I can’t remember the simplest tasks.
I once put my phone in the fridge
and a block of cheese in my backpack.
Grief makes clowns of us..
forgetful magicians pulling trauma
out of thin air instead of rabbits.
Every sound is an ambush.
Microwave beeps feel like alarms,
car doors slam like arguments
I never got to finish.
The world hasn’t gotten louder,
I’ve just lost my padding.
Everything lands bare-skin.
I used to multitask like a superhero.
Now I forget what I was multitasking for.
My brain is a browser with
forty tabs open,
thirty-nine frozen,
and one screaming music I can’t turn off.
My memories are a jigsaw puzzle
dumped in the dark.
Her voice shows up in the wrong decade,
her smile in places she never stood.
I keep trying to sort them
like laundry,
but everything comes out grief-colored.
“What if” is my brain’s favorite hobby.
It builds impossible houses
on land that doesn’t exist.
I keep living in them anyway.
Time is suddenly fragile;
like glassware I shouldn’t be trusted to hold.
Every second feels rented,
like it might ask me for change I don’t have.
So I cling tighter.
So I drop it faster.
I haven’t figured out which mistake hurts less.
I shut down quicker now.
My brain knows where the breaker switch is.
But numbness isn’t silence..
it’s the understudy for tenderness,
waiting in the wings
for a role I’m still too clumsy to play.
I overthink mortality
like it’s a side hustle no one pays me for.
Sometimes I wonder if “purpose”
is just another word for gravity;
the thing that keeps us from floating off
when we’d rather not stay grounded.
And sleep
sleep treats me like a bad date.
Shows up late,
leaves early,
texts me “u up?” at 3 a.m.
while I’m counting ceiling cracks
like constellations of all the things I can’t fix.
Still..
grief didn’t only hollow me.
It sharpened me enough to notice beauty.
Friends who orbit closer now,
and I refuse to rename their galaxies.
The way trees throw shade like compliments,
and skies blush in colors
that make me forgive the day.
And love..
not the one I lost,
but love that sneaks in anyway.
Love that taps me on the shoulder
like, surprise, you’re still capable of this.
Proof that my heart;
messy, rewired,
glued together with its own cracks;
hasn’t stopped trying
to beat out a song.
And I am still, against all odds,
Alive enough to want it.