Love, Miffalicious.

Taken in Leicester, United Kingdom.

Grief is a funny emotion.

You think you’re ‘over’ something. It’s in-the-past. It’s back there, somewhere, in the car boot of your life, hidden among the dusty, dirty debris of thoughts and feelings and daily activities and responsibilities. Safely covered by routines and habits that you had to force yourself to create, to adopt, after The Incident.

You’re over it. Yeah. It’s in-the-past.

You have spent countless hours agonising over the whats, and the hows, and the whys, and the whens, and you’ve wrung the prequels dry with your questions. You’ve gone over every single memory there is of the both of you, of the house that you used to live in, of the smells and colours that you liked and he hated, and the words he liked and you hated. You’ve gone over the memories so many times, that the ink has begun to fade, and the pages have become dog-eared, well worn. To your dismay, even the colours have taken on a strange sepia-tone.

It’s in-the-past.

And then, all of a sudden, you’re sitting in your room, silently watching the grey clouds roll by, and a memory squeezes itself out through one of the cracks of your quiet. You’ve slipped up; the usual door locks of your brain had not been latched tightly enough, and it has managed to resurface. You don’t know what to do with this errant fragment of your past that is battling with your present.

“Why are you here? What have you come back for?”

The memory slowly puffs out its chest in bravado, and taunts you silently. The familiar heaviness starts to settle,

oh hello, grief. Weren’t you supposed to be in-the-past?

You take a deep breath.

No matter how many times this has happened before, you’re never really prepared to deal with a fresh onslaught.

You settle into your chair, hunching your shoulders, curling inwards, moving into a foetal position. As if that would staunch the overwhelming sadness that is slowly burgeoning through your ventricles. As if you could mould your grief into something more manageable, to shape into something more aesthetically pleasing to the soul.

As if.

That’s the thing about grief. It is a multifaceted prism; it reveals something new to you each time, from a different angle, in a different patch of light. Just like how you can’t identify the colours in white light, you can’t pinpoint the reasons behind the resurgence of grief.

All you can do is to hold on tight, and ride the waves, knowing that as you reached ashore once before, you will do so again.

And again.

And again.

Until the tidal wave finally recedes.