Year 2 Grief journey

Logan Crane Nov 204-899-3921-May30th 2024

Dedicated to Laila Biali

IT’S AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB OF SEVERAL BILLION

Wake up, you slumbering Life. You have grown too familiar with the lie that keeps you fed but never nourished. Too comfortable inside the status quo, that well-decorated room where nothing grows but everyone says, isn’t this enough? Wake up like the first time your lover smiles and something secret begins to unfold between my words and your hidden place. Once I have tasted the sound of your voice between my lips, it is almost as if Life itself might finally kiss me. Make a wish of me. Make a choice. Make a move. Say my name like you mean it and prove me wrong for believing I am unlovable, as if you could. As if Love would ever agree to become a witness against me. Still, this mind screams inside the body, pulling thought from thought, knot from knot, trying to solve the ache with another plan. Caught in the old mistake: confusing the chase for happiness with the courage to be alive. Empty hands reach for the sky, but the sky does not explain itself. Morning comes. Your eyes doubt. Your body knows. And there it is, the bloody contrast between who you are, what you want, and the life you keep pretending is close enough. At least your feet still tell the truth. One step. Then the staggering next. This is how waking comes. Not as a choir. Not as lightning. Not as someone finally choosing you. But as the unbearable mercy of seeing clearly what you can no longer betray. The pulse runs wild. The teeth rattle. The skin rises. The muscles strain against all the silence you trained them to carry. Hold on to the procession that pulled you from the soft grave of almost enough. Do not mistake the dream for freedom. Do not mistake the familiar for home. Do not mistake being wanted for being known. Listen. The song in your head hurts because it is true. And all you know for certain is this: you have not been honest in far too long. So wake up, you slumbering Life. Wake up before the lie learns your voice and starts calling itself Love.  ~ MIRA

I spent years trying to outrun the darkness. As though healing were a race. Then one ordinary morning I noticed my attention. How it kept returning to the same abandoned house. The same hand unwound from mine. Naked intimacies with fire, ignoring the burn. As though love were something I had to earn. The same cup where your lips last touched it. The same wound begging to become my only religion. No one told me then I was never responsible for the darkness laid upon me. Only for the quiet miracle as my attention remembers to love me as I am. Not to force. Not to run. Just... stay. The kind that sits beside the dark without becoming it. The kind that remembers there is more sky than storm. The kind that notices a bird improvising her song even while the heart is still breaking.  Perhaps awakening is nothing more mysterious than this. Love looking so gently at suffering until suffering forgets to follow me home. ~MIRA

Dedicated to a beautiful Soul walking beside me from across the veil.

Do not call me unattached because I have learned not to beg at every closing door. This heart has not become clean. It has become weathered. There are names I no longer say out loud that still change the temperature of my body. There are hands I have released that still arrive in dreams as if the soul keeps its own appointment book. I know how to pray without building a prison around the Beloved. I know how to open and still let the river move on. This did not come from holiness. It came from loss. From repetition. From standing in the aftermath with my nervous system on fire like a city skyline bright with lightning I have mistaken longing for prophecy. I have called absence care. I have watched my body reach for what my spirit had already surrendered. So no, I am not untouched. I am touched everywhere. By grief. By beauty. By the unbearable intimacy of being human with no guarantee that love will stay where I place it. Still, I refuse the immaculate heart. Let me be marked. Let tenderness leave evidence. Let love ruin the small false self that thought safety meant never opening again. At three in the morning when memory walks through me wearing someone else’s voice, I do not call it weakness. I call it proof. Something entered. Something mattered. Something sacred found a door in me and left it open. ~MIRA #brave #canadian #poet

#griefjourney