Chapter Thirty: Griff (~jinghan)

PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Select secrets are then posted on the PostSecret website, or used for PostSecret’s books or museum exhibits. (Wikipedia) And every now and again I go to the blog site and read through the secrets, revelling in the beauty and the fear present in such truth. What I see in it is that the human race shares so much common feeling, and yet we still struggle with truth within ourselves. I always wondered whether I’d ever have a ‘secret’.

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I don’t like the word Grief. It sounds too much like asking for… something. Attention? Pity?

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When you’ve lived nineteen and a half years of your life without having to deal with death, you start to believe that you’ll never be touched by Grief. (Goldfish don’t count, even if you cry.) And I thought I had got away without when my grandmother passed away in the early months of this year.

I hadn’t.

Instead, I had run away from myself.

No more uni. No more exams. I spent the first week of post-exam holiday meeting up with friend every day of the week. But at the end of the week, exhausted and with no where left to run…

I picked up a book: Chosen By A Horse a personal memoir by Susan Richards. I was about three quarters of the way through the book when my drink bottle leaked on it and I spend a night drying it page by page in front of a fan-heater and then a few days airing out the spine and then a few days pressing it under some heavy books to  flatten the crinkled pages. I flicked opened the still slightly crinkled pages and read on from where I had last been up to. In the end, the abused horse she took on from a local animal rescue society dies.

To love without an echo is the death knell of the soul. Foolishly, the soulless body grows anyway. marches into the future without it’s nucleus, without its self, bonsaied by this echoless love. Hotshot’s [a horse] grief was big and bold, as unrestrained and open as his affection had been. Like mine. Lay Me Down [the rescued horse]  had given us that, an echo. For me, it was the first I could remember feeling such love and then such grief, the first since the numbing years of my childhood and then alcohol.

It wasn’t that I related to the situation, but something in the openness of the mentioning of grief that struck a deep sadness within myself. I couldn’t sleep after that. So I found a soft nostalgic playlist on my ipod wrapped my doona around myself and cried. I cried for discovering a terrible truth; I cried for the fear of the truth; I cried for the beauty of the truth; I cried for the loneliness of the truth.

I have a secret: I thought I had got away without grief, but all I had been doing was running away from myself.

At times during the semester I had felt like I couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate, maybe I had in fact I had been avoiding it. I was stressed when I was doing things, but even more stressed when I wasn’t. I was, I regret to realise, angry at people for reasons I could not grasp, and were not their fault. I was overly dependent and suffocatingly so on people who could not help me. And now I was feeling empty and scared. Like I had run away from myself, and now I was lost. I felt like I was someone on the outside but fading into no one on the inside, and it seemed a terrible fate. I would much rather be someone on the inside and no one on the outside any day.

Now, perhaps, is the time to stop running and refind myself.

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I don’t like the word Grief. It sounds too much like asking for… something. Attention? Pity?

…Help?