this door will never close

post-closure, pre-moving-on

there is only a god after death, and sometimes he confuses mercy with purgatory.

this time, i’ve grieved something so hard that it came back to life. i don’t know if it was for my grace or for my sins, but i’ve forced breath into the asphyxiated.

like everybody else, i fell in love at seventeen. and that, in itself, was its own kind of hell. there was suffering acting as bones in his hands and as vowels in his mouth.

i had survived the ending, i buried it well.

what i wasn’t prepared for was the return. not of him but of his words. of a normalcy that implies continuity, even when you know better.

it was months of sparks. it was sentences that worked as footsteps. it was moving across a floor that i thought i had left. it was reshaping the room that i had built around absence.

ease is not simple to run from. you must throw your body into uncertainty, and maybe i’m not yet old enough for that. maybe it’s better to run towards the comforts of something that might kill you.

there will never be enough room for this body. dead or alive, it takes up space that i desperately need. and yet, i’m willing to push on its ribs so that i have something to hold on to.

when the paragraphs reeked of familiarity, when i could hear his heartbeat in the punctuation. when the time lost its weight and when the anger lost its scars.

that was when i understood that, even braindead, this thing has a pulse.

the machine hums whether or not i’m watching. it will hum until someone calls it quits. when i’m old and broken, married and quiet, i’ll visit the room to poke at the flesh. rotting, bloodied, misshapen. nobody tended to it when i stopped paying attention.

i will grieve it the same way that i did at 17, i will clutch it the way i am now.

not because it deserves it, and not because it’s alive. only because it’s there.