Crawling out of the shushes

I am wearing grief like it’s a tire which I climbed into and then accidentally started rolling down a hill while still inside and I can’t work out if it would be safer to bail out or to stay put and hope that wherever I end up won’t leave me too broken.

I think if grief was an article of clothing it would be a belt.

The kind which crests the top of the pants so that the buckle chafes at my midsection to the extent I’d almost rather risk the humiliation of depantsing myself in public than go one more minute with this constant
resetting
restructuring
realigning
trying to make this new sense of self fit with the old
even as it needs more and more space.

I was promised less!

I was told that grief takes up space but your jar gets larger
and the only thing getting larger is my midsection as I try to swallow the feeling it will never be okay again
in the hope that I can digest it
or at very least hide it
and go back to pretending everything is fine.

There is a strange lethargy to this,
this feeling that I’m not quite done with it,
as though I didn’t chew thoroughly
and now I’m choking on the burden of missing someone
of the frustration and anger I feel about that
When it’s really not their fault they’re gone.

I’m crawling out of the shushes,
where I’ve been hiding
unsucessfully, it would seem.
Needing to crawl free of the constant reminders I give myself
that I need to shut the fuck up already
like anyone wants to hear about my sad bullshit when there is plenty to go around already.

If grief was an emotion it would be grief.
It would be just what it is,
and there are no parameters for how that looks,
nor should there be,
because it might be the strangest and overwhelmingest state of being
we don’t really talk about.

If grief was a friend, it would be the one you’ve not thought about in ages
but then they pop into your head
and suddenly there are reminders everywhere which feel really intangible in some weird way
of things you used to do
and places you used to go
and what the hell happened to them anyhow,
I can’t find them on the social meds
and most people are somewhere
unless they’re not.

Did they die?
Should I feel guilty for not thinking of them more?
For not reaching out?
To be fair, they didn’t reach out either.
Am I so forgettable?
Is it weird that I simultaneously hope not and so?

Happy September.
I miss you.