The Wound That Wants Something

Have you heard?

Of the “Widows Fire”?

A heat that only the dead can quench

Unchecked desire rising forth

Inflamed, heart, eyes, soul and pelvis

Calling after the lost one

Touch me!

Touch me!

Touch me!

Old (and not so old) bodies flooded like adolescents

Salty tears and salty climax pouring out of bodies rent by pain and loss.

Shame and guilt riding reverse cowgirl like it’s the only position

Howls of pain become the keening of ecstasy

Ecstatic moans fall away into shuddering sobs, deep in the belly

Life Continues

Some short months after Jason died I had never felt more alive. I wanted to fuck everything that moved (and a few things that didn’t). The whole world was glowing, bright and sparkly. I saw beauty in everything—sunlight on wet leaves, the soft curve of a stranger’s shoulder, the smell of the compost he had been turned into.

And I spent hours howling in pain, laying on my floor weeping until I dry heaved. Attacking my furniture with a sawzall, barely eating and then eating everything, wandering the pathless woods exhausted, breathless, completely ecstatic.

I had a full-on orgasm once just sitting in a cold mountain stream, the icy water rushing over me creating an overwhelming cacophony of sensation. Any kind of distinction of “my body” seemed to have become meaningless, I was everything, I could feel everything, taste everything, read minds if I cared to (I did not for the most part).  The boundary between self and world had almost completely dissolved.

For a while I used “we” as a pronoun because “I” didn’t even make sense anymore, I was so interpenetrated with the whole of the world.

I found men who could hold it—or at least meet it—and hold me while the swirl of ecstasy and grief erupted after minutes, hours, days of sweating fucking. They held my shaking body as laughter turned into sobbing and back again, as the enormous river of sensation enveloped us both.

I had never felt more alive and also never so incapable of engaging with the human-formed world of phones and jobs and emails and chores. The ordinary machinery of life felt absurdly thin compared to the magnitude of what was moving through me.

My grief was inseparable from Eros, the unabashed Dionysian force that all creation arises from. It wasn’t just that I missed Jason. It was that missing him had cracked open an enormous wound in me that was literally gushing life force with nowhere to land.

Some of the individuals I engaged with during this time could hold it—or at least meet it. Others I could see something like terror in their eyes, or at least confusion. They didn’t know where to put it. They didn’t know where to put me.

I didn’t know where to put me, I guess except into peoples beds.  Erotic (in this sense sexual eros) expression seemed to be the only place that felt normal.

photo by cottonbro studio

We are given almost no language for this territory and yet it is a common experience for those who have lost a partner.

Grief, the goddess, has been so diminished. Her meaning reduced to lack, loss, and absence—as if grief were simply a hollow where something used to be. As if it were a deficit, a failure of the psyche to move on.

But grief is not an empty space. It is a force.

To feel desire—even to feel alive—when grieving invites shame and guilt. It can feel like a betrayal of the one who died. How could I possibly desire another and also be in so much pain from the loss of one? How could my body open itself to pleasure when my heart had just been broken open by death?

It can be terribly confusing to those around you: one minute laughing and lining up dates, eyes shining (almost with madness), the next shivering on the floor beset with flashbacks from the hospital.

But grief is not simply absence or loss. It is presence and life and vitality. Everything it touches is transformed, revealing the true nature of things—what is real and what is illusion. What is important, vital, essential is suddenly highlighted in golden light, shimmering through the tears.

Grief strips away the unnecessary. It burns through the trivial. It leaves us raw and permeable and terrifyingly alive.

Grief is the presence of those in our lives we have lost magnified a thousandfold. It is love made visible.

And love is the wellspring of desire.

When someone we love dies, the love itself does not disappear. The energy of that love does not vanish into the ground or the crematorium with their body. It has to go somewhere.

Sometimes it pours out as tears. Sometimes it pours out as rage. Sometimes it pours out as longing. And sometimes it pours out as raw, electric desire.

Eros and grief share the same root system. Both open us. Both dismantle the tidy structures of our lives. Both pull us toward contact, toward intensity, toward the immediacy of the body.

Dionysus—so often assumed to be the god of ecstasy vitality and parties – was intimately involved in death and dismemberment.  We must be dismembered to be desired back into wholeness.

Life itself desires us into being, the original One falling in love with her own reflection in the great curved mirror of space and desire for touch rippling through the blackness of everything/everywhere to create a lover.

Sometimes grief is numbing. It can wrap us in soft, heavy blankets that protect us from feeling. This is desire frozen in place, not yet ready to be met in the world, not yet ready to move. The psyche, wise in its own way, slows the river to a trickle until the body is ready to bear its current.

Other times grief explodes outward, turning everything luminous and unbearable at once. The world becomes charged with significance. The body becomes a tuning fork for sensation.

In those moments we are standing very close to the source of life itself.

Grief has cracked the shell that usually protects us from the magnitude of existence.

And when that shell cracks, the life force rushes in.

This is why grief and desire sometimes share a bed. Not because one replaces the other. Not because desire is a distraction from loss.

But because they arise from the same well.

Grief is love that has lost its object in the visible world. Eros is love seeking form.

The current of life does not stop moving simply because someone has died. In fact, sometimes the opposite happens.

Death breaks open the structures that contain our vitality and suddenly the river is running wild.

The question then becomes:

Who can hold it?

Who can witness the strange and sacred marriage of sorrow and pleasure?

Who can stand beside someone who is simultaneously shattered and incandescent with life?

Grief asks us to become large enough to contain these contradictions.

To weep and laugh in the same breath. To mourn what is gone while touching what is still possible. To feel the presence of the dead inside the pulse of the living body.

Broken is the most beautiful shape a heart can take, making room for the force of all.

The same force that births forests, stars, and lovers.

Eros returning through “the wound that wants something.”