Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasped no more--
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
-Lord Tennyson
My first thought is that my lackluster cousin and his even less lustrous wife are naming their child Tennyson, assuredly with no thought to precision meter, delicate assonance, alliteration, and other literary nuances, or even to a bleak future of inevitable beatings from schoolmates. Will they call him Tenny for short? Poor child. Still just a fetus and already emasculated.
To the poem, though. For me, suffering a loss yields a suffocating quiet. The world is no longer colors and textures splashing and singing. It is a muted scale of gray blurred around the edges; expressionless and blank, like Grief drank the feeling out the day and left only drops of numbness.
I am functional, deliberate, effective. I watch and hear others feel freely, but I cannot. I'm stuck in a world of empty and fill it, and fill it, and fill it until there is nothing left to fill with. And then it's real. The richness of emotion that surges intensely and spirals forward is a savory, painful island in the middle of the gray, gray ocean where I was lost, forgetting how to feel.
Suffering never feels so sacred as that relieving moment when it erupts out of emotional paralysis.
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