On sadness and grief

Isolation is a crevice in my head, where my thoughts like to dwell and dawdle when grief seeps. Grief seeps, it doesn’t pour. It does not pour like the rain- heavy and dark, then clear and clean when the sun moves out. It seeps slow, smooth and soft.

It fills in like the kind of voices in songs that one puts on repeat and forgets about; the voices which become like the sound of your heart and spread through your blood and mind. The sound of your heart breaking, whispering its own little stories.

There is something in a voice like that. A gentle depth, a pierce deeper than the skin. A sight better seen when blurred. A slight bend from everyday.

When you close your eyes, you find yourself in an old dusty room. It has velvet cushions, rouge carpets, tinted windows and a stillness of stopped time, of melancholy. If grief were this room, it wouldn’t have a door. No escapes, no exit from a space of aching beauty.

And a song would play in the walls. In the voice, the same voice that felt like the broken humming of your heart. Like water it would seep- slow and smooth and soft.

A melodious trickle that intends to drown you.

Feet first-gentle embraces. All corners, then, well acquainted with its drugging feel. Through your clothes, right into your skin. So slow, so unnoticeable that you don’t realize when it becomes one of your tears. You don’t understand why the tears are how they are. Don’t understand why the room feels like a part of you, and why as it fills you get emptied.

The water is in your eyes, from your eyes, and the song is a distant melody, the words of which are now slurred into oblivion. Your body floats, cradled and loved, until the moment when you are the water, the room, the voice, the being of grief.

In the undifferentiated drifting nothingness, there is only one realization. It makes you realize acceptance.

There is no escape to the isolated grief. It must be accepted that I cannot be undone from myself. There is a reason to the noise and the nothing of sadness. Sadness is unlike being unhappy. Unhappiness is a state which makes me feel the lack of happiness, but sadness is a constant. It is not detachable from my existence.

I will be sad, and not because I’ve had a bad day or a too many problems to surmount. I will be sad because that is where my heart dwells when I’ve lived too much at once. Sadness is something I become, and then hide in the crevice of isolation in my head.

There, I’m somehow comforted with the fact of being unknown and misunderstood. With the memory of being alone and dying. The cold beating of pulse in my throat, reminding me of every moment I’ve spent in putting pieces together.

Living sane with the grief comes with the acceptance that sadness must be let pass through. Acceptance that my heart will break for no reasons- no new reasons. The old pain has found a home in me, and it shall call my name when it wishes. It won’t give regard to the events in my day, or the plans I make.

It will engulf me and impair me and then put me to sleep. Sleep will soothe my burning eyes and broken spirit; by the day I shall be well again.

Sadness cannot be escaped or explained. It cannot be helped. But that doesn’t make it hurtful- it is a journey of acceptance.

Acceptance that sadness will return in ebbs and waves, and leave thus.

Acceptance that sometimes people break. And they might not get fixed again.

Acceptance that, that is okay.

It’s alright to be sad. It’s okay to be broken.

Woman With Cat, H James Hoff