Morning Walk
Heavy.
If I look past the ground
I might drown
in these feelings.
I’d rather look down
at the gravel,
the grass.
No need to look further
than what is right here
and right now.
–
Noon
I keep forgetting you are dead,
like it’s someone else’s life
or another woman’s downcast fear.
–
Night
The bearing of this burden
is harder than leaves
refusing to fall
and trapping the city
in smog, decay,
and in old iron dreams.
July 2023
It was around 3:00 am when my boyfriend of seven years got a call. As I am often early to bed, I only heard his cry from the other room, taking me out of sleep to wonder why he was making strange noises so late at night. I ran in and learned it was the call no parent should ever have to get.
His only daughter, Celeste, was dead. I remember losing all feeling in my legs, a common symptom, I’m told, of shock. Hoping it had to be a terrible misunderstanding, we raced to the apartment complex where the sight of police cars and ambulance told us this was very, very real. Celeste Oriana Stokes was found dead in her boyfriend’s apartment. She was 23. Coroner’s reports would confirm there was cocaine and fentanyl in her system. Her boyfriend had waited 16 hours to report her death.
No investigation ever took place. It was more than two days before I could feel my legs again. My boyfriend had lost the most precious person in his world forever, and it could never be undone.
October 2024
These poems were ones I wrote in a haze. Interestingly, I have no memory of writing them, except for one mental snapshot of looking down for a long time at some concrete.
It continues to take support, alone time, grief counseling, and group and individual therapy to come to terms with this loss. Art therapy, both writing and painting, was instrumental in the processing and acceptance of myriad emotions and questions we will never get answered.
