We Run Green

I binged on grief in my dreams last night. Asleep, I watched videos of him that don’t exist — a Supergrass singalong he conducted on stage while he could still talk and sing. I saw myself looking tired — gray haired and lost among an ebullient crowd of his terminal illness well wishers.

I dreamed I sat in as a guest with his best friend in an interview for an anonymous admirer’s podcast. Numbed and silent. Dream me tirelessly edited montages for a funeral that didn’t happen — carefully showing the final product to the important people in my new life. Rewind…look…rewind again.

I found myself still speechless after all these years. Two years and two hundred. Gathering my thoughts will forever make me too late to speak aloud the most important things in life. I remain silent with nothing to say to anyone but the page in front of me.

I woke up stunned to find grief could still be this fresh, teeming around me like a parallel life waiting to break through the veil between then and now — between lost and forgotten, found and immortalized. Bound and tortured.

Stumbling into the bathroom, brushing my teeth in a daze like it was my first waking without him. Looking at the world around me with eyes peeking through that portal only birth or death can construct. Convinced that the benevolent world I live in is a confabulated dream and those glorious end days with a ghost are my permanent reality.

And this…this is how I deep discount any current happiness as fiction — the sabotage guised as the relentless drumbeat of grief. My careful mind will work tirelessly denying that life can be reliably peaceful and joyful and calm, preparing me instead for the ease of relentless sorrow, protecting me from all the good that can be — that can then be taken.