The Tale of Grief.

The thing about grief is that it steps in slowly, making room for itself without letting anyone know. I can imagine it sluggishly walking around, undoing wounds that I convinced myself no longer existed.

Perhaps it would have been better if, even for a brief moment, the entire world went silent as someone fell into the pit of grief so that it would be acknowledged. After all, that is the only thing it has been needing since the start of time.

In psychology, we learn that a negative stroke is much better than none at all, if not a positive one because anything and everything needs acknowledgment. I see you, I understand you even if I may not be able to hold you close. I discern your presence and I hope that can be enough. And perhaps, that is exactly what sadness wants to hear as well.

It sits there quietly, like a thorn in the middle of one's being. Enough to cause a slight ache but not enough to be insufferable. Little does it know, as human beings, we love nothing more than beasts in the making, even if taming is not a skill of proficiency to us.

And so, I carry forward the tale as old as times, just how it's meant to go, much like a fairy tale; I wait for the feeling to leave, almost in an animated fashion. I fill my coffee up to the brim of the cup each morning and take exceptionally huge steps on my way to the university, spend time outdoors, and watch cartoons that I used to love as a child. Somehow...anyhow, convince me that the thorn does not exist. That I am in fact, the happiest this world has seen.

Heck, a runaway sunshine character straight out of a rom-com.

And it's ironically humorous because I can feel it grow in me, the prick piercing through my veins. The pain screams inside me, louder each day, but yet it remains voiceless and unheard.

Even though it's meant to, the world does not shake.

My palms grow sweaty and I'm thrust backward by the intensity of my mind, but on the outside, I am just another entity sitting at the back of the class with a pen in my hand waiting for the clock arms to move swiftly yet quickly through the surface of the clock.

And the realization divulges upon me half-heartedly, I have to grasp it with both of my hands. It says you look happier than you are on the days you are not. And I know it is the truth after all.

Why?

Because it is so much easier to believe that the myth they call agony does not exist.

God forbid, it ever finds its way to me, inside me, and builds itself a home.

So I continue to play the game until I realize that all this time, I was only but a child holding a shard of glass in my hand, knowing damn well that it cuts. Except that the cut or the blood pouring from it could not stop me, but it was the pleasure of holding something forbidden that urged me to not loosen my grip.

The predictable plot twist, however, is that the truth did not change; the glass could still cut, and it did.

And before I knew it, I was catching my breath in a room full of people breathing, trying to pick myself up when I hadn't even fallen, keep my thoughts from falling prey to the headache inside my mind.

Until...

Midst this internalized chaos, the world around me whispered louder than any scream;

It has cut

you are bleeding

the grief has seeped in.

And even though I am sinking into a bed of black roses, a fading image in front of my eyes, I know that the pleasure of holding grief close to me, like a broken piece of glass, was far more sensual than laying it down would have been.