Surreal

Thirty days...it's been thirty days....
Wow....

I can't believe it, really--
I can't even begin to process
how four weeks of missing her,
of mourning her, of going
through the motions,
making lists of things to do
(yet haven't even begun to get done)
day in, tears out,
fitting the pieces back together
somehow, some way,
but, wow.
A month?!

I can't quite wrap my head
around that.  Nope.  Sorry.
Not when the pictures seem
so much faker to me than the
memories seared into my brain
dug into my arms, scarring,
dragging me out of my tear-soaked
sleepless reverie,
kicking and screaming.

Tears come, naturally.
That they do.
Come, that is.
Again, and again, and again....
At home, work, in the car,
in the damned store, for Heaven's sake--
with the smells, the laughs,
the speed-dialing to
revel in the great shoes I found on sale,
they have two, do you--
oh, wait, what am I doing?

I can't seem to think straight these days,
let alone write, speak, work, act,or feel--
totally surreal, complete with wilted clocks.
Wilted me, rather
(or at least it seems that way).
Imitating the art I love most. 

I stand,
"Hallucenogenic Toreador" that I am,
twirling my tissue for a cape,
tissue stained and twisted by the
persistence of memory--
of her, of us, of everything BEFORE--
head swollen into Big Apple
a-la-Magritte-style
as I tap my "this is not a pipe" life....
I'm not quite right, I'm afraid....

Seems strange to look at her pictures.
Pictures I've stuck all over the place--
on my wall, in my purse,
on my computer screen--
because that's not what I see,
not what I feel
when I close my eyes and
listen with my heart--
her voice in my head warms me better
than any clothes she bought me,
her eyes glow more beautifully
than any Tiffany lamp she ever gave me.
Even the one with dragonflies.

Lost and wandering without my daily dose,
morning conversations on the go,
though I talk to her all the time in my head--
it's just a bit harder to hear her now. 
All part of "the human condition" that
paints its way down my face in
such a masterful mess.

Close my eyes, everything's fine.
In here. I can breathe, I can think,
I can hear, I can see, I can remember--
wrap my brain around a coherent thought.
I think....
I feel.  I am. 
Fine, just fine....

It's when they're open,
everything out there
looks and feels like slow-motion,
underwater,squiggly-wiggly,
prismatic, unfocused, not so clear.
Muddy.
Soaked face slick with dripping,
dragging down business-as-usual into
drifting and floating in these
in-between days, far from normal. 
Strange.
Strange indeed.

Breathe in, breathe out, automatic.
I think.  I am.  Fine.  Just fine.

Written by Eliza Jane Farley Gomez
Wednesday, May 4, 2011