from blyth 1

 Let us agree for now: or write about a breaking heart: or about a blessing

 

Let us agree for now that time does not heal all wounds. That time is a brute force, to be respected, but not venerated, and it does not treat all of us equally.

That there was a time in my life when my grief made sense to others, and seemed an appropriate reaction in that moment. That time has passed, but my grief has not.

That time keeps marching on is a threat, not a reassurance.

The trajectory of growth I built for myself coming out of a scarred childhood carries me still. I have managed not to stagnate. I did find my next home and my next job and scrape together a new existence out of the rotted remains of my old life.

So I live now in a new place with new people who have no idea what I have walked through, and therefore can’t hold it against me, but also can’t hold it with me. My whole body is still existing in the moment years ago when I first understood that I would lose everything. There is so little of me alive in the moment that everyone else calls “right now.”

Time looking backward is too dense to view clearly, the losses pile up and over one another and none can be separated from the rest. When I look forward, sometimes I feel fearless, because I have proved I can live through the worst things. But many times I feel nothing. I feel sure that the major plot lines of my life are all behind me.