CINDERBLOCK GARDEN | POETRY

the pain of loss

When you lose someone, especially someone you love dearly, you lose a piece of yourself along with them.

When they're taken from you, it feels like an unforgiving fist has punched through your rib cage and snatched up one of the shattered bone fragments to keep for itself. It feels like, in all the chaos of trying to stay standing despite the crippling pain pulsing under your skin, you've forgotten that when your chest collapsed, it pierced the soft tissue of your lungs. And all your injuries are internal, so no one notices that agony is eating you alive. But their oblivion doesn't make the fact that you can barely breathe any less bearable.

You can hardly find the strength every day to put one foot in front of the other, when each movement jostles your broken bones and tears your lungs open further. Maybe you think that all you need to be whole again is that small shard of your bone that was stolen when they died, but piece of your ribs disintegrated in the cold grasp of death. There is no way to get it back.

Suffering through all of this pain has clouded your mind, and it makes you blind to the truth. There is only one solution. What you need is not to regain what you lost, it is to change how the loss tore you apart.

Heartstrings can pull your ribs back into place. But how to fix the gaping hole in your lungs where the air you struggle to breath can never really stay? The truth is that there is no easy solution. There is nothing you can use to patch the leak. All you can do is force yourself to continue breathing. Know your body is strong. Once the jagged bone is removed, the tissue will heal on it's own, leaving only a scar where the chasm used to be.

And some days the scar will burn, because you never really lose the pain that came with the loss, you simply learned that you were strong enough to live with it.