Moving on, as a concept, is easy.
It is breathing – automatically as we do – and taking one step after another. It is walking forward with a hint of hindsight in the back of your eyes and a gleam of hope in front of them. It is doing what people tell you is ‘best, is most normal for people in your situation’ as if they have any idea what that situation is and as if they can categorize you like they do the poor and the rich. ‘Look here ladies and gentlemen, one of the different classes of society: the grievers. Undoubtedly self loathing and full of pitch dark spite, they make up a large portion of the population.’
These people know nothing. They think moving on requires no effort, they think it just is what we do, what we do, what we do.
But moving on, in reality, is pitch black. It is fighting yourself and kicking the walls until you grow tired and lie down to sleep. Preferably for a few days. Maybe even a year. Moving on is being torn between the bitter sweet sensation of being content in the moment and knowing the dead will never be content again. It never feels right to laugh, never feels right to smile until your cheeks hurt or giggle like when you were not broken yet.
It feels like forgetting.
Moving on is smiling when you hear their name and not crying at every instant at the thought of them and is leaving their things in a box on the side of the desk in the room that was once theirs. It is filling the blank space at the table, removing their things from the bathroom.
Moving on is a battle, not really uphill or downhill, but in a place where up and down do not exist and roads are just lines and space is just black fog.
It never feels okay to feel okay, never looks right when you catch yourself smiling in the mirror, never sounds quite normal when you bulder out in a laugh and the people around the table join you.
There is always a missing link, is always something not quite there but not completely gone either. It is the lingering of them, of your mother your father your sister and your brother. It is the lingering of my brother. My brother who thought like a chain smoker smokes and was addicted to pondering over things no ordinary man dwells on.
Moving on is balance, is storm, is rainy days. Moving on is my brother, is me, is all of us.
Moving on is nothing. Moving on is all.