My memories are shrapnel and bloody bits of flesh and jagged pieces of time.
Dirty smoky air, which I breath. Pieces of parts of things. Of people. Blood, streaming onto and into the sharp, steaming shrapnel. I see familiar images –memories deteriorating on the ground.
I am my own world. My spinning world of love and grief and memories. My world of my words. My world of my worlds. My ether, with floating, evolving, melting snowflakes.
At first, it’s a party. People come over. They bring food and flowers and booze. They clean. They cook. How are you? They ask, because they truthfully want to know. They bring books and ask you to go on walks. They plan the memorial. They stay by your side on that day of celebration. Like a birthday party, a memorial celebrates a life.
The memorial is the last phase of people gifting you their time. They must get back to their lives. They must get back to the people in their lives. Friends visit only on weekends. The phone rings less. The walks get shorter and scarcer. The carefully wrapped casseroles stop appearing in the kitchen. The flowers start to wilt, dripping their leaves on the tabletop. Like snowflakes and people — flowers melt.
How are you doing? The soft voices that asked the caring questions start to evolve in tone, speed, intonation. And topics. Conversations evolve into the talk of life. The lives of the living.
But I can’t, I don’t, return to my life because my life isn’t there anymore. And never will be again. Guernica.
My friends go out for dinners and take day trips to lakes. They eat at home or at the home of friends. They return to their worlds. Silence now permeates what used to be our home. My house is now empty of noise because it is now missing my favorite sound. Now nothing seems right.
Now. For whom do I cook? Who do I cook with? How do I comfort others? How do I adjust to a new life without that person’s existence? In the beginning, there is disbelief and shock. The phone becomes a cold thing. It no longer brings me silly messages from the now dead person. I start feeling more emotions. These emotions slowly start to fade. This happens as I adjust to what’s missing from my life every fucking day.
Then — then things start seeming kinda normal. I notice that the world is continuing. I cry less. I lol. I listen to a podcast. I eat breakfast.
Life goes on and so do I.
I no longer have shock or disbelief to numb me. I no longer have the fresh, bloody cuts to bandage. All I have are what’s bleeding under my severed arteries and punctured organs and smokey images.
Memories. Trees and babies and so much beautiful food. Love. Hate. Sadness.
So many faded, deteriorating, decomposing images Last century’s photographs, drifting and joining and melting.
I know that I’ll remember all of the things again — and again. But my memories won’t be exactly the same. Our memories change, for the better, just a little bit every time we remember them. Our memories are protein.
I knit and I knit. A scarf for Darlene. Darlene will smile. I’ll feel her smile in the yarn coming alive in my hands. I’m
I’ve started knitting
My friends go out for dinners and take day trips to lakes and my friends eat at their homes. The homes of other people. They return to their worlds. My world is too fucking quiet. And that makes my brain a smokey battlefield of memories.
A.I. The narrator reflects on the aftermath of loss, from the first support of friends to the gradual return to normalcy. Memories become a haunting battleground, with fading images and changing emotions. Moving ahead is a process. It is marked by knitting a scarf for a friend. This act symbolizes the ongoing evolution of memories and life.