Grief is not a thing that can be held out at arm’s length, a box, detached and inert, upon which we gaze and ponder, unmoved.
Grief is a hideous monster, a gremlin, an ogre, an alien with bugged-out eyes and a snarly smirk, reeking of death-eater poison and rot, attached to our skin, our minds and our souls.
It lives and breathes, a parasite glomming off the spirit, dimming the light, sucking up bits of joy left inside.
Like melted drips and smears of ice cream at the bottom of the carton.
Grief lives inside us, an otherworldly resident of a haunted house, hiding and transforming and poking at our shakiest points, trying to bring the battered mess down to the ground.
Rooted in my spine with tendrils stretching through my network of nerves, skipping and dancing and radiating waves of ever-sharper pain along the pathways, teasing my mind, tricking my brain, gaslighting me into a false reality.
But now I have found you
I know who you are
I know where you live
and what you do and why and how
I am fearless.
You will not win.
3 thoughts on “The Gremlin of Grief”
Intense. Don’t think I’ve ever known anything like that. Hope I don’t too.
I meet with my grief and wrestle with it and laugh at it and surrender to it. Then I thank it for reminding me. It shows it’s face when I’ve lost someone, something, some hope. I learned long ago that nothing is lost. It’s physical presence has only moved. To another room, to another town, to another realm. Just like it has always done. I carry it as part of me. It can’t be lost.
Captures the darkness. How it seeps into your very being. How it can be a parasite if you let it. I am choosing not to let it anymore – I fight it every day. Beautiful Chris.