TW: mention of suicide
Photo Credit: Florencia Viadana for Unsplash
I wonder of the author’s intention
Sitting at the computer as they say to the reader
Look, here is the place where miracles happen
Here is a place where the hurt isn’t forever
When death is nothing but a blip
An inconvenience
A build up
A plot twist
And then…
And then I think of you and how you came back to me from the dead
How I still hear echoes of suicide attempts and ambulance sirens
Still imagine your voice calling out for me in your drug induced slumber The way that every night after my mother told me this, I’ve woken up screaming: “I’m so sorry. I would have been there only if I’d known.
If I’d know where you were I would have stolen every car in the country to be by your side just so that I knew you were still alive.”
Because you did live and you are still living so vibrantly
And I… I buried a part of me that I can’t get back
There is no undo button on this
No uno reverse on grief
I look at you and I can’t stop seeing ghosts
I read these stories and wonder how –
How can these characters stop smelling the damp graveyard dirt?
How can they stop reliving the moment they knew you were gone?
How can they silence the banshee squeal of grief that has been their bed fellow for years? How do we live with the knowledge that losing you once destroyed us?
How do we live with the fear of what would happen if we lost you again? I am afraid of losing you again.
Always.
Afraid that I won’t hear your calls for help until they’re coming through my Ouija board And yet I still can’t be near you
I can’t be near you without feeling like I’m dying
You took a piece of me with you to the hospital each time and they never came back I’ve been checking every gurney wheel
Every flashing light
Every ambulance siren for proof that it was just a story
That I can pick up a pen and paper and undo the part of me that mourned a death not yet lived Seeing you alive
Seeing you breathing was not enough to assuage my broken heart
I live forever in the moments I feared you were gone
My emotions an endless Groundhog Day I cannot escape
The author magics a family back together from the ashes of three years of grief And I wonder how he can look at her smile without seeing blood run down her cheeks How he can hear her laugh without hearing the echo of a gunshot and a stranger’s scream
There say that wasn’t enough of them left
I don’t think there’s enough of me left to love you again
I am allergic to grief
And your midnight poetry was anaphylactic shock
I’m still carving the memory of missed phone calls out from under my skin Still trying to excavate the guilt I drink like water
The regret I breathe like air
Death and life were never meant to be this
A riddle playing at a light switch
A turn signal bouncing back
How do I live with the death of the undying?
How do I love you without fear?
Death is not a clock we can rewind
We must live the tick of every second even when it feels like a knife in our hearts We were graveyard children without a bedtime story
Don’t tell me this could have ended any other way
Don’t speak of zombies and potions
I already know this story could have ended differently
I’m aware of it every time I see the blood on my hands
We were kids playing with matches instead of toys and we burnt our whole childhood to the ground
I still cough up smoke
Don’t make me live in the blank pages of could-have-beens
Every day I live my grief and every day I think of how beautiful we could have been if someone knew how to help your kind of sick
Don’t now give me a story with a doctor
All these pages
All these alternate endings just give me paper cuts
I let my blood drip onto the pages and cast a silent prayer
Please don’t give me a miracle seven years too late
My heart’s already worm food anyways
I still don’t believe the witch and the happily ever after can exist on the same page My story was over the first time you tried to exit the stage
Since the first moment you tried to take your life, I have been a record scratch A skip unable to move forward
And then I think of you and how you came back to me from the dead
And then…
A plot twist
A build up
An inconvenience
When death is nothing but a blip
Here is a place where the hurt isn’t forever
Look, here is the place where miracles happen
Sitting at the computer as they say to the reader
All your pain is nothing but dust
Madalyn firmly believes that we are all our own haunted houses. Her work deals with haunting, trauma, and liminality with a particular focus on the atemporality of time. Madalyn feels that society likes to confine both life and death into boxes without considering the ways in which they dance across the borders set up between them and how these visits of the dying impact the living. She is proudly of Anishinaabe and Scottish ancestry. Find more of their work on Instagram @sleepcreatecaffeinate