It’s strange how something as final as your death
Should be bookended by a series of beginnings:
The first Sunday after
The first meal without
The first solo visit to our shared hillside spot
The first time I messaged you with no reply
The first year
And further strange that this loss
Is not only joined to everyone else’s—
Simultaneously wounding and comforting—
But also to every grief I’ve felt
That previously seemed isolated and abstract
Like finding an underlying motif to a background melody
Or spotting a similar hue in every stranger’s iris
This ending is only the beginning
Of a life without you. I take comfort
In the fact that your absence places you
In a legion of the missing
I don’t believe in heaven, but I do believe
In the afterlife of memory
So we held each other, so I vow to you
My sorrow does not conclude with this final line
And cannot be contained
Within the ritual of elegy
Each moment is a constellation
Every word spiralling outwards
Into atoms. I picture your smile
And you are here
*N.B. The title of this poem is taken from a line in Be Holding by Ross Gay
