How to Avoid Grief (A Guide That Fails)
A lease agreement signed in silence
Start by removing their name from your mouth, carefully.
Replace it with appropriate weather. Say aloud, “It’s colder lately.”
*
Clear the house of objects that still remember them.
Start with the obvious ones. Work your way toward the ones that have mysteriously gone invisible.
*
Move the furniture.
Convince the room it has always looked this way.
*
Change your ringtone.
Let the silence fill the room with its ringing instead.
*
Sleep diagonally across the bed.
Reclaim all the territory where their body once softened the sheets.
*
When memory approaches, distract it with bones.
Count the cracks in the ceiling. Rearrange the silver spoons. Memorize all the exits in reverse.
*
If tears rise, swallow them whole like medicine.
Remind yourself of all the ways the body confuses water for loss.
*
When someone asks how you are, answer in measurements and increments.
Then say, “Functioning.” Say, “Improving.”
*
Finally, bury all the photographs in a box labeled Winter Clothes.
Slide it to the back of the closet. (No, further.)
*
Wait.
Listen for the faint knocking.
*
First, it will come from the walls.
Then from your own ribs.
*
Open nothing.
Grief does not require a door. It owns the address, you see.
About the Creator
Shannon Hilson
Pro copywriter chasing wonder, weirdness, and the stories that won’t leave me alone. Fiction, poetry, and reflections live here.
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By Moon Desert6 days ago in Fiction
Comments (1)
I like the sort of displacement you use, as if grief is another life. It feels odd and empty and distant while being right there. You did a nice job with this poem.