Something About Letting Go

...start living through the missing and stop avoiding the lessons. Let go, while keeping on. Forward is the only place to go from here.

— excerpt from "Something About Letting Go"

Living in a verb state has been difficult to say the least. I recently had a friend read my poem ‘Something About Letting Go’ and he asked me where I was when I wrote it. As I recalled the memory I realized that I was in a verb state - the act of constant doing. We don’t get to stop; even amidst grief. We may slow or pause, but nothing ever really stops. 

Releasing a balloon on the first birthday without my friend, Vince. 

While in the thickest parts of my grief I often found myself laying on the floor or sitting in my grandfather’s chair, focusing in on my breath, writing or speaking aloud while being captured by my voice notes. Even when I didn’t always wash my hair or change my clothes, I never stopped going forward in some capacity.

Letting go had to become a practice with rituals; especially while feeling like so much of myself was being stripped away every time I lost another person close to me. How do you continue on when you’ve lost so much? The only answer I can find is that

healing is a verb,

so I’m going to continue to lean into the verb state of life, and

take steps

forward even if they don’t move me very far.