Today is Day 23 without you and the whole country is freezing. I know they aren’t related events, I know they can’t be, but maybe if I suffer and mourn enough, all the souls in every corner will feel the cold, too. Maybe I can share this white sense of feeling with the world.
I don’t want February to arrive. It feels indecent for time to move on and for the minutes and days to not abide the loss. How has the world not stopped? Everything must just stop. Everything must just freeze into that subzero embargo where the news came, “he passed away 10 mins ago.” The alternative is for Father Time to line up his minutes, and for these minutes to march on and on without anything happening, until they simply fall off the world’s cliff and are no longer here.
(What does it mean to get through a day without crying? Is this what forgetting feels like?)
Forty-four years of memories are now only embodied in me. I am the lone vessel, I carry our story on my own and it feels bigger than what one person can manage.
Can I whisper my memories into a balloon and send it to you? Can I drop them into a hole where your ashes lay and let them mingle and grow a seed into a monument? What can I do? I can freeze time, and I can freeze too…but what else? What else is there?
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mary june brown 