I read your words from a distance and they land deep within me. I do not know the sound of your voice, but I know the sound of your sorrow. We echo across a torn land with the anguish of torn lives. You have lost someone dear and I know the dearness of loss. I cry alone into a pillow and you catch the tears in this far off land.
We find each other skimming the surface of daily life and sinking deep within the night the nights of sorrow. We are not alone in our aloneness. Our fragmented lives submerge into the whole. Perhaps that is why my fragments hurts so much and run so deep. I know you know, but I don’t even know you.
If we could sit in the same room and share our stories, our lives, our loss, perhaps we could find clues as to what got us here, where here is and where here is going. Sometimes I wander my mind wondering if there is another who knows. Then I hear your whisper on pages through storms of my solitude. I read your words, but more importantly, I feel your words. Your words heal me.
You share the loss of a child. I have lost children. You share the loss of a life partner. I have lost a life partner. You write of a mother that has left. I have a mother who is gone, but left so much. You speak of a sibling. I had a brother. We had them. Now all we have are each other.
We gather near the flame of life in the flickering shadows of loss. We hold the candle up to unrecognizable faces and ask, “Who is this person that is reflected in the mirror? Where has the one I knew gone? Where did everybody go?”
But everybody is here. I just couldn’t see through the distortion of my sorrow. My grief is not that they are gone. I will be forever with them in every forever; in every transitory moment that transcends moment, there I will find them. But I cannot hold them. I cannot touch what loss has made untouchable. I cannot hear their dreams. I cannot see their tomorrows. And there are so many days I cannot touch, hear or see mine either.
So, I reach out to you. For you know. You know how empty a heart full of love can be. You know deafening silence. You know what it is like to smell the scent of their presence in the caverns of alone. You know. And I need to know you know.
I wish we could sit together and listen in real time what surreal time has stolen. To see each other in the reflection of our tears. To hear the sound before it echoes. To hold each other in the boundaries bound by bodies that the ones we love no longer hold.
If I could hear you, perhaps I could hear me. In the vacuous vastness of my mind I am lost. I wander my thoughts, curl up within my aloneness and cry for someone to find me. I need to hear another voice. I need to step out of my aloneness and find others living in the alone, in the deep recesses of sorrow, looking for a way through the anguish of separation.
I yearn to hear someone other than me, something other than silence, somewhere other than this. I have lost precious lives and in the loss I have lost me.
We find each other on these pages. But I wish we could find each other on a mountain trail near a gentle creek. I wish we could sit for a while and as our words find sound.
Still, I would rather walk this path alone than to walk with someone that doesn’t know. The world fills the void with words. One who knows fills the words with the void. When I hear the fullness of your love that carries the weight of emptiness, then I know you know. I know. And that is all I need to know.
I listen and I learn. I learn how to live in loss. I learn how loss lives in me. I learn how I am not the only one. I learn that we are one. We are a collection of all that is one.
I have accepted their physical presence is not here, which all the more creates a yearning for the physicality of another. I wish we could sit and talk into the night of what night was and what night has become. I wish we could reach each other in a world that is out of reach and hear each other’s words and the beat of two broken hearts instead of the echo of just one.
Perhaps there will be a day we will meet in our night. Until then, I am so grateful we have found each other here. For this is what we have when what we had is not gone. We have each other.
