There are often times I stop and realize just how different my life is - from itself a year ago, from what I imagined, from what it would have been if I had made different choices. Today it sinks deeper - my clinging to change, a strange divorce from my younger self who craved settlement and constancy like a starving African child who has never tasted a complex carbohydrate craves the sense of fullness we take for granted. I always fought the effects of growth and movement until the recent years when I fel I have emerged from this cloud and become increasingly more frustrated with similarity.
My star chart reads that I am particularly marked by the habit of transformation - not pheonix-type, rising out of despair, but the type characterized by my beloved nautilus, that changes his home when he grows too big. I will forever change who I am when the last me gets too easy to be.
Today my life is drastically different - yes, from a year ago, but more acutely from two weeks ago. I find even this much change necessary and thrilling. This line of thought calls to mind a fear I had as a teenager that I would reach my goals, that I would be excellent. A strange fear perhaps? I have for a long time understood it as a fear of perfection left over from a troubled childhood, but I now understand it well as a fear that there will be no more room to grow, nothing to change into, only the possibility of a stagnating life.
And how, why, do I ponder this today? My grandmother, my father's mother and my last remaining grandparent, died last night in a coma. Sad, terribly, but a long time coming. She herself never stopped changing, always had new projects, new friends, new jobs, new great grandchildren that kept her going for ninety years. It was only in the past two years that she stopped moving and accepted she could not accomplish anything new. I feel that was her real death.
Grief manifests itself in as many different ways as there are people. Some search outside themselves to find comfort, acceptance of a world that has fundamentally changed for them by the loss of a person or a possibility. They need to replace that absence. Others seek companionship, hoping a strengthened relationship or time spent with others will fill the hole where their love used to be. Grief can destroy relationships, projects, jobs, a person. Grief can be inspiration to those stuck inside themselves in a world too isolated. It can be a quiet acceptance or an outraged roar. Grief is a private war against perhaps the most public and universally experienced emotions of sorrow.
My grief is blank, it is the lack of emotion, it is the lack of acknowledging the beauty in the morning, the attraction to my boyfriend, the variety in the public commuters beside me. I see only dull colors, only the pain in the forward steps that I have spent most my life coping with, I lack the energy to smile or the will to try, My grief is the prospect of tears. Never more than this.
I took the metro home today, as I do every day, and noticed how we learn to move with the car careening under our feet. We stand up to make way for our seat-mate so they may stand themselves, we shift our weight to hold on and remain upright, we stand sideways so more of us can fit in. We make sacrifices for this convenience, we relinquish the security of solid ground for a piece of carpeted earthquake, sometimes risking greater safety, so we may reap the benefits of public transportation. In a world of private sound controlled air conditioned automobiles we step into a dirty, hot, loud and smelly system. And this is how it should be. In order to exercise the full benefits of love and stories of love past and great adventure and small hugs, we have to step onto the car and know that we will probably lose our balance when the train stops and we may bump into a few people while doing so.
My grief is a forgotten subway ride, a half hour lost to the futility of movement-without-consideration to the wonder of efficiency or participants. I will mostly keep my balance, and certainly inconvenience nobody for I myself will be forgotten too. The plain low-faced girl that sits with her pad and pen, and never looks up, who has memorized the risks of tuning out to the station calls, who has decided that today this ride does not exist.
----
time may sit as a spider
on our should, who whispers
words of how things are in our ear,
proposing we turn away from
the fly on the other wide
who only buzzes about how
the world is not.
