How to Carry Grief - A Step by Step Analysis - (Poem)

1. Get the phone call
2. Before you even pick up the phone, immediately dissociate
3. Answer the call, hear the shaky echo of your voice
4. Get the news that someone you once loved is gone
5. The call will last approximately 20 seconds
6. They will hang up, not you
7. Do not cry
8. Feel an anger welling in your chest; it feels uncomfortable
9. Continue your day normally
10. Do your laundry and get an assignment done
11. Treat yourself to a “little treat”
12. Get in your car and drive to your favorite coffee shop
13. Play worship music combined with heartbreak
14. Tear up but do not break
15. Get back from coffee and feel a little better
16. Someone asks how you are… (EMERGENCY) (BREAKING) (DO NOT CRY)
17. Stutter out an “I’m fine,” do not let them know you are hurting
18. Write a poem that doesn’t equivalent to the amount of love you had
19. Continue to work hard and push through the evening
20. Get home from work and see flowers, realize that someone might care
21. Never mind, they were for someone else
22. Go buy yourself flowers and chips
23. Prune the flowers gently, do not cut yourself on the thorns
24. Eat all the chips
25. Go to movie night with friends, act okay
26. Leave thirty minutes into the movie, tell no one
27. Go straight to bed, do not sit in silence and wonder where they went
28. Wake up and act normal
29. Your voice will break a few times, that’s okay, but do not cry
30. Go to classes like normal, then to lunch
31. Cry at lunch, no one will judge you
32. Go to work and act like everything is fine
33. Get home, go to another movie night, and then to a party
34. Get home from it and cry… A lot… silently
35. Pass out from dehydration and exhaustion
36. Wake up someday and realize that the love you once had is not past tense. It is still there… That is why it hurts. And that’s okay