Learning Curve

I didn't fall apart the way I expected, which surprised me.

There is grief, yes, pain, yes,

a narrowing, long ache in the chest, yes -

but also a strange openness,

where breath continues like a horizon,

persisting without permission

against the sea-line of each hour.

It is true, what they say - that suffering is not a cliff but a slope.

You lean into it deeply, stare up at its summit,

adjust your footing, stumbling and screaming

against the Sisyphean Hell of it

but you move through, up, and over its tricksy terrain.

Meanwhile, no one tells you how ordinary grief is.

How it lives beside you while you make coffee,

eat toast, answer emails, scaling the summit,

bruised and battered while the world keeps being

unbearably itself.

Some days, I carry this poorly, other days it rests more easily

as if it has finally learned the shape of my body,

and then, without warning, something small interrupts:

warm light on a wall, the wind worrying a leaf,

a laugh that surprises me by still knowing my name.

I don't call it healing, I call it coexistence,

where love and pain exist in equal ground.

For the world is not gentler, nor am I,

but I am still here and sometimes that feels like a quiet skill

I am learning to respect.