More Sweet Than Bitter

You know this the way you know weather. Not because someone explained it to you but because you stood inside it long enough. There are things that do not survive being named. You can circle them with language, you can build sentences that lean toward them the way trees lean toward light, but the thing itself stays where it is, untouched, whole, indifferent to your effort. This is not a failure of language. It is the shape of what is real.

We are prior to our words. Whatever we are, we were that before we learned to speak it, and whatever remains most true about us still lives there, in that silence before the first syllable. Every photograph, every poem, every careful arrangement of color and sound is an attempt to point back toward that place. Not to capture it. To confirm that it exists.

There is a method for growing rhubarb called forcing. The plant is raised in total darkness, tended only in brief intervals of candlelight. It thrives by reaching toward an absent sun, stretching so fast its growth can be heard. Forcing can weaken the crop, but when done carefully, it yields something sweeter. I am not making an allegory. I am just saying that some things grow toward what they cannot see, and the growing is not separate from the sweetness.

Sorrow does this. It moves through a place the way weather moves through a place, changing what it touches without destroying it. What remains after is not what was there before, but it is not nothing either. It is something else, something that has been through the full weight of what happened and did not empty out. You cannot explain this to someone who has not stood inside it. You can only show them, and hope they are willing to stay long enough to feel it.

The simplest things carry it. A gesture repeated so many times it has become invisible. A door that still opens. The way the light falls in a particular room at a particular hour as if it has been practicing for years. These are not symbols. They are not evidence of anything. They are just what is here, what keeps being here, ordinary and ordinary and ordinary until it breaks your heart.

There are moments when time slips and what was once returns to you so vividly, with such detail, that it unsettles you. Was it ever real, or only a dream? The question is not the point. The point is the returning, the fact that something in you still receives it, still trembles at it, still opens when every logic says to close. The fortunate ones are those who never lose this. Not innocence, not naivety, but the willingness to be astonished by what you have seen a thousand times, to feel that quiet tremor as if the world were revealing itself to you for the first time, again and again.

It's more sweet than bitter. You don't notice it at first. Then it doesn't leave.