My honesty is relative to the amount of audience that I think I have. Little to none. Apart from spam. Yet here I am. Still talking. Never fear Mon petit reader, you are still saved from the official duty of my diary. If you think I am all out and over-share, trust me there are so many more secrets in my psyche. Compelling or alarming? Hung jury.

Grief. Grief, grief, grief, fucking grief. It is a cup of hot coffee held by a stranger waiting around a corner for me. It’s always an accident and never anticipated and fruitlessly blameless. It is seeing your ghost on a train. My eyes, swearing it’s you, my brain knowing better. It is one of my heart’s deepest wishes colliding against an immutable reality that it will never be.

If I am sounding dramatic, it is because I am back in a nightmare loop. Let me wax lyrical. It’s so pre postmodern writing. What is eloquence? A month ago I had a dream and realised that when I looked at my hands there was nothing wrong with them. They were no longer covered in blood or honey and I was no longer afraid to touch anything. In my dream state I felt relief and wonder that they had been returned to me. I no longer feared this part of me that represented my ability to physically confirm my perception of reality.

I was afraid to touch things because I was afraid to mark them, maybe with my grief but most likely with my guilt (blood=guilt=catholic=always). If I could severe myself from validating what I thought was real by perpetually holding myself back for fear of the ‘destructive’, shit would be ok. I think that’s what I meant when I once wrote (in my great novella that I constantly delete thousands of words out of) “I can’t even touch my own grief”.

Good things never last. Last night I had a dream where they cut off my hands after I was beheaded. As I stand there headless, I am told to put my hands on the wooden chopping block. They are next. I am looking at my decapitated self from the crowd; I am a third person observer. Of course I have to observe myself from outside myself. I am blind, I have no head and therefore no eyes but somehow it simultaneously becomes a tactile experience. I can feel the grain of the wood, dry and smooth under my fingertips, sticky with blood. I am aware of the feeling in my own hands but I see myself with someone else’s eyes. Even though I know that I’m looking at myself. And those ‘second eyes’ are my eyes. I may not have multiple personalities (hung jury) but I can definitely split my subconscious apart with ease (shit super power). It’s like that time I watched myself drown in my dream.

Once they take my hands. I feel nothing. I am a phantasm looking at my dismembered body. The last image I wake up to is, me on the gallows with no head and no hands. That shit was fucked up.

If I can reach out and allow myself to touch the things around me, unafraid that I am steeping in my grief and causing irrevocable damage to everything and everyone in my grasp. Well this is progress in accepting.

I don’t know how many words I have put together to try explain this all. How many ways I need to say the same thing.

No matter how much I will my friend into being, no matter how much I want him back, no matter how much my hands reach out to touch him and to confirm that he exists in atoms and cells that are so compact they create a life form, my sight or ability to perceive won’t bend to what is real and what is real is he is gone. And God fucking damn. It still gets me like a right hook when I’m not looking. I think my psyche is gently pushing me to admit that if I can’t touch him with my hands then he is lost to me forever. Accept it. I am stubborn and my dreams are mean.

When you lose someone you lose them through each sense, it is a physical experience. My eyes can still see him in the photos of us, my ears can still hear his voice when I read his letters, I still smell ‘his’ cologne when worn by another man, taste is meals we shared together but touch. I have lost touch. And soon I will lose voice. And even sight fades; the photographed blue is not how I remember the true colour of his eyes. These pieces always seem to dissemble and reassemble until I have a juxtaposition of what was real and what is memory and what I want so badly is to be able to touch it with my hands, for memory and reality to come back together.

Ps. I’m not even high, I’m sad which is worse.

xx SJ