On grief

I am in the process of mourning. Perhaps that is all this life is really about. I am learning to take leave of something I am still yearning to find words for, and it is heartwrenching in an utterly new, always ancient, way. I am in the desert, trying to find a way out, or at least through. I am at the ocean, begging for it to split in two. I am splitting in two.

I am mourning for all the time we waste and all the ways we tell ourselves we are not good enough. That doing more will somehow make us more. I am laying white lilies on all the questions we did not know to ask, and would never be given the answers to. I wear black for my father and all that he has in his heart. I ask for nothing like forgiveness, not from them, and not for this.

Because there is no one to offer me a pardon, and because I am angry as well as sore. Because I do not know how many years I would have to travel before I could find someone to lay this hurt in front of that would not meet mine with their own. Because people have written books and yet, there are still broken homes the world over. I do not ask for, and I do not give, anything approximating absolution. If this mourning is only a ritual, at least it is my own.

Lambs and lions and fiery wars and all that we are in service of something we cannot name. We read and speak and never say anything real. It hardly matters. I do not know where love may have saved us, but I believe it almost did. We almost were enough and in the trying perhaps we find something better than truth. I try to believe in the girl with flames for hair as she says this, but she is wrong. It is all wrong, because none of it is for us. Derrida does not care for us, and the theories do not suffice, not for the binaries we self-impose and flagellate ourselves and set ourselves on fire for.

There is no way to leave this and not end the world. We do not believe in ambiguities.

I am dramatic and I use turns of phrase more metaphorical than real. The world is really only smoke and dust anyway, and maybe the idea of smoking is more important than the tarred lungs we will die for. Perhaps it is a pleasure to burn.