After Crying

After Crying

Dear Ian,

After crying

I sleep hard

And on awakening I lie in a warm spot

Very still.

I don't move,

Dug in deep,

Hesitant to accept that time is still running along.

In a crib of suspended animation.

My eyes move only, and note what is the measure of darkness around me....1 am? 4 am? The quiet inhale of 5 am?  That oddest of hours just before the stirring of morning world. I lay still and wish this could be my final place of being,

Wish I could stay and stay and stay.

After crying

Mornings come with a slower gait;

Raw senses,

More effort to be quiet

Because noises hurt.

I find that I am still in some sort of delta state, moving very slowly 

Making tea or feeding the birds. Eyes fuzzy raw from swelling

My body moves to the least small measure so as to confirm acceptance of another day here,

Alone again.

I am without you.

I have poured this out again like poison from a cup.

I am emptied. It is not a tiredness so much as surrender; not defeat so much as a retreat.

I have taken a slow and deliberate plunge; a going down below the water line, down into the other world.

After crying

I observe with silence.

And secrecy

I can hear and see and sense what goes on above

Within a blessed veil of hiding. 

All sensation and perception are muted and warped and warbled. I float not apart exactly, but beneath the rest of the world in a cool and dark and different state. The dreaminess of sleep still a cloak.

Light is changed.

I drift slowly sipping my tea;

In the quiet..

No TV

No people 

None of the prattle that betrays the comings and goings of the normal world.

Safe and apart. 

My swollen eyes and blunted movements might work better down here...beneath all other things. I am altered, morphed, remade into a being that seems amphibious or mercurial, a temporary but delicious place.

I cast my gaze up through the backward light

and watch

and breath

and wait for a while.

A place where on one will even come for a while or notice or interrupt my will to be apart. 

Where I find again my Holy Stance;

My worship posture.

This body crying her

Remembrance of not having you anymore.

The most deep and sad truth 

And thus being alone in knowing it,

Willing to sit with this knowing.

After crying, my body wants to be invisible and my heart rues the coming of day. But come it always does. It is the closest I ever come to making peace with death, until I have to once again shoot to the surface for air.

Love,

Momma