Marrow.

At some point it becomes clear, after centuries of fog, that this is your life.

You aren’t stumbling around anymore, asking with your wide eyes, “what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what in the fuck”. You never did get your answer–You wouldn’t hear them anyway, from underwater.

You look down and notice your hands, how your fingers bend here and there are new lines on your face that do not leave when you give your best smile. This is your life.

There is a hollowness in your cheeks where once you were fat with joy, fat with a life you loved, even if you didn’t always love your fat cheeks. No matter the day count, you cannot find your way back to fullness.

Yet you are so heavy. Heavy with the weight of grief, heavy with the weight of carrying around wishes, the same wish, repeated again and again and again, stacking up like a greedy bankers coins, defying gravity, floor to ceiling, stacks of your wishes in piles all around you.

This is your life. His absence has become his presence. You straddle the same fence. A constant yearning and memory for something that does not exist any longer to your left, a total understanding, acceptance and adaptation on your right. Both equally at all times. Your angels. Your demons.

This is your life. You feel feisty for it, you feel on fire with it. And, also, when you take ill, you muse that death is welcome here, “jus sayin”. You fear more loss to the point of guarded detachment from anyone else whose death could unravel you AND you ache to connect to feel– to be capable of feeling the way you felt with-for-about, only one. Not because it’s possible but because you miss it. You miss him. You miss everyone. You miss life. You are totally half assing it. And you know it. You want more but when it gets too close you are like a baby who has learned that stoves are not.

This is your life. You weep when the sun rises elegantly over a field full of dew and deer. You weep for the long nights ahead of the new mothers who have joined your ranks and know the definition of keening by heart. You weep when you see a sweet old man fix his wife’s coat collar, or pull out a chair for her, with the ease and efficiency of decades of repetition, a habit predicated by love. Your heart swells from the love and beauty and pain and fear you feel all around you, like tv lights shining out neighborhood windows on a winters walk, blue hue on snow, you look down not wanting to see, you look up and in like you are staring at the sun like you are willing to go blind just to witness it all, every last sip of it, for as long as you are given this, your life.

“Everything that was broken has forgotten its brokenness. I live now in a sky house, through every window the sun. Also your presence. Out touching, our stories. Earthy and holy both. How can this be, but it is. Everyday has something in it whose name is forever.”

—Mary Oliver