October Is Bittersweet

not-quite Journaling, 74

 

10/1/2024: I love October--the colors, the clothes, the food, the spooky decorations, the lore, the tales, the remembrance of the lives of my Dead. I know some people find celebrating the dead with merriment weird (even ghoulish), but I’ve always thought it extra lovely to have a special time of the year when we share stories (sad and happy and funny) about the lives of those we’ve lost to death. It’s one of the best ways to keep them alive (in our hearts). 

 

Love waits--not always
patiently, perhaps; still,
love that has been touched,
love that has been fed,
love that remembers
love... waits.

10/6/2024: During a breast cancer awareness meeting, two individuals were discussing (okay, they were arguing at the top of their lungs about) cancer and true love. One shouted that if the love is true, the partner of a cancer patient would never leave them. The other yelled that if the cancer patient truly loves their partner, then they would understand the partner’s decision to walk away. When they asked a few of us our thoughts on the issue, I said that love is personal and complicated. The disgusted looks on their faces told me they didn’t think much of my opinion. So, I shut my mouth and started this poem bit. I still think that different loves are differently complicated. Selfishly (and unrepentantly), I’m just glad that my own love has been made stronger by my own ordeal. Also, I’m rather relieved that I don’t feel the need to scream at people, when I disagree with their much too loud views--ignoring them (and doing something that soothes me) is way more satisfying.  

 

10/10/2024: There are songs I only listen to in October. There are foods I only eat in October. Songs and foods that were the favorites of loved ones I’ve lost to death. I think of them always, but I only let the memories linger in October… 

– for Poets and Storytellers United (Friday Writings #148: October Is Bittersweet)

Love Never Dies

My words taste of you,
singing your scent into my dreams
until my all is you and me

again.

Last spring, I rained
morning after morning…
and at night

summer scorched your absence
into my skin.

I await the fall,
when October thins
all barriers,
and you can feel me, still

loving you through the veil.

 

“Til Death We Do Part”, by Michelle Kennedy

 - written for anyone whose love was claimed by death too soon. On Halloween, the veil between life and death is at its thinnest. So, reach out… remind them that your love will never die.

- for Poets and Storytellers United--Friday Writings #100: El Día de Muertos.

Drinking October All Year Long

“You have no seasons in that small island of yours,” she says, with a smile that stinks of nurtured ignorance and mirth-rich malice. “That’s why you people flee to our lands, searching for more, wanting better, needing our green springs and the vivid oranges of our falls. So sad.” 

For a fiery moment, her nasty thoughts threaten to shroud my tongue. But I magic the flames into a knowing grin--I won’t let your rot poison my words--and I speak my truth, instead: “In my small island, autumn sleeps in the reds of the coffee cherry. We stir it awake with our fingers, berry by berry, until our baskets are full of warming cups. We drink October all year long. And so could you. But the taste buds of your spirit are dead, and you fail to notice. So very sad.”

photo by Café Gato-Mourisco, on Unsplash

 
photo by Ante Samarzija, on Unsplash

- one of my favorite things about October, while growing up in the Dominican Republic, was the beginning of the coffee harvest. Most of my relatives and some hired hands would come home, to my grandmother’s house, and pick coffee beans. The work was exhausting, but the songs, the food, and the company made it wonderful.

 - for Poets and Storytellers United--Friday Writings #97: October!

Memory and Bone

It seemed the plum trees
were already in bloom
but when I picked a branch
what fell—so much like flowers—
was snow.
~ Izumi Shikibu

January snowed gently under the Wolf Moon. My Human watched her garden through glass, her eyes swollen with recent loss.

“She needs to see me.”

No, said the voice that turns life into memory and bone.

“Let me show her that I’m here.”

Humans see nothing.

“You don’t know my Human.” My words were a growl that shook snow from branches.

The world won’t be changed for the sake of one.

The Universe was pulling me away. I pulled back, held on to ropes made of love and tears, turned myself into memory, pushed it into the Universe. “See my soul. See her.”


From a snowy garden, a lifetime away, I see my Human for the first time. Her mouth says, “Our house isn’t big enough for all this energy”. But her soul, the truest part of her, sings, “She’s an angel—alive, happy, family.”

Years after, I’m falling from a boat. Water hits my belly, fills my mouth, steals my breath. But my Human’s arms embrace me. We struggle, but she makes things right.

Then, I show the Universe my Human and me around the house, living and doing, being the shadows of each other’s souls. Together… always.


Enough. The Universe stopped my memory reel. If you are to her what she is to you, she will know you never left.

“She knows. I just want her to see me.”

You are snow and breath and moonlight. She won’t see you.

“She will.”

The Universe sighed.

I sprouted as a snow tree in full bloom. 

My Human ran to the garden, reached for a snow blossom, I crumbled. She sobbed.

I told you.

“No,” I said to the Universe, after my Human began to laugh through tears, her warm fingers tracing Angel on snow that used to be a tree, that used to be me, “I told you.”

 

photo by Kristine Cinate, on Unsplash

 - I wrote this short tale a handful of years ago, for a friend who had just lost part of her furry family. Since October (and All Hallows’ Eve) always leaves me thinking about loved ones who no longer breathe in our world, sharing it today felt just right.

- for Poets and Storytellers United--Writers’ Pantry #91: Musing on the Factual and the Imaginary.