alexander lazarus wolff
After Jenny Boully
1 What they don’t tell you is how much loneliness can weigh on you. Consider the silence of an empty room. There is a density to emptiness. And loneliness is emptiness, it is yearning. There is a stream of light filtering through my window, seeking me. But I know it must weaken and fade. That is loss. Each day is loss.
2 Sigmund Freud said that the end of grief comes when you can sever your emotional attachments from the lost object and reinvest it into a new object. In this sense, grief comes not from loss but from the inability to replace it with something else.
3 Loss repeats itself. Loss consumes light like a shadow, swallowing the stream of sun pouring through the wind. Loss is tendrils of smoke, obscuring the mind like wisps of clouds in the sky.
4 A love song has started playing. The singer, though, has never known love. The best one can do is transform pain into art, the act of sublimation. What art would there be if not for loss? Life is an attempt at sublimation.
5 Outside, people walk down the street; a couple embraces. I sit here, an onlooker, staring at a world I cannot touch.
6 September 3rd, 2023
7 There is always a desperation that comes on when the connection is severed. Loss forces you to run toward the one causing you pain, the one who has always been your comfort, the one leaving you. Even after that initial impulse in the first months of grieving, you fade into a limbo state where there are still thoughts, but the loss of them is growing. I think this might be the most frightful thing about the process of grief, knowing that all that you’ve invested has faded like a dream, that even someone that was once so special to you can shatter to fragments of recollection.
8 This life sweeps all to their end, and what remains is merely a memory. Yet, time presses forward. The world outside continues to glide by: people mill about on the sidewalk, cars throttle down the street, the sun performs its demise at dusk.
9 Silence is a blank page that will never be filled. Though it’s a tolerable silence, for I know I can fill it at will. The silence that lingers in my apartment is something that reminds me that I’m alone, untouched even by the thoughts of others. Just as there is a difference between acceptance and resignation, there is one between solitude and loneliness. Aristotle said whoever is able to delight in solitude is either a beast or a god.
10 After every performance, the music must cease, and the listeners go home. Then, in the concert hall, there is only a silence that settles over the rows of empty seats.
11 What is the difference between acceptance and resignation?
12 The photos have turned black and white. Even if not, their content is sealed by cellophane, sequestered to a time where there was a voice in the air, the sound of footsteps, a breath on my neck; not this empty room where there is only the hum of the AC, the sound of a page being turned, a keystroke.
13 A single beam of light lances through my window and lands on my desk. From my window, I can see people in the pool laughing, chatting, pattering around. The surface of the pool ripples to crests of aqua, light playing across the waters. The scenario seems to swim with a vitality that is sealed away by a pane of glass. Yet, there is still a sun in my core. At times, I feel it brighten, and I have a lifting sensation. The world then seems to turn to a silence that is serene, a silence in which thoughts still instead of echo.
14 There is the loss of love, the memory of a smile fading, and all of it makes me makes me feel cumbersome, as if I take up too much space both emotionally and physically. Loss always changes your perception of yourself. You can think What if I did something differently? or How much of this did I cause? But those thoughts are nothing, but a failed attempt at trying to regain control over the situation. The reality is that you are powerless in the face of emptiness. But it is safer to blame yourself rather than recognize how much is out of your control, how much you can lose.
15 Right now, there is only an empty bed and phone calls unanswered.
16 There are times when I feel the air embrace me, times when the night is not a black sea in which the stars drown. The times when equanimity rushes in a lightness are intermittent like the shafts of light that shine through drifting clouds. And I’ve learned to be grateful for that shrapnel of pleasure. They are the moments that allow me to thrust myself on in this world with its car accidents and funerals. Yet, when will my bones hold a stillness?
17 Time flies by; the day decays as usual, and I’m left staring on. There is an emptiness that comes on as the sun dips below the horizon, as the light weakens and night spreads in from the corners of the sky. Night heightens absence. There is the possibility that I will learn to be at peace with an empty room, and all this grief will only be the thought of a thought. But, for now, I must content myself with the whistle of the wind, with these silent letters on the page.
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Alexander Lazarus Wolff’s writing appears in The Best American Poetry website, Poets.org, Cherry Tree, The Citron Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, he teaches and studies at the University of Houston, where he holds the Inprint MD Anderson Foundation Fellowship. You can read more of his work at www.alexanderlazaruswolff.com