I think I died last week {poem}

my heart broke and it killed me

I woke up a few days ago and
everything was not quite how I remembered.

(one look at my phone
tells me the worst of it is still the same)

every horror still true, still happening
to the least of us and to all of us.

but something about everything is
not quite what it was before,
if before is a place I used to live.

I feel it in the weariness, in my
cortisol-soaked skin.

it’s a cold-deep sadness I can’t shake off.
I think I died last week.

and there are hot tears on my face
because this means I wasn’t strong enough
in some other when, and
I disappeared when I meant to stay.

I tell you I am so good at grieving
that I grieve a reality I no longer occupy.

when it passes maybe this new strangeness
is a reminder that each day is a new choice,

not that I failed;
but in another when, I rested for a last time.
I must have been so tired.

and I’m tired still, bone-marrow tired,
waking up into a vaguely unfamiliar world.

I’ve been dead before and came back to the same place I left.
this is different. I feel fragile.

last week my heart broke and it killed me,
but today I am alive, cold and broken and quiet.

oh my ancestors and spirits, oh Loki, Rhiannon, Cha,
if this is a second chance, I hope that there is hope here for me.

I am having a difficult, challenging, and indescribably strange time. Everything I hear about this month’s astrology is that it is here to break communities along their pre-existing fault lines. That what we can do is re-make but not the same as before. That it will take all of who we are and then some. That the only way out is through, and the only way is with each other. The breaking and re-making is happening in my own family, in our own smaller holy spaces we share with one another. And I think my heart broke too far last week. And yet I am still here and breathing and I think that I will still be here and breathing tomorrow too.

xox,
Nix

featured image is a photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash