Sometimes the road seems paved, but you still slip through. You leave a crack in the flooring and think, I’ll get to it, but then you don’t, and then time flaps its gargoyled wings and the crack becomes a pothole, and you fall in.

Today, I fell in.

I sobbed in my bathroom for awhile, watching my face contort into something truly mythical. The way grief morphs a face is surrealistic perfection, because what is grief but an existential crisis of some sort, and how do you hold your face in place when the very idea of existence is toppling?

What was interesting about today is that I climbed out.

It’s easy to say here that I did it without any help and that is what made it feel exceptional. I didn’t interrupt Donny at work, though I wanted to. I didn’t emergency text my therapist, though she might say I should have. I didn’t walk out of the room and sit with my roommate. I didn’t even run immediately to this blank page to think it through.

No, I took a long look at my melting face, and wiped the surrealism off it. I dusted off, and filled that pothole. As I faced it, I felt like I could see past the painted spirals and swirls, and melted imagery. I was looking at the reality, or the reality as I knew it.

I loved a man and lost him, and it hurt so much, that sometimes I take time and smear it around in senseless circles. Time, in turn, hugs me close, and though it is a kind-hearted thing, it is also an easy embrace to get stuck in.

It’s easy to say I got up without any help, but the truth is, some time flies and some time sticks in place, and all the help I’ve received from people through the years is the latter. It’s a ladder.

And one step at a time, I can climb out of some types of grief.

I wish I could make this poetic, or even universally helpful, but instead it is just this. A tiny journal that says:

Today I tended to something that grief kept out of reach, which means today, I used all the love that came before and after to move grief to the side just long enough to remember that it was once just love, too. Not terrifying at all.

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The thing I did was fixing up Dave’s blog so that it exists again and showcases him. I have been avoiding it for quite awhile now. https://graysonqueen.wordpress.com/a-note-from-rara/