Grief

Which was unfortunately not feather-like

Grief – over what exactly, I’m not sure. Or at least, there was no pinpointable thing. Nothing big enough. But I did feel that the last year and a half of my life were a fast unravelling of form and joy and confidence that my life used to have. 

Perhaps it started with the breakup with my boyfriend-bestfriend, perhaps it started with the theft of my laptop, of the death of my horse, or the moving-away of my best friend, or the too-hot summer, or the shuffle of my upstairs neighbour all day, or my sink clogged for three weeks with no plumber coming, or the landlords threatening to evict on New Year’s Day, or the drinking too much champagne at a party and knowing it, or the bleakness of my apartment which still got no direct sunlight, or sleeping on an air mattress at my parents houses. Or the winter – the long, sunless winter. All of these badness-es, all of the heart-sink moments accumulated, file-like, film-like, rushing past in my mind, and I was trying to out-think this feeling I was having, trying to locate the particular narrative that explained where I ended up so I could catch the loose end and re-fasten it to the stable current of my life, to the next tall, sturdy telephone pole that it had fallen down from, so my life could continue going, so it could continue wowing up and down like hydrowires between poles, the ones you watch from the backseat window when you’re a kid, wondering who put them up there, and what happened if a pole fell down, and how many other poles would bend over if that happened, and who would fix them, and whose idea was it to put them like that, and what exactly was the whole rest of the world about anyway?

It could have started anywhere. And naturally, here I was – trying to find its end.