Fridge

When people say it gets better, they’re right. It doesn’t make you unfeeling to admit that smarts fade and ten years down the line you aren’t still coiled in the agony of the unthinkable shattering, frozen in that same scream. We people put other things in our hearts faster than we think is seemly; before we know it the furniture of our lives is rearranged and we can scarcely remember what the room looked like before. I have spent too long lying about grief, sitting in my pants at 1:43 on the Notes app, or drunk and weeping with a mouth shut utterly at a picture of him by a cherry blossom tree looking lovely and a bit bored. I have in these silly moments sought to render it in obfuscating Tennysonian lace, or else the gleeful iconoclasm of unfettered anguish.
(Those poems were all, perhaps mercifully, lost on a stolen phone. They had too many dashes, and were snotty to read.)

Neither is true. The truest unpleasantness of the matter is that it makes one a cultivator of useless and potent artefacts. There are few more covetous than a person who has lost a person that they loved very, very much. All this kind of healing really means is quarantining horror to the corners of rooms, keeping jam for eight years knowing that you cannot throw it away, you simply can’t. It is an inheritance of cobwebs and inedible things. Turmeric. Unopened protein shakes. Pickled garlic. Things which become powerful because you ignore them. It’s seldom that you open the brackets and hurt: but be well advised, this hurt is not remembering. It honours nothing but the item itself, like a poem. (Yellow rice – it’s good for your health, you know.) (He’s so thin.) (There must have been a reason he bought this. Perhaps he still has plans for it.) My fridge is a mausoleum.

I have moved on: I am warm and my cheeks are pink and I am in love all the time with people and the soft pace that consequence treads nowadays. But in my house are many frozen things that pay no one homage but their own redundancy. The spice rack did not whisper to me “Remember me. I too wanted to do something beautiful.” While writing this, not once did I hear his voice.