perpetually inconsolable
Perpetual inconsolability and the phantom groove
reading now kept timesconnectedness 0.51
three weeks, or four, after bobbi died, i told my wife that instead of trying to think more about it, i would consider myself perpetually inconsolable. since then i have left it at that, even through the moments of longing in her absence.
i said it so i would stop looking for a way through.
i used to think i would make something. a zine, a collection of poems waiting to be written. it is not on my mind as something i should accomplish just to find closure, and even then i know there would be none. there is no sufficient narrative i can tell myself to justify what happened.
since we moved, everything feels light. i have caught myself thinking that we are where we should be. then the second thought, the one i keep: not to mean that she had to pass away in order for us to have this kind of life.
the lightness and her death sit side by side, and i leave them there, unjoined.
i switch back and forth between justification and simply sitting with what is. i think i do more of the latter than the former, though some days the former wins.
a habit does not end when its reason ends. it goes on a while in the body, the way a groove keeps the shape of what once ran through it. i have called this a phantom groove. i do not go looking for it. it finds me in the parts of the day she used to fill.
what i have tried not to do: romanticize, write about yearning or longing. there is no language for how hard that loss felt, and writing anything about it feels like a disservice to the language i lived with her for four years.
what we had between us lived in days and habits, four years of them, and whatever i write now would have to put it into words it never needed.
derrida, mourning a friend, wrote that a mourning which fails to take the other in can be a kind of respect. i would rather she stay a little outside of me, still hers.
if anything is ever made, it will come from the shape the absence has left in the ordinary, a room that keeps a habit after the one who held it
How it's been read
From readings, counted anonymously: time with the page open, and the furthest movement reached.
Where this note sits
- echoes About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art
- echoes Apropos of Nothing · On writing toward a death beyond disappearance
- echoes A Return to Form
- echoes Consequences of Belief · The observing 'I' and the architecture of solitude
- echoes The World is as Hostile as the Morning
- thread · self a small glossary about the weight of loss
- thread · self A month in the trenches · The knot of incompatible selves
- thread · self Algorithmic realities · A question that assumes a world