5 stages

The anger was the easy part. Even when all consuming, debilitating, merciless. It’s easy to keep warm when a fire is raging, when the bed and the stairs and the carpets and everything you’ve built are all ablaze. When the skin peels raw and lips are blistered, but the flames demand more flesh. My heart was full of memories, so the fire was easy to feed.

Although many moments are now charred, I’m glad I fed the anger.

The denial didn’t last long. I questioned how the air we breathed so frequently together could oxidise so differently in the two of us. What was nitrous to me was rust to you, acid even. Still, I wrapped a shirt in cling film just so I could inhale you in the high altitude, life-threatening moments.

The same when my father died.

The bargaining was futile. You surrended to the fact you didn’t want me, I didn’t want to undermine your conviction. Dead horses are not in short supply.

Away from you, I tried to change myself, present differently, rewrite the past. Care about what you care about. See what you see. I have never been a good liar, especially to myself. An even worse negotiator, I reasoned I had lost you. No good losing myself too.

The depression. The depression almost killed me.

Yet, I fear that to not feel, to aquiesce into apathy would be a greater disservice. And if I was to die, that it would be from feeling too much, not nothing at all.

The acceptance has taken me by surprise. I had exhausted the other four so thoroughly, so often, so turbulently that when I noticed that my face was again wet, I mistook the rain for tears. It’s only when I saw the fire was almost out, that I realised that the clouds must have collapsed under their own weight and were forced to release.

Everybody hates the rain except for farmers and firefighters. And as I see what was once all consuming reduced to the small ember, a faint red glow on a pile of ash and charcoal, I thank God for the rain.

It’d be righteous, and much more just, to stay enraged. To sew my badge of indignation onto my still raw skin, to hold a memorial to the assassination of my character and give you a dishonarable discharge for abandoning your post. It would be easier to burn, disintegrate, suffocate.

I choose instead instead to bury the dead. To hold the last kindlings above this paper latern, release it into the sky. Let go, along with the memories, as they float further and further away.

In this way, so will I.