Months after the celebration of life service, you stand in line for coffee as you once did without thinking, three in the afternoon, woman on a laptop looking out the window, soft blue jazz bass playing around, familiar wall hangings familiar tall and wide windows on light yellow turning orange and lengthening shadow, last push before evening. Maybe, you consider, you’ve never learned to grieve properly. Victorians went on and on, took weird pictures of their dead, didn’t have Starbucks, some Jews still wear clothing to say, no, it hasn’t yet been a year, so don’t talk to me about baseball scores, unless I bring it up. People have said they miss the old you from before the fall, or spring, or winter of the loss, whatever. This old consolation is self care. Except that now you’re here, absence has words, and you think about it, that your son won’t ever do or have this because you never got there in time. And later, dropping the cup in the trash, walking out again you get what this was and how the walls cave in, aren’t really there, and you don’t just get carried in, you flood in.
Thomas Allbaugh writes both poetry and fiction, though poetry has been his mainstay since his son's suicide in 2017. More recently, his work has appeared in Panoply Zine, Broken Sky 67, Relief, and Red Heron Review. He has published a novel, Apocalypse TV (2017), a collection of stories, and The View from January (2020), a chapbook of poems with Kelsay Books. Last year, he retired from teaching writing at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California and is currently working on a grief memoir.
I missed this when it first came out (I was on an airplane to England) but wow, powerful piece. {{{hugs}}}