An Anthology on Comets

grief is one of those things where it doesn’t quite feel like it’s taking over your body, but everywhere you turn, there it is.

at your fingertips, daring you to acknowledge it.

grief starts with the emptiness that comes from looking at the universe and only seeing yourself. it becomes the ground beneath your feet, where everything is moving but the world has changed. and in it, you become a whisper: it isn’t about you it isn’t about you it isn’t about you.

it doesn’t hurt, no. it does not persist. it is not a monster waiting to drag you into the shadows, a hole of hopelessness.

it is time and memories and time. it is having all the words to say and not wanting to say anything all at once. it is the moments you sat next to each other in class and didn’t have to exchange glances to know you were hating it together. it is girls outside sharing a cigarette, and being berated about the perils of lung cancer. it is the guilt that follows.

and sometimes when you miss someone, you don’t know what to do.

it festers—

—not like fungus, green and sprawling; not like a sickness, in your bloodstream and veins; not like a fear in the back of your mind over shadowing the control of your fingertips and the half-second behind your eyelids—

—not like—

—like when you meet someone new and you begin seeing them everywhere,

in every corner, saying hi when you pass each other in the english building, coincidences and knocking on your door when you don’t expect it, sitting with you and you don’t know what to do because you want to talk, you want to talk, you should want to,

and you don’t feel like you have as many memories as you should and there was never really a time things would be different but now you’re in a different country and (…) (she is gone)

—water in the air clinging to the tips of your fingers and you rub them together, remember when she drew you, remember when the worst parts of college friendships was

leaving for the summer—

—

—and in ways you can’t imagine, the gap in your heart is too numb to hurt.

you are the stars
on the other side of the world
(i still dream of you, anyway,
and how we might share the
same sky again.)
don't believe that i don't know

you know when sadness grabs you suddenly like it’s crawling through your chest, up your throat and back down, a monster trying desperately to tear itself out and your veins are barely enough to hold it together? there is no escape: it takes you from the inside whole and burns the surface beneath your heart, and your chest hurts like it’s suffocating that air is drowning, and inside the monster scrabbles at your heart for purchase, tearing small parts of it bit by bit that makes it hard to breathe.

it lives there and you do not will it to go away. you cannot remember the last words you said to her. the monster weeps.

grief eats you up on the inside, grows like fungus, rattles your steel caged heart, makes a home on the underside of your wrists, swallows you like a bad innuendo, (—sleeps.)

i do not like to remember you are mortal.
and then i remember -
- you are six feet beneath the ground.

you are - were stardust, but now
you are soil and bone. the gap
in the world that was once yours
is the empty barrel, still fresh
with gunpowder.

how have i not fallen with you?
there is a hole in my chest,
aching
aching
aching

i did not know it was yours.

but it was for you.

it is all-consuming.
it is all-consuming.
it is all-consuming.

on the words we were too afraid to say, and the worlds we are too small to imagine

i don't know how to miss you properly

It’s easy to fall apart at the sound of someone leaving you
and it takes another
two weeks
fourteen hours
for the silence to settle into your life

an unfamiliar pattern with which you
forget
forget
forget
until you

remember that you’d always assume that
she was there when she wasn’t, but now
she’s really not there, and she won’t
be there to give her opinions you don’t
want or ask you how your summer was
after three months of forgetting each
other’s existence. you can’t forget her

now

there never will be
a time to
recover, or pretend
that she is
not here anymore. she

is not here.

she is not here.

she is not

your mouth is the foam at the waves of the sea and the heels of your ankles dig into every inch of my veins like they were rivulets of water at the edges of my eyelashes, down my cheeks. i think you taste like the heat on the sand at 4:23am but i can’t be sure. there are memories that come to me like shutters of a camera, black spots in between as i struggle to keep them in my mind, you with me. but all i can say is this — we were never meant for tastes or as close as two people can get, but rather the slow pacing of a camera gearing up between one photo from the next — an almost but not quite, and your shoulder next to mine. you were not the loudest but you were outside of the white noise, a devastating stanza, a light at the edge of a silhouette at three in the morning. i remember the not-quite-ness of it all, a two-syllable ask for help, and there was something — something there, between us. but there is something between all of us, and i can only remember the curve of your lips behind the sound of your voice i think is real. your absence is not as poetic as this; beyond my memory of your senses is you.

i don’t miss you as much as i should but there are words at the edges of my fingertips reaching out for you, hoping that what letters can put together can find you again.

For Haley.

I wrote this series of poems between October-November 2016. I was in Sydney, Australia when I got the news of her death via a Facebook status of one of her family members. This anthology has been largely untouched since being written, but the webpage was put together on 16 July 2025. The font Verdana is used on this page because she liked the font "Veranda."