Incorporated

Dear Friend,

I am learning, once more, to grieve. To lose something precious and feel its absence, to allow pain to run its course through the body as the heart works to fill its hollow. To love and to grieve are, after all, twinned fates. Grief is the adieu paid to love well spent, for you cannot grieve that which you did not truly hold dear. To live devoid of grief is to live devoid of love, and I decided long ago to turn down the stoic's bargain.

It starts in the heart and sinks to your stomach. It crawls its way through your arms and down your legs, into your hands and feet, until every digit is stiff as iron, until every step falls heavy as lead. It congeals in the veins and makes the blood run thick, so that the heart must work too hard just to keep its beat.

To fight grief is to set the head at war with the heart, and to wage such a campaign is almost so foolish as wishing away a fever. You cannot negotiate your way out of grief; you cannot excise it as you might a tumor. It demands to be held, to be heard, and so you must embrace it, and hear its cries as your own.

It is a lifelong lesson, a growing pain.

I loved a girl, a lifetime ago. With eyes like the moon, she dreamed of the stars, and I lost myself in her constellations. In them, I saw a life greater than the one I knew, and in a plot of empty sky, we sowed new stars to claim as our own. We dreamed of a cliffside cottage above the rolling sea, of a hidden grove with a shaded pond and spotted koi larger than any you've ever seen.

Naive dreams, perhaps, but dreams they were. And when the sky fell and the sun extinguished, when the storms uprooted the grove, and the cottage washed out to sea, I fought defiantly the venom that poured from my heart. To no avail, of course. Time would prove the only salve. When, at last, my strength returned, I laid her to rest with our memories.

What remains now, after the storms? Little and less, but enough. A sun that shines; a cliffside consecrated, a grave mourned.

I tend well my graves. I must believe love cannot be wasted.

I am leaving California too soon to see the flowers. To return so abruptly is medicine made bitter by defeat, but the patient needs it, and it arrives coated in honey. I return in time to see the cherry blossoms, to see the City come alive for Spring, to see my lovely Duna once more.

I wish to know upon my deathbed that mine was a life well lived, that the worlds I built were well loved. I would rather have loved too much than too little, to be the fool a thousand times than to live with the singular fear of baring my heart.

Grief is a small price to pay for this privilege.

Forevermore, Eden