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Thursday, November 24, 2016

I.

 Heat rises and stews along my hairline beneath my golden cap. I skim cement squares like pages of a book-each chapter intentional. The earth around me is amber and bright against a crystalline sky...my autumnal snow globe.
 My shins strain beneath the grey canvas slacks that thickly cover my frame and bell widely below my knee. "Elephant bells," she called them. Her face is clear to me. She holds several needles between her pursed lips as she hand-finishes her product.
 I stoop to examine my calves and feet. As I massage them for comfort, I notice shiny silver strands along my hemline beginning to fray. The pain comes. I inhale slowly. November chills the warm spaces of my nose, esophagus, and belly.
 She is not here. I am going to have to fix this. 
 I stand in stillness beneath the weighty truth of death. I consider returning home, sliding out of my slacks, putting them into a drawer for safe keeping, and never considering them again. I have hidden the majority of my grandmother's trinkets. Nostalgia is an all-consuming sinkhole. I avoid the deep missing despite its intentionality with me. "The Deep" tends to invade during my most vulnerable hours. No matter the season, it contrasts itself against the stark winter of my mind. In the fashion of a true undertaker it ushers me into everything I cannot tolerate and do not want to accept. During these tours of myself everything liquifies. My breast-stroking brain wades in bottomless waters of questions my mouth has never had the courage to choke up.
  I am a woman composed of only extravagant and barren rooms. Strangely, I am far more willing to investigate the sad rooms of myself than the happy ones. I fear adulthood coupled with dread will disenchant the favored scenes of my past. I cannot afford to take a sledgehammer to the glorious design of my childhood hope.
 In the midst of my contemplation, I study our hands. We were are identical.

 She gave up. 
 I won't. 

 Despite the appeal of drowning in a mattress until spring, I lock eyes with Main Street and keep inching forward. What is the alternative? Become a dead rock gathering moss beneath borrowed sheets, the last patchwork quilt of her hands, and my heavy duvet? The Tennessee winter is not yet frigid enough to justify this depth of burrowing.

 I will wait to properly grieve until December. 

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