BLACK HOLE (OR/OF) GRIEF

My understanding of a black hole--which is a hazy, non-scientist understanding, so take it for what it's worth--is that they're an exponentially intensified version of a diamond. Take coal and add pressure you get a diamond. Now add more pressure to that diamond. Now add more pressure. Add so much pressure that atoms are condensed, gravity drawing all matter in squeezing the living daylights out of it all.

There is a theory that black holes create universes. They act as a forge, spinning at unimaginable speeds trapping and wrapping matter up into a tiny seed particle which explodes on the other side of the black hole as a new universe. (1)

Once I had my heart break, only it didn't feel like breaking. It felt as though it was being tightly squeezed, painfully so. 

I imagine grief as a black hole, beginning as the heart is squeezed in an invisible fist of the irreversible weight of an ending, causing the collapse of the heart and drawing everything within range into the swirling blackness. For a while you wear the event horizon around you like a painful crown, you watch as everything you treasured, hoped for, dreamed of, and once were spins, torn from their place in the heavens where they should be. Then you are left on the other side of a one way door in a new universe. What will it be? Are there no familiar constellations to guide your ship by? Are there no ships? Would it be better to not remember as you walked into this new world?

I read Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, because I saw this quote from it, "When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all." I felt that painful heart squeeze for a person who was living and gone and for several people who were dead, whom I had felt die and then seen them picked out of the car and off the road and placed gently into the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a highway in Paraguay. It was for that I read Year of Magical Thinking. It was for the person who I was six years ago who couldn't stop seeing and feeling all those moments and aching painfully over the living and the dead. For that person who had no strength of will to go, to stretch, or to push herself. And for the girl she had been.

Grief is a beautiful awful thing.


(1) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140218-black-hole-blast-explains-big-bang/
(Another basic resource on black holes) http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html

JOURNAL: THERE'S BLOOD ON MY MOTHERBOARD

 My biggest fear continues to be that people will find me boring. Or grow bored with me, I'm not sure if those are the same or two different things.

It's a thing that has haunted me for always. I used to think I could banish it, that I'd beat it and cast it off like a brilliant and powerful amazon (not the corporation) never to be held back again. But now I recognize it will probably always be there. It's become a thing to face, to test--to dance with and romance and then to shy away from again.



There's a lull in building friendships--a great gulf that scares me every time. The initial getting-to-know-facts-and-favorite-colors step is second nature now. The shy young kid who crept around her dorm building freshman year and sat paralyzed unable to speak to anyone in her classes has blossomed a bit. But there's this deep cavernous pit, a moon crater, or perhaps a Kola Superdeep Borehole--a scientific drilling project that I'm afraid of going into because I hate when we come away empty and walk away from each other. Perhaps it's better to look at these as expeditions in the name of science and in the pursuit of truth rather than feeling like I just shared a bit of my soul that I can't get back even though it's been rejected.

How do you even share when your raisons d'être are made of things like cupping your hands in front of your face and blowing at the honeysuckle petals in your hand to watch as they flutter in a puff of tiny brilliant orange specks? Marvels like that are so quiet and small, they're hard to share with most people.   

I'd been pondering this because I've dipped back into a reclusive phase and I'm feeling the need to break out in some way. Last night I was twiddling my thumbs reflecting when I knew what was needed was to film something. Anything. So I took a walk to a hidden little nature preserve I discovered a few months ago with a boy--I'd known for a long time I'd need to go back alone to make it mine. Even then as we'd held hands we felt like two solo units who happened to be there in step with each other. I walked there hoping I'd find it again, find it before it was dark. I found the stairs just as we had then and I climbed down into this beautiful place. And for a minute I filmed the stream as I looked around and breathed in the world. 


22 April 2016 from Marge Bjork on Vimeo.