Sorrow

I know that I will never do this work again in this same way and that a chapter of my life has ended. There were so many bittersweet goodbyes today. There is immense sorrow in leaving and a haunting amount of fixing I intended to do that won't exist in my absence. A mountain of tasks will dissolve when the door closes behind me. And the things I so fastidiously worked on will crumble with neglect. My work will turn to dust, a casualty of mismanagement, apathy, and stupidity. It is heartbreaking.

Telling people who I hold dear and respect that I am going felt like a dozen heartbreaks, the cracks spreading, and the hollow grief widening with each bewildered response. There was gratitude, affection, and love. Their sorrow met mine. And a recognition that our time together was fading.

I have been through enough change now to know this will pass, to know that there is beauty on the other side. But getting through the death is so difficult, understanding and processing the magnitude of the loss will take time. I was proud of the work I had done and I held so many I worked with in such high esteem. To part ways is a specific cruelty when it feels like there should have been more time.

When I can plant seeds again and see them erupt toward the light, the water and fertile soil egging them into existence, the healing will begin. Already I feel the vibrations of wonder at the next great project, the next aspiration. But for now, it is simply grief and sorrow and loss. It is bewildered astonishment that it is all over. It is a sense of gratitude for the impossibility of what I accomplished and the haunting of a hundred grains of an idea of which I had only started to conceive.

My heart feels heavy today, my eyes swollen with the exhaustion of goodbye. It is a gift to have loved a thing so much that its loss leaves you ragged. I wonder how many bold, beautiful things have died in their first breath. I wonder how many hearts have shattered over a dream. This energy must go somewhere, it must be funneled into work and life and creativity; though now it feels impossible, there is a dream beyond this one, lying dormant in need of a single spark to cast it into the light.

This goodbye was terribly heavy. It is one I will carry with pain for a long, long time. But I refuse to let the part of me who was capable of dreaming my last five years into existence go dormant. There is a knocking and the smallest sense of a whisper asking what beautiful thing could be next, what impossibility may become reality in the space created by expansive sorrow.