowing me back when I need to push forward.  She hits at the softest spaces, the most happiest of places and rips them apart like a tornado.  Entering my grandmother’s sweet room like a Hefty trash bag grief comes and smothers the life, the light, the rose-scented everything, the sound of bagpipes outside, the cold gentleness of her last hand-hold.  Grief slips over me, bouncing from ear to ear, ruining my vestibular balance and ringing something awful inside of me.  Grief lays it on thick like Vegemite, salty and timeless.  Grief comes at me, doubled over in the shower, hot bodied and helpless, the ball of emotion filling the tub around me, it’s membrane sucking the smile out of me, like Ursula robbing Ariel of her voice.  Grief pauses only so I can catch my breath, then goes on to make me breathless, not in a high school romance sort of way, but in the Quentin Tarantino way – violent breaths and hearts breaking.  Grief tumbles around me until I push her back inside, until I push her back inside.