I'll never be clean of your loss

Washing your hands of a person isn’t as simple as it seems.

(Image by Alexander Zvir from Pexels)

I am not a pretty crier, I am actually pretty messy. I get red in the face and snot-nosed. I scream and wail and beg and plead with entities I don’t believe in. I am not teary-eyed with soft smiles. I am filled with rage at this loss. You were supposed to watch me grow up and I was supposed to watch you grow old. I want to claw at the ground that holds you until there's mud caked under my fingernails and the distance between us isn’t so great. 

I was told time heals all wounds, but it's been six years and my chest still aches with the loss of you. Grief is funny.], it’s not the dead roses and damp tissues I expected. It’s a vicious anger at the world and at you. How dare you have gone somewhere I cannot reach you. Buried amongst the grass and the peonies. How dare something grow from your bones that isn’t you. 

Grief is messy. Blood, sweat and tears string my body together. Stitching moments until days pass and then years. Soon enough I’ll have missed you longer than I knew you. How cruel is that? How can I move through the world when my soul is soiled with the loss of you. There is more to the world than you, yet you were my whole world. Now my world is a headstone and grocery store flowers. When did the universe become so small?

No matter where I go, I see you. I hear the cadence of your voice, I see your smiles on the heads of strangers and your face in the mirror. I cannot escape your memory; it clings to me like dirt from the garden, dusting my feet and covering my fingers. My fingerprints are muddy with the memory of you. No one told me you should wear gardening gloves when loving someone.

I can’t wash this grief off; it sticks to me like a second skin. I am messy with the remnants of you. I cling to your memory the way I did your hand as a little girl. My hands look like yours and every word I write echoes your voice. This second skin I wear is a recollection of you. I am everything you were and you’re all I could ever be.

I hold my grief for you deep in my bones; somewhere even I cannot reach. Despite its burial, this grief doesn’t decompose the way I envisioned. It haunts me in every moment; the ghost of you echoes in the hallways like a phantom. 

I could wipe my hands of you a thousand times and still feel your sage advice and witty remarks. Your voice echoes off the walls of my mind.

I hold onto every memory of you with a death grip, unable to let them leave me. My soul is stained with the loss of you. Can you wash something that's so entrenched in your being? Can I scrub this grief off in the shower? Can I wipe it off my hands and let the dust settle in the air? How do I clean myself of you?

How do I clean off something I sickly want to hold onto forever. Because if I lose this grief what do I have left? Who am I if I am not a part of you? So I carry it with me, as it slips between my fingers like grains of sand.