Grief

 

He was far from her.  

Distance and geography...time zones and weather patterns...the pandemic already well underway and worsening with the advent of Fall.  

Isolation...is what it felt like.  Not quite a prison because there weren't any walls...free to walk about, free to go outside.  

She hated change...disruption.  A process was what she favored, predictability.  Numbers adding up, tallying up items so they made sense.  

So in a time when nothing made sense, when nothing added up, she potentially was at her most frustrated state when a cold dark shiver was placed inside her and tore her gut into a place she hadn't had to visit...for some time.

And like the tiniest of pin pricks it drew tears as easily as if drawing blood.

And he was far from her.

At a time when she needed him to fit.  The way when they greeted each other, her chin perfect into his shoulder.  Needed his voice to just calm her pettiest of fears, her frustrations...the sheer lunacy of the randomness of this whole episode.

One day you're talking to someone...and the next you are hearing they have left this world.  No warnings, no head's up...just some lightning in a clear blue day suddenly immolating something...someone...right near you.  You can feel...you can fucking feel the absence.  You can feel the pull away from you viscerally, like some civil war surgeon clumsily chopping off a limb.  It stirs an ache you didn't realize you possessed.

She needed him to fit.

And he was far.

No amount of calls or texts would help.

So he knew that she would paddle into the kitchen, perhaps already dark in the Virginia countryside in late October, and uncork the bottle of bourbon and take it to the glass already stacked with ice.  And she would take the first few sips and like those first few tears they would fall into her...watching the windows, the blackening outside and it would look like she felt...empty and cold...the sun unfairly gone with no colors, the only sound the clink of the bourbon...

Before she finished her glass she poured more to refill it.  This time she raised it slightly and murmured some words that only she could hear.

So he did the same...poured a little into a glass with no ice...but tried to push stars into her direction, tried to push dreams into her mind, tried to rewind the sun in the sky and maybe just create a bit of a distraction for her.

He was far....but in his mind he was fitting her into him.