Gravitational Grief

Grief is a force like gravity; it works over a field that is greater, much greater than the day to day, the hour by hour, or even the week to week. It extends its broad, heavy reach over a vast area of months, perhaps even years-- I cannot yet tell-- and weighs heavily on your subconscious, latent, until it manifests itself, for instance, in dreams, which more and more to me seem like a conduit to some realm beyond, whether this hidden realm lies in the self or in angels and ghosts. Because its reach covers such a vast area of time, its weight is only minimally felt from day to day. But over time-- weeks, months-- this weight accumulates with the self being none the wiser until one night, you find yourself facing an old brick wall in the middle of a walk home, weeping, unable to contain the grief that has mysteriously taken over your conscious, adult self and broken it down into notes of whimpering, sounds of the child that you thought you had outgrown many years ago. You could attribute it to extreme fatigue, hunger, physical exhaustion, daily stress, all leading to some random existential crisis, but the truth is that the grief exists inside of you independent of these negative physical conditions, and is carried around with you through all the day-to-day, week-to-week highs and lows, through all the ephemeral moments of laughter or of worldly troubles. The negative physical conditions only make it easier to break down the self, to tap into this latent abyss-like pool of sadness and release the element within, an element which hijacks the well-controlled, well-composed self of reason and maturity, and reduces it to a heaving soul, primal sounds escaping from a source beyond comprehension, as if the force of the element is too much to bear for one fragile human being and must be released to the night sky, dissipated among the stars, absorbed by the silence of space and whatever mysterious dark matter that exists there. Thus is the mammoth power of grief; it buries deeply inside the individual self, and extends across acres and acres of time.