Things they never told you about the bad times

That emptiness is a psychological state, and not just a physical one.  That in so being, perversely, it takes shape in the heart as a thing that feels present around you, a thing that ought to be visible right there in front of you.

That the bad times will echo and reverberate from the good times like thousands of sharp pebbles in a narrow cave.  That you will suddenly notice the shelves full of books you bought for somebody because you knew that they would like them.  That you will suddenly notice and remember all the random photos of interesting things you sent to somebody via text message, that you posted to somebody's social media.  That you will suddenly discover how you were always thinking about them even when you weren't.  That the smallest things that were background noise—literally or figuratively—in your life now sound like thundering elephants.  (That you can't write the phrase "thundering elephants" without thinking about how they liked elephants, or how you gave them a game you'd never heard of before solely because the pieces were brightly colored wooden elephants, and they like bright things, and elephants, and games, and, and, and—)

The way that, in times that were difficult but not really bad—

(these are the bad times, now; whatever you thought about the difficult times, they weren't bad times; oh, and now we discover something else as we write this aloud, that difficult times and the bad times are different and not necessarily even similar things)

—you thought someone's departure might be a relief, only to discover in the actual bad times that it's no such thing, that you will ache, you will ache, you will write things like "you will ache" and feel a compression in your chest that turns your shoulders inwards as your body tries to physically expel emotions from it as if that's possible.  (It isn't.)  Like the body tries to expel an irritant with a cough, or a sneeze, it will try to expel grief and it will fail.

That even knowing you will live, you also know that some wounds never heal.  That the great wisdom at the deep root of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is his knowledge (maybe learned in the Great War) that some wounds never really heal, that some wounds may make you wiser but they never actually make you stronger, Nietzsche can go fuck himself sometime.  That you can tell, somehow just tell, that you will always fall sick from the thing that hurt you, no matter how well you recover, no matter how well something seems to heal.  That all the well-meaning people who tell you that you will heal may even know they're lying if they've been around the sun a high enough number of times, because this will never make me stronger even if it fades to a dull ache only remembered on certain days of the year, or when seeing a certain color or shape, or when the wind blows a particular way.

That you will remember so many good times and they will not make you feel any better.

That you will be compelled to shout all of these things even when you have nothing to say and don't want to talk about it.

That seeing someone's stupidest, silliest thing still lying there will twist the knife, that the stupidest, silliest thing they kept around will somehow be an icon (religious, symbolizing their spiritual presence; technical, feeling like you ought to be able to poke it and bring them back).  That the stupid, silly thing will suddenly be imbued with meaning, freighted with symbolism; that it will somehow seem like a vital piece of their essence that was detached and left floating around like that absence you feel around you that refuses to visually manifest itself.  That you will want to cover it up or move it so you don't have to look at it, but will feel reluctant or perhaps even unable to, because you're afraid of hurting it and thereby through some metaphysical transitive property of the universe hurt them.

That you will want to hurt them like they are hurting you and will feel your body struggling to expel that again, that as soon as you think it, your heart will start screaming, "Take it back!  Take it back!" as if you can recover that errant cruel thought (as if it had escaped somehow) and by suffocating it in its crib kill it and all the things you may have done (probably did, aren't certain you did, can't think of how you'd have done them differently if you could have, had to do, never did but are found guilty by juror prejudice and sentenced to hang) that actually hurt the person.  The person you never wanted to hurt.  Never.  Not ever.

That you will feel hostage to someone else's heart.  That you will pray for a negotiator.  That you will know the heart is a terrorist who cannot be negotiated with.



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