I'll Be Your Dr. Frankenstein

Grief and the Danger of Hope

These days I’ve felt my evergreen desperation to defeat my grief swell beyond tolerability. Consequently, I’ve come to consider what grief does to one’s moral compass in the willingness to suspend disbelief and allow the most frightened parts of oneself to fester.

I possess an unnerving understanding of the hubris of Dr. Frankenstein, vampiric sires, and any other lecherous being wading in worlds that are not their own.

Each admission of the rot and stilled rage I feel flooding even the gentlest parts of myself bodes a guilt eager to suppress any pain at all. I write my Penny Dreadfuls of journal entries, see shrouds in my sleep, seethe at those who admit to resenting the newfound faulty parts of me. Each day is the same; a perch at the crossroads’ pit, avoiding the eyes of a salesman that’s always got a deal on miracles.

When does the frenzy of a known absence become familiar— less frayed nerve endings and eyes that jitter at a mere mention of a mother? What is anyone meant to do when their reflection is no longer their own? I wasn’t prepared, soothed, given a brochure on how to continue being a person in the world once it was no longer the world I knew. The eyes I avoid the gaze of most are my own. I’m told I even sound like her nowadays. Is this what the Victorian horror tales were forged upon? If the grief is indefinitely active— the circuitry of knowing another rendered faulty—, one considers the impossible and macabre to simply be misunderstood ideologies by those who have never craved a salve of death transcended.

However temporary, relief can be found in a breath that unencumbered the lungs, a breeze carrying the scent of a shared meal, a patch of earth known best by a select few, the meld of household aromas somehow refined to a single mystic breath. Inhalation often seems to burst open my lungs when I am least composed. Only then does my physical being feel near to tolerable— it clings to that breath. In those moments, pulmonary contractions are the nearest to both persevering and venturing to reunite with who has been lost. Yet still— each breath is an anchor tethering me to what feels to be a great nothingness.

Some years ago, a day could be so beautiful that even the bluest skies seemed to perch just above my head; anything could feel akin to a cosmic gift.

I see the world in all its glory for all but myself. I haven’t yet determined a courteous way to release the dim fog of death above my head— a thicket just between me and the salvation of my big blue sky. I’ve never felt so far from divinity. Yet now it is the stoop upon which I weep, screaming at every star in the sky. if any star could grant a wish it surely has spurned me. I can only allow myself to believe in anything that isn’t an end.

I’d become the monster and its maker to rid myself of this constant vacancy I’ve succumb to in order to be a person in the world. Yes, she isn’t coming back. Yes, I would claw into the devil’s dirt roads to prove that she can simply because I will it to be so. There are no miracles— only desperately forged horrors. I continue to beg the universe to grant one anyway.