ashes, ashes...

some of the worst days come when we are nostalgic about something we never really had: true love, certainty, time... our memories hold falsehoods and wishful thinking as much as truth sometimes. we think we recall when love was a dream we both had, and now neither of us does; searching the past to see where things went wrong, what was left undone, or overdone. in reality, who knows what love looks like to someone else? in reality, we can do it all right, and still have it fall apart.

then there is the jolt that comes with an unforeseen loss--when the person who seemed to be dying is alive and just as one is relaxing into that relief, someone else dear dies suddenly. the tragedy we prepared for and steeled ourselves against is not the tragedy that happened. we may find ourselves one day journeying home with a box of ashes in the lap. all at once, the heart is also a box of ashes and we cannot even scatter them, because then we would have nothing.

we put off making appointments with doctors, dreading diagnosis. fears of silent tumours inside, death growing where life once did, or finding there is a fault in the blood, in the eyes, in the heart. there are some things we don't need to know. there is enough illness and death around to go on with for now. our bones ache with the weariness of holding up a dying thing, and what does it matter why?

every one of us is a child in a burning house, so fragile, so beautiful, so alone. i wear my mother's lipsticks, found while clearing out her vanity. i wear the colour of the dead as i go about my days. nothing is as it was, but the dishes still must be washed, the laundry done, the classes taught. i am always astonished how we do this, how we continue to move through life and move life through us, inside our cages of flame.