Hungry graves and mad grief, a thousand welcome insanities

Even before I knew I was leaving, I would know I was leaving. I had already begun to close off, I just hadn't realized it in reality or consciously. Example: by New Years' 2021, it was so clear I was going to leave my post. I knew it somatically and yet intellectually I fought it, in much the same way I fought fr  I fought the tide for another few weeks but when the inevitable happened, the relief that washed over me was beyond intense. 

This is actually something that has been true many times in my life. My dear friend S pointed it out to me in 2001, when I was preparing to leave Prague. I didn't want to go back to the US, but I did miss aspects of my life there. But I did what I had learned to do: retreat into my shell. Not even into myself, but into my shell. 

I was thinking about a storm one night on Long Island. I was visiting a boy who was my best friend of a fashion except there was weird attraction. And he had very certain, very odd ideas, about Jews, about me, about himself...so strange. But he knew things that I didn't and he seemed refined in a way I thought I needed to be. It was not meant to be, we did not even kiss on the New Years, we rang in together and later, I broke a piece of his heart when I literally fell into a young man on the Boston to Albany Express.  It was like falling into wildfire. Kinetic. And it electrifies the harridan in me, brings her close to the surface to gather the dead closer. But whose dead? And who is dead? 

I finished _You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty_ and put in on the bookshelf with a sense of rightness. There is so much hard truth in the layers of romantic prose, which to my mind is a testament to a quality piece of romantic fiction. The layers of sugar and spice are made infinitely more deliciously grating and soothing by these harsh truths, like: 

• 'Feyi picked up her fork and started thinking about what she could make for this woman who had a dead little girl seeding madness in the hollow of her heart.' 
• 'It was too private, unless you were Feyi, and alive, in which case you displayed it to strangers because something inside of you never stopped screaming.'
• 'She couldn't remember the last time someone had been content to just kiss her desperately then lie in bed breathing each other's air.' 
• 'What was the point in learning to scale down, how to make things in single portions? What was the point in cooking in bulk and and freezing Tupperware as if you believed in a future consistent enough to plan meals for?' 

Finishing that book, I felt calmer and ready to walk forward. I wasn't alone in the wind tunnel of exasperated grief and frustration, as I occasionally feel when I fall down a rabbit hole that doesn't feel like it leads to the safety of my well. My well may also be my shell, since I carry it with me. Traditionally, I have felt it a place off deep shame and sadness but more and more, I am embracing it as a quiet space to heal and gain strength away from the light which can be unforgiving. 

But I have also slid down a chasm, as I was climbing out of the well and at this moment - for suspended successions of moments - I feel as though I am suspsended and twisting in the air and that no ground will be able to handle the weight of my fall.