How to Avoid Grief (A Guide That Fails)

Start by removing their name from your mouth, carefully.

Replace it with appropriate weather. Say aloud, “It’s colder lately.”

*

Clear the house of objects that still remember them.

Start with the obvious ones. Work your way toward theones that have mysteriously gone invisible.

*

Move the furniture.

Convince the room it has always looked this way.

*

Change your ringtone.

Let the silence fill the room with its ringing instead.

*

Sleep diagonally across the bed.

Reclaim all the territory where their body once softened the sheets.

*

When memory approaches, distract it with bones.

Count the cracks in the ceiling. Rearrange the silver spoons. Memorize all the exits in reverse.

*

If tears rise, swallow them whole like medicine.

Remind yourself of all the ways the body confuses water for loss.

*

When someone asks how you are, answer in measurements and increments.

Then say, “Functioning.” Say, “Improving.”

*

Finally, bury all the photographs in a box labeled Winter Clothes.

Slide it to the back of the closet. (No, further.)

*

Wait.

Listen for the faint knocking.

*

First, it will come from the walls.

Then from your own ribs.

*

Open nothing.

Grief does not require a door. It owns the address, you see.