In the Bones

Six years after my father died
My mother was still wearing black

She wanted people to know
She was in mourning

She wanted to make that clear

Six months after Ted died
I wore my favorite red dress to a bar
And picked a man
Who looked nothing like Ted

I fragmented
I know that now
I split into so many parts

The grieving
The struggling
The surviving
The living
The dead

They say grieving is a process
But so often
It comes upon you all at once
All facets of it
Turning you around
To face parts of yourself
You didn't even know existed

My mother wore black
To signify her grieving
Because she felt...

I suppose she worried
That people would notice
How happy she was
That my father was dead

He was a very cruel man
And when he died
She mourned him only out of tradition

When Ted died
I didn't need a physical manifestation of my grieving
To signal to people
How painful it was

If anything, I needed to show people
That I was all right
That I could carry on

I didn't want anyone worrying about me
So I put on red dresses
And went to bars
Drank
Smoked
Flirted with men
And people saw this
People who knew me
And they called it 'healthy'

Even the people who knew Ted
Who knew me
Who knew I was well past the age
When it's attractive for a woman
To be kissing a strange man on a dance floor
Even with Sam Cooke blessing the whole thing
Everyone who saw me was just so relieved
That I wasn't falling apart

Nobody imagines that you can fall in
That you can fall inside yourself
Where the grief hides
And have it hold you hostage

I only wore black once
But when it was back in the closet
Tucked away where we used to keep the kids' Christmas presents
I still felt it
It wasn't something
I could take off

It was in my bones
Under my skin
Behind my eyes
Growing out of me

Like the tears
Like the sobs
Like the muscles in my body
Weak from shaking with disbelief

I took a man home from a bar
Because he was wearing my husband's cologne
And I wanted to fall asleep
With that smell wrapped around me

I wanted to wake up to it
It didn't matter to me
That the man
Left in the middle of the night
Without so much as a kiss on my neck

All that mattered was that I woke up
With the scent of my husband
On the pillow
For the first time in...

Quite awhile

By then the drinking had already gotten out of hand
And I felt myself being compelled to try stronger distractions
Things that would keep me numb
For longer periods of time

Someone should have noticed
But I wasn't missing work
And I wasn't snapping at anyone
And I wasn't losing a drastic amount of weight
So...

...Well I don't want to say nobody cared
But 'Nobody felt like they had the time to care'
Is, I think, a fair statement

Besides, it would have had to be a hunch
A speculation
There was no physical evidence
Of what was happening inside me

It was chemical
Transformational
How could it not be?

I had lost a part of myself
My body, my mind
It was making up for it
It was creating something new
To go where the old me had been

Maybe that isn't the most progressive statement
But it's true

I lost Ted
And suddenly being the person I was
When he was alive
Was no longer an option

A good wife
A good mother
An overall stable person

None of that made sense to me anymore

And so I had to start from scratch

My language changed
My reactions to things
How I saw colors
And shapes
I'm not exaggerating
This is all fact

A sign near my house over a store
Suddenly became neon red
Instead of light blue

And the 'e' went out, or at least
I thought it did
And nobody ever bothered to fix it

Nobody seemed to care about
How bad it looked

The things people don't notice...

And all the while
I was re-forming
Transitioning myself

Everyone thought Ted was gone
But I was gone too
We went together
How else could it be?

How else could it possibly be?

The only thing I took with me were my bones
And even they were saturated
With this past burden
This heavy bitterness
That lingered
Like salt on the tongue

The grief still hung on
In the bones
And that was something
No strange men
Or blue pills
Or red dresses could fix

It was determined to never leave me

And I didn't try to banish it
Because it felt like...

Like the only real part of Ted
That I had left

The only part that felt strong enough
Agonizing, but full, intensely full

So I let it stay
Resting there
Inside my structure

But I carried on as someone else

A lesser someone?

Maybe

But still strong

Still made up
Of unbreakable things