Exercises in Grief

A strange year, all said...

1
A strange year, all said. My glasses broke and the new prescription, I’m fairly certain, is incorrect. It’s been months and my eyes have not adjusted. I’m detecting a sense of lag, even right now, like a dying mouse on a slow computer screen.

2
Snow turned and slid from the window sill while I was doing our taxes which I found unfair (the pile-on of taxes introduced to the situation) considering she had now, at once, met the two certainties of life, a kind of double whammy. I prepared the return though I’ll have you know I waited as long as I could. I waited so long the CRA called me. The CRA doesn’t call anyone.

3
It’s worth saying, I work hard to not measure my life in loss but by what I have gained.

4
For the first half of today, I forgot you were gone. Then, suddenly, I asked myself why I wasn’t more sad. The only return on sadness is more sadness.

5
On such a day, finding myself incapable of love—a recurring discovery—I know to commit to the labour of utility. Cooking and cleaning, tidying up, rearrange the living room furniture, perhaps. But I am aware of the futility of this labour, too, its diminishing returns, the negative utility; for was it ever really enough to drive her around, wash her hair, do the laundry and fold it in thirds?

6
All said, I consider myself the right density of naive to call what I’ve done my life’s work. I just haven’t done it yet. I haven’t finished anything.

7
What do they call a short memory but for the future? A lack of imagination? In theory, the short memory feels kind and forgiving, airy, with a slight tinge of charm, if I may; while having no imagination, or being shortsighted, comes across as thoughtless, far more ignorant, cursed, even. I think I prefer the question of perception versus reality. Admittedly, one of the toughest nuts to crack.

8
Tomorrow, none of the above will be true for I will be a changed man—another tax season will have gone, the end of spring next, and eventually the real new year, September, will come and go, when, finally, this One More Year will end, the calendar’s turn!, a new, lesser year appearing. I will have had eight to ten hours of sleep. I will have known the evil of time (its goodness, too). I will begin again.

9
We constantly decide what one another deserve. Unfair it may seem, it is a power we all possess.

10
This sentence is a list of everyone in my life. Use your imagination.

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