Making Space
I suffer through an indulgent cry on the floor of my home office. No lights on, everything is blue and gray. A relentless winter storm barricades me in. My body has been begging for this, I think.
Nothing particular set the emotions in motion today; I just woke up a little closer to the longing. The grief is a familiar passenger in my life now, and I know how to keep a tight grasp on its reins. But on days like this, I am sensitive and fragile, like a withering sunflower. Everything I touch touches me deeper. It’s like my heart has sprouted a pair of antennae, scanning the world for anything remotely painful. Anything that feels like what I used to have.
Maybe it was the simple Tom Petty chord progression I fumbled through on the piano this morning. Maybe it was the regal pear tree in the backyard, or the eerie rhythm of the winter wind.
Today the Aching reminds me of the darker days, the ones I spend unravelling on bathroom floors and bedroom carpets. This time it escapes me like an animal, the kind that hibernates inside you when your life is going well. Suddenly the glittering snowflakes seem so menacing, and the bluish air more melancholy than I remember this time of year.
I sit with the Aching, like an old friend. Sitting together feels better than carrying her in the pit of my stomach or the lump in my throat. She finally has some room to breathe.
And for a while, like that, we sit.
The wind whispers lullabies against my windows. The vents hum a soothing, steady static I was never still enough to hear. My own breath even has a comforting cadence, air flowing through my lungs with the rest of this unforgiving, gentle world.
Eventually I stand up, dust off the rubble, ready to tend to my soul like a garden resurfacing after her first rainfall of the year. There is no protocol for this, so I decide to make one. I’ll draw a bath as hot as the water will go. Change out of the pajamas I’ve been wearing for the past two days. I’ll make something salty and something sweet, and soak in epsom salts while listening to hauntingly beautiful songs. I’ll light a candle and fill the yellow tea kettle my mom gave me some Christmases ago.
This journey from the floor to the flow of life still is never easy. My whole life feels like a learning curve, and I don’t practice this part enough anymore. It’s been awhile since I did any sort of emotional checkup on my heart or let myself cry into my kneecaps. These days the deep, raw, ugly claws of my grief hardly permeate the surface. They reside so deep down that I can hardly feel it. The place they used to live feels hollow now instead - until they reach up and scratch a piece of my ribcage. Then I cry, which makes me remember. And that’s when I start to write.
For six years now, I’ve been trying to understand what it means to “make space” for my grief. The phrase has always sounded like an abstract catchphrase to me. How can you make room for pain when you can’t even see it or the confines to which it lives?
The only real way I know how to “make space” is with words. To me they are the magical bricks of language, the bedrock where we can lay our weary souls. I hardly understand anything I’m feeling until I write it down. But I’m learning a new way to make space: sitting, being, noticing. I notice more things when I get to be still. I find more space when words aren’t filling up the air.
February is coming to an end now, like the haunting relief you feel upon waking from a nightmare: your body adapts to the fabric of reality, your mind still a few breaths behind. You linger in bed, no longer in the dream, yet not surrendering to the wheels of time. Life only moves forward with your eyes open. But underneath my eyelids, the cyclical dream returns. It goes like this:
I am always in my childhood home, pacing around the silhouette of my father. He leans against the wall in the dining room with his arms crossed, facial features dancing in and out of focus. The enigma of his death becomes a loud, internal chaos. We have already had the funeral. The obituary has been published. My books have been written. And yet he is standing before me, a concept even my uninhibited subconscious mind cannot compute. How can this be. The fibers of this subliminal realm are coming undone.
From there, the dream takes different routes. Sometimes there is a conversation I can’t remember. Most of the time I can’t remember anything but the feeling. I wake up clammy and disoriented. The dream melts away as if it never came, leaving its mark on the tip of my tongue. How can this be.
I still am not sure which consciousness I prefer. Both are bewildering. Neither is exactly comforting. But I’m at the crossroads, frozen like a shocked pedestrian on a busy street. I don’t have a choice between now and March 9th. Time moves that way, regardless of my consciousness. I’m dragging my feet, lingering under the covers, wondering how to exist in this space between. How to make space when you know it makes you cry.
I am okay, as long as I have a place to sit and a longing to keep writing. Another season passes thorough me, a winter more mild than the last. My composure is stronger, and the pain cuts deeper every year. I notice only when I’m still. But today, the backyard echoes with friendly crows and curious squirrels and a breeze much kinder. February has never been this kind to me. I will relish every second of this burning world, and sit with the Aching until each difficult season is born into the next. I always remember the harsh shift from one month to the next, but I forget about the softness - the melting, the changing, the growth parts of spring. I have done this before, and I can do this again.
