Where The Pain Dissolves

This is the part where the pain dissolves. You know the pain you've kept frozen inside you, unable to touch it, unwilling to feel it, impossible to move through it?

Well, this is the part where it thaws, just a little, and your body schlumps forward and you feel some of the tension, not all of it but some of it, leave.

You feel it prickle in your eyes, you feel the tell tale waves sweep through your body. You watch a movie, just a silly romantic comedy, and start to cry because of the guy whose son fell off the scaffold and broke his back and died. And the father is stuck like you, stuck in the moment, frozen...the moment before his son fell, the moment before...

This is the part where the pain dissolves, where you start to cry, where you start just a little, to stop being dead.

And you read e cheerful email by a friend who is going through so much pain but is looking on the bright side, nonetheless, sending out poetry to journals and contests, making lists, keeping track of what she sent where...having hope. The friend you try to write to every week. Send books to, because she likes them. Silly books. Serious books. She loves you. You love her. She is trying now. Really trying. Rising up from the ashes of a broken body.

This is the part where the pain dissolves; where you start to cry, where you start, just a little to stop dying.

I hold you in me. I hold your body, your presence, your words, the sound of your voice, the feel of your skin. I hold how it felt to cuddle you and be cuddled by you. To crawl into your bed and smell your smell on the sheets. The house may crumble, the house may fall, but that house, it's not you. Nor are those things.

The things that made you eternal, those things are in me now. I held them away unable to accept them, because they reminded me of you, because they hurt too much.

It's been two years now.

This is the part where the pain dissolves.