the happy cactus

Grief is a heavy weighted blanket, swathed around your shoulders, impeding your movements and tangling your thoughts.

It is a dense fog shrouding your vision with variegated shades grey, turning the simple mundane tasks into mindless distant shadowed memories. It flavours your soul with a residue of hollowness, dispelling all breath leaving you inhaling loss and sadness flavoured with a damp rich moss.

The deep resonating emptiness encompasses each thought, each movement, each waking moment, inconceivably suffocating you with a dark filmy skin of insipid melancholy that perpetually coats your body in uncomfortableness.

Beneath each breath, idles a desolate longing for what was, not for what is now; always yearning, always grasping for a way to regain a time before darkness descended and perched within your heart. It is muted thickness that puts down root tendrils  around your arteries and pumps anxiety driven dread with each beat of your wearied heart.

Grief is a bitterly cold rising tide, deliberately creeping up your soul and gradually drowning you from the inside out, silently smothering and enveloping all senses and rendering you enmeshed in the dark recesses of your mind. The thick stillness is becomes deafeningly loud, forever replaying memories through smell, sight, touch and sounds, torturing your entire being effortlessly and ruthlessly.

Grief is non-linear nor does it make reservations for a set time; rather it bides its’ time, openly lurking behind a conversation, a fleeting thought, a brief look; unwearyingly waiting to take shape and mutter small reminders you of what you have lost.

Grief is a torrent of emotions, rampaging and assaulting you with wide empty spaces void of warmth or hope. A ghost of a house left with a simmering essence left to wander the empty chambers of your heart, unable to take root.

Grief is a deep crevasse oppressed with gentle fading memories and the spaces and places where the once concrete presence took up so much of my universe now merely leaves a black void engulfing each breath thus rendering me caught in motion.

Grief is a dear old friend; patient and gentle, calmly coercing and encouraging me to reason with the difficult decision, and be at peace with it.

Grief has been a welcomed warm guest, endlessly following me like my shadow, always holding my heart, quietly healing.

Grief is as inevitable and as it is inescapable.

Grief is tender as it appeases your entire existence whilst rhythmically murmuring through the rudiments of dark despair.

Grief is no stranger but a dear companion who will eventually diminish over time.

Until then, I will keep a seat for her at my table.