and i saw how the holding on, the not letting go of things—how this caused me the most pain.

how not allowing my hands to fall open—naked to the sky, how not trusting my heart to set free the thing whose time had come to leave me, robbed me of the quiet presence of common joy, and how it kept me blind to all the things that i stumbled past—both beauty, and sadness. they both deserve to be felt with the whole body, deserve to be eaten with a hungry mouth.

i missed so much beauty.

i couldn’t hear properly, couldn’t see—didn’t want to, because my eyes were afraid to look away from the thing that was dying in my hands, lest i look back to find it gone, and then allowing guilt to choose me as a home.

i never realised how tired i was from breathing my life into something whose time had come to leave, to die.

— on learning to live again

© Liezel Graham 2020.

Image by Ray Hennessy

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