A lying shroud

m I mad to miss the pain of your loss?

After initially numb, flattened by the utterly incomprehensible gift of spiritual closure, of forgiveness,

I am now bereft.

Was this bloody burden truly such an integral appendage as to leave me stumbling at the absence of its crushing weight?

I seem to have forgotten the me that lay hidden beneath the shroud of loss. It’s cloying, groping roots reached in and wrapped about the throat of my inner child -who was once shone with passion and innocent hope- and strangled it.

And I was deaf to my own cries

Seduced, drunk on the exquisite agony of your absence, the regurgitated memories of soft moments, the stillborn longing held close and rocked in a mockery of life.

Oh, how I wished for life to once more whisper into that corpse...

I held it up, moved its lips and ventriloquized the words we would say when finally reunited. I wept tears in floods against its cold flesh with arms wrapped tight, pretending it was you.

Such abject fantasies replaced whatever I was before

Hopes once clear and bright now become merely roadmaps to self inflicted failure.

The shroud was lifted but nothing hides beneath.

I am no longer there