An analogy of Grief

Now

I’m numb, but for a dull throbbing, somewhere at the back of my head. I can feel the metallic taste of fatigue climbing down my throat. Why haven’t I cried yet?
She’s gone. I keep telling myself this. I keep trying to force myself to believe it, but I can’t. I refuse to believe that I have to enter the dry, frightening mouth of this new life alone.

It’s raining outside. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting, watching it, with nothing but blankness superseding my grief.


***
Then

“What are you doing?”

“I’m opening the window. I want to be able to smell the rain!” She laughed.

He got up and followed her, catching her, as she opened the latch and jumped back to face him, away from the torrent of rain which came through the open space. He made her turn, and held her close from behind, so that they stood with the rain surging down in front of them. She leant back against him, abandoning the front of her body to the night. The storm raged outside, but it seemed to be from another world; the only real world was her body and his…that moment, like so many others, the warmth in the curves of her back, their delicate, elusive connection, which forced them into each others arms with an intensity of love which neither of them had realised, or could understand, but both embraced because of the pure, unadulterated happiness it gave them.


***
Now

“Don’t think about it! Don’t remember!”


***
Then

“Let me get you a towel,” he said, and walked up the stairs, stretching his hand out behind him for her to take hold of. He grabbed a towel from the bathroom and handed it to her, but stopped in his tracks when he looked at her. Her skin glistened with wet, dripping from her hair to her chest. She wrinkled her nose in a mischievous smile, aware of his gaze which ran over her body to which her clothes clung, accentuating her breasts and her hips. He reached his hand towards her neck and pulled her face towards him, letting their lips touch.


***
Now

The phone is ringing. It has been non stop. Since… since… I continue to sit, watching the rain beating down, trying not to remember, or to think, but the memories have started flooding into my brain mercilessly and in quick, painful succession. I contemplate getting up to answer the phone. But I just don’t have the energy. I contemplate going out into the rain, going for a walk, getting some air into my stifled lungs, some clarity into my suffocating brain. No. I can’t. I can’t summon the energy to move from where I’m sitting.

I try to think of her face. I want to remember everything. The exact shape of the two moles above her right ear, the exact shade of her eyes, the exact way her hair fell around her face. Her smile. I can feel the memory of it slipping away from me. Already, her face has become a blur. I start to panic. How can I already be forgetting? How can I? My panic turns to anger, and guilt. I get up suddenly and drag from the book shelf, the photo album, tearing the pages open, finding every picture of her, of us. I pull them out and lay them on the floor. All of them. Hundreds of them. The photographs pierce me with a sudden, thrilling pain. I sit on my knees and force myself to look at them. Each one, slowly, deliberately, forcing my brain to record each photo, each nuance of her face, so that’ll I’ll never forget it. I refuse to forget it. I can’t. The memory is all I have left.


***
Then

He propped himself up on his elbow so that he could look at her, and ran his finger tips across her stomach. “You’re so beautiful.” He breathed.

“Shut up,” She laughed, pushing his shoulder so that he fell onto his back, and lifting her body up so that she was sitting with him between her legs. She looked down at him, her hair falling in front of her face, and bit her lip. He caught a sharp hint of her scent, conveying something both sensual and innocent in her, a growing abandon to passion that was also a willed attempt to be what she felt he must want. He took her in his arms and held her close to him, suddenly aware that he was in love with her.


***
Now

Eventually, I get up. The rain has stopped. It’s dark outside. I’ve spent all afternoon looking at the photographs. I know I should sleep, so I walk up the stairs stiffly and collapse onto the bed. I lie, staring at the ceiling. I know I’ll never love again, and this sends an infinite throb of loneliness crawling over my skin. I clench my teeth against the pain. I close my eyes and try to surrender to sleep, to oblivion.

And in that first instance of grief, I realise that true, real suffering is nothing but a test of love, that one of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately is that it is the only cure for loneliness, and shame and sorrow. I gradually become conscious that my love has truly gone. The reality that she’s dead dawns on me as I lie alone, half expecting to turn over and see her looking at me…And I haven’t cried yet, and I don’t believe that I’ll ever be able to cry. I think that when you are lucky enough to be given something as good as what I had, and then it is snatched from you with the cruelty of suddenness, only your soul can do the crying for you.