From Jester To King LVI

You can almost see it happening. They die, she dies, they start not calling and the aloneness, the sense of being apart coming home to roost. The grief a dormant animal. The grief set on fire. And all the things in the sunlight slowly departing. Everything falling off and down. Diminishing slowly, ebbing away. All the people so far gone. How you hardly even remember your father and like there’s no point straining for something stuck in the hedgerow. This or that thing, to concoct from the mulch, the pondweed, the thing is blank gone absent and dead. You as breathing sentient animal. Crucible of lovingkindness. All the grief reengaged. In fifteen years time you shall be exactly thus as you are feeling in this very moment. Exactly thus as person, the same, identical, and just a few more figures gone by wayside. Those at some point be next moment gone, friends of old friends, people you rubbed shoulders with, like leaning off a hunk of meat. And there you are wanting to crease one happening into the eternal, and it is not even the touch of the person that assuages, since the grief is a thing quite distinct from the object. So that you just carry it around without letting it resolve. Nothing can touch it. But it brings with the peace. The peace of nothings of being no other way. The peace of resignation of sleep of softness, of a shock whose existence you neglected to recall. Stung by a paralysis. And the tears weigh on the eye wells, sitting heavy on aging wood. As if no other feeling. The iron peace of grief. A drawn wan clarity casting all other feelings as buffoonery – laughter, stress, anxiety, fear -- like you’ve been playing the child for all this time, all of those feelings so bloody childish, so that as you sit in his mother’s service, back straight, engaged and for the first time in ages, you see that the only mode that holds is this grief, and it sinks in deep and there is nothing but now. And it just so happens there’s not a breath of wind, not a bird, the day burning itself out, silence, and all the worry removed like an anchor hitting the bottom of the pool. And there is no one but you looking outward to feel this, locking it in until it’s gone.