diary
Waning is the phase for banishing, for excising what has died and clearing the ground for whatever arrives next. I read that on my own website, which is a profoundly amusing sentence to be obliged to type in earnest, and then, absurdly, I went and actually did the thing.
Three hundred and forty photographs of a life I keep auditioning for a return to. Him, chiefly. Us. A version of myself who appears so hopeful in them that it is genuinely difficult to hold her gaze. I had kept them ‘just in case,’ which is the phrase we deploy for hope we are too proud to name plainly and too frightened to bury.
I understand now that keeping them was not love. It was a refusal to permit the story to be finished, a small daily vigil maintained for a thing that had already, quietly, without ceremony, concluded some months before I was willing to notice.
Grief requires a vessel, or it seeps into everything and dilutes the whole of a life to a pale, permanent ache. The waning moon was not magic. It was a threshold, a line inscribed across time that announced: on this side you were still waiting, and on that side you have elected to stop.
Gone. I wept, properly, the good variety that is more drainage than despair, the kind that leaves you exhausted and clean. And then I felt perhaps four kilograms lighter, as though I had been carrying a phone’s worth of unfinished past about in my actual arms. The moon did nothing. But it furnished a date, and on occasion a date is the entire permission you were quietly waiting to be granted.
the diary lives on a site with a moon phase, a daily oracle and a shelf of things reviewed with feeling.
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