Modern Romanticism

When I walked in, he was asleep. His eyes closed, though his chest did not rise. I knew. In that moment, I knew. He had nothing left to weep after. No more burden to keep his existence a semi-purposeful one. Nothing more to fight for, because illness had carted it off. Death has given him a different home, as he rests under black wings and the caws from a thousand ravens.

I stared at this sight. For more time I thought that the universe was able to sustain itself on, I watched a sight that held no motion. What was there to look at? It was not art. There was nothing to admire about this. Appreciation came after I looked away. It came after I understood that this sight had nothing left to it. For I had absorbed the memories about who he was, about those times he did move, held purpose for whatever it might be, as it is here where all I see is a shell.

A shell, indeed. Around him, I see an ocean that will be the place I drop the tears. A belonging for them, while wind comes in from that ocean to push me in random directions. I chose to go down one path, until the symptom of confusion from grief compels me to choose again. That shell, that physical form without a soul anymore, lays on an endless shoreline. It looks like all others. Empty.

In staring at his form, I viewed such a scene of a shell, a shoreline, and an ocean while knowing it was all a haunt. For memories, I came to understand that they were what remains glimmering in staggering radiance. It was next to a holiness, if one can define it as such, because I came to see that this shell, his form, had been an emptiness because of what had been scooped out. Memories. As I recall all that can be appreciated, I fall back not into grief’s suffering. I fall back into the softest bed that carries with it moments to carve a smile upon lips that would rather speak, along with moments that bring on motion to my limbs that might have been spent in utter stagnation were despair to drown me.

He has no more weight to carry. He has no more burden to isolate himself in thoughts that unwind, to rewind, and then this repeats itself. But memories needn’t be what weight I carry. Memories needn’t pressure me into self-destruction, until I am buried as another overlooked shell on that same endless shoreline. For memories can be transparent enough to see through to everything about them. Memories can look like everything when one refuses to let them eat up oneself until they have become akin to nothing.