Black Pearl

My father died in April.

It’s been four months and I am still trying to get my  head around the fact that he isn’t here.  I am trying to adjust to this new normal.

I wake up in the morning, mother my children, go to work and trudge through the paces of my days. I am there but I am not present.

I am looking through a window and there are people talking but I can’t hear and I don’t care what they are saying.

I watch, feeling separate from what goes around me.

I am unhappy. I think too much. I drink too much.

I am lonely but am comforted by my solitude.

Melancholy hangs in the corners of my days and my mind toys with the idea of letting go of the thread that binds me to this reality.

The six year old girl in me wants to hide, cry and pull at her hair in sorrow, grabbing at the crumbling pieces of the myth that was her father.

There are emotions that are bubbling beneath the surface but I don’t know how to communicate in this language of loss, and so I am mute.

Frustrated by my inability to communicate and unable to let off the steam, the heat of my grief is burning through me.

I want to bleed it out, scream it out, but when I tear back the surface all I find is nothing. There is nothing to say.

I light  candles at my alter, burn incense and raise my intentions to the sky but I feel nothing. I am obsessed with death and I try to grab at the spaces between the moments spent with the ones that I love the most.

I dream of my father.

Sometimes he stands at the edges, watching me, like a silent witness.

Once we wandered through an old shopping mall, visiting memories that were for sale like cheap knick knacks in dollar stores filthy with age.

One night he came to me scared and wandering through oblivion, confused, unable to rest and stuck in between the living and the dead.

I try not to call to him. I hold his memory in white light and whisper prayers that he can move on.

In my optimistic moments I wonder if he is visiting me, letting me know that he is still there, like a small anchor to hold onto.

In my most fearful moments, I am afraid that he is lost, his soul still burdened by the illness that plagued his life and he still needs me. He needs me and I am paralyzed by my inability to reach across the chasm that separates us.

This is the  black pearl that is my grief,  wrought from the chafing of the splinters in my soul.  I am just now able to pull it out and observe it, vulnerable with my need for comfort.