The Life That Won’t Let Me Go

By Sini Jerome

I am the body that won't stop breathing.

I don't know how to want to be here

without you. Some days I don't want to be 

here

at all. 

I wake up disappointed

that I've woken. My body insists on this

:breath after breath, heart beating

its involuntary rhythm

like it doesn't know we're already gone.

So I try to drown it instead.

Bass-thump-strobe-sweat, nights blur

into a fever of noise, the beautiful amnesia

of moving until I'm hollow,

and when the sun finally rises

I wonder who I've become —

this stranger wearing my face.

Then the silence comes.

Days in bed where I forget to eat,

where I can't remember if I showered

yesterday

or three days ago. The ceiling becomes

a movie screen playing our life on loop:

your hand reaching for mine in the car,

the way you said my name when you were

half-asleep, how your body fit against mine like we were built

as two halves of one thing.

Your coffee mug still on the counter, unwashed.

Your toothbrush I can't throw away.

Your jacket on the hook, and sometimes

I press my face into it to find your smell

but it's fading, you're fading,

and I am digging through the remains of us,

burying myself in what's left.

It's not just missing you.

It's my hand still reaching for yours in sleep.

It's setting out food and realising

I’ve made too much again.

It's my body forgetting, turning to tell you something,

laughing at a joke you would have loved,

and then the crash, 

the sickening drop

when I remember: you're not here.

You'll never be here again.

I died too. I watched myself

slip under with you, and now

there's this thing that looks like me

going through motions,

answering emails, saying "I'm okay,

"buying groceries I won't eat, existing

as a haunting of my own life.

People say, "I'm sorry for your loss"

like you're a set of keys I misplaced.

They say, "time heals" and I want to tell them

time is the problem. Each second pulls me further from the last time I touched you,

each minute widens the canyon

between us, between me and the person

I was when you were alive.

I rage. God, I rage.

At you for leaving, at your body for failing,

at my body for continuing,

at the world for spinning like nothing has ended

when everything has ended.

Then I bargain with the morning:

just get through this hour.

This minute.

This breath.

Then I deny it all over again,

check my phone for your texts,

listen for your key in the door,

turn when I think I hear your laugh,

reach for your side of the bed

before I remember

there is no side, no two.

There is only one, and I don't know

how to be just one.

I am watching myself drown,

spectator to my own life

as this body shambles through days,

as it goes to work, pays bills, performs

the theatre of being alive,

as it cycles through rage, denial, bargaining, despair,

a wheel I can't escape.

Some days I think I see you

in the space between heartbeats,

in the gap where I used to be whole.

Some days I talk to you and pretend

you're answering.

Most days I know this is what's left:

me, grieving you.

Me, grieving me.

Me, grieving the us that died

the day you did.

And I keep not dying.

And I keep not living.

Somewhere between those two impossibilities,

this body breathes out of habit,

this heart beats without permission.

This unbearable persistence of being here

when everything that mattered is gone.

For now.

I exist.

I am still here.

And I don't want to be.

By Sini Jerome