Sick

My body makes its own memorials. When I am ravaged by a sadness I can not solve, eventually I go to the calendar where I find a fact to back up the ache.

Two years after the second baby I will never have left me–taking me with her right out of my marriage, I become deeply infected with the grief I had thought excavated by now. Down to the roots of my teeth, through the rattle of my shallow lungs it travels me.

You should be over it by now they would say if I’d let them. But I know better than to confess the truth of this illness. I will not be wronged or shamed for circling this sadness as many times as is necessary until I am released from its orbit.

I am wrung out: a wet sheet on a wet day that will not resolve. The bed becomes the ultimate in hopelessness: horizontal and going nowhere, as I am. We are twins of oblivion. My muddled and feverish brain makes a snow globe of the facts then shakes and shakes and shakes, as if somehow things might settle differently this time.

It is too hard to be alive, I would say if anyone was listening. But I am alone, everyone I know ossified in their own homes. So I eat food I can not taste then take the medicine that shows no evidence of working and give my body back to its catastrophe of holding onto falling snow inside the invention of what could have been.

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