A Change In Mind

It is almost three years since my friend of 30 years died very suddenly after the rapid onset of leukaemia. Her death hit me harder than I could ever have anticipated. I was thinking about her this morning after spotting her name on my friends' email folder. I have not been able to bring myself to delete our correspondence which includes her last message to me when she clearly had a presentiment of her death. In the manner in which coincidence works, later as I worked to delete some sent emails in one of my organisational burst of energy, I came across the following which was sent to another friend in April of 2006.

Funny old world and strangely wonderful the workings of the human heart. I had just finished writing a memorial for Deborah which was really quite hopeful and positive in my own uniquely Maria way. Then I started to write a poem for a class I am in and wham, there I was blind sided yet again, wallop, smack across the face. Grief is a bit like a worm wriggling its way to the surface. You are never sure when it will appear, if it it still there at all and where it might pop up.

Funny old world, indeed.

Has it been a year?

Time seems so sluggish

quagmired in deep sludge,

emotional debris of a life lost and mourned.

Strange thoughts come in unguarded moments.

Are our lives recycled as some great cosmic compost

Cast upon the earth again?

It really hurt.

You made your exit

I missed my chance to say goodbye

but truly we already had.

Words are superfluous

when you inhabit one another's heads

think the same thoughts

live the same fears.

I remember you at 18

crying in my arms

because you felt life slipping away,

afraid already.

Damn, it still hurts,

tight feeling in my chest,

across my heart,

as tears fight to escape my eyes.
I feel a scream building up inside

ready to explode

out into a world stripped bare of you.