on loss

i am listening to tchaikovsky quartet no. 1 in D by the borodin string quartet on vinyl in my living room. jane austen sits next to me as well as the letter and poems typed out on one of those vintage type writers written by a friend probably on his floor late in the night. he is talking to me about my "writer's block" problem and at the end of the letter he tells me to do what i want in the moment all the time no matter what, and not just with writing either. i think i know what he means but then again i think i don't. (he probably imagines me having the urge to write and then resisting it due to self-consciousness or something like that but really the urge is never there anymore). but there are these poems and some of them say the word "she" and whenever anybody says the word she in a poem i always imagine the she is me. i imagine that i affected their life so profoundly, even for a flickering instant, that they wrote about me. subtley. i think i like to have that affect on people, floating in the background like a ghost. not important enough to remember always, or to be invited to the party but, looking back at me with retrospect, worthy of a small mention in a simple poem.

i just got off the phone with him actually. we talked about the recent death of my friend, nadyne. we talked about my writing. i told him i've taken the pressure off of me. that to experience loss is allow all the words to drain out of me. and without judgement on myself, without any pressure or expectation, i wait for this so called "writer's block", perhaps just a myth, to be gone from me. if even just for a moment, for one poem, for one sentence, for one word. for the right word at the right moment could mean everything. like cash's chapters in as i lay dying. short and perhaps the most meaningful. and so i am letting myself empty. i am letting grief play its part in my living life and my written life. what do you say when your friend falls 30 feet to their death? nothing. you don't say anything. because i can't even begin.