Shackles

(Originally written: December 13, 2020)

Grief doesn’t die. Even with time. It fades to the background and leaves nothing but vestiges of itself. Sparse, flickering echoes in the forefront of the mind that go unnoticed but not forgotten.

It uses those beacons of sorrow as guides to surge back to the forefront at a moment’s notice. Either due to an external trigger or because the grief was growing burdened in its solitude and it needed to be held. Whatever the cause, grief comes back and it demands itself be felt.

Grief’s tar wraps the heart with the urgency of a flood and drowns it while breath is still drawn. It wrests control and becomes the tyrant of a body in mourning. Again.

All healing is forgotten. Buried memoires thrust hands out from their graves, as wrapped in flesh as the moment they were born but with none of their purity. The barbed remembrance that grief brings is always veiled in anguish. By its very nature grief cannot recall what is lost without tainting it as it is the cruel realization that what was, can no longer be. And what could have been, will never be.

Then, the tyrant dims. Its beacons are relit. And the soul finds itself with its health returned with a warning. Not to humble it or make it quiver with fear. But so that it knows that even the oldest grief can come back. Will come back.

And the soul must continue anyway.