The Museum of You - by Potato

<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/11947.jpg"/>Photo by Michael Starkie on Unsplash They tell me this is where everyone is headed; down, always down, into the patient dark that has been waiting under our footsteps the whole time we called ourselves "alive". We walk the earth as if it belongs to us, but it is only lending us the space above itself and today it has called in your debt. Six feet. Such a small measure for something so total. I stand at the seam where the grass was cut and stitched back over you, slowly understanding for the first time that the ground is not only a floor but doubles as a lid.I brought you flowers. I always bring you flowers now, as if petals could reach where my voice cannot. I lay them down because your hands can no longer hold anything; neither a stem, nor a spoon. Not even the weight of my palm in the dark when I was afraid. I drop them and they are already dying, which is perhaps the only honest gift I have left to give; a beautiful thing on its way to becoming nothing, laid on the doorstep of a house that will not open.Here is what no one warned me about. When you left, you did not simply take yourself. You took the shape of yourself out of the world and left behind the hollow where you had been pressed against my days. A mould cast in negative. Every ordinary hour still carries the outline of you and I keep reaching into that emptiness expecting to find warmth and finding only the cold exact dimensions of what I have lost. No one else fits. I have tried to let others fill it and they slide against its edges like the wrong key in a lock that was carved for one hand only. Not even I can fill it. I have grown around the absence the way a tree grows around a nail, taking the wound into my own grain, carrying it in the wood of me forever.So, I have built a museum. It has no doors and no closing hours. I am its only visitor and I cannot leave. Every room holds you; the way you laughed with your whole face, the last thing you said that I did not know was the last thing — I would have listened harder, I swear to God I would have listened. I stand before these exhibits and I stare, I stare and stare and stare and stare, not because I have forgotten but, I am terrified that if I look away, even the memory will slip below the grass. So I keep the vigil, constantly looking at the shape of where you were.Sighs, the living think grief is a river you cross once. Alas, grief is a country and I have taken up citizenship here, at the foot of your stone sitting in the dirt with my back against your stone, talking to a name carved in rock like it's ever going to answer, learning slowly that love does not end when the earth closes over it. It only changes addresses. It moves down, waits and one day, the ground will call in my debt too and I will finally, finally go to where you have been all this time; down, always down, into the dark that has been keeping you for me.

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