Jagged Edges

Prose and poetry on grief and holding integrity over closure

I haven’t written since Li died. Nothing worth sharing, anyway.

I’ve tried, of course. Spent hours trying to write something “meaningful” and “aligned with my experience” and “resonant with my readers.”

There’s this common idea that when you can’t get the words out, it’s a “block”—something in the way that you just need to push past or work around. But that’s not what this is. It doesn’t feel like an obstacle. It feels like something beneath me shifted.

Li was a constant in my life for seventeen years. He was with me through divorce, depression, sickness, buying a home, autistic realization, and so much more. He was part of the way I settled into a room, part of the way I noticed the world around us, part of the way I moved through the day and our life together.

When that’s gone, you don’t just “lose a pet.” You lose a primary coordinate—a load-bearing anchor. The world doesn’t look the same because the person looking at it isn’t oriented the same way anymore.

There’s a pressure to find the point. To smooth out the jagged edges of an experience until it fits into something that resolves.

But that kind of resolution feels like flattening. If I tried to force some kind of “peace” or “meaning” onto this right now, it wouldn’t be true. It would just make it easier to say. Easier to convince myself and others that everything is okay.

I’m letting it stay unresolved. It’s the only way I know to keep it honest. Li mattered, and the space he left behind is huge. I’m not trying to fill that space or make it smaller so it’s easier to carry.

I’d rather stay with it as it is than make it “better” by making it less real. Li matters to me more than I have the words or feelings to express. I’m not going to compress that. And I think that is okay.

It’s been a month now. This is the first thing I’ve written since.

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Refining

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Li

I took a deeper drag than intended. 

Coughed up a lung.
                                     My senior kitty

pawed the 
                      space 
                                    clear
     between us. 

I miss him as much as I thought
                                                           I would. 

     I gently stroke the 
                                          space 
                       between 
     his eyes. 

They blink
                     slowly. 

∞

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