Checking for missing pieces

My friend Abi told me once I was giving my brain too much credit, that other parts of the body feel things too. I regularly feel the urge to stick a skewer into my chest and pop out my heart. Just look at it a bit. See who it is. Pop it back in. Grief is stored in the lungs, Abi said.

I don’t know what organ stores the feeling of casual emptiness. When nothing is wrong but also nothing feels right. I think it might be in my throat.

Everything feels like glass these days. Like one wrong move and the whole floor shatters. I picked up Camus wall art the other week. A silly floral-border circling the quote. An invisible summer trapped in a fingerprint-cloudy frame.

I know none of this means anything. That there is no endgame, no complete, no point at which I have lived a meaningful life amidst the absurdity. There is no meaning, and barely any time. But here it all is. In my heart and my lungs and my throat. This missing… something.

My friend Lauren told me once that the missing is forever. “I think contentment must come from feeling the missing pieces in every stage and remembering like, ‘Ah, yes, there is no end goal. There’s only now.’” I copied into my notes.

It’s spring now. Or late winter. The years have started to race. I’m not ready for things to grow. I did not hibernate, did not slow down like I said that I would. I just kept walking around with last summer’s dead leaves tangled in my hair.

It is lonely, all of this stretching. Grasping greedy fingers at things that look like they might dam the river of loss. But they just pierce new holes and walk away with slivers of muscle.

I think maybe it was a bad idea, how much we move. How everyone I love has scattered to their corner of the world and in turn parts of myself are walking through a hundred cities. There are places I left, but not really. There are places I’ve never been with walls that echo my name. And there’s the place I am, which should know everything but often feels like barely an acquaintance.

I can’t stop wishing it all felt more whole. That all this missing piled up in my lungs would clear. I wonder, if I could pop out my heart, how many holes would be in it, where all I’d have to go to find the missing pieces.

My favorite thing to feel is small. Like nothing I do affects anything. The ocean used to do it. Now I stand on the sand and think about how much it will rise.

I never wanted any of this power. I don’t know how to get rid of it. Sometimes I stay up til 3 AM just to slow down time. Just to have a few more hours with things as they are. I don’t know how to settle. I suppose that’s not part of the deal.

Now will be gone in a moment. Maybe the next one will feel more whole.