What do you do with your sadness? Do you roll it like cream cheese around crescents of dough? Does it keep things stuck together, or does your sadness make things fall apart?
Down this whole blue block, snow is falling.
Snow, they say, is a benediction or special sort of forgetting.
I say that’s a myth. Your sadness falls with the snow. It falls with the rain.
At night, something is always trickling down the outdoor eave, timbred precisely to your ear, and yours alone. That is your sadness—as personal and persistent as the dripping no one else can hear.
And when it comes awake, every night, to trickle, there is no shame at all to feel some comfort in its return. No shame in it.
You can call your sadness an event or an occasion—these things occasion sadness. You can call it a situation or a state of being or the way your eye—and only yours—looks out the window. You can call it all these things, but I say, you are never not hemming its great cloth with the fabric of your tears. Look here, the cloth says, I am made of all of your hands, the tiny habituations you make with the thread, the way you’ve hitched one finger over another since you began to hold things, since you began to make.
Your sadness is repetitive. You greet it without surprise. It has different looks and different sounds, yet its aspect is the same. It is there at tide-in and tide-out. It is there when things are floating up, and when they are falling back to earth. There is nothing it is too light for.
Your sadness has its ways. You can make light of your sadness, but it is still the truest thing you know.
Every night, half the world is dark, you know.
Every day, half the world is dark, you know.
Your sadness knows. Things are thought to be two-sided, but anyone that knows sadness, knows that is has no sides at all. Sadness both squeezes small and unrolls with the tedium of dirt or plains or anything that in its omnipresence must be made of things even smaller and more tedious than itself.
Your sadness is the most beautiful thing about you, the star your eyelash pulls down with every blink. It is the thing that makes way station towns especially ugly and fields of lavender especially purple. Your sadness blows paper in the gutter at the same time that comets are fizzing past the earth trailing your powdered teeth a million years from now.
Your sadness is inevitable, like a closing mouth or a mouth already closed. Your sadness is riding alone in the boat made of hope you sent out on the water. It bobs out there, and it hovers back on the dock with you, too. In both places, it’s giving off its light, its shade of blue.
You think your heart is breaking, but your sadness knows more than you. It, companion, is the tune by which you sing your way to the center. It, elastic, returns you always to the start—that first cry of shock upon entering this world. It, sage, tells you that even if you never moved in space, the sadness you feel was the reason for it all, the song that told you what was beautiful, and the song that in the singing, became you. Your sadness is the whole you that is knitted to the world, flowing inward and staying put, touching the lips of others and touching the snow with your tongue and tasting the salt of the sea.
Without your sadness, love, we could not be.