A Valediction: Allowing Mourning

Isolation was nothing new.

For her.

She had always been isolated by her own singularity and plate mail (male?) sense of self. Too fierce in conviction, too fierce in love. Unsympathetic in the body of a girl. Now woman.

Now. The world was isolated. Broken apart into single rooms of introspection. Broken apart at heart because maybe isolation was a new and terrible proposition for most.

She wished, longed to offer some dull opiate to the collective sorrow. To expand and give until she was paper thin or vaporous or nothingness, as only women can be when they love.

And she did love the aching world.

[He was able.

To give.

When he sang, it was into and of sunlight, visible. (As maybe only a young man could be.) He probably did not see it as such, but such it seemed to be. And certainly was loveable and he would be reciprocated in a way, in maybe several different ways. Like the Keatsian summer grasshopper.

Leaving.]

But not being the Nightingale, not of summer, her cricket cries seemed to be swallowed in the abyss of feminine domesticity. They echoed back at her from the graceful curves of the bell jar. (Echoed also the poetry of men, yet voluptuous and unbound by meter.)

Creatures of the tender night cast their voices into vacuums, helpless and hopeless in all they produce.

(For a woman’s lyrics are laughable.)

Would that her voice were received and difference-making to the world weary world. That her plate pride and contradictions could marry into beauty and significance.

That.

She.

Mattered.

Or mattered less. To herself.

All she wished to say, then, to bid farewell to another numberless day:

Isolation need not be lonely. Be it instead a thread that binds from chest to chest, Donne’s twinned compasses multiplied by womanliness.

Making us both matter and matter-less.

xW