#SOL17: Rue-the-Blue-Days

Is There a Moon Out Tonight? (M.A. Reilly, January 2017)

I.

Inconsolable.

Last night I heard someone use that word and I thought, almost. Almost, exactly.

Almost.

After Rob's death, in the months that passed, I walked and walked and walked some more. I walked out beyond what was comfortable where time thinned and forests fell apart. I walked until being a widow was forgotten.


II.

One could say I am inconsolable. Not all of me. But in that slight, deep space where light is unable to penetrate. There, it simply hurts.


III.

Comfort is a cool tea.
Too weak to be a balm.
Too pagan to know dispensation from grief.


IV.

On this snowy Tuesday, I've brewed some cardamon tea in my mother's blue teapot, and listened, just once, to the last message Rob left that remains on my phone. 13 seconds.

This morning, I can hear the hoarseness, the raspy, partial sound of his voice.
Oxygen-starved.

He would die less than four weeks later.
Even now, a year later, rereading these words has me feeling disoriented as if I was dropping too fast. Free falling into the present with my ears popping, my stomach rolling and then gripping and beneath all of this is the brutal recognition of what it means when I say, Rob is dead. 

After his death, I did not realize all that had been lost.
How could I?


V.

Grief is more thief than not.
More cheat, than trickster.
It stabs unexpectedly and leaves behind inconsolable sadness.

Some days I wear my father's thread-thin red cardigan. I wear it on these rue-the-blue-days.


VI.

I know little and I know this.
Far longer than the new calendar hanging in the kitchen has days, I will grieve.