Someday, Maybe

by Onyi Nwabineli

To grieve is to frighten the people you love.

But grief torches your capacity for both sympathy and empathy. I am nothing but a selfish collection of exposed nerve endings.

It doesn’t get better; it just doesn’t get any worse.

Better to make tea and pat knees and act like this is a nasty case of flu rather than an all-encompassing torture that refuses to fade. Grief is not neat. Pain is not dignified. Both are ugly, visceral things. They rip holes through you and burst forth when they see fit. They are constant, controlling companions, and if they don’t destroy you or your relationships with others, they certainly go a long way to damaging you, disfiguring you internally and altering your existence so much so that when you are lucid enough to look at yourself, at your life, you are astounded (and often disgusted) by what you find staring back at you.

You spend your time learning that you should not tie your happiness up in another person, that the love of another should only underpin your life instead of dominate it, that men are not the prize. You learn these things, but in the end you devote yourself to a man, because you are nineteen and he brings you books and is almost physically perfect to the point it hurts to look at him sometimes. Like staring into the sun.

The sun has the audacity to be shining, pouring its cheerfulness with great pomposity into my dark little world.

Moments like these become part of you, are imprinted for the small eternity that you are.

“We loved each other,” I tell her because the words need to exist as spoken by me. We did. Imperfectly. As all humans love.

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”