It’s missing noises like the gentle tap of nails as you walk from room to room, just checking nothing has changed in case some space has opened up that needs your affection.
It’s missing temperatures like the way your body gives heat, leaving warm shallow dents on anything soft.
It’s missing fury because you opened the door just to taste the air.
It’s also presence. Presence of things that are yours alone and I have no use for now, never before noticed sitting loud and mutely unused.
It’s months later when I clean the drain to find parts of you weaving across the dark pipe with soap residue and knots of my hair. I won’t want to throw you away so I’ll leave the grey mass and the shower will flood and the boards outside the door will warp and they’ll creak from that moment on and I’ll blame you and hold on to that simple irritation long after a professional probes a camera in the hole and tells me I have a blockage.
‘I know,’ I’ll say, ‘but I need someone else to fix it.’
And he’ll tell me it’s always easiest to prevent rather than cure and I’ll think: ‘what a fucking poet.’ But when he draws away the last part of you and empties you under the cherry tree, I smell blossom even though it’s only January, and I’m one image further from grief.
Kinneson Lalor likes writing, walking, gardening, and her dog. She followed a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge with an MSt in Creative Writing from the same institution while writing her first novel, teaching mathematics, and co-founding a supercomputing start-up. She is Australian but has lived in the UK for over a decade. Her work has appeared in The Mays, Tiny Molecules, and Microfiction Monday Magazine, and she writes a regular blog about sustainable gardening for edibles and wildlife. Find Kinneson at @KinnesonLalor and www.instagram.com/kinneson.lalor/.
After losing my whole family , I know how grief feels . I couldn’t have expressed it better .
Having lived with grief most of my life,
This is exactly ‘what grief is’.