To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.

GriefIn the night I brush my teeth with a razor

I am no longer ashamed how for weeks, after, I wanted to be dead--not to die, mind you, or do myself in--but to be there already, walking amongst all those I'd lost, to join the throng singing, if that's what there is-- or the nothing, the gnawing--So be it.

It never ends, the bruiseof being