closure
How is it, that after all these years, it takes an email to unravel multiple griefs that should've dissipated? Why does the 'end' of old things still linger?
I rearrange hurt, anger and experience like spice racks, so carefully, like I am vested in the act of finding fulfilment again.
When I asked my heart for closure, it started resembling the back of an old building with equidistant windows displaying the multitudes of lives on different floors. Nothing felt like resolution, nothing looked like a finishing line. Windows to me have a pleasing binary: they are either open or they are closed. I suppose closure is more like everything inside the windows that you only get to glance at- the mess of emotions in the corner of a room or nostalgia from a time when vinyl played on while blueotooth phones were kept aside. Looking from the outside in, is like letting memory reopen the hurt; realizing that there is no one window capable of holding this, the whole building and the street around the corner are holding songs of you two, refusing to draw a neat line you can cross over into closure.
I try to extract love out of me like lemon juice, but so much of it is riddled with the rest of me. We learned to cook Thai green curry together, and I still know how to cook it. We made friends with a kind waiter who still knows our favourite Calamari. We learned to make Calamari together, and I still know when to caution myself with salt.
To seek closure meant to return to the person I was before, but that person does not exist, no matter how deep the needle pierces. The streets have expanded beyond the horizon, beckoning me to walk, even the parts where his presence lingers. But already, I have learned to hold my heart again and whisper/ into it and once more / listen / a little better / to the songs it sings.
xx,
Srish
I had warm pumpernickel bread, cheese and chicken.
It is sunny outside. I miss you. My head is tired.
John was nice this morning. Already what I remember
most is the happiness of seeing you. Having tea.
Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake
in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice.
I’ll try to tell you better when I am stronger.
—The Defeated,
Linda Gregg
And when spring arrived I took a class to learn something I had never before learned and a thing I thought I might love
How did we make it through this winter after the year we had and while knowing what awaited us in the new one?
How amazing we who have stayed are how beautiful and heavy and vulnerable we who couldn’t were oh
—Perseus’ Spoon,
Anis Mojgan
I want to call you thine
to tattoo mercy
along my knuckles. I assassin
down the avenue
I hope
to have you forgotten
by noon. To know you
by your knees
palsied by prayer.
Loneliness is a science—
consider the taxidermist's
tender hands
trying to keep from losing
skin, the bobcat grin
of the living.
—I am Trying to Break Your Heart,
Kevin Young
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