Grief is never a straight line.
Molly likes to think of it as more of an ocean.
It pulses and curls in time with the moon. Waves cresting and breaking apart against the shore and rocks. Sometimes it's a gentle push, a slight nudge to her legs as she stands on the shore. Water covering her toes and lower legs in the cool warmth of a distant memory. She can take those days, prefers them to the waves that crash. The ones that push and tear at the sand. The water that rushes in suddenly, a cacophonous harmony. The way it disturbs in its suddenness. Changing the landscape as it carves away the foundation below her.
She wishes that someone had told her that when she was younger. When she watches the adults around her shuffle about, their voices hushed whispers. How her mother rotated between so many emotions that she felt dizzy trying to categorize it. No one had sat her down then to tell her. To explain how you can miss someone who is never really gone. How traces of them can linger in everything, like mines left behind long after the soldiers have gone.
Will this shirt trigger a memory?
Will it hurt?
Will she be ok on the other side when her mind stops wandering down these corridors?
She never has the answers to those questions.
She doesn't think that anyone does.
She's experienced her share of grief. The way it manifests in various forms. Like the time she dropped her ice cream on her favorite dress and thought that it had been ruined forever. How she woke up to find one of her fish had died and she held a funeral for them in the yard.
The crushing agonizing feeling that curled through her body, icy tendrils encasing her heart, as the person before her walks away.
She wished someone had told her of all the ways you can miss a person. That one day you'll wake up and turn over to find no one behind you. The imprint of their body the only indication that they had ever been there at all. But even that is faint, the lines of them having been ironed out. The scent of them getting stuck in your nose. You smell it everywhere but can't find the source. How at odd hours of the night it can creep up on you and your body aches.
She misses all the ways they were and all the ways they could have been.
If only he would just listen.
If only he would just care
If only
if only...