Out of Love

by Hazel Hayes

Every time I closed my eyes I was met with a flurry of memories that seemed to lash against the inside of my head. They came to me unbidden: the good and the bad ones, the significant and the banal, and among the debris I saw fragments of a life I might have lived. If I’d just done this. If I’d just said that. I played out every scenario, every what-if a hundred times and more and I never reached a solution. Because there was none. Every morning, somewhere between dreaming and waking, the blurry memory of what had happened slid into focus and I cried anew for what I’d lost. One night, my pain became palpable; my emotions were manifesting as real, physical agony. I lay in bed, hands on my chest in some sort of weird attempt to grab onto my own heart and hold it together. I was sure that it was literally ripping apart inside me. How else could it possibly hurt this much? My mind, too, felt torn. Pieces of it were coming away and I wondered if I would ever get them back. My body moved about as though independent of me, fists clenching, feet scraping against the sheets, all of me, every inch, agitated and incapable of rest. Somewhere, deep in that night, the pain consumed me. The thought of being happy again was inconceivable. And even though all I wanted was to sleep, the idea of waking up, still here, still feeling this way, was torturous.

My usual information-gathering instinct was useless in this case – no matter how much I learned about death, she’d still be gone and I’d still be grieving