ISSUE 14 

Romy Ruukel

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Grief Moth

The world is not the world, but what reaches you.
What touches the antennae becomes the universe.
Everything else remains a vast, indifferent elsewhere
that does not speak you.

A porch light is a false star burning a hole in instinct.
The umwelt of the bereaved is a map
with half the features cold and monochrome
and the other half burning, still asking to be read.

“I can’t imagine,” you say.
And often you are telling the truth.

You cannot imagine losing the bodies
inside which your childhood still exists.

You cannot imagine the moment you realize
that you are now the oldest version of the story,
that the corrections are gone.

You cannot imagine the absurd ordinariness of the morning after.
Shoes. Phone calls. Probate forms.
Choosing between this and that as though choosing still matters.
As though the world has not just moved you to the front of the line.
As though the eyes that recognized your face before you did
are not now shut forever.

You cannot imagine being the last surviving witness
to the strange weather system that was your family —
the pressure in the kitchen before rain,
the way your mother said your name when exhausted,
the smell of wool, cigarettes, basement, snow.

The world is not as it is, but as it can be entered.
Night arrives, and with it the old permission to become strange.
Perhaps grief only appears awful to those outside its senses.
Inside, it is a signal, an orientation, a dark-winged summons,
the soul extending what it must
whatever fragile antennae it has left
to find, in the enormous night, what still, impossibly, answers.

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