The anatomy of grieving
I travel down my oesophagus, the rigged stair to a moist world under. I sneak through the epiglottis, unnoticed, pass the larynx, wordless and red as a vulva. Adam’s apple unbitten – my pharynx is no sinner.
I descend down passing the thymus, space between breasts where lovers like to hide, a space that’s neither skin nor bone and not yet heart, safe and uncommitted.
I follow the trachea, dark tunnel to my insides lit up by the minuscule capillaries, their direction confused and scattered. Down through the dark path of the bronchus, closer here to what I’m seeking: the still cave of grief and grieving.
You have to be small enough to fit through the stiff and judicious bronchioles. You have to be humble enough like air, slowly persuading the smooth muscle to loosen around you.
I arrive finally to the microscopic gathering of alveoli, my destination, like infinite breathing infants, still, oblivious of their significance, round like a new earth, no sharp edges or unexpected turns.
I go to the very bottom to find the key place of exchange and life, where breath begins to feed me and water is blood and here the grief is a sea, starting at this very end.
I’m careful not to spill it into the heart cavity, its place is only here, a sea in every alveoli of lungs. Millions of them here to move your grief, keepers of your longing.
I come here often for the salt to cure me, to keep the ways unstuck and open.
I’m in the memory of cartilage rings, the little flaps of meat must let me in, the bones of the ribs expand to accommodate my size, to welcome me and my grief like old friends.
There, at the very bottom, the grief becomes the sea and loses specificity. Story no longer matters, there is no name, no face. It is now a shell, a rock, now a mollusk or silvery scaled fish shining in its transformation.
This descent is no anatomical repetition, but prayer through the cavities of your body to the grief that is holy, the losses through which you find yourself.
Grief is prayer to what you’ve been saved from.
Grief is the answer to your daily prayer
take away from me all that takes me away from You.
Grief is god.
The pleura brings me up in its thin river, effortless delivery to the collar bone, I spit myself out full and clean as dawn.
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