Genesis

There are people who believe it is their fate to lose, that somehow they have inherited a life of loss. That all good things will be taken away from them so they don’t get attached to anyone or anything. I never really thought about it but if I did I suppose I could understand and even relate. It’s everyone’s fate, after all. To lose everything eventually, to be left with nothing but memories and even those can be cruelly snatched away like grains of sand on the winds of time. When I look at you I can see the struggle inside of you, your smile betrays the sadness in your eyes. And that is the part I want, that is the part I recognize like looking into a mirror. I have dreams sometimes in which I am trying to catch something I never do, I try to make it somewhere my mind wants to be but my body won’t move fast enough. And the whole time, I am reaching for something I never quite come to grasp, though time and again I come so close to it I could almost tell you what it is. There is a kind of loss in which something you had is taken away. Goes away, somehow. Then there is a kind of loss which happens on repeat over an infinite amount of time. It is hollow like the sound of a ghost as it passes through you to the other side, a breath sucked out slowly across an absence of tongue. It takes up an infinite amount of space and no space at all. You can feel it like lead inside of you although it is invisible, it is always sinking though it never touches bottom. It is the loss of something you never quite had. It is a feeling of perpetual stagnation, even while moving, even while intending to move. Perhaps some fill this void, this emptiness which contains weight inexplicably, with religious beliefs or promises. Perhaps some fill it with cars or money or women or men or fetishes or art or family photos on Facebook or plastic fame on Instagram. Perhaps with jobs or careers or titles or power or greed or sadism or masochism or nursery rhymes. They fill it and fill it with anything they know how but it can never be filled, only denied. Only ignored. Only feared. But what of the ones who sit with it, holding the hand of a clock without hands. Who instead of turning away from the ache, worship at its dimmed singular altar. Who touch the weighted face of the weightlessness and caress it into their very souls. The ones who mourncherish the loss of everything before it has gone. Who taste and seek the melancholy, the anguish and seduction of her sorrow laden song.  I suppose we are the poets, and we name the darkness home.