The Impossible Truths of Love

by Hannah Beckerman

Over the past year she has learnt that even with your closest friends, there is a time limit on grief. There is a point at which discomfort creeps around the edges of people’s sympathy, a flicker of impatience visible in their eyes. She has learnt to tuck her grief inside a box behind the wall of her chest, to be taken out and handled with care only when she is alone.

Grief, Annie is discovering, does not follow a neat, linear trajectory. It does not, contrary to popular aphorism, get easier with every day. It does not gradually recede, like a tide that only ebbs but never flows. Instead, it is more like an unpredictable season of tropical storms that can be whipped into a tempest out at sea before crashing onto land, disabling everything in its path, without any warning.