Grief is a bitch.

One of my favorite web series, WandaVision, had a beautiful line that didn't make sense to me until a few months ago. "What is grief, if not love persevering?"

I must say, I have led a perfectly shielded life (touchwood). The last death I remember were both of my grandfathers, one whose body was so cold due to the touch of death and yet warmer than his life, and one whose death i couldn't comprehend until I saw tears on my mother's eye, not a regular sight for my naive stride. I didn't understand love much deeply back then, and yet the smell of cigarettes bring me peace and collecting coins with irrelevant value is one of my hobby, all because those are the only things i can hold onto for them. At one point of time, you can let go of these habits, as you decide that maybe just having a photo of them is enough to celebrate their once-existence. In my still preserving naivety, I believe that death gives you a perfect image, an indestructible view of who you grieve. You have limited imagination to work with, you are not concerned of how the torterous living realm might be treating them as they lay in the obscurity of death, and you have nothing to achieve, but simply acceptance. You swallow yourself whole until their memory only leaves a smile, a sweet taste on your tongue, almost like reliving a childhood memory you cannot restore, yet always pine to get back to. Grief with the assurance of death is a relief.

Yet, grief is a disgusting feeling. Especially when it is reserved for the people you hate, immensely, or atleast you're supposed to. The five, conventional stages of grief do not apply here anymore. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance do not wait for their rightful turns, they battle each other down to the sands, choking each other for victory at specfic moments, and sometimes, rise together when need be. They do not feed themselves with their mother's milk anymore, they feast on the clumps of tissues that grow with them in the womb, but never fully grow up. These five refuse to believe in the hierarchy of their presence anymore, they simply fight, resisting blood and tears, to completely wreck you apart. Anger will be the king for a few moments, finally giving the crown onto Acceptance, and yet slipping it unto the heads of denial. 

I wish there was a moment where I did not grieve the living. Where I did not wonder anymore how that person talks to their parents anymore, a time where someone's walk at a park did not capture my immediate attention simply because I remembered that walk from years ago, where I did not come across a line of their love for me and remember the hatred they hold for me now, or a place where the word 'grief' didn't automatically define them. I wish I didn't grieve a living, a person who I once knew inside out and now I know nothing about, a person whose loss was a nightmare to me. I wish I didn't grieve the living, where I didn't accidentally looked at a photo of their hands and instantly think of their stupid habit of starving, where I didn't see my old self in the person they love now, my old phrases now the vocabulary of a different being. I wish my grieve was for a static, immovable object that stayed the same as I grew around it, but I believe that I'll never allow it. 

My grieve will subside. It will give up its constant urge to grow and rise. It will be bound to a stunted tumor, and no longer see my demise in its costant hold. But it'll only require one thing- and that is my own promise to myself, that these accidents will remain accidental and not precise, and then maybe,one day, I'll know lesser enough for my grief to die, probably building its built for the next design.