Grief: The Moon's Realm
I felt a hole burning through my chest.
Lights out.
Everything stopped. Time itself.
Just like that.
Grief is an eclipse that swallows you whole.
The Sun yields to his Moon. And she claims you.
Her waves bring the flood.
The ground drops out.
You, uprooted.
And in freefall.
Folded in half, reaching out in nothingness.
You only drift further and further away from the life you knew.
Eventually, you lose sight of what was.
It disintegrates.
And all your body can do is instinctively return to its origins—the fetal position.
Your breath becomes shallow. To breathe deeply is to rupture.
To feel your body is to risk full collapse.
Sensation stirs the waves, threatening to pull you under.
And you hold still.
There is nothing to hold onto but what’s left of you.
You’re floating in the void where gravity no longer applies.
Reality ceases to exist.
A reset.
The illusion of permanence shattered and your world permanently altered in the blink of an eye.
That’s grief.
A reorientation. Toward the North Star.
Terror and mercy have the same face.
You sink. Into the deepest deep.
You are in the Moon’s realm now. Returned to the womb, curled in her depths.
Your body’s batteries have run out. It has no power here.
Love sustains you.
And here you draw your first breath. Like a newborn, but with different eyes.
Only the essence of you remains.
Love.
The only way to return to time and space, is to embody what the flood revealed:
the flicker of light that doesn’t go out.
The love felt.
The very love that rises from the depths.
Love.
What helped you breathe underwater.
Your heart stands by you as pain and love rage inside your chest.
She carries you when your body no longer can.
And unbeknownst to you, she only grows in these waters. Just like the Moon reflecting the Sun’s light as she grows in the darkness, the heart illuminates the depths.
And you remember.
Through suffering and loss.
Love is not of the body
Love is not of the mind
Love is not of the world
Love simply is.
Before time.
And after time.
This is what you showed me, darling.
And this pain inside my chest is but a testament to the love I felt for you.
The love you brought alive in me.
The parts I’d long forgotten—cold and dry, hiding away inside the edges where light couldn’t reach.
But you did.
And you showed me that my heart is bigger than the smallness I reduce myself to.
That’s what your loss cracked open.
My own capacity for love.
A direct confrontation with my own limitations.
Because you reminded me.
My heart is bigger than the body which hosts it.
My heart knows no limits, though limits are all my brain knows.
My heart only becomes softer from the tides it endures.
And when the coasts flood.
When the systems collapse.
And everything built on sand goes under—
My heart remains.
All I have to do is, let love do what she does best.
Just as you taught me.
Be love.
